This proposal seeks to fund 6 months of work towards developing online hackathon organization playbook and tools. This playbook goal is to help efficiently organize this kind of online events independently from third party event organizers/companies.
This playbook goal is to help streamline the process and avoid common pitfalls, mainly: avoid third party organization of the event, avoid sponsorship costs, avoid time consuming meetings and problems related to particular participants. We have already organized one hackathon in LATAM and we plan to continue to test this new playbook in the region.
It has 3 core projects:
- Content creation (tutorials, courses, explainers and workshops)
- Make your own hackathon kit + hackathon organization
- Ongoing challenges/bounties
We are after new talent, mainly programmers, researchers and designers. This proposal will also include translation of core assets (doco, video scripts, challenges, relevant copy) created that may assist other teams in onboarding new devs. We will not bill the treasury for content distribution or social media usage.
Participating in and organizing events is costly. Most marketing proposals in the past had a sponsorship budget to buy their place in events. Developing our own tools, reusable content, and methodology is a must to remove this intermediary costs.
Past efforts towards attracting dev talent in LATAM started yielding results. Developers with a maker mindset are in the best position to understand what Decred is building, they are the power users we are after. The Hackathon helped us achieve momentum and continue to grow the dev community in LATAM is key so that the region can adopt Decred by helping build tools that fit their needs.
We separated this proposal from the Spanish Comms and Content proposal because we saw interest in pursuing this direction and an opportunity to focus on it.
Content (30% of efforts)
Even if already motivated, new developers must learn about Decred before contributing to the code base or starting new projects.
We’ve been working on Codigo Decred, a video series that explains Decred tech for devs. We will continue on this path covering repos/tools to make it easier for devs to understand why/how Decred tech is built. But we also learned they struggle with some of the core concepts behind cryptocurrencies, especially the how and why so tutorials and guides should be paired with higher level overviews of Decred mission and vision.
Hackathon (60%)
The Hackathon proved to be one of the best yielding efforts in this area. But this proposal will not think of the hackathon as a one time event, instead we will work towards developing a system that aids us and other contractors in organizing these kinds of events.
Hackathon work includes:
- Challenge design
- Finding partners
- Promoting the event (focus on dev communities instead of platform brands)
- Event organization
- Announce winners and projects
The team will work towards creating a playbook that explains how to complete each step and, when possible and not found elsewhere, tools that automate them.
Just like other Decred projects, we think iterating the hackathon format is a must. Moving forward, the plan is to turn it upside down, ideally, we want to work towards a scenario where third party orgs come and sponsor a Decred hackathon, help us present beefy prizes and more.
Ongoing challenges/bounties (10%)
While Hackathon works, sporadic events are not enough to keep the community together. We propose creating weekly/monthly challenges that push new devs to dive into the code while contributing to it from the start.
Bounty format:
Small challenges that require dev submitting new code as a PR to the challenge repo. Community could vote on the next challenge (the tools they would like to see made) and a two-tier prize structure could make the first solution to earn 1 DCR while alternative implementations in other languages win 0.1 DCR in order to grow the codebase and enable some “replayability”.
Asset translation (no cost, side-job)
All assets created by this proposal that can help other teams and contractors organize their own online events or challenges will be translated to English.
The team is a subset of the Spanish team:
@pablito: Content production, software development, dev relationships
@addcade: Producer, distribution partnerships, event organization
@nachito: Graphic designer, video editing, templates.
Other people with Decred Contractor Clearance may contribute to the project and bill for their valuable work.
Contractor hours
$13500 MAX (~450 hours over 6 months)
Prizes
$ 3500
- $ 3000 for hackathons ($ 1500 each)
- $ 500 MAX for small bounties
- We fund prizes up front
$ 17000 MAX TOTAL BUDGET
As always, the unspent budget will remain in the treasury.