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
- 1 Secret Box (Secret Counter)
- 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