Guidelines for Technical Community Contributions

Version 1.0.0

Introduction

Dear Contributors,

We are excited to see the enthusiasm around Ontology and appreciate your participation in the community. This is a guide to help you understand how to make technical contributions for Ontology.

Please note that these guidelines focus on technical contributions e.g. code contribution and dApps. Guidelines for facilitating events, community management and translation are not included.

From the Ontology side we wish to build a highly engaged, quality community and believe that this is best achieved by teamwork. We encourage the community to form independent groups so that we, the Ontology core team, can engage on a strategic level for support and compensation. It’s important for us that the community takes responsibility for their own development and management.

We believe that projects are best executed in teams and encourage contributors to form independent groups.

How you chose to structure groups or function as an individual contributor is entirely up to yourself. However, for groups, we would like you to identify a single point of contact so that we can engage with someone who’s carrying out the interests of the group as a whole.

Technical contributions

Ideas come from various sources and in many shapes and sizes. We encourage contributors to bring their own ideas to the table, but also get inspired by other ideas from the community. To get an overview of potential and ongoing projects, we are working on an index. This will be a space built and maintained by the community – dedicated to index Ontology activities so that it is more digestible for contributors and investors. For community contributors this index will include a section of projects and ideas, and you can:

List your own ideas
See other community member ideas
See ideas from the Ontology Technical Committee

Generally, we divide development ideas into three categories

Ontology enhancement proposals (OEP)
- E.g. major proposals for design, network, architecture, protocols, or modules
Code contribution
- E.g. SDK development or bug fixing
dApps
- E.g. wallets

Each category has its own subcategories and scope. OEPs are related to our foundational technology, such as network architecture. OEPs are considered to have a large scope and a high level of complexity. Code contributions include projects which aim to build tools for the Ontology ecosystem and its users. The dApps category represent apps developed on the distributed network e.g. wallets or games.

Standard process for community contributions

Individual or group technical contributions

1. OEP

Login to GitHub OEPs to view existing proposals and make new proposals. New proposals must be prototyped. The Ontology Technical Committee evaluates proposals and their prototype results, then submits projects to the Ontology Council. Pull requests are also welcome for existing proposals with no code implementation. The Ontology Technical Committee evaluates whether to accept the project based on the development application and sends it to the Ontology Council. The Ontology Council will consider giving appropriate compensation if the proposal is a large contribution to Ontology or will have a large impact.

2. Code contribution

After starting the project you can start development. Please submit a pull request according to the GitHub Standard Processes. The Ontology Technical Committee will make an assessment and submit the report to the Ontology Council. It will then provide compensation based on the results of the assessment.

If you identify a bug in any of the Ontology Github repositories, submit a pull request according to the GitHub standard processes, which is evaluated by the Ontology Technical Committee and submitted to the Ontology Council. After that, compensation is given based on the evaluation result.

3. dApps

Ontology welcomes the community to build dApps in the ecosystem. If you have general inquiries regarding support, please refer to our Organizational Cooperation portal.

Ontology has its own ecosystem accelerator program, which aims to incubate new dApps. The program invites technology and product experts across fields to collaborate in entrepreneurship and build new distributed business applications based on Ontology’s next-generation public chain infrastructure to build an open-source, open-minded, and collaborative distributed trust ecosystem. The Ontology Olympus Accelerator program will provide complete technical, marketing, funding, talent, and legal compliance support. For more information please visit Ontology Olympus Accelerator.

Compensation

Compensation for qualified contributions are made according to the standard process for community contributions. They will be based on case-by-case evaluation conducted by the Ontology Technical Committee and approved by the Ontology Council. Compensation is distributed upon project completion and evaluation.

Note: Assessment of contributions for compensation is a detailed process and can take some time.

How we measure compensation

Our first approach will be based on case-by-case evaluation, hence as the community grows we will gain experience and be able to build a comprehensive framework. In general, when assessing compensation we will look at three factors:

Effort
- Number of people/teams involved and their technical expertise
- Total amount of manhours
- Project duration
- Involvement of community/Ontology Technical Committee
Projects degree of difficulty
- Technology
- Design and architecture
- Requirements
- Scope
Overall risk severity
- Impact
- Likelihood

Technical committee

We welcome community talent to join the Ontology Technical Community. If you are interested, please apply in the developer community on Discord.

Developer community organizational cooperation

The Ontology Council welcomes organizations to discuss cooperation. Please indicate that you are requesting technical community cooperation when you apply. The Ontology Council will carry out reviews based on the proposal, code contributions, and weekly reviews (JIRA will be used for management). Incentives will be distributed to partner institutions on a regular basis. Particularly excellent organizations can be considered for investment from Ontology.

Ontology Technical Committee：

Group	Name	Discord	GitHub	Gitter
Ontology	Weng Junjie	luodanwg	luodanwg	luodanwg
	Zhou Yan	harry.zy	harryzy	harryzy
	Tan Yuan	tanyuan	tanZiWen	tanZiWen
OEPs	Hu Ning	dcjojo	javajoker	javajoker
	Cong Honglei	Honglei	Honglei-Cong	Honglei-Cong
dApps	Xiao Min	xiaomin-trouble shooting	xiaomin49	xiaomin49
	Ding Wenbing	dwb1991	dwb19911025	dwb19911025
Community Mgmt.	Mathias G	Fluid_DK	Fluid_DK	Fluid_DK