Gitcoin is an Ethereum-based application for the open source software ecosystem.

Why?

Despite the power of the open source software solutions they build, Open Source Developers receive a small percentage of compensation relative to their economic value to the 21st century economy.  Open Source Developers are underfunded, under-appreciated, and overworked. 
Gitcoin brings market dynamics to the problem of allocating the scarce attention of software developers. It's a distributed application that augments coding networks like Github.com with a fun, lightweight interface for exchanging scarce tokens that can:

1.   Filter signal from noise
2.   Incentivize software development.

Our long-term vision is to disrupt the software development lifecycle end-to-end.  What Uber did for ridesharing, Gitcoin has the potential to do to software development.



Open Source Software is the foundation of millions of careers in software development. For developers like myself who have built careers on python, javascript, HTML5, Ubuntu, and countless other Open Source technologies, its easy to forget that it wasn’t  always this way. 

Before the advent of distributed version control systems like Git in 2005, Open Source was a fringe phenomenon. The launch of Github, several years after Git become a phenomenon, further pushed open source forward by making it easy for developers to share ideas, get feedback, and distribute their code. Today, Github has 5.8 million active users, 331k active organizations, and enabled 815k new users to make their first pull request in 2016 alone.

As far as Open Source has come, there is still a disconnect between the _value_ that the open source ecosystem provides to the modern economy, and the compensation provided to developers for that impact. The Oracle’s and Red Hat’s of the world have built successful businesses built upon open source, but the small and mid-caps of the world have not yet unbundled those business models.

The launch of Ethereum and the smart contract infrastructure built upon it has the potential to change all that. By tokenizing value and making it programmatically easy and secure to exchange value, there exists an opportunity to push open source forward with borderless, secure, easy payments.

What?

Gitcoin Core is a team of developers that believes each of the follow actors in the Open Source ecosystem have a lot to gain by removing middlemen, creating new opportunities, and introducing efficiencies into their workflow:

Gitcoin is a series of smart contracts designed to push open source forward.



So what exactly is Gitcoin? Gitcoin is a distributed network of Smart Contracts, based upon Ethereum that enables:

- Job Hunters to find work, and perhaps more importantly, to try out working together before they commit.
- Open Source Contributors to make a living wage off of their work in open source.
- Repo Maintainers to galvanize an always-on, globalized, network of peers.



By facilitating the transfer of value through this ecosystem, Gitcoin solves for the inefficiencies in this triple-sided market:



How?

The Gitcoin network is live today.  At the center of the current functionality is the Gitcoin Bounty Explorer. The Bounty Explorer is an index of all of the funded tasks available immediately worldwide. Here is what it looks like (and hey, there’s an API also!)



It is possible, based upon the momentum of this launch, that a token distribution event will occur.  If that is the case, the token distribution event will be detailed within the Gitcoin Whitepaper.

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