High Velocity Developer Communities with NEAR DevGov DAO by Max Zavershynskyi

there you go all right happy everyone um hey everyone my name is Max I'm from near today I want to talk to you about High Velocity developer communities and whether you're from New York system or from any other ecosystem I hope whatever tips you hear from me today will be applicable to your blockchain ecosystem so a little bit about myself I was the first employee at near I joined ILY and Alex when they were still doing artificial intelligence before they pivot to the blockchain um and before that I used to work at Google and before that I did PhD in computer science so today I'm EPF engineering at Pagoda which is the new name for the near Inc and then bootstrap in this developer governance project that is behind our decentralized developer community so um let's like quickly go back to what do we usually expect from developers participating in our ecosystem we want them to build stuff we want them to participate in all kind of social structures processes and we want them to learn things but how do you usually go about it and it's not unique to near I think pretty much every blockchain ecosystem has the same approach we funnel them to a whole bunch of content and some of this content is really nice right we have a nice landing page and here I'm a bit biased right I'm showing you examples from near ecosystem but obviously ethereum has analogs of that thing too and many other blockchains too so we funnel them to like the landing page that has a lot of routing to the documentation to the videos some success stories maybe there is a social network where people can mingle with other developers and maybe there is another like catalog of the projects that exist on the ecosystem what's the problem with that well that's where the first big slowdown of your developer ecosystem actually happens because what you're essentially doing is you're delegating to the developer who just heard about you take a run out what's the reason for being there why why should they care what they should be excited about your ecosystem and of course they're gonna say well we have all the success stories and we have cool projects and once they're gonna see it they're gonna get excited and they're gonna figure out what they're gonna do there which is a bit of a wishful thinking let's be honest because many of these developers when they heard the first time about the blockchain or about Eureka system they actually have full-time job so they have to carve out some time at the end of the work day or during the weekend when they you know need to go through all of your content and figure out why they care what they're going to build on it and you know even if they're excited about the stuff that you're building the time between the weekends is enough for them to just forget about what they were doing and they're going to have a pretty big churn in there and the Slowdown of the entire ecosystem so what is our solution that we propose to other blockchains too is to form Community groups and we didn't invent that we copied it from other open source communities we have lots of people actually working in the governance bodies of the other open source communities that also work at near so we just copied this concept what is the community group it's pretty simple thing the community group is just a group of people that congregate around certain theme in Eureka system maybe around certain projects for example we have a zero knowledge community group at near when we have some Community groups that are centered around say python tooling and other kind of stuff they usually manifest through like a telegram Channel where people just have a synchronous conversation very frequently heated debate or maybe semi-regular video calls once or twice a week where they meet you know and discuss things together usually there is a leader um many even several of them who decide what what's the agenda oh what what's the agenda write the summary of the meeting you know just maintain the decor of your of your community group but we want these Community groups to be entirely permissionless we really encourage for them to not ask for the permission to create a community group we want anyone to be able to come to dinner and create a community group and even if there is one around the topic that you care about create another one let's have two zero knowledge Community groups let's have some redundancy in duplication it's a real free market here and we want people to be able to enter a community group without asking a permission and be able to participate in the conversations what does it solve well now when developers come to your ecosystem if you are successful in thrusting them into this community groups the first thing that developers will see is another person they appear someone who already figured out why they need to build a New York System what they're building they have passions they have purpose to maybe even have a project that they're working on they already processed all of this content that you otherwise would require the newcomer to figure out on their own and this is a much better experience it's a very interactive human-like experience which is different from you know a person carving out time and like you know going through your content and video recordings on their own in their free free time and so as I said this community groups are very permissionless but at near we have certain like expectations that we really want them to be the places where the brainstorming is happening where people generate ideas we have very little way of influencing that because as I said they don't have to ask us to do anything but we can facilitate it we can incentivize them you know like help them around because that's what we want from them we want them to generate ideas and concerns and just some random thoughts once the ideas are generated typically that's where the second slowdown happens in in blockchain ecosystems and in open source communities usually these ideas do not even leave the person's head or even if they've been discussed in certain group you know there is no full office happening it might take days for the person to even voice the thoughts and ideas that they have and it might take months or never for someone to follow up on the idea that they was discussed in some community group meeting and this is just the reality of all open source communities so what's the solution to it again you know learn from the best open source communities you want these ideas to be written down and usually in some form on a blockchain so we have a board which is a part of our near social network where people just write their ideas so they never get lost and people can interact with them that's the place where people do the brain dump in our system and it pretty much looks like Reddit in there with subreddits and we try to guarantee that all the ideas are going to be followed through and nothing is going to be lost so once the ideas are written down the reality is that many of these projects they are not created in isolation they depend on something they depend on the new contract standard on new wallet interface on some infrastructure thing and that's where a lot of the Slowdown happens in the blockchain ecosystem too because people are just waiting for this new standard to be approved by a huge Community which can take easily half a year or even more um and the our way of solving it is again we copied it from the rust governance this is called War groups we took it as this because we have people who actually participate in the rust governance but they're inside near ecosystem so the work group is is a group of the experts um who are electable they hold accountable for making sure that the ideas and proposals are reviewed at the given Cadence and the big important thing here which is our the most important Source here of this near developer ecosystem is that we refine this proposaly process to such degree that we can guarantee that their ideas will be discussed and will be reviewed within a given time frame and the difference that it makes is that now businesses can rely on you because before when you when you have a business that has a roadmap that has investors and you know fundraising rounds they cannot really rely that much of on on ecosystem standards to be reviewed by a certain deadline because like a system can take as much time as they want discussing it but now what this proposal reprocess that we took from the rust and modified heavily we can guarantee that all of the things are going to be discussed within certain timeline and different businesses and projects can actually have their roadmap depend on it we spent many months refining this Proposal review process we have today by the way about six work groups that are formed they cover many aspects of the of our blockchain development and I didn't mention it but we have like more than 15 Community groups that people have formed so we encourage every blockchain ecosystem to try that out I think this works pretty nice well and then finally what is the final slowdown that happens once the things are agreed on and people are excited about working on them they don't have enough help because the reality is again a lot of these projects are not just pure code they require a lot of help outside the coding even with the coding you need to pay some to people sometimes so it's not just the help with uh with the funding so the way we generalized it for the near developer ecosystem is we say we're now going to have a lot of the service providers we're going to have marketing service providers we're going to have different funding Outlets that actually give us money to build developer ecosystem we're going to have people who help us with hiring with volunteer programs security audits and we have basically a community agreed [Music] agreements with the service providers what it does is it guarantees now that people can take the idea from from the Fresh like brainstorming session in the community group write it down in the board have a discussion have validation by the experts inside the work group and then get help from all these different service providers that would be paid by our Dow to help different projects succeed so that that's pretty much it just four recipes that I recommend everyone who is building uh developer ecosystem inside your blockchain to follow if you're interested in near developer ecosystem specifically follow this URL near devgov.org uh we're looking for all kind of leaders and experts in different technical areas who want to have roles in our developer ecosystem and uh you might even get paid if you're spending a lot of time on our developer system we want to incentivize people so thanks everyone that's uh yeah near developer governance thank you [Music]