Open Initiative

[fuksman]

At Any, our goal is to become an open organization. This means we operate in a transparent and inclusive manner when it comes to creating our product and its ecosystem.

In an open organization, anyone can contribute and affect product development. Becoming one shows our commitment to transparency and trust.

Our community has already provided valuable feedback to help us improve our product. Now, we want to strengthen this connection by forming relationships with contributors who share our vision and values.

Our Public Beta launch marks the start of our transformation to an open organization.

We created this article to outline our roadmap for becoming open and answer questions about contributors’ roles in our ecosystem.

Roadmap

We have identified several significant tracks on our journey toward becoming an open organization.

Our team works in four-month-long seasons, providing us with a great opportunity to focus on our goals and make the most of our efforts. The primary objective of Any’s work in Season 1 and 2 2023 was to release a public beta of the app and kick off working with contributors.

Track 1: Publishing the Code

As we launch the Public Beta, we're making the source code of our protocols and applications available. This allows users and developers to review the code and get a better understanding of how the platform works. It will build trust and encourage adoption.

Once we have established our internal processes, such as defining roles for reviewing pull requests, implementing code quality checks, and maintaining developer documentation, we'll be ready to accept contributions from the wider community.

It is possible to contribute to our projects since July 23, 2023.

Making source code available is a great way to ensure security, as vulnerabilities can be identified and fixed by a large group of developers. By publishing the code, we are giving the community the opportunity to help us identify and address any potential security issues.

Track 2: Localization

After our Public Beta Launch, we will invite our users to translate Anytype interfaces and documentation into a variety of languages. From surveys and interviews with our alpha-stage users, we have seen a very diverse community from all over the world, and we believe these users can contribute to Any's growth by adopting it to their native languages.

Adapting applications for multiple languages can take a considerable amount of work on the UI side, so it is likely to happen in Season 3, with the help of our core team or community contributors.

Track 3: Galleries

In Seasons 2 and 3, we are excited to offer a convenient way to build Any together.

We know that our community has the best knowledge on how to use Anytype effectively and they are eager to share it. Everyone will be able to package their use cases and make them available in a gallery, where other users can easily find and enable them in their Anytype.

For our users with development skills, we will provide a developer-friendly way to integrate Anytype with external services. Developers will be able to use APIs to create new data imports and exports and share them through an in-app gallery.

Finally, we will publish our design guidelines and invite designers to create and share UI themes for Anytype apps.

Track 4: Community

Thanks to our community moderators and alpha testers, we know that working with each user and providing help when questions arise, is key for long-term product adoption.

We cannot do this alone, and we hope active community members will be the driving force behind Any's growth and success.

We invite everyone to become a moderator, offer the support needed by the users, help us to write documentation, and so on.

Rewards

At Any, we strongly believe that sustainable development of our platform and the ecosystem surrounding it can only be achieved through honesty and transparency. As a non-profit association, our goal is to provide the community with technologies and solutions that help build a co-owned economy.

Our vision for this economy, once it is launched, is one where all creators are fairly rewarded for their contributions. It is still early days and to be clear, there are not many organizations that have created an incentive model that we feel is reflective of our ethos and can be applied to our ecosystem. However, in this process, we intend to work closely with our contributors to design a rewards system, and in the meantime make sure that all contributions are received openly and transparently, allowing us to recognize contributors when this system is mature.

We’ve now launched our Contributors’ Community openly on Github Discussions and follow the all-contributors specification. Contributions of any kind are welcome!

Licensing

We’re releasing our protocols as open source with a permissive license, enabling anyone to review the code and make modifications with minimal restrictions. Our applications, on the other hand, are distributed with a source available license. While anyone can review and modify the code, certain commercial uses will require specific permission or license.

We believe that this approach will promote transparency and freedom for the community, while also enabling contributors to create a sustainable ecosystem around our code.

Documentation and translations created by Any's team or contributors will be in the public domain. As for use cases, integrations, and themes created to share through the gallery, the choice of a license will be left up to their creators.

Please read more about our Open Philosophy.