IPFS is the collective work of thousands of contributors from multiple geographies and backgrounds, working collaboratively and asynchronously to decentralize the web.
Open-source community
As an open-source project, anyone can contribute to IPFS and help make an impact on the future of the web – regardless of areas of interest or specialty. IPFS open-source contributors bring a broad range of valuable skills to the project, making tangible differences in a wide variety of areas:
- Protocol design and implementation
- Documentation
- Community outreach and support
- Functional testing and user testing
- Visual and user experience design
- Building apps and services that use IPFS
There's never been a more exciting time to be part of the global IPFS community, so if you'd like to make a difference and help shape the future of the internet, there's a place for you to jump in! The IPFS community is an engaged, inquisitive, and helpful collective with a code of conduct intended to create an environment that is friendly, safe, and accepting, and free from intimidation or harassment.
If you'd like to start by dipping your toes in the water, IPFS meetups are a great place to begin. Local community meetups happen worldwide, and there's also a well-attended monthly virtual meetup showcasing the latest community projects, current IPFS news and events, and more.
IPFS core team
While IPFS is primarily an open-source, community-driven project, community priorities are shepherded by a core team that helps to ensure that strategic roadmapping and overall velocity continue to meet the project's high-level goals of decentralizing the web.
Many, but not all, of the IPFS core team are also part of Protocol Labs, an open-source R&D lab whose mission is to drive breakthroughs in computing to push humanity forward.
The IPFS core team is organized flexibly and responsively to nimbly adjust to shifting priorities over time. While team organization may iterate on an as-needed basis to best serve current project priorities, team structure always reflects a high-level commitment to improving the IPFS developer experience and toolset as part of making IPFS and its sibling web3 protocols Filecoin, libp2p, IPLD, and Multiformats a seamless, ubiquitous part of the future web. Current areas of high-level organization include:
- Web3 Developer Tools: Ensuring that developers on the decentralized web have a robust, performant, easy-to-use stack — including IPFS — available to them in order to accelerate the impact of the future internet.
- Ecosystem: Seeding the long-term growth of the decentralized web by fostering relationships with a wide variety of developers and other stakeholders who are using IPFS and related protocols and tools in the web3 stack.
- Stewards: Ensuring the existing IPFS codebase and related tools are well maintained and iteratively improved upon in response to community needs and future goals.
The IPFS core team strictly adheres to a policy of public discussion and communication by default in order to maximize opportunities for community involvement and feedback. This means a commitment to communicating and discussing strategic direction and other high-level decisionmaking in public-facing, async-friendly channels such as GitHub and the official IPFS forums. For example, calls to participate in roadmapping and similar strategic activities will be announced on the IPFS Blog & News, and proposals and discussions regarding future strategic work can be found in the IPFS Roadmap repo.
Jobs working with IPFS
The simplest way to search for jobs building on or working with IPFS is to subscribe to the IPFS Weekly newsletter — each week's edition includes new job postings from a wide variety of companies and organizations looking for talented individuals interested in building the decentralized web.
Additionally, open positions to work on the IPFS core team can be found here.