Leveraging on-chain use cases for DevRel in the blockchain space

Speaker

Lauren Lee

Job title

Director of Developer Relations

Company

Parity

Event

DevRelCon London 2023

Explore the transformative power of on-chain governance in DevRel with Lauren Lee in this talk from DevRelCon London 2023. Unpack the innovative approach of Polkadot’s OpenGov and its implications for developer communities in this insightful session.

Watch the video

Watch the video on YouTube >

Key takeaways

  • On-chain governance as a democratic model: Lauren highlights how Polkadot’s on-chain governance system, OpenGov, democratizes decision-making, allowing every token holder to vote on proposals, which she believes leads to a transparent, inclusive, and accountable governance model that could inspire web 2.0 communities.
  • Decentralized community empowerment: The talk underscores the power of community in decision-making, where even funding and operational costs, including DevRel teams, are governed by the community, ensuring alignment with communal needs and priorities.
  • Technical fellowship and expertise delegation: Lauren introduces the concept of a Technical Fellowship within Polkadot, where experts guide the network’s evolution, and token holders can delegate their votes to these experts, ensuring informed decision-making.
  • Quadratic voting to address wealth disparity: To prevent wealth concentration from overpowering the voting process, Polkadot implements quadratic voting, making it costly for ‘whales’ to dominate decisions, thereby aiming to balance influence among all participants.
  • Financial incentives for contributions: Lauren explained how contributors to the network are rewarded through a treasury funded by transaction fees, reinforcing positive behavior and financially supporting those who add value to the ecosystem, a concept that could be replicated in web 2.0 platforms for community engagement and growth.

Transcript

Ben Greenberg:

Another amazing session, enlightening session. Insightful session by Lauren on leveraging on chain use cases for DevRel. Lauren is a fantastic presenter. I didn’t give this intro to Aaron by the way, but Lauren’s a fantastic presenter. You’re in for a real, real treat, so give it up a standing ovation for Lauren. Thank you.

Lauren Lee:

I have to say, so the last time I was giving a talk, a sudden wave of nausea came over me. I bolted off the stage to throw up and that is when I found out that I was pregnant with the child I’m carrying right now. So let’s, fingers crossed, today goes better, but pretty terrifying in the moment. That’s like a DevRel nightmare. That came true. Okay. Hi everyone, my name is Lauren. It is wonderful to see you all here very quickly. Before I dive in, I want to share how excited I am to be here. I love DevRelCon so so much. I remember attending my first one in San Francisco when I was just a newbie and I was joining the Nexmo team and I learned so much from both the community, the talks, et cetera. It just feels really full circle moment to be able to bring my team here with me today and see them being welcomed by the community with such open arms.

So I appreciate, thank you all for being welcoming to the Web3 team that we are at Parity. And so yes, that is the team that I lead. Developer relations at Parity Technologies. It is the company as Aaron said, that develops and works on Polkadot. So Polkadot, if you are unfamiliar is a blockchain platform designed to multiple blockchains, connect multiple blockchains together, allowing them to work in harmony. You can think of it as a network of networks and it aims to solve some of the biggest challenges facing blockchains today, such as scalability, interoperability, and security. In simple terms, Polkadot allows different blockchains to essentially talk to each other and share information, making it easier to create complex applications and services. Now, I should caveat that joining Parity was my first foray into Web3. I’ve done Dev Rel dev education at a host of different companies with a lot of you in the audience today.

In fact, and I’ll be honest, I was both skeptical and hesitant about joining this space in general. Wasn’t it made up of a bunch of crypto bros? Isn’t it a bunch of scams or just a fad maybe turns out, and sure honestly, maybe I’ve drank the Kool-Aid, but I’ll let you decide. There’s some actually really cool tech behind some of the blockchain companies and some of the systems in place to grow and to govern and make decisions for a community are incredibly impressive and inclusive, which is like a ding ding word in my book. When I began interviewing about a year ago, that was what convinced me ultimately to join, and that’s what I would love to talk to you about today about the on chain governance system that Polkadot implements as well as the takeaways or applications web two teams might want to use themselves to better recognize to improve their community contributions and involvement.

So let’s dive in and just as all realms of tech does, Web3 is pretty guilty of using exclusively invented vernacular, and I find that to be relatively unwelcoming for newbies into the community. And as an educator myself, I could never stand up on stage using three letter acronyms or just jargon without defining them first. So we’ll begin with governance as I want to talk about our on chain governance system called OpenGov. And to do that I will level set and declare that governance in a general sense is a system of rules, practices, and processes by which a community or organization is directed and controlled. Essentially, it helps in decision-making, conflict resolution, future planning. We’re all familiar with how governance works in traditional settings like governments, corporations, governments are in democracy. People vote for a representative who then makes the laws In most companies, the board and the C-suite, they establish and enforce the rules.

Similarly, blockchains all need their own governance systems. It’s how decisions are made within their decentralized network. Bitcoin, the original, the OG blockchain had an incredibly simple offering. It was just a digital ledger that kept record of all peer-to-peer transactions made with a token. It didn’t really need to worry too much about how decisions were made, so governance wasn’t something it was too concerned about. However, with the introduction of smart contracts and the technology evolved to handle more complex use cases beyond just moving tokens between wallets, the need for governance became increasingly important. Suddenly people were able to do a whole lot more in the blockchain space beyond just moving tokens and this new complexity, most definitely required rules and decision-making processes. A Web3 is, or maybe a core tenant, is that decentralization means that no single party has complete control over the entire network. Again, for some of the OG chains, Bitcoin included, remember they didn’t really require too heavy of a hand in terms of governance.

So the type that they utilized is what we call off chain governance, meaning that major decisions are made outside of the blockchain itself through forums, social media developer meetings, which if you ask me is a bit ironic because that means that it doesn’t fulfill the Web3 philosophical goal of being decentralized. These chains are asking their users to trust their core devs to make the correct decisions when it comes to system upgrades and whatnot, and Bitcoin is not alone. In fact, majority of the chains, even much, much more complex ones such as Ethereum do their governance off chain, which some might say is a flaw in their development, or rather just that they’re missing out on a key feature of what blockchain tech enables because blockchain technology opens up a wide variety of possibilities when it comes to governance so quickly, we will define what exactly I mean by on chain governance as well as off chain.

So think of off chain governance as exactly what we’re already familiar with. We just needed to come up with our own word for it. Judges, committees, code of conduct forums, all those sort of things, Bitcoin and Ethereum developers have to trust that their core devs are making the best decisions possible for them, and there’s very little transparency into majority of the decision-making processes. Now on chain governance implies that all decisions related to the network are made through transactions on the blockchain itself. This means that proposals voting and the implementation of changes are all recorded and executed within the blockchain, making the process transparent, auditable, and resistant to tampering doing on chain enables a more democratic, a more inclusive form of governance where decisions can be made collectively by a broader group of stakeholders rather than a centralized authority or a small group of people. The community gets to be directly involved in the development and decision-making processes, ensuring that the project evolves in a way that meets that community’s needs and it ensures accountability among members because all actions and transactions as Aaron spoke about are recorded then on the blockchain.

Essentially, the possibilities are quite impressive because blockchain can help create a more equitable, transparent, and participatory governance model for ecosystems and communities have done on chain ly. A good shout on the overuse of ecosystems. I will say it quite a bit in this presentation, but as I mentioned, the big dogs like Ethereum, Bitcoin are doing their governance off chain. So let’s talk about an example of what it looks like to do it on chain and how freaking cool. It’s okay. It’s rather complex to implement, and there are very few chains, as I mentioned I think before that are doing this sort of on chain governance. Tezos Cosmos, they have systems that allow their token holders to vote on proposals, which is awesome and I love, but today I want to talk about Polkadot’s model OpenGov as it is quite sophisticated and goes well beyond just voting.

Now, I fear that because I work at parity, this may come off as a bit of a product pitch, which absolutely is not my goal and something I hold deeply core tenant of dev realism instead. This is me really just genuinely wanting to show off a really cool bit of tech and a system that aims to provide genuine democratic structure for decision making. It allows the community to participate and decide on pretty much everything, the good, the bad, the ugly, and that happens within our ecosystem and honestly in I truly believe you all might find this compelling. So with that said, some key features about the bottle to shout out are on chain voting, literally any and every.holder.by the way is what Polkadot calls its token, BTC is the equivalent for Bitcoin. ETHE. Ether is what Ethereum calls their coin, but we call it dot.

So I will say that a few times and I don’t have a slide about it. Apologies. And that is a three letter acronym. No, it’s not. It doesn’t stand for anything. Anyway, tangent. So anyone or any and every dot holder can directly vote on proposals. Anyone can propose a referendum and then everyone gets to say on whether or not it is approved. Essentially the notion was they figured out the technical way to decide democratically on chain upgrades, why not be radical and vote on everything within the ecosystem, including those system upgrades, but also funding and how money is spent, which then leads to greater transparency Because all governance activities are recorded on the blockchain, the process becomes incredibly transparent. Think of any company that’s done a round of layoffs recently, but continues to pay their executives ridiculous salaries. Why was that decision made? With traditional governance models, you would never be given a transparent or honest reason for that.

However, OpenGov ensures that all actions are publicly verifiable and thus accountability. Because all actions are recorded, it’s easier to hold participants accountable for their decisions, and then we have automated execution. Decisions can be made and implemented quickly, which is crucial for rapidly evolving technologies like blockchain. And once a proposal is approved, changes are automatically and effectively efficiently implemented through smart contracts. So something’s been approved, gets the yay vote, it becomes coded, it becomes live and effective instantaneously immediately, which is really cool. Decentralization by so many different token holders to participate in governance, OpenGov reduces the risk of decision being controlled by a small group of entities. And lastly, inclusivity. Because every dot holder can propose changes and vote on them, the system is incredibly democratic. This is a big win-win. It comes to inclusivity as it aims to remove biases. It’s not some group of wealthy old dudes.

Anyone can have a voice and vote regardless of their background, which also is great for community engagement as a model encourages active participation for community members leading to a really vibrant and engaged ding, ding, ding ecosystem. Polkadot believes in this system so much that even the upgrades to the chain or done via OpenGov, meaning literally anyone can propose software updates to be voted upon and to put that in kind of perspective or comparative terms, imagine the scenario of say, Dropbox, which has roughly the same market cap as Polkadot, allowing anyone in their community and shareholders to submit a new version of their software or to suggest to change and completely restructure their pricing model or even elect a new board. Everyone is out from the top, new folks are in, that sounds wild, but is exactly what OpenGov is encouraging the community to do.

But of course, maintaining, authoring and reading some of this tech requires an incredible amount of expertise. Rust is in a language known by all nor are the intricacies of consensus algorithms, cryptographic data structures and chain synchronization strategies. Everyone can and should vote or be able to vote, but what happens if people don’t understand the tech that they’re voting upon? Well, Polkadot has a technical fellowship to help guide things. It’s made up of individuals who have the technical expertise, who then serve as a political collective and have an on chain voice. They weigh in on the ongoing maintenance evolution and development of the polka.network. Anyone can nominate to join and all members are then voted on chain, and I’m talking, everyone has to be voted upon. The founder of Ethereum in Polkadot itself, Dr. Gavin Wood had to nominate himself and everyone has to go through the same voting process.

Members hold different ranks representing varying technical requirements, ensuring that only individuals with a comprehensive understanding of the network can influence the governance and requirements to level up, if you will, include contributions like leading the design and implementation of a major protocol innovation, as well as publishing educational content about the tech, which I personally love because that ensures that the ecosystem is brought along for the ride and the innovation is shared with the dev community. To join a developer must make significant contributions to the core protocol. So while right now, I’ll admit it, the majority of the members come from parity as it’s our job to develop the tech, but that’s not the forever model. In fact, the goal is that there’s a healthy balance between internal core devs and community members. It evolves as the community grows. It’s been really cool to kind of watch that process evolve over the past few years.

What’s cool is that because this model is open source, you can use it to form whatever on chain board your community might need. As in you want to create a fellowship, say a developer relations one or for your ambassador program, you’re welcome and encouraged to do so. Feel free to grab it, borrow it. It’s important to note that the fellowship has or never has hard power over the network. It cannot change the parameters, it cannot conduct rescues or move assets. It simply represents a body that votes and they speak on chain publicly about their opinions and expertise. And nor do they get more votes just because they’re in the fellowship. In fact, they’re not the only group that can vote as a group on chain. And in a traditional sense, I imagine we’re all familiar with what delegation is. As our governments utilize it, we civilians vote for our local council and then they go on to represent us.

Oftentimes in those situations though, I or we have to make a trade off, I may agree with maybe 80% of their policies, maybe on the economy education, but not their views on healthcare, for example. Well, that sucks whether I like it or not, that representative is my best option. I have to suck it up and accept that they’re my best choice in the election and that they’re the one to represent me. Is my mic better? Is it kind of sp? Is it okay? Okay. In delegation, in OpenGov, it allows us to assign your vote much, much, much more. Granularly, granularly, granularly to note, who knows? You can delegate. I used to be an English teacher, so things like that I could stick on for a really long time, but we don’t need to do that together. I’ll fixate on tonight as I fall asleep. So yes, you can delegate to experts for every track that exists and there are a bunch.

So for votes requiring cheaply technical expertise, I can choose to delegate a trusted expert or to an expert who acts in the best interest of the network protocol. It could be someone in the fellowship, but it doesn’t necessarily have to be. It could be Aaron, I know he’s super smart, so okay, I’ll give you my votes to you. Please use them well, whereas for votes on proposals pretending to community, maybe an education initiatives, okay, I feel like I’m an expert there. I’m going to keep those and handle and review all of them myself. And because I am by no means an expert in legal security matters, I can delegate votes on those proposals pertaining to those matters to other experts. So with this model, voters don’t need to necessarily be up to date with all the governance matters and can still make their vote count, which I personally think is pretty cool.

Now, some of you in the audience might be thinking, sure, Lauren, this sounds cool. In theory, I like that everyone gets to vote on things, but you can’t discount the reality of wealth disparity as in can’t. Those who hold a whole lot of DOT disproportionately sway the outcomes of these votes. And yes, we call those whales and most definitely OpenGov. To balance that, I guess utilizes something we call quadratic voting, which makes it increasingly more expensive to dominate a single issue. So while whales still sometimes swoop in minutes before a vote closes to downvote a proposal that necessarily was likely to be approved, quadratic voting aims to level the field a bit, but again, no person is ever allocated more votes than any other person. The vote is simply and directly tied to a singular token. Members of the fellowship have just as much ability to vote or invoice their opinion as any of us do, which is cool.

And something I have forgotten to mention so far is that members of the fellowship are monetarily incentivized to share their experience and their expertise as well as in their participation is paid. How does that work? You might be wondering, well, let’s talk about the treasury and Polkadots. Funding model has a treasury funds of approximately 200 million, which is designed to fund everything I’ve discussed so far, the networks, development, security of the chain, essentially any and all community efforts. The way it’s funded is via a few different initiatives. One is transaction fees, meaning a portion of every transaction on the network goes into the treasury. Anytime a token is sent or received, anytime a smart contract is executed, a vote is cast. Literally, anytime anything happens on chain, a teeny tiny portion, I’m talking pennies, the equivalency of is allocated into the treasury and there are a lot of transactions every single day.

Every single minute there is a new block every six seconds, the treasury is funded via some other mechanisms as well. For example, something called slashing, which essentially aims to reinforce good behavior of the block validators who help execute and run the chain from an e-comm perspective. Essentially, Polkadot makes the incentive to behave benevolently and good outweigh the penalty of bad malicious skeezy behavior. And I won’t go into that too much detail here, but know that the transaction fees are not the only way that the treasury is funded, but because what is more interesting is how the funds are spent or allocated, if you will, because the treasury is overseen, and hopefully you have guessed this by now, by the community, the community, a K, any member who is a dot holder, so anyone who holds a dot can submit proposals to use funds for the treasury.

The community reads the proposals, has an open discussion in the public forum, and then votes on whether or not they believe that it would be good for us for the community. And these proposals can genuinely be for anything. Of course, it’s going to be for some classic dev work development of the network bug fixes, or it could be for marketing, it could be for design work for a project. What’s probably most interesting for folks in this room, it could be for educational content for your community members, it could be for a meetup, a hackathon conferences, and this isn’t just theory, millions of dollars have been allocated and awarded to community projects. Over the past year, a proposal to create an online learning platform for developers within the ecosystem was funded earlier for $45,000 or equivalency of so was one to create an educational video explainer tutorial series.

We also, a hackathon series in China was funded recently for $400,000. Our Python, SDK started out as a community proposal. A ton of translation work is done via proposals as our conferences, especially in places that we don’t have teams or the bandwidth to cover just yet, such as Safari dao, their two day conference in Kenya was roughly $250,000 that was funded and approved and awarded. I will be real. Not all proposals are like these. They, there definitely have been some silly ones. A couple years ago there was a proposal to create a rap music video explaining the intricacies of Polkadots proposal or protocol for $120,000, and guess what it got funded.

The power is with the community though. If the community believes in it, then they have the ability and the power to approve it. The treasury is also used for operational costs such as employee salaries, administrative work, and infrastructure costs. So my dev rail team is a DevRel team for the community, quite literally funded and paid for by the community. Tying treasury to the OpenGov system ensures that it is incredibly transparent and inclusive, which allows for us to participate in the growth and evolution of the network. It allows people to have genuine input while ensuring responsible spending. It’s so powerful the idea of a community weighing in and deciding what’s necessary and best for the future of the ecosystem. It sounds radical and maybe it’s, I mean, again, I sound like I’m on a prophesizing soapbox, but it is what convinced me to learn more, and so thus, I wanted to share that with all of y’all.

And if this sounds familiar to a or something that, I’m sorry, I think I slurred that word a dao, you’d be spot on. For example, some of you may have heard of the DevRel dao. Yes. No. Okay, those of you who are not a DAO is a decentralized autonomous organization, and it is an organization that is represented by rules encoded as a computer program that is transparent, controlled by the organization members and not influenced by a central government. Well, everything that I’ve discussed today, the fellowship, the treasury voting on proposals within OpenGov, it is essentially a giant Dow and any member can participate in everything I’ve described to be a member, simply own a single.today when I checked earlier this morning, single dot $4 and 32 cents. Again, not to belabor the point, but that makes all of this wildly accessible and inclusive. And yeah, those are things that I look to get behind and get excited about.

So tangible part of the show. How might all of this apply to y’all? What takeaways or concepts might you be able to implement in your world at your company for your community? OpenGov has opened the door to our community, allowing developers, token holders, anyone really to have a say. And again, it’s not always sunshine and roses. There are people who down vote, good proposals just to be agents of chaos and maybe assholes, but the good outweighs the bad. So why not consider implementing a voting structure, say within your community initiative, within your ambassador or your champion programs? There are a bunch of ways to practically make this happen. Via both Web3 and web two resources, there are teams that our ecosystem, there’s one called invar that could help you quickly set up a DAO to vote on community issues or if you wanted to stay within the web two space user voice and platforms like them, they allow participants to vote, weigh in on ideas, give feedback, because how cool is it to encourage your community members to weigh in on the direction of the program itself could be incredibly powerful.

Our model emphasizes transparency as any nomination to join the fellowship is public. The discussion around that nomination is as well. Because of this, there is genuine accountability within the community. People cannot be someone that they aren’t. I like the idea of applying this philosophy to any community program, be it your champion program or an open source contributor initiative, publicly applauding and thanking participation and allowing the community to decide on what initiatives are most important and deserve funding. Feels pretty cool. Speaking of funding, I think I’m short on time, so I’ll whip through this. I mentioned it before, but the fellowship receives incentives for their participation in the program to help induct retain expertise important for the network. So we use things like tips and bounties to pay our community for their open source contributions to the tech. Not that money is the end all be all right, especially when it comes to showing value, but it is nice to pay people for their work, for their time.

Tips are generally given for smaller tasks or contributions that benefit the system. This could include things like fixing minor bugs, creating educational content, or providing helpful support. In community forums like Stack Overflow, stack Exchange, anyone can propose a tip for contribution. The proposal usually includes details of the contribution as well as the suggested tip amount, and then within the OpenGov system, the tip is reviewed and approved by the fellowship or the community and doesn’t need to have an exhaustive voting time because the amount of token is not super extreme and it can be approved relatively quickly. Then once it’s approved, the tip is paid out from the treasury to the contributor’s account instantaneously, and not to belabor the point, but again, all proposals, all approvals payouts are recorded on chain, ensuring authentic transparency and bounties are for larger, more complex tasks that require significant effort and expertise, including developing new features, improving existing protocols, conducting security audits, and a contributor submits then on chain publicly a proposal to be read, to be reviewed, kind of people discuss whether it’s even valid or not.

Do we need this? They weigh in on it publicly. Once it’s been approved, the work gets started, the community reviews it, and then the payout would happen again, happening publicly and immediately to that contributor. Essentially, there’s nothing stopping y’all from borrowing concepts within your own world. Imagine within your champions program. I’m not saying be radical and spend your entire budget on this, but what if you allocated, I dunno, some money for these sort of tips and bounties Back in the day at Nexmo, the original SDKs, those were maintained by community members. Oh, we need the P-H-P-S-D-K. Let’s go out and find someone in the community and get them to do the work for us. What I’m suggesting is that we flip that model, allow our community members to propose what they want to build, what they believe will help the network and what they believe the future is of the tech, and then pay them for that work, for that contribution.

Just you can’t convince me that that’s not more valuable than a T-shirt or a sock. As you say, the tech that we’re using for tipping is just a node JS bot. You’re welcome to use it. It’s open source. Get started there. There’s a bunch of web two options as well via GitHub. I think to my knowledge, none of have been too successful because that amount for a tip sometimes is the transaction fee itself over weighs the tip amount. And so I do know that Tide Lift, for example, aims to help teams request features and pay the contributors though. So there are web two options as well. Again, this is not a novel concept. During those early Nexmo days when our team was super small, maintaining those six SDKs was nearly impossible. So of course we turned to the community, but eventually those million retainers were brought onto the team.

They were the full-time advocates on the DevRell team. Not every team right now was discussed heavily yesterday has the budget, the buy-in from leadership to expand headcount. You can start small. Polkadot went all in on this concept. It’s the entire foundation of how the network itself works, but you can start with a few hundred dollars, see how it impacts your community. Hopefully it’ll be for the better. That’s a wrap on my talk today. I hope you found this informative and perhaps it’s sparked a few ideas for your own team. I know community may not be the word that you associate when you hear the word blockchain, but it’s quite literally everything to Polkadot and our ecosystem. I hope my talk today adds a bit of nuance and intrigue to your understanding of Web3 and what it is, what blockchain tech might be capable of for your developer communities in the future. Feel free to reach out. I love discussing these sort of things in the world of community. Thank you.

Ben Greenberg:

Thank you. Lauren. We have time for a question or two if there are any. I see. I’ll go here for Sam.

Lauren Lee:

Wait,

Audience member 1:

So slight devil’s advocate voting and go back to Aaron’s talk. So Aaron said pretty much anything on a blockchain can be ascertained to a person because you can figure out the other wallets and blah blah. Yes. In your open gov model though, are all the who voted yes or no public, or is there any concept of an anonymous ballot? Yes.

Lauren Lee:

So your wallet doesn’t, you don’t always need to know. You can know the wallet identity, but who owns that wallet does not necessarily need to be public.

Audience member 1:

But there’s nothing within the protocol that allows for explicitly anonymous ballot. You have to basically keep user an anonymous what

Lauren Lee:

Or you would want to decide that while creating your governance system. And so we encourage everyone to kind of take the concept and apply their version of it. We’re relatively neutral in that concept, but if you want it to be anonymous voting, go for it. If you don’t want it to be anonymous voting and both have pros and cons, right? And as Aaron said, you can have multiple wallets. So that is the thought. If you’re thinking about you want public voting or non-anonymous, is there a word for that? Non-Anonymous voting. Okay. Known voting. If you want known voting, you got to consider the fact that there are multiple wallets someone could be using.

Audience member 2:

So is the treasury fully controlled by the community?

Lauren Lee:

Ding, ding, ding. I hope that that is the moral of the story that you walk out of here being like, oh, what was Lauren talk about? Oh, she was talking about this community treasury funded thing. Completely funded by the community. Yes.

Audience member 2:

So the team is fully funded

Lauren Lee:

Fuck yes. My dev team is a, we are paid for, we do dev work for the community, and the community pays for it. They decide if it is good. And so talk about the pressure we have on metrics.

Audience member 2:

No pressure at all.

Lauren Lee:

Isn’t that wild? I just find it, it’s so exciting to be leading a team that is able to go talk to the community, get this feedback in proposal format, and they’re like, no, that hackathon sounds stupid. You’re not getting that money. And guess what, we then don’t do that hackathon. I get

Audience member 1:

Great care from that.

Lauren Lee:

Yes, urban, it manages the hackathons. That’s okay, but also let’s acknowledge it. That can be chaos and people often use that. Our phrase in expect chaos, it is chaotic because sometimes people can just be mean. And so that’s a reality. And I think right now we have some, I mentioned earlier people are naysay some votes, but we had just recently opened the model where everyone was participating and so people just were like, oh, this is fun to say no to things like what? We’re working really hard and putting together these nice proposals. What do you mean you don’t like me? There’s a tension there and I think it’ll shake out, but who’s to say? Who knows?

Ben Greenberg:

I’m going to grab one more question and someone who hasn’t asked the question yet. Sure. This lovely person over here.

Audience member 3:

Thank you. Hi Lauren. Hi Max. I mean, my question has got two parts. Part one, where can I find that wrap video?

Lauren Lee:

I will never share that link.

Audience member 3:

I’m going to find it. Can you

Lauren Lee:

Imagine 120? No, I can’t.

Audience member 3:

I just want to see the production value for the money.

Lauren Lee:

No. Well, we were working out how to hold people accountable. That’s a great question though, because you have to think about if you’re going to do something like this, how do you keep things in stages to hold account? That was a lesson learned there. We gave the money and then never asked how things went. That was a learning moment for, I mean, right? We’re navigating it ourselves. So now there’s checkpoints and along the way. Exactly, and we were just like, we’re all nubs in this space.

Audience member 3:

So my real question, you talked a bit about how your work is funded and how it’s decided on, what are the other big changes that you see in terms of what DevRel is like from web2 to Web3?

Lauren Lee:

Oh my gosh. Everything. That could be a whole DevRel

Ben Greenberg:

Small question.

Lauren Lee:

DevRelCon talk and how different it is. And honestly, what’s for me, what’s really exciting right now is how greenfield it feels. We just launched a heroes program and we’re the first to do a champions program in the space. Like what? That is a well worn hat in DevRel Web two and mentorship programs meetup. And so it’s almost like getting to be at the early days of DevRel and figuring out strategy, almost doing it again, the mistakes. We made it next. Now I get to kind of implement the better in this industry. That’s like cool. You get to celebrate the people who are super excited about your program and call them champions. So that for me is a big, big difference. Our ecosystem, we just want to celebrate everyone building on us. We don’t have active signups, so we spend a lot of our time talking about what are our hard metrics. I mean, we drank, I did, I’m pregnant, but we spent many hours last night over dinner discussing, but what are we measuring? So we are there too. So no one’s alone in that question.

Ben Greenberg:

You are welcome, Lauren. Thank you so much. You’re welcome. That was such a thought provoking presentation. Thank you, Lauren.

 

Leave a comment

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.