LMS Maintenance - Renewable Annual Stewardship (Obsidian Systems)#459
LMS Maintenance - Renewable Annual Stewardship (Obsidian Systems)#459frankgruberOS wants to merge 3 commits into
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Signed-off-by: Frank Gruber <frank.gruber@obsidian.systems>
Signed-off-by: Frank Gruber <frank.gruber@obsidian.systems>
frankgruberOS
requested review from
hythloda,
isegall-da,
stas-sbi,
tkatrichenko and
waynecollier-da
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Champion identified Ali Abrar (Obsidian Systems) The committee will verify this champion during review. |
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SIG labels auto-detected and applied: If this is incorrect, you can ask the reviewers to update the labels. |
Signed-off-by: Frank Gruber <frank.gruber@obsidian.systems>
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| Stewardship is operational, evaluative, and content-aligned across four areas: | ||
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| **Day-to-day operations.** User reactivations, coupon issuance, platform health monitoring, certification-pipeline support. Volumes today (per Digital Asset, April 2026) run at single-digit reactivations and coupons per month, growing modestly with new course releases under the Daml Training grant. |
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I don't understand what this means: "TalentLMS's per-seat pricing penalizes a developer population that goes inactive and reactivates on its own cadence, forcing recurring account cleanup." Please explain because this doesn't sound like a big problem to me.
Also, what is the success criteria for the LMS platform in a prioritized order? What are the must haves?
Wouldn't you also need to include the migration cost from one LMS to another?
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| **Platform evaluation (Year One only).** Obsidian evaluates alternatives to TalentLMS across a named three platform shortlist plus three cost-and-fit comparators. TalentLMS's per-seat pricing penalizes a developer population that goes inactive and reactivates on its own cadence, forcing recurring account cleanup. | ||
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| | Rank | Platform | Pricing model | Why on shortlist | |
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Are any of these LMS systems used by any other blockchains? What does Eth and Solana use? I would think this is a more important factor than what AWS uses.
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| **Release-aligned short courses.** A short explainer course alongside each Daml release posted to the LMS. Cadence assumed at 4–6 releases per year; depth scoped to a brief "what's new" explainer. | ||
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| **Reporting and governance.** Monthly internal ops metrics to the CF liaison; public quarterly certification reports; Year One operational review and Year Two renewal proposal at Month 10; Foundation governance review window Months 10–12. |
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What about metrics for those that start but never finish and other important metrics related to losing users?
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| Year One outcomes: | ||
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| - Clean handoff from Digital Asset within Month 1, with parallel shadowing and runbook published to a Foundation-accessible repository. |
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Please explain in detail what 'shadowing' requires from DA and what knowledge is needed.
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| Each deliverable is accepted when it meets the standard below: | ||
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| - Runbook is sufficient for a successor steward to operate the LMS unaided (transferability test, verified on publication) |
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This makes sense. can you explain how this transferability test will be done?
| - Each quarterly certification report follows the Foundation-confirmed format and is published by its due date. | ||
| - Operational requests (reactivations, coupons, health issues) resolved within the agreed response target. | ||
| - Platform evaluation delivers a comparison of viable platform options on cost and fit, and Obsidian's selected platform. | ||
| - Release-aligned short courses produced in line with the Daml release cadence. |
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These short courses can be very valuable. I think the short course needs more exploration or definition to be reviewed.
Can they be made public to serve two purposes:
- educate the public community
- advertise the courses
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| - **DA cooperation during handoff.** Month 1 assumes cooperative handoff (credential transfer, parallel shadowing, in-flight inventory). If materially delayed, deliverables shift accordingly and are not held against operational targets. | ||
| - **Foundation liaison cadence.** Quarterly report formats, monthly ops channels, and renewal review windows depend on Foundation responsiveness. | ||
| - **Daml Training grant cadence.** Release-aligned short courses depend on the Daml Training team producing release notes and curriculum hooks. |
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Please explain who this "Daml Training team" is and what content you expect to receive?
| - **Quarterly certification transparency.** Operationalizes the April 2026 quarterly certification reporting requirement. | ||
| - **Open-licensed, transferable artifacts.** Runbook, metrics and report templates, platform evaluation, migration plan, and Year One review released under Apache 2.0 or equivalent. Obsidian asserts no proprietary claim, and all artifacts transfer to any future steward. | ||
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| No Canton protocol, Daml language, or application-level changes. No Daml contracts produced or modified; SCU compatibility therefore not applicable. |
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Please explain this line.
| - Instructor-led or live-cohort training delivery. | ||
| - Vendor-side product fixes (escalated per vendor SLA; product-level fixes remain the vendor's responsibility). | ||
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| ## Co-Marketing |
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I wonder if the short courses could be used for marketing purposes?
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| Pricing-model axis: transaction-based and flat-tier pricing avoid the active user account cleanup churn. The Year One evaluation tests both pricing structures across the shortlist on total cost of operation over a multi-year horizon. | ||
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| **Release-aligned short courses.** A short explainer course alongside each Daml release posted to the LMS. Cadence assumed at 4–6 releases per year; depth scoped to a brief "what's new" explainer. |
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I don't know that these short explainers are useful enough to be worth producing.
- If they're scoped to be short "what's new" explainers, what value do they add on top of the release notes?
- The only target audience that makes sense to me for such courses are existing devs, who are already familiar with Daml/Canton and who have been or are working on Daml/Canton projects. These devs are highly unlikely to be current active users of LMS. How would they know to go to LMS to learn about what's new in a release? And why would they prefer LMS content over the release notes (back to my previous point)?
4 participants
SIG:
daml-toolingDevelopment Fund Proposal Submission
Proposal file:
/proposals/2026-06-Obsidian-lms-maintenance.md
Summary
Renewable annual stewardship grant for the Canton/Daml developer LMS. Year One operations handoff from Digital Asset, platform evaluation + migration plan, release-aligned short courses, public quarterly certification reporting, and a transferable runbook. Year One ask: 500,000 CC. Champion: Ali Abrar (Obsidian Systems).
Checklist
/proposals/Notes for Reviewers
Renewal structure follows the Daml OSS Maintenance Grant and Splice management grant (PR #47) precedent. Year Two renewal proposal at Month 10 enables a Month 12 renewal decision. Supersedes #458 (auto-closed pending champion field, now added).