Introducing the Omega Team

Even with bleeding edge technology such as IOTA, we must balance the need for innovation, with the need to pursue standardisation and operationalisation of more developed streams. The concept of bimodal IT has become increasingly popular in traditional industry. Traditionally bimodal IT has split a department into 2 parts, one dealing with maintenance and support issues, while the other concentrates on innovation and expansion.

As the entire IOTA Foundation is tasked with ongoing innovation, we must approach this problem in a slightly different way. Today we introduce our own version of bimodal IT in the IOTA Foundation. Two separate teams called Alpha and Omega.

Alpha — for cloud services, aka the current internet.
Omega — for fog services / edge computing — the Internet of Things vision of IOTA.

The Alpha team will continue to improve our current systems aimed at the internet. This work includes the majority of current projects, including IRI, entangled, Trinity, libs, MAM and the coordicide project.

The Omega team will look towards the longer term — as the name suggests, to the final version of IOTA. Their remit includes the following workstreams:

Ict — an agent controlled by iotas (paid to its owner) for performing services built on top of the IOTA network.
Qubic — a protocol that specifies IOTA’s solution for quorum-based computations.
IXI — an interface aiming to extend IOTA protocol functionality in a modular manner — and IXI-plugins (e.g. Timestamping IXI, Graph IXI) required to connect Qubic and other future projects to IOTA.
Various tools for the above (e.g. Merkle signature scheme for economic clustering (EC) markers).
Porting of Ict to Android (as a proof of concept) and implementation of Network-bound PoW prototype.

It should be noted that there will undoubtedly be some overlap between the remit of the 2 teams. For example systems like Qubic will be deployed on the internet, but we feel they would benefit from working in the Omega style at this current time. Of course as with traditional bimodal approaches, some of the Omega projects may migrate to the Alpha team for full operationalisation.

Development in Omega will take a different approach going forward, working in a “garage style”. Every member picks a piece of work, preferably something isolated. All work should be split into smaller pieces which can be coded in short bursts, and committed to GitHub right away. This allows other Omega team members see what the others are doing, and also allows the community to see what we are doing and contribute to our codebase. So please keep your eyes peeled on Github and Discord.

The Omega team will consist of the following members (some members will join after completing their current commitments):