Community roadmap

A community-focused companion to docs/roadmap.md. The technical roadmap describes what code we ship; this document describes what community we build around it. The two are co-equal — a project with no community is a research artifact, not a standard.

Why community, not just code

OrganoidOS is the first open spec for biological-neural-network operating systems. Being first is necessary but not sufficient — the first credible open spec in a category often becomes the de facto standard, but only if it has the community to defend it. Docker had the community to win against Rocket; Kubernetes had the community to win against Mesos and Swarm. We need to build that community now, while the field is small enough that everyone who matters still fits in a Discord channel.

Stars milestones

We treat GitHub stars as a (noisy) signal of community interest, not as a vanity metric. Each milestone triggers a different set of investments.

10 stars — “First believers”

• Trigger: ≥10 stars on GitHub
• Action: Announce on Hacker News / r/MachineLearning / r/neuroscience. Cross-post to bioinformatics mailing lists.
• Goal: Land at least 1 external contributor (any role) by this point. If we have 10 stars and 0 external contributors, something is wrong with our contributor onboarding — fix CONTRIBUTING.md.

50 stars — “Community call”

• Trigger: ≥50 stars
• Action: Start a monthly OrganoidOS Community Call (Zoom/Jitsi, recorded, posted to YouTube). 30 minutes, agenda:
  • 5 min — what’s new in the spec since last call
  • 10 min — driver maintainer updates (any L1 drivers in progress)
  • 10 min — one deep-dive talk from a contributor or external speaker
  • 5 min — open Q&A
• Action: Set up a Discord (or Matrix — see docs/governance.md) with channels for #drivers, #benchmarks, #spec-discussion, #ethics, #help-wanted.
• Goal: Land at least 2 L1 driver contributors and 1 neuroscientist contributor by this point.

100 stars — “Grant application”

• Trigger: ≥100 stars
• Action: Apply for one of:
  • NSF SBIR/STTR (US, if a US-based maintainer is found)
  • Horizon Europe (EU, if an EU-based maintainer is found)
  • Sloan Foundation (computational-biology track)
  • Open Philanthropy (scientific infrastructure)
  • Custom — approach Cortical Labs / FinalSpark directly for a joint grant to fund an L1 hardware driver
• Goal: Fund one full-time maintainer for 12 months to ship v1.0.
• Why now: at 100 stars we have enough signal of community interest to justify grant funding. Below 100 stars, funders will see it as a one-person hobby project.

500 stars — “v1.0 spec freeze with advisory board”

• Trigger: ≥500 stars
• Action: Form an Advisory Board of 5–7 members including:
  • 1 representative from each L1 driver maintainer’s organization
  • 1 bioethicist
  • 1 neuroscience PI
  • 1 systems-engineering advisor (someone who has shipped a successful open spec before — e.g., an OCI maintainer)
  • The initial author (modarresi1913), as chair
• Action: Convene the advisory board for a v1.0 spec freeze vote. The board must reach consensus on every open question in spec/*.md §9 before the freeze.
• Goal: Ship v1.0 with multi-vendor validation and a clear governance structure that survives the initial author moving on.

1,000+ stars — “Foundation”

• Trigger: ≥1,000 stars
• Action: Move the project to a foundation. Candidates:
  • Linux Foundation — natural home for infrastructure projects that span multiple commercial vendors (Docker, OCI, Kubernetes all went this route)
  • Apache Software Foundation — proven incubator; Apache 2.0 license is compatible with our MIT choice
  • NumFOCUS — for scientific-computing projects
• Action: Establish formal trademark protection for “OrganoidOS” via the foundation. The initial author currently holds implicit trademark; a foundation can defend it better.
• Goal: Survive founder departure. By 1,000 stars the project is bigger than any one person; it must continue independent of who works on it.

Concrete next steps (today)

The above milestones describe the future. Here’s what we are doing this week:

1. ✅ Ship v0.1 with 4 working benchmarks, full AEO/GEO, and CI on Python 3.9–3.12 across Ubuntu + macOS
2. ✅ Open 3 starter issues with good first issue and help wanted labels (L1 driver, Pong benchmark, AdEx neuron model)
3. ✅ Enable GitHub Discussions with a Welcome announcement
4. ✅ Set up Dependabot and stale-bot for repo hygiene
5. ⏳ First 10 stars — announce externally (HN, Reddit, X)
6. ⏳ First external PR — assign a maintainer for pairing
7. ⏳ First Discussion thread — schedule a 30-min community call

What we explicitly do NOT do

• No “growth hacking.” We will not buy stars, ask friends to star without using the project, or run fake engagement campaigns. The milestone numbers above are signals of real interest, not targets to hit by any means.
• No vendor lock-in. We will not accept grants that require preferential treatment of one vendor’s hardware in the spec. The spec must remain vendor-neutral.
• No “move fast and break things.” The spec is a standard. Once v1.0 ships, breaking changes are gated by semver. We would rather ship slowly than ship a broken standard.
• No anonymous maintainer. The maintainer of record must be a real person reachable via GitHub. Anonymous contributors are welcome; anonymous maintainers are not (because funders and partners need a person to talk to).

For potential funders

If you represent a foundation, government grant program, or corporate sponsor interested in funding open biological-computing infrastructure:

• The spec is open (MIT) and the governance plan is in docs/governance.md.
• The technical roadmap is in docs/roadmap.md.
• The ethics framework is in docs/ethics.md.
• We are willing to share a detailed budget and 12-month plan on request. Please open a Discussion thread or DM the maintainer.

We do not accept funding that:

• Requires preferential treatment of one vendor’s hardware in the spec
• Restricts publication of benchmark results
• Asks the maintainer to keep funding sources confidential
• Restricts migration to other foundations in the future