Summary

Across most teams there seems to be an agreement that we should be focusing our efforts on the DAO segment. There is also agreement that a core component of the pitch to them should be tools for building a developer ecosystem and driving contribution.

I've gone out to partner projects to validate target stakeholders and their reality. This document tries to outline lessons learned from discussions with ~20 potential partner projects. It also aims to highlight the lack of solution for driving developers to engage with contribution opportunities at projects.

Who

  1. Developers - My initial assumption was that our entry point into projects would be via developers who are interested in using code collaboration tools. Developers have been hard to engage with past the point of them liking and respecting the project. They want to see it exist, but many come with the view that this needs to be an alternative to github to be useful for them and aren't keen to invest too much time till that's true.
  2. Ecosystem leads (Grant leads, community leads, devRel) - have been very responsive to our "DAO tooling", "decentralised infrastructure", and "growing developer ecosystems" narratives. My understanding thus far is that the key reasons they are responding to this is because it hits some of the most important components of their role's directives;
    1. Grow the developer ecosystem and number of contributors/users of their OS software
    2. Grow decentralisation

What and How

In order to achieve the directive of building developer ecosystems around their projects, ecosystem leads are

  1. Funding bounties
  2. Funding prizes at hackathons
  3. Launching grant programmes
  4. Working to engage developers via their community channels.
  5. Many are struggling to attract great engineers and thus turn to tradition recruiters or internal recruitment with traditional strategies for core team.

Developers are keen to get into web3 and don't find it super accessible, but start engaging by;

  1. Trying to play with some of the key technologies
  2. Taking guidance from friends already in the space
  3. Participating in hackathons

There remain a lot of unanswered questions around the best ways to grow decentralisation around web3 projects at every level of the stack/organisations, so projects are treading carefully and hoping to learn from pioneers over invest time and effort early. Projects seem to be responding by;

  1. trying to stay up to date with the latest models and tooling
  2. keen to learn what is working and driving real value from other projects