Introducing developer’s market

Presentation

We are building a developer’s market particularly geared towards sustainable developers. The idea is to galvanize sustainable development using the mechanisms that work so well for open source development. These have lead to building the most robust and lucrative solutions seen to this day in the software space.

Have you ever asked yourself how much your project might be worth?

Our idea is to provide a platform where any project, favorizing those that address SDGs, can be shared and receive contributions from the community at large. One great advantage is that a solution that has worked in a certain context can also be re-used by the community. We are also tackling the sustainability issue from a new angle that hasn’t been used very much in open source development. The market idea comes from the fact that we give tokens to anyone who contributes to a project. These tokens can then be purchased providing financing to the developer community that helped but also to the project itself. The purchase of tokens thus also acts as a valuation mechanism.

Current status

We have already built the first version of our platform which computes the tokens based on the number of characters added or removed by a certain actor. We have also implemented an optional more complex algorithm that computes the Levenshtein difference between two contributions to get a more precise picture. On the current platform accessible at developers.market it is possible to add projects and track the evolution of their value based on the implemented algorithms.

Next steps

We are currently working on various aspects including :

• Allowing developers to implement their own contribution counting algorithms maybe based on downloads or another measure of impact rather than work
• A more appealing interface
• Plotting the evolution of projects as valuation graphs
• Giving access to portfolios for users to easily view everything they own or might be interested in.
• Evaluating safety and trust which could rely on blockchain, GPG signatures, electronic signatures or a combination of these.
• Evaluating legal implications of our solution

Some of these goals typically that of evaluating the safety and legality of our solution will require funding which implies one of our logical next steps of searching for funding.

Roadmap

• Q1 Working on graphs and visual additions
• Public introduction of the market at WSIS April 2019
• Q2 2019 Implementing security features and reviewing legality
• Skill hunting / presentation at Forum EPFL October 2019
• Presentation at Unige Entrepreneurship week November 2019

Likely all of these public presentations will also help us get a feel for the market and have a stronger position when asking for funding based on the community we will have built along the way.