ICON Technical Community Update – Q4 2022

To support the growing technical community on ICON, we are publishing "ICON Technical Community Reports" on a quarterly basis. These reports are designed to inform ICON’s technical community about the ideological focus, milestones, specific goals, and planned timelines for a given time period. In this update, we will discuss milestones and goals for October 1 to December 31. Let’s dive in!

Overview

During this time period from October 1 to December 31, our main focus will be on integrating community resources with the new ICON Builder Program. This includes organizing community development efforts into groups, organizing public resources related to grants, and creating better systems for non-technical community members to interact with technical community members.

Prior Milestones

• Completed: Establish "ICON Builder Program"
• Not started: Create technical tutorials section on icon.community
• Ongoing: Reorganize Blockchain Transmission Protocol (BTP) specifications
• Ongoing, consolidated: Increase community contribution
• Ongoing, consolidated: Organize current state of contributions to ICON
• Ongoing, consolidated: Organize public resources for ICON grants programs

Goals

Create Technical Tutorials on icon.community

We are working on adding a technical tutorials section to the icon.community website. This is in the same state as last time. Creating the technical tutorials page was de-prioritized due to work to establish the ICON Builder Program. It will be managed by Contributor Experience Special Interest Group once the group is established.

Reorganize BTP Specifications

We are working on creating more well-defined, comprehensive specifications for BTP components with the goal of making BTP more useful for developers, content creators, and users. This task is ongoing. It is being integrated into the now-operational Interoperability Special Interest Group.

Organize Current State of the ICON Project

We are consolidating three prior goals into one larger goal to organize the current state of the ICON project. The prior-stated goals are, as well as one new sub-goal:

• "Get more regular community contributors"
• "Organize current state of contributions to ICON project"
• "Organize public resources for ICON grants programs"
• "Establish Special Interest Groups for pertinent, current community groups"

We are pursuing increasing community contributions through a number of different, complementary approaches. The Builder Program aims to funnel in contributors to the different ecosystems and community roles that make up ICON. One of the ways that contributors will be promoted is via the newly created Special Interest Groups, which aim to do a better job of showcasing contributor status/identity and strengthen communication channels for the various public endeavors in ICON.

We are also encouraging projects that receive grants to contribute to public ICON projects, and we have provided guidelines and public issue boards per project to let potential contributors know where they can direct their efforts. Further, we are continuing to build and structure partnerships with web3-based jobs portals, including tr3butor.io, crypto.jobs, and Soil Project from Developer DAO.

We are organizing the current state of contributions to the ICON project, so that we can know how much participation we are receiving and in which areas. Currently, we are using Github Graphs and RHIZOME Tracker build page to track contribution statistics. We are looking to see if there are potential avenues for collaboration with RHIZOME to use their tool to better understand contributor statistics.

We are organizing public resources for ICON grants programs. This includes making templates and public reports available via the icon-project/grants-program repository. We have also created funnels and Requests for Proposal lists for the various grant programs in the ICON ecosystem available at build.icon.foundation/grants page. These efforts may end up being managed by the Contributor Experience Special Interest Group once that group is established.

The last sub-goal of organizing the current state of the ICON project is centered around building out the structure of the open development organization for this ecosystem. We are planning to establish five more Special Interest Groups. We expect that some, but not necessarily all, of these groups will be established within the next quarter. Note that this is a stylistic change from prior working group management structure, and so the onboarding process will take some time. Learn more about these efforts in the icon-project/community repository on Github. The groups are as follows:

• "Contributor Experience" (expected)
• "Documentations" (expected)
• "Communications" (possible)
• "Core blockchain" (possible)
• "Execution environment" (possible)

Conclusion

We look to continue having a positive and transparent experience with the technical community of ICON. Please feel free to give your feedback on this update, including about task status and prioritization. We feel that it is very important to understand what the community values and why, so that we can plan how to best move forward. Like last time, there will be a quarterly meeting on the to discuss the topics and tasks described in this update. Stay tuned for the timeslot of the meeting!