Radicle is a decentralized network for code collaboration built on open protocols. After three years of active development the network is now live (beta state) and is being used by a number of teams (see here and here).
The Radicle Foundation, as mentioned before, is a Swiss non-profit that currently funds Radicle maintainers & contributors. The Foundation’s board coordinates project-wide strategy and allocates capital in order to support the development of the Radicle network.
The goal of this post is to inform the community about the strategy & objectives for 2021 and how the core teams will contribute towards them.
What is the strategy for 2021?
For 2021 Radicle’s focus is on maturing the Radicle stack and having more decentralized communities & DAOs leverage Radicle for community-critical operations.
The main focus is on decentralized communities because these communities value security, sovereignty and sustainability which are the core differentiating properties of the Radicle stack. There is also a strong belief that decentralized communities will see significant growth and adoption in the upcoming years, so there is a strong desire to develop with them in mind.
From a technology perspective, the focus for 2021 will be on improving Radicle’s infrastructure & tooling, while embracing decentralization and reducing coordination bottlenecks between contributors and teams. The goal is to scale the development process in order to welcome a much wider group of contributors and to operate as a new kind of open source project that is built, governed, and financed on the internet.
High-level Objectives
1. Get every DAO in the world using Radicle adoption
The objective here is for more and more decentralized communities to use Radicle on a frequent basis for community-critical operations. This could take the form of using Radicle as an active mirror for their Github/Gitlab projects, using Radicle orgs for organization management and releases or funding their operations through Radicle (which will be possible later this year when Radicle-funding officially launches).
2. Have Radicle core teams fully dog-fooding Radicle #core-teams
This means core teams will use mostly Radicle tooling for all development, funding, and governance actions.
3. Increase the number of devs building and contributing to Radicle 
Grants ##progressive-decentralization
This is a very important goal in Radicle’s journey to progressively decentralize all layers of its stack.
4. Strengthen the core teams #people
“Core teams” are teams that contribute to critical components of the Radicle ecosystem. It will be important to continue to attract talent that can help the Radicle community realize its vision.
Product & Technology Objectives
1. Develop and maintain a healthy and reliable p2p network.
This is the backbone (base layer) for the Radicle stack, so it will be very important to reach a more reliable and healthy state in 2021, so more experiences can be developed on top of it.
2. Create the building blocks for code collaboration, such that high-level code collaboration experiences can be built by application developers.
While today the p2p network is mostly used for replication of git repositories, there is a need for collaboration objects that can be used to develop experiences similar to what’s available from centralized forges, but in a way that respects the properties of the Radicle stack.
3. Improve tooling, build re-usable components
The goal here is to increase the pace of development on Radicle products & reduce coordination between different core teams.
4. Deliver a low-friction, web-native Radicle experience
While the Radicle-upstream team will continue to focus on the desktop client, it’s becoming clear that a web-native Radicle experience is necessary for increased adoption.
Who is working on Radicle today?
Today there are six core teams working on critical components of the Radicle ecosystem. Specifically:
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Radicle-link: led by @kim with @xla @fintohaps @alexgood as maintainers.
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Radicle-upstream: led by @julien, with @geigerzaehler @rudolfs @brandonhaslegs as maintainers.
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Radicle-funding: led by @lftherios with @everett @andrewd and @manuel as contributors.
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Alternative-clients: led by @cloudhead with @sebastinez as contributor.
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Radicle-Ethereum-L2: led by @igor.
Each of these projects has a team lead (i.e. a lead maintainer) that works with the Foundation board to inform the project budget, scopes of work, and yearly objectives. Coordination between and within teams is now mostly asynchronous, autonomous, and public by default. Each of these projects are currently financed by the Radicle Foundation. In addition to supporting these teams, the Foundation holds the Radicle trademarks and manages the $12M that was raised from the project’s private sale as well as 5% of RAD token supply.
While the Radicle Foundation will coordinate and fund core maintainers & contributors for now, ultimately all project development will be funded via the Radicle Treasury, a.k.a. the Radicle DAO. Therefore, the prime directive of the Foundation is to support the development and growth of collective community infrastructure that can be employed to further decentralize the project.
In an upcoming post, the purpose statements and yearly objectives for each core team will be shared, as well as their progress on development.