The let's enjoy growing web3 together.
I decided to write this article for several reasons, the first one is that I wanna contribute with some good ideas to the @synergy.witness community, in which I am posting for the first time.
The second reason is that I often feel weird for many projects that I have seen trying to get the hive funding through hive.vote I see devs trying hard to meet requirements as if the livelihood of their projects depends on the amount of hive power they can gather around it, and that imho is not fair for a dev.
Let me explain, I find there is a basic difference between publishing a social post and setting up a web3 dev project a difference in meaning.
When you publish a post, even a development post like the last ones I have shared, you try to contribute to a social gathering around a meaningful subject, inherent to the everyday life of the community.
When you setup a development project you try to setup a direction by building a tool to convey the social effort of the whole community.
The return of meaning of setting up a project is less immediate and more difficult to evaluate, the social impact depends on the social evolution that may be ready to be conveyed but not to understand the intermediate step to achieve a goal.
For example, who would have said a USA president would spend time talking about bitcoin during his election campaign back in 2011?
And this is the "matter of fact" explanation of the difference between the two activities and also the why I think it's important that the tools that fund development project are differentiated and work with specific mechanics allowing the "leaders" of our community to express themselves in a gamified way and, why not, earn from their contribution while allowing new devs to be rewarded for their contributions to selected open source repos, allowing everyone to rely on some basic git repositories, suggested and maintained by devs looking to build their reputation on the hive blockchain.
And that was my concept idea, boring and nerd, now let's explain the scout game which was developed by the ethereum L2 community well represented by the picture above, in order to explain the third and last reason why I think these tools are important to develop, because web3 development can (and should) be fun.
What the scout game has always been and will continue to be is a place where the contributors to some selected (and very important) open source repos from some of the biggest communities of the decentralized world can see their efforts recognized within 3 months of their contributions and get to mint some "developer" cards that allow them to interact with founders in the game and complete even more projects while taking advantage of the NFT and now also fungible token rewards distributed within the game.
So:
- developer contributes to one of the open source repos
- developer gets the dev role inside the game and gets to mint NFT cards. Developers receive 20% of the proceeds from their NFT sales in Scout Points, NFT cards can be purchased in different coins.
- during 13 weeks seasons a developer gets "gems" by contributing to qualified repositories, the gems get converted in scout points at the end of each week and each dev gets rewarded along with all the people that bought her cards.
So you get rewarded when you choose a good dev for your project or you simply appreciate her work, cool isn't it?
A way to convey the development energy toward the goals that each "scout" values most, without standing in the way of other leaders, each of us gets to speak to the persons that they feel more incline to speak with looking at her work.
If you wanna take a look at how the rewards are divided between scouts and developers check the math here.
But you know sometimes a dev gets creative, because she didn't sleep last night and/or she was chatting with one of her NFT collectors and with her open source LLM coding assistant (most likely zephyr in my case) so she decides to start a project for that collector because she liked her brilliant idea, and she also attaches a smart contract to the project, because what are you a web3 dev for if not for writing and deploying smart contracts?
This way a dev can get gems too on the scout game, just by creating projects inside the game and connecting smart contracts to them.
Fast and easy.
The more activity onchain the smart contract proves to have at the end of the week the more gems every dev involved in a project can earn.
Dulcis in fundo
There's more, the scout game has collected users, devs, repos, reputation, during the last year, and so now they can count on partners that rely on them to find developers for their projects.
Cool isn't it?
Now it's not only devs that find funding in order to contribute to open source community repos, it's entire blockchain communities and DAOs that go to the scout community to recruit devs for small paid projects and start building long term collabs.
No loud advertisement, just a "partner" page where devs can go to find bounties, and there's 5 open at the moment, all with L2 EVM compatible chains.
Can we build this far in the hive community?
Who dares collect all git repos from @vsc.network, the above mentioned synergy, @ausbitbank and who else I darn forgot (willingly or unwillingly) to mention here to finally get a comprehensive list of can dos on the hive blockchain plus some smart contract samples?
I bet there are devs who'd wait in line for something like this, independet from hive power, gamified, highly vision related interactions.
PS:
Forgot to mention, the $DEV token, scout point related, has been launched on the 21th of april, with an airdrop.
Each week there'll be an airdrop too during the next month and there's an allocation for devs and scouts in the game.
I got 30$ and I am very happy.
Much love <3