Secret University - Community Spend Proposal

A) Why you should vote “yes” to Secret University initiative

Secret University is a concept that will evolve over time to fit the needs of our developer community. It will serve as a launchpad for developers new to our ecosystem, allowing them to jumpstart their journey and build on Secret Network. Our team does not want to do this alone - we can only scale these efforts with our thriving developer community. Therefore, we purpose setting up a framework in which developers can be incentivized to document and create educational materials, enriching the onboarding experience of our network for future developers, and providing a path for those who aim to follow in their footsteps and build their own private decentralized applications. This effort will hopefully save time for critical network resources, lower the gap for learning to build secret contracts, and propel our developers into more advanced topics that are supported by leaders of the development community.

We are requesting $27,650 USD to fund a 14 week (max) initiative to deliver on the first milestone of our program - Milestone 1: Intro to Secret Network (see below for breakdown). This initial community fund will allow us to curate a developer education experience that will make our community proud and help us establish an initial framework in which developers can thrive.

Budget request at $70/hr

  • 50 hrs - @fuzzy - coordination of efforts, design of secret pathways, and documentation of intro material
  • 215 hrs - @alex - development of Secret University platform and design of secret pathways
  • 70 hrs - @laura and Secret Boxes dev team - integration of secret boxes
  • 40 hrs - documentation leads and reviewers
  • 20 hrs - graphic designer
    ===
  • Total - $27,650 ask in USD + established governance buffer %

The core team will consist of the following individuals

  • Darren | fuzzypizza - previous co-lead of education committee; over 50+ pieces of content across secret network, lead contributor to developers page on scrt.network website, lead contributor for initial Secret Agents HQ, current Lead of Operations at ALTER
  • Alex | sinplea - lead developer, lead designer for Secret Pathways and front-end developer for Secret Boxes, started his own journey as a new developer in the Secret Network ecosystem
  • Laura | SecretChainGirl - helped with initial launch of Secret Network, secret contracts developer, founder of Secret Boxes, staunch proponent of the Secret Network developer community, current developer for Hydro.finance

B) What is the value and specific differentiator for Secret University?

Secret University is the collaborative effort of a few existing collective efforts - Secret Pathways and Secret Boxes. Secret Pathways is an effort to establish a learning pathway that handholds users through the initial phases of learning about the ecosystem and how to launch a secret contract on testnet. Secret Boxes is an effort to gamify learning by creating pre-defined code driven learning modules that walk new developers through creating a secret contract with a built-in, beautiful user interface.

As a program, we hope to identify a sustainable path for developers to curate information and find an incentive structure that will allow them to continue to pave the path for future developers. This framework will be documented and deliberated as the project matures.

We understand the segmented nature of current education efforts and are dedicated to working with existing teams working on secret documentation, Secret Foundation and Whispernode to see how these efforts will align with the Secret Agents program and secret badges. We have also had conversations with BizDev on how Secret University may collaborate in the future with their intended developer incubator and accelerator program.


C) Secret University Project Timeline

Our fully realized vision for Secret University starts with a strong foundation set in Milestone 1: Intro to Secret Network. We fully intend to deliver the following given adequate funding:

Milestone 1: Welcome to Secret Network

The purpose of this milestone is to provide developers with a place to start and answer any immediate questions that they may run into in the development process

  • Launch the Secret University platform and web application (200 hrs)
  • Integration of Secret Pathways lesson plans for hand-holding developers (40 hrs)
    • Welcome to Secret Network - 5 hours (Darren)
    • Creating your first Secret Contract - 20 hours (Laura)
    • Building your first Dapp - 15 hours (Alex)
  • Integration of Secret Boxes efforts (70 hrs)
    • 1 Secret Box (Secret Counter)
      • Gitpod Deployment - 15 hrs
      • Secret Smart Contract - 5 hrs
      • Frontend - 10 hrs
      • Technical Guide - 15 hrs
      • User interface / Graphics - 25 hrs
  • Identify process framework for continuous developer learning and community contribution (40 hrs)

Once Milestone 1: Intro to Secret Network has been completed and delivered we aim to continue our efforts in a few ways - add depth to Secret Pathways documentation, add new Secret Boxes, integrate with pre-existing knowledge libraries (primarily docs.scrt.network) and Secret Network website, and implement a sustainable way to support developer-curated content. Once we have an established knowledge base, we want to refocus our efforts to defining the developer onboarding experience - with efforts to tie in the Secret Agents program and handoff to an accelerator program.

Milestone 2: Knowledge Library and advanced learning

The purpose of this milestone is to collate existing documentation that circulates across many mediums into a single place that can be intuitively navigated

  • Complete documentation for Secret Pathways and add new Secret Boxes
  • Integrate existing efforts for Secret Network documentation (currently in progress by @ertemann)
  • Integrate tutorials on Secret Network website
  • Launch framework and incentive structure for new documentation
  • Collate advanced learning topics and frequently asked questions

Milestone 3: Join a Team

The purpose of this milestone is to curate the onboarding experience for developers to join an existing team or navigate to the appropriate place around the ecosystem to get in touch with the people they need to succeed

  • Establish onboarding pathway for developers to register (potentially into secret agents)
  • Integrate with existing job boards - who is in charge of current one?
  • Polish the experience from top-to-bottom: Intro to Secret Network > Knowledge Library / Advanced Learning > Job Board

D) Funding strategy

The purpose of our community proposal is to bootstrap initial efforts to deliver on an initial experience that takes dedicated time and effort. In the future, our goal is to launch a validator that will be able to support continuous and sustainable content creation by experienced developers to feedback into the education portal that we have created. We have no intentions of draining the community fund - and only intend to ask for the bare minimum to get our team moving in the right direction.

The funding strategy for this team and all associated parties will be as follows:

  • Milestone 1: Intro to Secret Network - Community funding support (proposal 1) for Secret Pathways and Secret Boxes
  • Milestone 2: Knowledge Library - Kickstart validator model for funding new documentation efforts; potential community funding (proposal 2) or delegation support
  • Milestone 3: Join a Team - Validator model to continue funding new documentation efforts, updates to existing tutorials, and organizational process improvements to the developer onboarding experience

Summary - Why voting “yes” is a strong future for Secret Network

It was a difficult choice to fully commit to this effort. Existing projects and programs compete for our time and this is a large public facing endeavor that makes scrutiny and communication ever more present. In addition, it is just daunting to say you will be creating developer education material for the biggest brains that are at reaching to enter the blockchain space. The reason we are requesting funding is that we firmly believe that we are capable of building a pillar of growth for our ecosystem and also believe to be filling a very important need in our community. By voting “yes,” we insure that we will, in our best efforts, launch a platform for developers to create content for their community.

The team will need to work most closely with the following individuals to be successful:

  • @ertemann and @schultize to integrate with existing secret documentation efforts
  • @cog1018 from Secret Foundation to integrate work with end user learning efforts
  • @Brendan from Whispernodes to integrate work with current secret agent efforts
  • @wolfgang and @Lumi from dev committee / bizdev to collaborate with enterprise and accelerator
  • ddt and sheru - back-end developers with experience building as a new secret developer
  • johnbrodish and evelien from Secret Foundation to discuss how to co-exist with scrt website
  • bEngEE - to consult for content quality control and review
  • JXR50 to consult with funding structure for developers
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Existing assets

We have been busy - our team has given this effort a lot of thought and have collated our initial perspective of what we think is possible. Refer to the attached assets to view our vision:

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Dropping a few of our answers to commonly asked questions from the community - will continue to add to this list as we see fit!

  1. How is Secret University different from existing efforts?
  • docs.scrt.network - This is an extremely robust library of technical documentation that our team fully intends to integrate with. This knowledge library, however, is a flood of text-based information that can be overwhelming for new developers as it can be difficult to learn where exactly to start. Secret University intends to do more hand-holding with Secret Pathways and be more interactive with Secret Boxes as we hope to make learning on Secret Network easier and more straightforward! Then we will redirect them to the robust library where they can navigate to more in-depth technicalities that are needed to build what they need to build.
  • Secret Foundation education - Education efforts that Secret Foundation is working on actually aligns really well in terms of vision (integration with agents, use of badges, modular learning); however, this effort is currently focused on end user education and we hope to fill the gap to provide a similar experience for developer education. We have spoken with Jeremy, who is leading the initiative for Secret Foundation and we will be coordinating and sharing ideas throughout our journey together.
  • Bizdev accelerator program and enterprise education - Bizdev is focused on a top down approach to developer education by building out the accelerator for organized teams and launching in-depth education that is holistic to startup growth, including marketing, business growth, enterprise education, and VC funding. We take a bottom up approach that aims walk new developers from every walk into Secret Network, help them join a team, and eventually launch in them into an existing established accelerator program, such as the scrt labs or bizdevs accelerators.
  1. Why are we not using an existing platform?
  • One goal of Secret University is to put an end to this fragmentation of knowledge on the network. Gumroad, for instance I know is used by independent educators to sell lessons. While pathways could work well as a free Gumroad course, Secret Boxes would not. Collecting open source repos and making sure they are tagged and indexable is valuable to network participants and containing all of these resources in one place is also valuable–goals that again can’t be achieved by opting for a 3rd party platform.
  • We don’t have experience with these platforms and therefore cannot accurately assess the limitations they’ll have on our goals and vision for Secret University in the future. (Vendor locking us could be a trap).
  • Building our own platform gives us the control to integrate with the Secret Network blockchain natively for DAO like functionality as contributors onboarded onto our platform.
  • If we learn from experience, Figment Learn was a core resource for onboarding developers that was created and curated by our own developers. They have since retired our secret contracts tutorial and will not be continuing to update this information. With Secret University, we hope to be an in-house solution that any and every secret focused party can launch their ideas from and we can benefit by being agile as a small dedicated team.
  1. Why are we asking for community funding?
  • We understand the state of market conditions and have prepared what we believe to be a fair ask that runs lean to reduce management and planning hours. We have spent countless hours preparing existing assets for this initiative so that we can hit the ground running as soon as the project starts.
  • We have decided to pitch for community funding for milestone 1, because Secret University is a project that cannot be successful without the full support of our robust community. We will require feedback and coordination from every party including our developer community, SCRT Labs, Secret Foundation, secret agents program, dev docs, and bizdev to achieve success. Therefore we are going on-chain with our initial milestone to prove viability for future funding and confirm that our community wants and needs the Secret University.
  • In the future, we hope to fund a pool to use specifically for continuous developer education and incentivize hard-working devs to share their knowledge using pre-defined templates. We are open to any and all funding resources and will also be pursuing a validator approach to sustained growth.
6 Likes

I’d like to see a milestone 0 for market research comparing the proposed approach with similar programs ran by the top 10 smart contract L1s.

First principle thinking is worthwhile but not a substitute for market research.

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In my opinion, this is a very detailed, and well budgeted proposal. And already has a lot built and prepared. Very good job. Given that Cosmwasm 1.0 testnet is dropping this week or next (for real this time according to slabs). We should be needing new and better learning material anyway. It’d be nice if this effort was done with cosmwasm 1.0 testnet. But either way I really like this proposal!

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Thanks @winston - we have certainly done a lot of market research that contributed to the draft version of our Secret University design doc (linked above). We have looked at the following projects from other ecosystems:

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Thank you! We could definitely use your expertise and any other experienced developers to help review our materials to ensure we are up-to-date with the latest ecosystem developments. Happy to be in the position to be drafting new content for Cosmwasm!

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Have we also talked with people who have gone through Near University and / or have members on the team who have used it?

Looking at projects is good, but talking directly with users is also important.

Near University appears to have a 74 NPS, which I’d consider to be quite good. I think NPS should be one of the KPIs of this proposal.

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Nice suggestions - We have not reached out to any end users, but we can certainly reach out to their community to see who we may interview as a success story. We have not used NPS previously, but can look to integrating the metric as a KPI.

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I love the initiative and value of this prop! Also excellent feedback from Winston, but I think this is important to deliver, and that the team working on it is exceptionally capable of delivering! Excited to see this getting done :+1:

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Awesome proposal, you have my support for this :slight_smile:

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Got my support, cant wait to see this grow out as a dev onboarding platform.

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Excellent detail. This is how every proposal should be.

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This is great. It’s the type of thing we really should have a focused and smooth Program for. It’s Got my vote

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This is cool. Respect to the proposers. Valuable work and reasonable ask

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As of today, the Secret University initiative has been funded. As a lead dev for the project, I wanted to thank the community for your support on this proposal. This project has been a long time coming for the team, and I am personally humbled to be working on improving the developer experience for the network alongside my teammates, various members from network leadership, and the broader community.

I, along with my teammates, will be updating the community of our progress on the main Secret Network discord in the #secret-university room (under the development section). Thanks again for the support! I look forward to working with many of you over the coming weeks and months to get our devs the help and quality-of-life improvements they deserve.

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Well said, @Alex :raised_hands:. My sentiments as well!

Thank you to all in the community for the feedback and suggestions, support, and voting :heart:.

I’d like to also take this opportunity to introduce the Secret Boxes UI/UX and graphics team:

  • Secret Mickey (Jeff) is an amazing UI/UX designer and created the original Figma designs for the 1st iteration of Stashh and Secret Boxes
  • Unakatu (Kate) has worked on many projects in Secret, currently Geek Pics, as a UI/UX and graphic designer extraordinaire and has created many beautiful things

:rocket:

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Thank you everyone for the overwhelming support of this proposal! We will continue to push forward and build Secret University to be the developer experience we believe the community wants and needs :muscle:

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I am glad this proposal passed and I am looking forward to see your progress :))

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@fuzzzypizzza @laura can you give us an update, we have a couple of big events over the next few weeks & it would be great to give devs the lowdown about Secret Uni when we meet them :slight_smile:

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