# 2019 MoU 'original' tasks 1-7

Memorandum of Understanding

Number: 2019-02-159

###### tags: `ipfs-search` `2019 MoU`

# Annexe I: Project plan *ipfs-search.com*

In order to improve and promote ipfs-search.com as an experimental
search engine, we wish to professionalize our team, by providing
existing collaborators with a (below-market) compensation for their
work. This allows us to increase the overall continuity and pace of
development, which will allow us to significantly improve the quality of
the service as well as the user experience. We will make the first steps
on our roadmap towards the world's first truly trustless and
decentralised search engine, operated as a knowledge commons, in the
interests of its users, rather than as private silo in which the users
are the product.

## 1. Hackathon summer 2019

In june 2019, the team members will gather in Amsterdam for a two-day
Hackathon, during which we will align our mission, strategy as well as
our roadmap and planning for the short, medium and long term.

### Milestone(s)

- Rough planning up until summer 2020
- Roadmap for short, medium and long term
- Agreement on foundation of legal structure
- Agreement on distribution of roles

### Amount

1.900 EUR

## 2. Project management

Project management, from beginning to end, including all of the tasks
that need to be done and for which the team is not really big enough to
have a specific role.

### Milestone(s)

- Monitoring the planning and re-scoping where necessary
- Monitoring dependencies (internal and external)
- Clarifying communication and bringing parties together
- Reporting
- External communication
- Facilitating shared understanding

### Amount

4.200 EUR

## 3. User Experience research

Reimagining the user interface to provide an experience that clearly
demonstrates the competitive advantage of search for the decentralised
web. Exposing the full potential of the existing API's as well guiding
and anticipating future extensions to the backend and crawler
infrastructure.

During this phase we will attempt to integrate best practices and
concrete recommendation concerning internationalisation and
accessibility, with regards to regional, cultural as well as individual
diversity.

### Milestone(s)

- Reorientation of frontend tooling and design frameworks
- Interaction and design research
- New interaction design

### Amount

8.100 EUR

## 4. User Experience implementation

The translation of the design from the previous phase, integrating it in
the existing search engine's frontend and allowing for progressive
extension as backend features anticipated in the previous phase become
available as a result of the backend refactor.

### Milestone(s)

- Implementation and integration of new interaction design
- Allowing for progressive integration of anticipated backend features
as they become available

### Amount

9.000 EUR

## 5. Refactoring crawler infrastructure

Based on the results from research into the user experience, and with a
general view of increasing the maintainability, scalability and
accessibility for contributors of the project, we will refactor the
crawler as well as the entire crawling infrastructure. Part of this will
be to simplify the components and their coupling, to implement automated
testing for (at least) the data-producing components as well as adding
extensive documentation, mainly for implementers and contributors.

### Milestone(s)

- Re-evaluation of system architecture, scalability and initial threat
modeling
- Consolidation of data model and conversion of existing index data
- (Ideally) double-digit optimization of crawler performance
- Refactoring of crawler code and deployment automation
- Automated testing for data-producing components

### Amount

10.800 EUR

## 6. World-class documentation

It is our personal experience that many FOSS projects become overly
dependent on a very select group of developers, effectively creating a
closed community. Besides being approachable and actively engaging in
conversations, documentation is a key component to enable others to
contribute to a project, improving upon it, using it and/or pinpointing
essential mistakes. As such, we have specifically allocated time to
integrate and document the large set of changes in both the front- and
backends, raising the overall documentation level from its current,
admittedly, abominal state.

### Milestone(s)

- Improved documentation of system architecture, code, deployment and
API\'s

### Amount

900 EUR

## 7. Sharing our index; facilitating coopetition

Since its very inception, we have wanted to create a search engine that
was explicitly open with regards to its intellectual property. As a part
of this, we have repeatedly attempted to automatically publish snapshots
of our index to the IPFS. Thus far, for technical reasons beyond our
control (notably IPFS' initial instability) we have yet to find a
pragmatic solution.

We are confident that during the scope of this project, we will be able
to publish our full index to IPFS such that others may fork our project
in its entirety and/or use our index for whatever creative purposes they
see fit.

### Milestone(s)

- Regular automated publication of our index' snapshots to IPFS under
a Creative Commons license, with appropriate usage documentation.

### Amount

720 EUR