To the Cosmonauts,

Regardless of recent organizational restructuring at Tendermint Inc in Q1, Cosmos, as an ecosystem, continues to make headway quietly under the hood. After having done several months of vetting, tracking, and onboarding individuals who were outstanding in their myriad contributions to the Cosmos Network, I’m proud to announce the recipients of Cosmos Community Contributor Grants.

This is a retroactive grant awarded to people who have done exceptional work throughout the process of bootstrapping the Cosmos community since 2019 and—for some—even earlier. While this blog post outlines recipients of a “grant”, know that there was no explicit “grant program” that was in place for applications to be processed. These Community Contributors neither asked for funds nor applied for any such grants. They were simply chosen because they each took the initiative to build their respective communities out of passion for the project. All we did was take note.

Methodology

This “bottom-up” laissez-faire approach was taken because when it comes to building distributed autonomous ecosystems, taking a self-selected group of individuals who first contribute sweat equity without expectation of profit, and recognizing them as the ambassadors of a project is — and the proof is in the pudding — advantageous compared to “top-down” selection processes for bootstrapping burgeoning ecosystems. This is a nod to acknowledging what mechanics led to the development and subsequent explosion of what became the open-source community, built upon a notion of giving away free code with no expectation of financial gain.

As of this past weekend, on February 23 2020, all of the recipients have been onboarded as vendors to All in Bits Inc (dba Tendermint Inc), where each vendor received between $1000-$3000 USD in Q1. With that, ambassadors are now able to kick off and get reimbursed for future meetups in regions all over the world for the next 12 months. To keep up with or to find various meetups via Twitter, search #cosmosisworldwide on your feed.

The following recipient list is a non-exhaustive list of contributors. In total, there were 27 Community Contributors who we recognize as stellar stewards of the network. Reinvestment in these productive individuals and future recipients will remain our top priority as one of the stewards of the Cosmos community.

General Selection Criteria

We are constantly keeping track of contributors who meet three criteria. First, they must have done some prior work that got them noticed (e.g. published a technical, informative blog post, ran a meetup, etc.). Second, they must have been a part of the Cosmos community for at least 3 months and are knowledgeable about the breadth of instruments that are used for composing interoperable application-specific blockchains (e.g. Cosmos SDK, Tendermint, IBC, Peggy, etc.). Lastly, the prior work that was done must not have been a one-off event but part of an ongoing, self-directed string of events that demonstrates their long-term commitment.

Activities could fall into any one or more of these categories:

Runs a Cosmos Meetup group

Runs a Cosmos community chat channel in various languages

Runs a Cosmos [country name] Twitter handle that regularly re-posts translated content from the Cosmos account

Builds explorers, visualizers, network monitoring tools, etc.

Translates Cosmos documentation

Translates Today in Cosmos

Makes pull requests, bug reports, or upstreams modules to the Cosmos stack

Other (let me know what I might’ve missed in the comments)

2019 Contributors: Year in Review

In no particular order:

If many of these names resonate with you, then it should be no surprise that these are our Q1 Community Contributor Grant recipients. I anticipate that there will be many more individuals who will step up to take-then-pass the torch on this never-ending journey of cosmic evolution.

Future Plans

There’s no shortage of platforms, governance experiments, and working groups we could be working with to bootstrap, establish, and maintain this vibrant community. Indeed, many of them already exist. However, with Community Contributor Grants streamlined and integrated into Tendermint Inc’s internal workflow, we’re able to scale the global Cosmos community at a more rapid pace when it comes to funding, reimbursement, and milestones tracking. Future plans of externalizing this workflow into a transparent, community-owned process is certainly the desired end-state of this initiative.

New to the community?

There’s a chat channel/educational group for you in any language:

There’s a meetup group near you in any region:

Don’t see a group in your preferred language or meetup group in your area? Reach out to t.me/chjangounchained.

Until we’ve explored and conquered spacetime itself, we won’t stop pursuing the Cosmos,