DevNode is an open source code and data stackoverflow focused on smaller community peer group dynamics that we’ve seen in DAOs.
Devnode is working to improve the tooling for developers trying to learn in web3. Developers want support as they try navigate the fast changing landscape in web3 and we’ve seen trends that we’re trying to drive further.
The majority of developers do not feel comfortable posting to stackoverflow as they feel there is a high bar for questions that are worthy of the community’s time.
Peer groups are meeting and learning together online and would benefit from better tooling and ways to interact with other communities to share knowledge and support. We’ve seen this in value, mission, and incentive aligned micro communities such as DAOs and cohort based programmes like buildspace and on deck.
The communities focused on product and protocol, and infrastructure are keen to support those that are trying to learn.
We aim to use ethereum mainnet, popular layer 2s, the graph, ceramic, and radicle network as key parts of the experience.
Our team formed in developerDAO and saw many of these supportive dynamics between both members of the DAO and from other projects that need to educate developers.
Martin (embiem) - full stack web3 dev at Heroic Story - Germany
MartinB - frontend engineer - South Africa
Ezekiel (Azephiar) - entrepreneur and engineer (ceramic experience) - Netherlands
Contact
Contact Name: Nassar Hayat
Contact Email: nassar@radicle.xyz
Team’s experience
Please describe the team’s relevant experience.
Nassar has been actively contributing to the marketing and business development guild in developerDAO and so is able to bring together DAOs that are keen to work with a platform that helps educate their communities.
James is the design lead in multiple developerDAO projects, most recently the $CODE claim site. Previously he was designing and building apps in the fitness space.
DevNode is a community of developers that came together online to build an open source toolset to support developer education. We aim to use radicle protocols and believe that our missions are very aligned. We want to build out the MVP of this tooling in order to test our assumptions on the market, new DAO dynamics, and our platform.
Deliverables:
Please list the deliverables of the project in as much detail as possible. Please also estimate the amount of work required and try to divide the project into meaningful milestones.
Total Estimated Duration: 4 months
Full-time equivalent (FTE): 66 days
Total Costs: $50,000
Milestone 1 - prototype
Objective: test out core decentralised tech stack.
Estimated Duration: 2 months
FTE: 20 days
Costs: $15,000
Deliverable
Specification
onboarding
allow users to authenticate with ethereum wallet and use IDX for identity
add question
add question flow with question, technology tags
question page
page that shows questions and answers
add answer
input answer and submit
discovery
home page that allows developers to discover, search, and filter questions
Milestone 2 - MVP
Objective: Test whether we can pull more people to support with questions and challenges faced by individuals in a micro community by adding more structure and sharing these questions across communities and platforms. Initial test base will be 5 communities.
estimates
Estimated Duration: 4 months
FTE: 46 days
Costs: $35,000
Deliverable
Specification
groups
ability to create micro communities and then when you post questions it can either be shared publicly, all the communities you’re in, or specific selected ones
group page
page that allows dao members to see a feed of questions and answers from their members. Also allows them to see a leaderboard for their members.
discord write bot
give server managers way to setup bot which posts all DAO member and relevant technology related questions to channel
answer vote
allow users to vote on answers
dev page
profile page for developers with history of questions, answers, DAO memberships, DN reputation, radicle network developer contribution data
reputation system
display DAO and technology tags they’ve contributed to with questions and answers and a score based on responses/votes
leaderboard
global leaderboard for those that contribute questions and answers
Future Plans
The aim is to launch this project in partnership with 5 top web3 DAOs as partners. Radicle, DeveloperDAO, and Ceramic being the first three.
We also aim to raise further funding from the other DAOs we choose to partner with.
Documentation and SDK to allow other interface to leverage and contribute to the data in the devnode network
There are a lot of ideas flying around on how we can improve the learning experience within these micro communities and across them. We’ve tried to keep the MVP as bare bones as possible to focus on testing our core hypotheses.
Additional points
DevNode is a great experiment in truly internet native DevDAOs. This project is being built by a community of developers that met online to build open source software, funded by grants, and contributors rewarded by a collectively co-ordinated treasury. This should allow the radicle ecosystem to get into the weeds on what works and what doesn’t across the lifecycle of these new orgs.
Also, nas will be abstaining from voting on this proposal as both the lead on this proposal and a grants committee member.
We welcome input and challenges from the ecosystem. Particularly Phinton.
Super cool idea! @nas, how do you see this being built on Radicle? First milestone of “test out decentralized stack” seems a bit vague — do you have a clear idea of what piece of the stack we’d use?
This seems like such a great idea. I’m so happy to see more applications and ideas focusing on use cases outside of just NFTs and DeFi and think this aligns really well with the developer ecosystem in general, and the developers who might be interested in building with Radicle.
I’m curious if you all have thought through the “taggin” process, and how the tags might be determined (i.e. “javascript”, “solidity”, etc…). I know that Stack Overflow has some sort of process set up for this, I wonder if there’s a way to allow the community to decide which tags get added via some governance mechanism.
Nice. Means a lot coming from the king of dev rel.
Yup. I’ve always been more fascinated by self-sovereign data and interoperability.
We haven’t thought too much about tagging yet, but I guess we would want to make tag creation and moderation a community and interface level concern. That would probably be the main difference between stackoverflow’s approach and ours.
So perhaps the way it works is that your reputation in the network is also micro-community and interface specific, which allows you to create or remove tags for your micro-community and interface (e.g. Devnode.network may have different moderation to radicle.network/org/support) as you grow you reputation and with each having their own governance mechanisms.
Still exploring these questions, so please do jump in and let us know if you’ve had specific issues with centralised moderation and have ideas on alternative approaches.
@nas thanks for the application and outlining some of the general ideas on the stack you all are planning to use.
Thoughts specific to the grant’s current form
Support
This ties in really nicely with onboarding to web3 (and hopefully) Radicle as well
Any such communal learning platform lends itself to creating opportunity for people to grow their skill sets and the social aspect is an added bonus in that it ties people together around common goals…nothing makes a product stickier than some social interaction
I’m totally in support of this grant.
Concerns
Stackoverflow already exists and is used by millions of people (source). So the most basic features around asking / answering questions is a largely solved problem. And due to network effects, it will be hard to convince people to move to DevNod just for those basic features. Stackoverflow is so valuable specifically because there are so many people already on it.
Stackoverflow is the place to get ask/answer questions.
So you’ll need a sort of “trojan horse” to convince people to come over to DevNode.
I think the most important thing here will be coming up with features that are web3 native and provide value that is specifically useful for decentralized workflows. I really like that there’s already a milestone with tasks to help DAO’s organize their work. I imagine these features will be some of the most important. So I imagine focusing a lot of effort there will be key.
I’d also recommend to continue to do research into web2 tools like Stackoverflow and finding other areas where they fall short for decentralized workflows (remote work, DAOs, etc.). This may be a fruitful exercise for any follow-up grants.
I imagine user profile pages for Radicle that help label profiles as being certain types of contributors. I wonder if an integration with DevNode + Otterspace might also make sense in the more distant future.
As an example, below is my StackOverflow profile that shows my “badges” (see red square).
And I wonder how badges could be universally displayed across different protocols/networks, analogous to the way you have achievements for PlayStation or X-Box games online. Adds a nice bit of gamification to the whole thing.
I agree that taking on stackoverflow needs us to have a trojan horse. The two lens we are most interested in researching initially as we try discover this are:
small community (including DAOs) workflows - e.g. helping improve the support channel in community discords, tracking contribution by community members
interfaces built on open protocols - work on a discord bot and web app have already begun. keen to see others leverage the data in our network. Hoping it becomes something radicle orgs will want to add as a tab
The badges side is pretty interesting given reputation plays an important role in Q&A platforms. I have spoken to otterspace. Will pull them into a conversation with the community when it starts working on the reputation side of things.
Hope all is going well. Great to see the heartwood protocol progress!
We’ve completed milestone two and continued progress past it as we work to build tools for supporting developer ecosystems! - Links below
We’ve renamed the project to peer from devnode. We’ve spoken to a long list of developer tooling ecosystems and learned they need help supporting developers. The impact of high-quality support results in growth in usage and retention and it’s driving ecosystem success and revenue. We’ve also clarified our focus and like to summarise it as follows:
Intercom meets Stackoverflow, built on open protocols and as open-source software.
app functionality: The demo highlights the progress made and peer as an alpha version of what we’re trying to build. It shows the following functionality:
Onboarding: Enabled user authentication with Ethereum wallet and IDX for identity
Add Question: Implemented question flow with technology tags
Question Page: Developed page to show questions and answers
Add Answer: Added input and submission for answers
Discovery: Created a homepage for developers to discover, search, and filter questions
Groups: Developed functionality to create micro-communities and control question visibility
Group Page: Created a page for DAO members to view their members’ questions and answers
Discord read and write Bot: Implemented a bot to post relevant questions to Discord channels
Answer Vote: Enabled users to vote on answers
Dev Page: Developed a profile page for developers with various details and contribution data
Reputation System: Displayed DAO and technology tags along with scores based on responses/votes
We also continued building and have added the following:
the ability for users to connect and upload their GitHub repos into the Radicle network.
optimised the experience to make it extendable for community builders to aggregate conversations across interfaces.
conducted extensive market research and grown an in-depth understanding of the problems of those building developer ecosystems.
We’re excited to continue building this out. We’ve learned a great deal about both the market and the open protocol stack as we’ve built, and we believe we can build something that solves a significant market need. We’re also excited that we can drive users to the radicle network with existing features, but also with a few we’ve been exploring as next steps. We hope to explore and update on this in the coming weeks, but we would love to hear the community’s feedback and thoughts on this alpha before we plough ahead.
I’d also like to note that users can connect their Radicle repos directly onto their profile page. This is a really nice integration that should help surface peoples’ expertise on various topics by connecting repos they’ve contributed to.
