Foundation FAQ (Core Dev Perspective)

Foundation Elections
#1

What is the purpose of the foundation?

The foundation’s charter is to be the trustee of and make decisions for the public chain and spread its adoption. Awareness is a secondary goal of the foundation because it should increase naturally as a result of (successful) adoption.

Additionally, foundation should have good enough knowledge of the underlying tech so that it can consult other organizations or people who are building or considering building projects on NEM.

How is foundation participating in catapult development?

Minimally. Foundation has established a Center of Excellence to support catapult development. Only the EU region has been active in staffing it even though it is a global initiative. After nearly two years, the foundation has hired two NodeJS developers contributing to catapult-rest and one CPP developer. Outside of the EU region, no catapult support has been provided. This is really an indictment of all the other regions, excepting the newly established NA region.

Foundation was provided technical roadmap for catapult nearly 6mo ago, but has been unable to approve it for public release in the time since. The roadmap received almost no feedback from foundation members and many did not bother to understand it.

Catapult is only moving forward because TechBureau is funding nearly all development.

What does foundation do?

It seems to spend a lot of time opening blockchain centers and traveling to conferences. No ROI of such investments have been provided. In fact, most of the foundation’s finances are too opaque.

What should foundation do?

Fulfill its charter as defined in the first answer and facilitate the public chain release of catapult, which includes defining the public chain requirements and parameters.

Are core devs foundation members?

No.

38 Likes
NEMtech FAQ (overview and updates)
#2

@Jaguar0625 Thank you. Now I know that there is actualy some Catapult roadmap.

4 Likes
#3

++ :raised_hands:

#4

Happy to see I am not the only one who acknowledged it.

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#5

Really informative post!

Thx.

#6

I would like to add to that :

  • we have hired more people but some of them went on to pursue other challenges for various reasons
  • in addition to the active developers I really appreciate we have David working on the docs and training ( curricular framework ) which I see as part of the CoE work too.

Just adding some things that I believe are important for everyone to know. Other than that I do acknowledge that the foundation has failed at growing the dev team to the size and structure required although I’m still doing whatever I can to make things move in the right direction.

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#7

++ couldn’t agree more.

#8

Thank you for this, Jag.

1 Like
#9

when Gimre’s riddles?

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Why from a point of view, election wont do it
#10

Well, that made for a depressing read.

On one hand you have the core developers beavering away.

On the other you have a community desperate for more information, acknowledgement and participation.

And in the middle you have the foundation who appear to be doing… well I’m not too sure.

The roadmap factoid is quite mind boggling. How anyone could let that hang is astounding to me.

I hope we get a big fat dollop of fresh meat from these elections.

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#11

Thanks a lot for this update. As someone ‘on the ground’ we usually are in the dark about high level decisions and the inner workings of council and development. We get given KPI’s and are told to fill them. I would love to hear more about the CoE, what it does, how can we partner up from every region. It is clear there needs to be an overhaul of how things work.
Thanks you for your blunt but honest words.

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#12

I think the council member should have several active developers or experienced developers.

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#13

I thought NEM Core devs were part of NF, but after reading this I don’t understand the critics to NF.

To my understanding there are 2 sides.
NEM CORE DEVS= Their job is developing NEM technology
NEM FOUNDATION= Promote the tools provided by NEM CORE DEVS.

Why NF devs have to spend time developing instead of teaching and trainning like that guy is doing in South America?
Is Public catapult ready or not?
Thanks

#14

I’m very sad.
Foundation should work with more technological impression.

3 Likes
#16

If we could vote for the Core Devs to be part of the foundation decision making process I would vote for them. We need more transparency in the NEM foundation, who knows, they could be frittering away NEM on business class trips, all expenses paid with no governance and oversight.

#17

public catapult won’t be ready until foundation will come up with a scope of it.

1 Like
#18

What does ‘a scope’ mean? Has your progress in delivering product been actively hindered by foundation slackness?

#19

NEM foundation should have proactively checking and sync with core developers, working together to move forward. Hopefully after this election, we can move on better.

#20

Why NF devs have to spend time developing instead of teaching and training like that guy is doing in South America?

NEM CORE DEVS= Their job is developing NEM technology

Shin Tatt is not a developer. Is technical trainer as far as I know.

The Foundation should support and outline the development (roadmap, features needed) of the public blockchain. By supporting, I also understand the Catapult, API, wrappers, wallets, etc development. For this developers are needed. And as I can read here there is a problem to hire a couple of them.
Right now: “Catapult is only moving forward because TechBureau is funding nearly all development.”.
What will be when TB, for example, stop funding? I’m afraid to think about it.

There are only 3 core devs. Do you think they will create an entire NEM ecosystem?

Why other than EU regions don’t participate in Catapult development? In my opinion, Foundation failed here.

1 Like
#21

‘scope’ means defining the features required in the initial public catapult chain. This is mostly a superset of private catapult chain features, so this has not slowed us down yet, but it does hinder mid-term planning. Lack of foundation participation has been disappointing but not hindering.

Having said that, foundation’s lack of emphasis on building out technical competence and hiring developers has certainly slowed things down. Development is still resource constrained and more developers would move things along faster. It is worrying that only the EU region has made investments to try and redress this.

9 Likes