[Blog] Grants Program Update, February 2023

Grants Program Update, February 2023

The Sia Foundation has grant funding available for community contributors! The Grants Program was created to fund research, development, developer tools, and anything else that will support and further our mission of user-owned data while enriching the Sia ecosystem.

Just design a proposal that meets our requirements, submit to our forums, and wait for review by our grants committee. If your grant gets approved, you’re on your way to creating the next great project on the Sia storage network.

Check out our site for more info.

The Current State of Grants

We’re continuing to see new and interesting proposals at a steady pace. Over the past month we reviewed four new submissions, approving one, declining another, requesting more information from the third, and recommending the final wait and re-propose at a later date.

The committee also made an important decision after approving Alphaday, a Sia news and on-chain data aggregator. They had committed to open source their data streams, but also asked about difficulties open-sourcing non-critical dev components like their front-end. The committee’s conclusion was the following: Projects can use closed-source components, but can’t develop closed-source code.

This is of course subject to review and may change at a later date, but will serve as a target for us moving forward and will hopefully not relegate otherwise great (or fun!) projects to an unnecessary denial.

We’ve also added a Grant FAQ to our site to answer some common questions about the program.

Link

“We are proposing that Messari provide Sia with in-depth data analytics and research. This would serve to better inform existing stakeholders as well as attract new ones. while building out the open-source data infrastructure for the community. These reports would live as free resources on Messari and would be distributed through our newsletter, social channels, and third-party distribution partners including Bloomberg, S&P Global, and Refinitiv.” -Messari

Grant Status

Approved

The committee was very excited to have not just a research-centric proposal, but one from Messari. They agreed that these reports would benefit the ecosystem, and Messari has a large audience and a strong track record of doing thorough research.

Between the potentially massive reach of the reports, and the meticulous attention to detail for which Messari is known, these reports will provide an excellent resource for Sia community newcomers and veterans for years to come.

Link

Content creation and outreach for Arabic-speaking communities.

Declined

The committee was concerned with being able to assess the outcome without having anyone on the team who can speak the language, and our inability to continue serving whatever community might arise from this effort.

We actually receive requests for this type of work fairly often, but this was the first to come via a grant proposal. We love the idea of expanding the community reach of Sia and will consider if this is something we might want to move on in the future. This just wasn’t the right fit quite yet.

Link

Secure, archivable service for all personal and individual content types.

More information requested

The committee is concerned about the lack of risk definition in the proposal. A risk identified by the committee was the need to hire developers for this project — having to onboard brand-new developer talent can be costly and time-consuming. Details regarding the ability of the current team to deliver would also be helpful, such as links to actual work done in the form of GitHub profiles or something else.

It seems like the team is currently developing on Arweave, and an understanding of the differences between Arweave and Sia would be an important consideration. The open source commitment is also unclear in the proposal. The idea seems very cool, and we’re excited to see if the Memory Gardens team can supply the requested info.

Link

A decentralised event log storage solution that they want to integrate with the Sia network for storage of these event logs.

Recommended to re-submit at a later date

The Log Store team submitted an excellent, well-detailed proposal. Upon review, the committee requested more info from the team and was concerned about the timeline and existing state of development with the project and its Arweave integration.

The Log Store team responded and said that they can create a new grant proposal exclusively for the Sia storage module component of Log Store after the alpha has been released. The Grants Committee agreed with this and is looking forward to hearing from the Log Store team!

We already have a brand new proposal to take a look at during our next meeting. We encourage the community to provide their feedback and ask questions on the Sia Forum so the committee can gauge community interest and to help engage the applicant should they not come from the Sia ecosystem.

You can see the list of all proposals here, and our proposal requirements here. See you next month!

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