143 sats \ 2 replies \ @kr 22 Mar \ on: AMA - Stratum V2 SRI team, yesterday we released an important update 1.0.0! AMA
how was your experience asking for grants and donations?
were there any important lessons you learned that might be useful for other FOSS builders looking for grants to support their work?
how was your experience asking for grants and donations?
One thing that's great since project's inception is that we're all funded by different entities. Thus far we had: Spiral, HRF, OpenSats, Foundry, Bitmex, Galaxy. Some of the entities even allowed their employees to work on SRI.
It's tough, but back when I started doing FOSS Bitcoin 7 years ago, situation is much better. There are now so many entities that recognize good and valuable work. I would say that each and every one of us first added some proof of work, before applying for a grant.
Situation can always be better, as someone handling this side of the things for contributors of SRI, one thing that could be better is mullti-year support so that contributors don't have to worry every 6-months or 12-months if their grants will be renewed,
were there any important lessons you learned that might be useful for other FOSS builders looking for grants to support their work?
- Put in proof of work, even if it's in spare time and ensure community recognizes the value you're adding
- When writing application always ask core contribution team to validate your ideas or areas you can be useful for the project
- We need multi-year grants in this space asap, dealing with sustainability insecurities and constant renewals takes a toll on people.
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I've been working on FOSS for about 5y now. I was on the shitcoin world until recently, but now I'm a grantee with Spiral and my experience towards a grant consisted of several factors:
- Joining the Discord server
- Joining SRI team calls
- Following tutorials from stratumprotocol.org
- Exploring codebase on github
- Exploring issues and PRs on github
- Reading the specs, and writing material to summarize my learnings
These items above helped me get context on the team activity. It is important not only to be willing to help, but also to understand what kind of help is needed, and what are the current priorities.
Eventually I saw SteveLee/moneyball mention on SV2 Discord that the SRI team needed experienced Rust devs to join the team and Spiral was willing to give out more grants. So I reached out to him and started talking. Some key points of our interaction were me sharing my CV and him telling me to join some calls with @pavlenex and @Fi3 to agree on what the project's roadmap needed more hands and how I could commit myself to helping it.
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