Education Committee Proposal for Q3

Secret Committees
#1

This proposal is for the on-chain funding period of 1 June 2022 - 31 Aug 2022

Purpose of the Education Committee

The Education Committee exists to create, update, and manage educational content to accelerate the use and adoption of Secret Network. We work closely with both the Awareness and International growth committees as well as the Website and design team from the Secret Foundation to ensure our output is relevant and supports their and the overarching Secret Network goals. For full Education Charter see here: Education Committee Charter 2022_03_01.pdf - Google Drive

Achievements past funding period:

  • 56 pieces of content
  • 15 Recorded AMA sessions with Network participants - Youtube
    • 136 subs and 1383 views
  • 7 videos fit for the new Secret Network Youtube
  • 6 guides for the improved Secret network Website
  • Increased Twitter followers by 12x (80 → 909)
    • coordinated with Awareness and IGC to combine into a single account @scrtcommittees - from may 10th
  • Increased Medium subs by 5x (160 → 803)
    • Appx 25K views and 10K reads during this time
  • Provided educational support in Telegram and Discord
  • 22 unique community contributors

Continual Deliverables

  • Maintain and organize educational content across Secret Network repositories
  • Participate in key Inter-Committee conversations that promote efficiency and resource pooling
  • Assist with educational content (infographics, blog posts, articles, tutorials) for all launches of products and ecosystem components (such as bridges)
  • Organize and manage the education committee, its projects and subcommittees.
  • Oversee the organization of a weekly community-AMA by the Agents of the Round Table subcommittee
  • Provide content and structure to the improved developer documentation

Project Deliverables

  • Update relevant Telegram bot commands to trigger proper resources and links
  • Improve upon the existing website FAQ by adding all major Dapps
  • Collaborate on creating a more complete and organized non-developer learning environment over the different SN websites and socials (medium)
  • Creative direction for new video creators in partnership with the support and resources of Secret Foundation

Performance Indicators by Which the Committee Can Be Held Accountable

Volume and Quality of Content Created - The definition being any infographic, article, tutorial, video, webpage that was created by the committee and its members. Although the time and effort that goes into these pieces of content can vary widely, we believe that it, statistically, provides a measurement on the performance of the committee. Notable deviations from the target will see an explanation from the committee leadership. We are targeting 35 pieces of content.

Additional goals for funding period - beside

  • Improve further on guide/tutorial availability via the scrt.network website
  • Help with educational content pages on privacy, technology, token and applications for the scrt.network website
  • Work with Awareness to make a larger educational path for new agents - educate Secret agents attending events for the network.
  • Provide content for transparency about SN trust/privacy assumptions
  • Work with core community contributors of the education committee to create a more intuitive tech overview
  • Launch 15+ tutorial/guide videos on the SN youtube with the community and SF
  • Keep producing weekly community AMA sessions with a youtube upload
  • Help with the non-developer developer documentation for docs.scrt.network

Budget Request

The Education Committee asks for a budget for the compensated leadership roles, a discretionary budget for leading roles in the subcommittees and a discretionary budget to put bounties on open projects and reward committee members on top of the rewards they are able to earn through the Secret Agent Program.

Our ask is in USD, calculated to SCRT on the day the proposal goes on the chain.

Compensated Roles

Sean - $70/h - 20 hours per week - $6000 / month

  • Education Co-Lead for last funding period
  • 15 years experience in business operations and executive coaching
  • 9 years experience founding/designing learning experiences (undergrad and graduate)
  • Doctorate in Contextual Communication, professor of MA classes in Interpersonal Neurobiology and Communication Skills

Ertemann - 20 hours/week at 70$/h - $6000 / month

  • Education Co-lead for last funding period
  • Technical support in the Secret network channels for 7+ months
  • Contributor to dev docs and other UX improvements (gas fees, contract naming)
  • 5 years experience in (ML) data analysis and scientific writing
  • Documentation/tutorial creator for several scientific data analysis applications and development frameworks (Git/CLI)

Discretionary Budget

The education committee requests a discretionary budget to compensate committee members for their work. This budget will be used to reward the completion of open projects like the creation of infographics, articles, written/video tutorials.

The Discretionary budget is based on:

  • 3 Types of open projects (infographics, articles/written tutorials, and video tutorials),
  • Complexity of the project (e.g. research, expertise, collaboration, design, etc)
  • rewards at $25/h - with 15$/h buffer based on performance

We decided to slightly change the funding for community contributors setting the rate from 40$ to 25$ /hour as a standard fee. We leave a 15$/h buffer here which can be given to agents for their contribution based on the quality of the content. We had some scenarios over the past funding period where content even after many feedback iterations was not of a sufficient level. We made a promise to pay these contributors but didn’t feel it was fair to pay the same rate as other contributors. We will now promise 25$/hour to everyone making it easier for us to pay people for the full amount of hours even is the content is of lower quality instead of giving them less then they expected, meanwhile we can incentivize higher quality creators with a bonus on their hourly rate up to 40$/hour. We will adhere to the expected time spent on different content contributions:

  • 3 hours for a written guide/tutorial | 2 hours for a tutorial infographic
  • 6 hours for long form written content/article | 4 hours for a tech infographic
  • 4 hours for a guide video | 8 hours for explainer videos

These open project bounties will be a fair compensation for these smaller projects. We are fully aware that the ‘hourly’ rate is not up to professional level (professional video editor, professional photoshop artist). However, we believe that people with such professional skills can use open-projects as a stepping stone to request SNAC funding, and we look forward to guiding such contributors in getting successfully funded for their ideas to grow the network.

Besides the project based discretionary funding the committee asks for:

  • 5 hours a week for constant higher-level contributors in the AOTRT (40$/h)

These hours are used to incentivize constant community members to find hosts and guests for the weekly sessions, upload the recorded sessions to youtube and help with other AOTRT organized events and content. We reduced this budget from 10-5 following both the reduced interest with the market downturn and better leading structure of this community. We will steer away from calling this a full on sub-committee and will take direction of the community again. This will put more strain on the education leads but makes sure we provide consistent content and can properly incentivize new active community members to participate. 5-10 hours of constant pay a week turned out to not be enough to constantly incentivize 1-3 leads but IS enough to incentivize multiple smaller contributors with bounties as proven over time by both support, awareness and education committee. If interest significantly rises again we may rethink this structure again and create a 10 hour 1 person position, for now this is not the case.

Budget leftovers

Any SCRT left at the end of the funding period (3 months) will carry over to the next round. If both education leads discontinue their role the remaining funds will be transferred to the new leads.

This funding period we spend the full education discretionary budget, our wallet is almost empty with some creators still awaiting payment. The Ask for initial USD amount would have been sufficient but due to the market downturn we spend significantly more SCRT than initially proposed, this made it so we cut into the AOTRT budget to pay education contributors. We expect this won’t be the case with the newly requested budget.

Total Ask

  • Sean = $18000

  • Ertemann = $18000

  • Discretionary budget projects = $12000 (300 hours paid work)

  • Discretionary Subcommittee = $2500

  • Total Proposal Spend for 3 Months = $50500 + 10% volatility buffer = $55500

Education committee Address : secret1uqalfng7uxc3xxh9c9ndvj94h4sgee9rwjcxrs

5 Likes
#2

Not necessarily specific to this proposal, but I’d like to see a freeze on all non-dev spend from the community pool for Q3.

Project launches are being delayed, and we have not had a major hackathon for 5 months, possibly attributable to insufficient developer documentation and an inadequate testnet, among other factors.

Given limited resources, and the sizable amount of work remaining to be done to improve developer onboarding, I believe development items need to be prioritized above all else with funds conserved accordingly.

Assuming market conditions improve and progress is made on the higher priority items, I’d be open to resuming non-dev spend in Q4.

#3

I think we are all thinking about how to best spend funds atm so i fully understand where your coming from. I do personally disagree with defunding the Edu committee though.

We really are creating THE hub for users and developers to learn about the Secret network techstack and products. Launches is not where most of our time was spend. We have been spending countless hours trying to gather more information to 1 or 2 places (docs.scrt.network, website, medium) so that we can just give people links to learn. We are getting close to having a full set of infopieces on all dapps and topics and it would be a big shame to stop right now.

You would be amazed by how many developers dont know shit about the SN techstack, in my opinion we have to create a good path for them to learn the nuances of the network. Besides that the Edu committee helps with organizing and structuring the documentation and brings up community members who are capable enough to go to events and actually explain what SN does.

Besides this i think its valid to mention that committees were also funded for 0.8c per SCRT and we are not in that territory yet. Its important to keep building and what we are creating has nothing to do with whether there are people active in discord or not, we are making it so that when we need to onboard people we can.

1 Like
#4

Thanks for your thoughts Winston. You’ve definitely named some key pain points that are inhibiting growth right now. I don’t think your solution (freeze on non-dev spending) will help achieve these outcomes faster though.

It reminds me of a family. They weren’t rich, but they weren’t poor. There was always food in the pantry and fresh meat and cheese in the fridge.

This family had four children and the oldest was a teenager named Dev. The parents were concerned that Dev wasn’t hitting the growth spurts they would expect from a teenager.

So mom and dad rallied all the children and said, “Kids, we’ve always been able to put food on the table for each of you. But right now we are worried about Dev. Until he has a major growth spurt, all nutrition will be going to him at mealtimes.”

So Dev ate quadruple portions in the months to come and grew horizontally. He went on to become a developer, coding secret contracts in Rust.

What about his siblings? We don’t know… they died.

2 Likes
#5

Got our support :+1:

3 Likes
#7

Someone recently shared this link with me. I will add it here for the community to consider:

#8

Thanks for sharing Winston. It is certainly wise to plan for contingencies and worst-case scenarios rather than being frivolous and ignoring market conditions.

#9

I did work on some articles for the Education committee. Sean and Ertemann were an added value in terms of reviewing, helping to find information, editing and commenting in a professionnal and constructive way.

Just a comment on the “Expected time for contribution”:
6 hours for long form written content/article is a little bit underestimated based on my past experience because it depends on the perimeter.
But I get it that you must have a metric.

Love the concept of having a base rate and an incentive for high quality work.

I will also support this proposal onchain for the same reasons stated in the Support Committee Proposal.

2 Likes
#10

I think a change in the budget for the AOTRT subcommittee has to be made: from my understanding that part of the budget goes entirely to the leads and not to the community members hosting AMAs.
afaik for hosting an AMA as a Secret Agent you only get 75 agent points. What I’m trying to say is that hosting an AMA requires preparation(time) and effort and it produces educational content(youtube and spotify) so I think if agents completing open projects(articles, guides, infographics) get paid 25$/h the agents hosting AMAs should at least be paid 60$(?) a session.
This would obviously increase the demand and help fill some holes in the schedule (ultimately there has been less interest because of market conditions).

5 Likes
#11

I don’t see how the lack of a major hackathon or the lack of developer documentation, inadequate testnet etc. is relevant to the funding of the Education Committee and its requested funding from the community pool.

Instead, I would consider the lack of adequate developer documentation and any sort of discernible effort to improve them by Secret Labs - choosing instead to prioritize an NFT loot box platform. Now that Terra Devs are up in the air, and we are pointing them to dated forms, tooling, broken links, lack of a test net faucet etc. it starts to become an issue?

“Project launches are being delayed, and we have not had a major hackathon for 5 months, possibly attributable to insufficient developer documentation and an inadequate testnet, among other factors.”

Let’s explore those other factors:
SCRT Labs - In charge of grants to incentivize builders to, well, build:

  • Hydro - announced months back, undergoing a private sale. So another who knows how long before we can replace the zombie that is Secret Swap - a DEX that looks like it was abandoned ages ago.

  • Legendao ; so yeah. They minted an NFT and have plebs rub shoulders with the big shots in Hollywood, first ever NFT movie ! Tell your friends! Join discord like this tweet x3 and post below to be legendary. So far have launched half a NFT collection and makes ppl who come to this chain looking for privacy focused chain dedicated to building tools with real use cases cringe. For good reason.

  • The amount of man-hours spent modding their discord probably been put into dev docs? Done months ago.

  • postponing their airdrop / platform release for :“better market conditions” (not due to lack of dev funding)

  • 3 full weeks of governance committee meetings spent trying to get tor and guy to sit down and talk about controversial and issues many community members felt passionately about.

  • let’s take a look at the core team behind legendary:

lgnddaotean
lgnddaotean1475×469 260 KB

Two executive officers, 3 developers, head of product, head of business, head of marketing. Extremely talented, some brightest builders SN has for sure.

Meanwhile…

3 Likes
#12

My understanding is that the developer documentation overhaul grant is being funded exclusively by SCRT Labs and receives no funding or hours from the Education Committee.

The Education Committee proposal itself is explicitly for non-developer documentation and is aimed at further educating users, despite there being fewer users in a contracting market.

#13

I am well aware the grant would be funded by Scrt labs. My point, this is something that should have been addressed a long time ago - the fact that it took this long before it became a priority is a problem. I was not trying to say the docs would be handled by the edu committee. Education committee funding should not suffer a reduced allocation from the community pool, justified by the need to hastily make up for the shortcomings of Secret Labs to have waited this long?

#14

Meh, it doesn’t really matter to me how we got to this point.

The reality remains that we have not had a major hackathon in 5 months and are now in a market where preserving runway while maintaining or increasing developer share is crucial.

#15

Of course it matters how we got to this point. If you don’t understand how we did - you are not qualified to speak on ways to improve the situation. The best plan you have posted across multiple threads is “cut everything but dev funding b/c bad markets…runway!..yadayada”. The problems we face in relation to extremely outdated developer resources have nothing to do with lack of funding.

#16

Even if we were to take as an assumption that it were SCRT Labs’ responsibility, they are a sovereign entity and can do as they please.

Since they haven’t expressed an interest, having the community pool take over developer experience / onboarding and proactively engaging SCRT Labs as needed seems logical.

#17

Why can’t we fund all committees? Is the community pool dried?

All committees are important for Secret to succeed. You’re missing the big picture imo.

#18

Liquidity of $SCRT is the primary constraint as it relates to funding rather than the size of the community pool.

For instance, a non-negligible factor to consider is that if the community pool maintains the past quarter’s level of spend (despite a 60% + drawdown in $SCRT), then the non-community projects that also rely on $SCRT for funding could be encouraged to liquidate $SCRT sooner than they otherwise would have to ensure their future ongoing operations.

This type of scenario would be a negative feedback loop where the more projects that secure their future operations through liquidations, the more other projects feel they need to do the same.

We can reduce the probability of this bank run scenario on $SCRT liquidity by reducing spending in non-essential areas and diminishing the need for project’s to feel the need to liquidate right away to preserve runway.

Cutting investments in development and onboarding would make us less competitive once the market starts recovering, but community engagement is something we can afford to reduce due to a high drop in network activity over the past week and historical high rates of overlap.

#19

just as a small note on this:

Without incentivizing players like Seanp, Gino and myself i think an overhaul like this organized from the community would not have happened. I am able to spend way more hours on Secret Network than the hours noted in committee proposals because of the funding i get as a committee lead. Education is also closely aligned with educating Developers, and i wouldnt mind bringing developer education/developer relation IN scope of the education committee. I just dont think NOW is the correct moment for that and nor can i decide about it.

Lets just say we are not done with creating learning experiences for developers and the efforts on that are spearheaded by past and current Education committee leads (just not within their education hours, but as a side effort to make the ecosystem better).

4 Likes
#20

In the end hours paid to a contributor is always by our discretion. If we expect an article to take longer (like for example a complete tech stack overview) then we will make sure agents get a better estimate when starting the project or we will compensate them afterwards.

We do think the above metrics are a good average guideline for most pieces, maybe not realised time but atleast for expected time if the agent is skilled enough with content creation.

#21

Thanks for your comment, i quickly gave you an overview in DMs of why the budget is set up like this but an overview:

  • AOTRT was a volunteer group and initially not meant to be funded for hosting/organizing events at all
  • Some budget was introduced to reward people who got in a lot of hosts/guests and handled less “fun” tasks (like uploading as a podcast and fixing charter and other documents)/
  • The budget for previous funding period was a bit overstated so we lowered it, some of this budget will go to 1 contributor who consistently does the uploads and helps sharing these episodes on social media. the other ~30% can be used to incentivize people who have gone abovce and beyond to create nice episodes with good guests (similar to support discretionary budget)
  • We think consistently paying for hosts would put a lot more quality constraints on the episodes, put more work on the leads for curating this and removing the open contribution nature of the group. We also think this is unfair to other content streams in the ecosystem who do their episodes for fun or find sustainable revenue somewhere else to create their content.

So in general i think we should steer away from putting a USD bounty on hosting AOTRT episodes but we can incentivize large contributors with a few things here and there if they consistently take load of the leads and other players in the ecosystem.
AOTRT was meant to be fun, it being under education just makes it so we can consistently put out things and scout new contributors coming in. but if i host or do work for it then that is voluntarily mostly just like i think new hosts should see it when coming in.

2 Likes