gm Season 2 🌞

February 1 kicks off the next iteration of Developer DAO and hopes to bring with it a more streamlined member experience, more frequent community events and more stable teams to deliver them.

First though, let’s take a moment to reintroduce D_D.

A Brief History

Developer DAO is about 16 months young. Still, in crypto years, that's old enough to get a Lambo license.

The origin story, including Nader's live-streamed genesis NFT deployment, is captured here. Since that launch, a community formed and narrowed in on a shared mission with accompanying values and goals.

After a primordial period, Season 0 kicked off with web3con and introduced Guilds. Members organized by discipline to socialize and set the first grassroots goals in the DAO. The Writers Guild, for example, set about establishing a newsletter and a blog.

In Season 1, The Developer DAO Foundation was formed and the CODE governance token launched. 19 budget proposals were created, stress testing the first iteration of a new process. Budget stewards stepped in and helped to build the plane as it flew.

The Wins

Along the way, industry partners got on board to engage the community via workshops, blog content, Twitter Spaces, jobs, IRL events, and more. A special thanks to our Season 1 partners: Consensys, Push Protocol, Hedera, States DAO, and Oasis for bringing with them top tier education content, career opportunities, and for enabling Developer DAO's mission.

A quick highlight reel:

• The DAO Fundraising Team produced a brilliant workshop series on grant writing and project pitching. The team also hosted regular office hours, helping members apply for and earn significant funding.

• The Mentorship Team matched 20+ mentors and 30+ mentees.

• DevNTell, one of D_D’s longest running initiatives, has well over 50 episodes published and is booked up with presenters through May.

• The Workshop Team hosted a weekly stream of 60-90 minute deep dives.

• The D_D Blog has published over 125 articles from community members and partners.

• D_D Jobs kicked off, currently home to 30+ job listings and a talent collective of over 160 members. A paid posting tier is now available that includes a hosted Twitter Space to discuss your company and role!

• A refreshed D_D Academy team has new content and UX on the way.

• D_D Agency took its first steps out of the nest, launching Woop Pay for beta use.

• DAO-incubated projects, Eden Protocol and P3RKS, continue to discover product-market fit.

• Member opportunities: D_D Hackers has an open travel sponsorship opportunity to help teams get to ETHDenver.

• Continued brand growth: Twitter (83k followers), Substack (2.6k subscribers), YouTube (1.8k subscribers).

The Challenges

While this is meant to be a hype piece, transparency is a core value of the DAO. Amongst the successes, we discovered that aligning the incentives of very many people around the globe can be a messy business. (Surprise?)

An important paradigm shift was prompted by the realization that Developer DAO has historically funneled everyone towards becoming a core contributor. Core contributors require a ton of time and context to be successful and the all-too-obvious truth is that most members aren’t signing up for that.

Your average D_D member joins the community for a more casual social experience, to find collaborators or get some feedback on their project, to learn and level up alongside peers and mentors, to get exposure to new career opportunities, and to take advantage of the perks of membership without needing to peek behind the curtain.

Sounds obvious, but we now recognize those contributors as a separate persona to design for. Members attend workshops, demos, and social events; contributors organize, market, and host those events.

In the end, Guilds served to confuse this experience by attempting to offer the lightweight social experience, while mixing in heavy organization topics within the same meetings. Further, gathering around a discipline seemed to generate less excitement and inertia than gathering around a goal or vision.

Additionally some tough lessons were learned in the delivery of value to partners. We leaned on heroic, unsustainable efforts from a few members. Important roles were overlooked or under-rewarded in the first iteration of budgets, leading to burn-out and frustration.

What’s worked well and, crucially, what hasn’t has informed the next iteration of D_D.

Season 2

So, what can you expect in the next Season 2?

Heavy-Hitter Partners

• We’ve partnered with more industry movers and shakers to bring the next batch of content and opportunity into D_D. Massive shout to our first two Season 2 partners: QuickNode and Streamr. More partner announcements Coming Soon™.

Member Experience Upgrades

• The first thing you’re likely to notice as a current member is an overhaul of the Discord server. Much of the core contributor areas are pulled out of the default experience and other seldomly used channels or categories have been archived or shuffled around. (The dust is still settling there.)

• A new on-chain badge system is getting rolled out to enable more tailored experiences within Discord. As a part of that effort, new members will be greeted with a more gentle onboarding experience which they can graduate from at their own pace.

• Guilds have been sunset. Instead, some of the server channels are organized by motivation, e.g., Vibe, Learn, Build. Within them you’ll find channels for sharing #accountabuidl updates, forming hackathon teams, asking technical questions, and so on.

• In addition to the Twitter Spaces, podcast episodes, and workshops, core social calls are coming back on a more regular cadence, including Vibes and Wellness Sessions.

Contributor Experience Upgrades

• More clearly defined reward structures are in flight. Part of this includes a definition of Sub-DAOs and how they interact with D_D.

• The governance process has been simplified, enabling the DAO to react more quickly while still maintaining some safeguards.

Hype

“Iterate, iterate, iterate” is the mantra.

Ready to go for another spin?

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