And a very difficult one. Visibility of a dev is an antipattern.
This is what I try to do when choosing who we support with donations:
- look at library usage in our projects
- make a table of GitHub stars vs downloads on Rubygems
- donate to GitHub developers with few stars but heavy usage
There are other and unrelated selection criteria as well. For example we donate to the Web Archive and Tor because we think them to be very important infrastructure projects.
1) It's relatively easy to get an OpenSats grant, if you've already gotten one. You're basically on the payroll. That's a sign that the grant program isn't seeing enough attractive opportunities, like a company doing share buybacks. They need to look harder and lower the barrier.
2) If you don't implement a new tech, apply for a grant and say you will implement it, then wait around to find out if your grant is approved, your chances of getting the grant are higher, then if you just immediately build it. That is paying people to refrain from effort. Burning ambition should be rewarded, not discouraged.
3) Current income -- especially as a sw engineer or other STEM profession -- counts against you, even if you're already and obviously putting 20+ hours a week into Nostr development. It's seen as "not being personally invested". Is it a grant foundation or a welfare agency?
4) Obvious grant-worthy projects don't receive grants, unless they apply for one, which is basically a humiliation ritual because they might go through the whole process and get turned down, while everyone is watching them. And everyone knows about them and their efforts are obvious, so why the ritual? Just give them money or don't. If you don't, explain why. In public.
5) Everyone is supposed to prove themselves on GitHub and be active there. But we are on Nostr. They prove themselves here.
A grant foundation should not be preselecting for a willingness to conform to authority, submit to arbitrary rules and paperwork, and interest in adapting to the foundation's own obscure project plans.
It should be chasing down the people working away all night on exciting stuff we're all waiting to get, driven by burning desire and personal obsession, and throw money at them, to encourage them to double-down on the effort.
Just my 27 sats worth.
And before anyone asks, the obvious solution to this is using Nostr to decide who gets a Nostr grant. You don't need backroom interviews and groveling supplicants to decide how to spend money to promote an open communications protocol.
Use the protocol.
People should just write up an explanation of their stuff in a long-form note and link to it from a Grant Application wiki table. And then we can all watch the process go down, read through the results and explanation of why each application was accepted or rejected, and add congratulatory zaps to the winners and condolence zaps to the losers.
And add a handicap score to the applications, to make it a fairer game.
The losers are automatically entered into the next round, unless they withdraw, and have a chance to better their application beforehand.
I know I probably just pissed everyone off, but I'm wondering why we are asking developers who publish EVERYTHING ON THE INTERNET, to pause developing and fill out forms and go through interviews and reviews.
Want to know what they're building? Read their docs and look at their repo.
Want to know what they've done since the last time you looked? Look again. Do a diff.
We want them building like their heels are on fire.
Everyone who wants a grant, raise your hand.
Okay, don't call us, we'll call you.
Keep building.
1) Determine the measurable criteria for receiving a grant and create a checklist.
2) Publish that checklist on the wiki.
3) Publish any later changes to that checklist and announce them on Nostr.
4) Everyone who applied for a grant gets a copy of that checklist, filled out and published, as the output of the round of deliberations.
5) Everyone who gets a grant should have the amount of money granted written on this checklist.
Everyone who got a grant doesn't have to explain or justify, to anyone, why he got one.
Everyone who didn't, doesn't have to wonder why he didn't, and has a chance to adjust for the next round.
Do you have some context here? My experience of the OpenSats application process was filling out a simple form pointing to the nostr work I had done and getting approved or rejected based on that.
As a developer who's also worked with literally thousands of developers over the last quarter of a century, I can say that this is insufficient.
There's more to it, for example character, vision, etc.
Oh, and one more thing!
We have repeatedly seen the effect of:
Person A has gigantic, popular client.
Person B is #smolfev and has a neat idea.
Person A and B discuss the idea, and both sit down to implement it.
Person A is done in an hour because he just has to add ten lines of code, and does a victory lap and submits a NIP.
Person B is still trying to figure out how the SDK works, choose a stylesheet, and find some website to host his implementation and get the DNS change through. And he's doing this in his free time.
Person A gets a grant, for being innovative. Again.
Person B is discouraged. Guess he can't keep up.
This is going to stymie innovation and create entrenched interests.
