TLDR: Highlighting the amazing things being built in the Radix ecosystem is a priority. We need to celebrate ecosystem success better than we have, and we would like feedback on our plan to do this. Pending feedback, we will launch this new process on March 10th.
A north-star goal for 2022 (and beyond) is building a robust, innovative, and engaged developer/builder community around the Radix Public Network. Why? Because it’s you, the builders, who will create and sustain a thriving DeFi ecosystem on Radix.
It is therefore essential there is a focus on supporting the rapidly growing developer community and ecosystem for Radix.
Part of this is giving builders the right tools and making sure that those tools are seen and used by the right people. But that’s just the start. What happens when things are built, launched, and used? We must also help the developer community by using our visibility to celebrate the success of Radix developers.
We’ve heard the feedback that we need to accelerate the ways we highlight the amazing things the developer (and wider) community are achieving, even at this early stage of the network.
In this post, we’re going to share our proposal for how we will begin celebrating successes, while also making clear how we will approach this in a fair and balanced way so that we don’t inadvertently seem to be ignoring some projects while giving attention to others. We would like to get feedback from the Radix developer community, and wider community, on this plan to make sure it makes sense. If you have feedback on this, please let us know in the “wen-marketing” channel on Discord before March 10th, 2022.
What we’ve done so far and why it isn’t working
When we’ve seen something cool, we’ve sometimes made a comment in something like the Radix Report, or made the occasional Tweet (either as Radix or from individual team members). There are a few issues with this approach and general challenges:
- It’s unintentionally inconsistent, and would only get more so.
While we spend a lot of time ensuring we’re up to speed on the conversations and developments in the Radix community, we cannot see everything that happens. If we just comment on things we see, more often than not, we could miss things that deserve celebrating. Often those who are simply better at attracting random attention from team members unfairly get highlighted more. - It’s subjective.
We strongly believe that it is not our place to pick and choose “winners” and we are extremely conscious that currently the largest platform to reach people interested in the Radix ecosystem are the official channels. We want to use these channels to promote ecosystem activity, but it must be in a way that is as fair as possible to the community as a whole rather than based on off-the-cuff judgments of what is worth talking about. - It’s easy for bad actors to try to game/abuse.
There have been plenty of times in other crypto projects where high-profile people in an ecosystem/team are listed as “advisors” to build credibility without their knowledge. Even well-intentioned approaches can become problematic, such as messaging team members directly for support - this puts individuals in an awkward position as it’s important they remain fair/ethical, but that will lead to understandable disappointment in the community. - We must be responsible for what we say, as it reflects on the network as a whole.
Firstly, we do not have the capacity to audit or do ongoing monitoring of things being built. If we post something that is perceived as an endorsement of a product or service, which later causes problems for users (accidentally or not) it can cause real harm to users, and create anger with Radix overall. Equally we obviously can’t highlight things that are likely to negatively impact the reputation of the Radix Network (even if this is unlikely).
Because of these challenges, so far, we have mainly taken the “safe” approach of inaction/silence – and the spotty coverage we have given can easily, although accidently, miss long-time community contributors doing amazing things.
The current approach isn't right and isn’t working. That’s why we’re putting in place this new process for how projects/builders can be highlighted, and what the criteria will be for their consideration. These will be the starting steps of a work in progress we can improve on over time with the support and help of the Radix ecosystem and community.
How We Will Celebrate Successes Going Forward
The three step process, starting with a simple form for a project (or community member) to submit something for review will involve the following steps - starting after March 10th:
- Is the project objectively successful? (Criteria)
- Is the project in a new category that highlights the breadth of Radix’s capabilities?
- Where and how the project will be publicized/promoted
Step 1: Evaluating Success
This is the cornerstone of how we will evaluate what to highlight - we must celebrate success.
Even at this early stage, there is already so much happening in the ecosystem that it isn’t feasible to highlight everything. By Babylon and beyond, the amount happening will only exponentially increase.
If we highlighted everything, then it would just become noise and do a disservice to those making the biggest impact in the ecosystem going forward. Therefore, similar to the ethos behind the developer royalty system of rewarding those that make the system better, we will take a similar approach to evaluate things to highlight in the ecosystem by celebrating the successes of builders and the community/ecosystem.
So, what does success mean? Well, this is something that we initially want to be broad. It could be a “first” to code an AMM in Scrypto. It could be a project getting X number of users reserving an NFT or an on-chain game generating Y number of transactions per month. Perhaps something like a community documentation site completing a tutorial for getting started with Scrypto. The key feature is this is something that advanced the ecosystem in a relatively new way - either by originality, or magnitude of impact.
Beyond Babylon, this could also include things like a DeFi app on Radix reaching $1m of liquidity. We would probably celebrate the first few to reach that milestone, but if multiple dApps had already reached $10m of liquidity, the celebrations may be reserved for that level of success going forward.
The TLDR here - if the community wins and wants to celebrate an achievement, we want to ensure as many in the Radix community cheer along!
Step 2: What Category is the Success in?
One of the great things about the growing Radix ecosystem is that there are a wide variety of ways the community can contribute to the success of the Radix Network. When we are looking at what we should be highlighting, there are considerations we must take into account based on the type of contribution.
Currently, we believe contributions to the ecosystem fall into four groups. Here is how we define them and how we can engage with them:
- Content such as articles, videos, memes, docs, community meet-ups, etc. If you have had success in this category, we definitely want to shout about it. Examples could be reaching a certain number of views, having good reviews from others in the community on the quality of the content, a unique type of content, content on a specific topic, or consistent output.
- Built using, or utilizing, core Radix tech such as Scrypto or the Radix Public Network. Again, if you have had success here - let us know! Examples include creating blueprints using Scrypto or tools that utilize Olympia network functionality such as sending and/or creating tokens.
- Validator nodes for the Radix Public Network. Everyone who uses (or cares about) the network is incredibly fortunate to have such an amazing and growing group of high-quality validators participating in consensus. As a decentralized, permissionless network, it is an extremely important and essential contribution to the success of the Radix Public Network. Although there are plenty of things to celebrate about validators, we feel strongly that RTJL, RDX Works, and team members should NOT comment on specific validators for the risk of influencing stake.
- Tools or services such as dashboards, wallets, message boards, unofficial community channels, and many more! There is a wide range of things here, and while we want to celebrate the success of these things, currently it will need to be on a case-by-case basis. We don’t have the capacity to continually monitor these tools and services, so we need to be clear that when we celebrate success for these things it is not seen as an endorsement of their accuracy or security. If you see something in this category worth celebrating, let us know, and we will discuss with you on a case-by-case basis for now on how best to balance this.
Step 3: Medium of Celebration
We now have something in the Radix ecosystem that is ready to be recognized for the success it’s achieved! This final step is looking at what is the best way to highlight this to the wider Radix community and followers.
Generally, the larger the impact, the greater the success milestone, or more unique the achievement is will result in the celebration taking place on our larger mediums and channels. Although our goal is to cheer as much as possible, we believe it is also important to save the brightest spotlights for the greatest achievements.
The rough hierarchy (from high to low) of our channels is explained below:
- A permanent feature on a static page or menu of https://radixdlt.com.
- A dedicated blog on the website and/or press release.
- Added to the ecosystem page, community Scrypto GitHub, linked from official docs. (These are generally reserved for things directly related to core products.)
- Highlighted in the Radix Report and/or a dedicated tweet/social post.
- Your update is shared via official channels, such as a retweet, or posted on main Telegram/Discord channels.
- Shared on dedicated ecosystem update channels (starting with a new Discord channel we’re making).
The above are the formal channels, however, we will still try to do more commenting/mentioning of things we see that we think are cool in organic conversation/social via team-members’ personal accounts. This type of highlighting will be inconsistent due to being organic, so we will continue to monitor if it is a net positive or not!
Alternate Route: Community Operated Channels
Alongside our push to do more to promote things in the Radix ecosystem, we also want to encourage the community itself to promote, champion, and celebrate each other. It is likely (and desired) that the ecosystem will grow to the point where it is impossible for any single entity to have complete coverage of everything happening.
As we have seen with other ecosystems, a whole category of community-run services build tools to surface or highlight things in the ecosystem. There are often even multiple competing services doing similar things (such as DeFiPulse and DeFiLama). Therefore, we want to help both new and existing services achieve similar success highlighting things in the Radix Ecosystem to ensure we’re not the bottleneck, only a source of excitement!
One way we will do this is by celebrating the success of these community-operated channels!
Final Thoughts
Our goal with this framework is to dramatically improve how we highlight the amazing things happening in the ecosystem since we haven’t been doing that well enough to date. It is still a work in progress and a system that will need to improve based on feedback and experience - so please give your feedback in the “wen-marketing” channel on Discord!