Open Science SDG project report by Bayar

Introduction:

I joined this project after Xoeseko and Sofia had started getting involved. They had different issues and plans for this project. I had been said to get started directly with the issues and problems they encountered. I already had a basic understanding of JavaScript and Html, but my biggest challenge was the development of an open-source project through GitHub and other tools that I never used before. It was quite difficult to undestand the objectives of the project and my involvement at first, but as it went on, I came to understand the use of GitHub and the essence of project development using open-source tools. Sdg.Market for me is a platform for remuneration for any project on GitHub and maybe even more( see Future Plans section), using tokens as currency on the platform. My contribution to this project has been to help the team in their technical problems specially with coding. Since the design wasn’t part of the issues, I decided to contribute on the design part of the project. Starting by the logo and different animations on the documentation site. Yet the logo is still to be done.

Problem Statement:

This project addresses all the issues in the Sustainable Development Goals, because it offers a platform for partnership and exchange opportunities. Many of these projects help a unique or multiples SDG issues. It also helps small projects get recognized by investors or developers, and when they get recognized, it creates a probability of getting funds for this project.

Methodology:

Open Science made me discover many open source tools and just how much they can do without any effort. But the most interesting open source tool that I wanted to learn how to use is GitHub. I have had many projects involving coding and programming, but never found an efficient way of organizing these projects. Since SDG-Market involved coding and testing on GitHub, it caught my attention and my curiosity of finally learning to use and cooperate with others on this platform. Open Science also made me aware of different type of copyright certifications and its limits, but also what other parties can and cannot do with “fair use”.

Research Results & Solutions Proposal:

The documentation site is for people joining the platform and wanting to know more about the functionality or for people just curious about the platform. We only had the documentation at the start of this project, we all read the whitepaper and decided that we should contribute in any way we wanted. My contributions with this project was the design of the documentation site for the actual platform. If I had started the design of the website from scratch, it would take a lot of time, so I decided that we should use an open source theme that was available for use on GitHub-pages. This theme called Minimal-Mistakes served as baseline for the design and a way for me to discover how GitHub-pages worked from a technical point of view. On top of the theme, I wanted an animation displaying each time the user wanted to load a page, so I also used an open source loader in GitHub. Finding a logo for the site and for the platform was also important. We decided for the logo that we should take the logo from the “Geneva Tsinghua initiative for SDG” as it was on GitHub and represents all the SDG issues in one logo.

Future Plans:

For future implementations, the platform should have the basic financial functions. But on top of that, it would be interesting to implement a way for real money to participate on the platform. There multiple ways of implementing that function, but there a few we found interesting : first option is to use real money on the platform to buy parts of a project or buy stocks and exchange it on the platform with other users. The second option is to prioritize the use of tokens and specific tokens for projects, investors buy sdg tokens with real money or cryptocurrency and then invest it on projects that they find interesting. For the second option, it is possible to get exchange tokens for real money and also exchange specific sdg tokens against another specific sdg tokens. Since, the platform is full on market for projects it is necessary to implement a time series tool as part of the basic financial functions.

The platform also needs a Blockchain system for Smart Contracts. A Smart Contract is contract made at the start of a project, it has all the rules and the information needed for collaborators, developers and investors to participate or invest in the project. The Blockchain system would fit quite well on the platform, it has not been developed yet and is out of my reach to implement that function, but it is an idea that is very interesting.

Once the platform is available on GitHub, all the repositories on GitHub can use the market. But we know that there are way more projects on other platform using Git, like GitLab, OSHW from CERN. The projects that are on GitLab and OSHW could be incorporated on the market and could benefit from the incentivization.