Roadmap

(For now, this is a bit of a brain dump. Hopefully it will become more organized over time.)

"Make no little plans; they have no magic to stir [our] blood..." --Daniel Burnham

Getting to 1.0

To me, when a project runs on Ethereum, reaching version 1.0 means that its primary contract address is set permanently, and that any future modifications to its behavior will only happen via other smart contracts whose permissions are explicit. So, "getting to 1.0" will mean the live-libs contracts take on some of the characteristics of a DAO. (Yikes) Also, it seems like the system should/could eat its own dog food, using libraries that it's storing itself.

The live-libs system will be built on 3 pillars:

• Stateless libraries
• Excellent documentation
• Tests that can be run statically (no gas costs) to verify library behavior

Since this is all being built on Ethereum, a world-wide computer with a built-in currency, there are opportunities for financial incentives for contributions to the live-libs ecosystem.

Initial ideas for how to incentivize behavior to grow the system:

• Library authors "ransom" their code: the community must pay N ether in order for the library to become available (N is set by the author)
• Test authors register their tests during the "ransom" period (on Morden), and these tests are used to determine whether a library will be released
• The authors (library and test) of a released library are granted tokens
• More tests can be registered post-release, and these authors may receive tokens (see: problems)
• Initial excellent documentation will help the author get their ransom (see: problems)
• After a lock-out period, token holders should be able to exchange their tokens for either
• Someone needs to be incentivized to run the tests continually since libraries can selfdestruct or disable themselves
• Are new versions ransomed just like the initial version?

Problems to solve:

• How to reward ongoing testing
• How to reward ongoing documentation
• I'd like to use a different word than "ransom" since it has negative connotations