Request for funding Groundskeeper @Jankie Mar-May 2022
This is a request for a 3 months period (March 2022-May 2022). Rate 1,000€ per month. Working with Grin continues to be my singular professional responsibility and as such this request is a total commitment.
During this period I would like to continue work on the following:
release bi-weekly grinnews newsletter
facilitate developer outreach initiative
source points of contact and introduce promising developers project information
maintain existing hiring posts to ensure eyes on project.
extend existing and develop new strategies to broaden this initiative
maintain, organize, and contribute to github documentation
financial documents
decision log
meeting notes
misc opportunity
Work closely with CC,OC,IC’s, and developers to identify new campaigns and opportunities.
Remain flexible and available to respond to project related tasks and initiatives directed from CC/OC
This will be my third quarter of work with Grin if approved. My recent progress update can be found here.
I remain both committed and available to continue and expand upon the ongoing groundskeeping initiatives. Please feel free to comment on these proposed items or make any suggestions
After discussing this proposal during the Mar 01 meeting it was suggested to expand on some details. Here I will be diving into the process of each of the items above for clarity and to illustrate what work is involved during the process:
Facilitate developer outreach initiative - I am always looking for new ways to expand and reach more developers; there is value here as developers make up essential product demographics in both contribution and use. Here is the working process currently in play:
R//Rust has a prominent jobs posting on each new rustLang update. As this post gets updated a new Grin Jobs post is posted. This benefits project awareness in addition to eyes on from essential demographic.
Also in this jobs post is a section where experienced Rust devs may post work experience and contact info for recruiters to contact them. In the past Q I’ve contacted over 40 Rust developers and fwd them a friendly greeting with an invitation to join dev channels. This also benefits project awareness in key demographic. As Grin has a strong value proposition I am confident with moving forward with individual contact sourced from other channels i.e github profiles, lobste.rs contributors, etc. for more eyes on.
The Grin Jobs post went to twitter thanks to @future. I have a strategy to use this screencap and share across various channels. This is a clever way to use the ‘Jobs’ post as a way to push general awareness/ gets eyes on project.
I don’t see this job ending with the advertised jobs posts, or the individual contact outreach. When interested parties respond to outreach they don’t get ghosted. There has to be a follow up such as getting the wish-list, bounty items of interest and general on-boarding assistance in front of new developers.
I am looking to expand on this initiative through new methods and from various sources like github profiles and lobste.rs technical site. This work came into scope as the community highlighted the importance of bringing developers to Grin.
release bi-weekly grinnews newsletter - This work process looks like this:
Research Phase: conducted by following closely development, news, research, governance, and community updates to identify item inclusion.
Writing + Edit + Publish Phase: original content writing with brief survey of the items from the research phase. Also will include meetups, jobs into newsletter as they come-up. Edit and formatted to be published to stackexhange.
I don’t just write the newsletter; I see this also as an asset to drive project awareness, as such I take responsibility to share, and spread this article across various channels post publish including: HackerNews, Reddit(various subs), Bitcointalk, Telegram, Keybase, Grin-Forum. I am looking for more channels to share to as this is an asset to bring eyes on the project.
Maintain, organize, and contribute to github documentation -
Meeting notes - Community Council meetings run Bi-weekly. These notes are transcribed and published.
During meetings there are decisions being made, I maintain these post meeting note transcription with updates to the decision_log.md
Misc opportunity is the acknowledgment that there will be additional future updates, additions, edits, etc that may fall outside the scope of those already mentioned above. I take responsibility to make these necessary changes when needed as part of the role.
Work closely with CC,OC,IC’s, and developers to identify new campaigns and opportunities - To clarify, this is in reference to how the Groundskeeping role puts my work in close proximity to these entities; and as such I take personal responsibility to collaborate and meet the ongoing and any unforeseen new requests. I refer to these ongoing request as campaigns and opportunities as they can be various tasks asked within reason. The job title groundskeeper is a hint at this job feature- as being available to meet demands and requests as needed.
Remain flexible and available to respond to project related tasks and initiatives directed from CC/OC - I think this item is closely related to the above item but I want to make clear the emphasis of availability and to be open to meet ongoing project demands and requests. This is an emphasis on role flexibility and being open to meet these objectives as they arise without placing burden on others to get the job done.
I hope this is helpful in clarifying some of the work objectives and processes that go into fulfilling the role. I also see these job descriptions as an evolution and work in progress.
Since your task is for a large part flying keep, as well as outreach to for example developers, I would like to add the requirement that you log your activities to make your work more transparent. By logging your activities you can reflect after each funding period on how useful each task has been and how much time it costs.
In this way you can iteratively fine tune your tasks, as well as the amount of time you spend on each of them to reach optimal productivity.
Community input
Furthermore I would like to request community members to suggest tasks that they are important for Grin. Currently both ground-keepers are doing a lot of support work for the Community Council, but in the end we as council and as such the ground-keepers are in service to the community. Meaning input on what is needed is very much welcome!
This can be anything. Think of what you liked and what you did not like when you started with Grin. Which information did you find hard to find, or should be added. What did your friends complained about when you introduce them to Grin. These can be very small things, e.g.
Where is a list of exchanges
Lack of youtube video’s on how to use the wallet
Where are the FAQ pages
Something you did not like in the wallet experience
… you name it, any suggestion is better than none
These tasks can be taken on by the council as well as our hard working groundskeepers.
Hence I bring it up here since .
What kind of activity are you thinking of? The newsletter is distributed on quite a few media:
But there could also be other kind of social media outreach, e.g. more marketing, or asking people if they want to be market makers, etc. Any suggestions @Cobragrin ?
I’m good with that request, and per usual thanks again for the feedback and support. This will be a minor update on my end as I have sort of incorporated this into my workflow as is ( I work in pomodoro technique in 45min blocks and I write down what is worked during ) but with a little refinement I can use this as both a tool for transparency and also like you suggest to determine where cycles can be improved.
I know the items list doesn’t reflect really a social outreach agenda but I assure you I am in the trenches along side the community who hit twitter (looking to expand to other channels) trying to get word out and eyes on the project. I am running 2 twitter handles under psydoneums and I try to get tweets out daily alongside pushing the newsletter. I personally appreciate the importance of sharing the project and community with a wider audience and breaking into mass consciousness. I meme, make amateur art and like to think I can Grinpost with the best of them. I don’t add this to the work list of items because I see this activity as not a job duty but my personal duty as part of the community.
I agree- my opinion is on the one hand we should continue to strive to bridge the gap between the project and the general population. I’ve said it somewhere before but Grin has a unique value prop in that it is a rare project that features fairness, and a persons human right to communicate free from the creep of privacy invasion. Content isn’t hard to craft, and people are open and opening up to talk to about it. On the other hand we can do better to keep the core community energized: I think community activism is one way to do this- examples include sharing and pushing community projects and initiatives. I noticed that when mareks QA stack he would remind the community and make memes, people were tweeting to support- it was something the communty circled around, everyone was activated to get that done. It was energizing. We saw the same thing during the push for BISQ re-listing. I am seeking to duplicate that feeling of activism on really anything. When a new jobs post goes live on reddit I meme for support, I want to give the community something to be ‘activated’ around. I call on the community to do the same- everyone wants to help, to do some good, let’s think of ongoing ways we can strive together to accomplish a thing or objective together. Also, fun activity like meme challenges have been positive to the community energy. We can make it run in a thread here on the forum and then as a community push the link across socials- perhaps make this reoccurring monthly and keep the energy building.
Just some thoughts on my end. Echoing @Anynomous I’d love to see what the community would like to see/ suggestions.
Could you expand a bit more on this. On what platform did you contact these developers and what was their response? It might give an insight into what we have to do differently or what bothered them. Considering we had no success in getting anyone new involved, it’s probably good to reflect on what could be done better.
In the comments section of the revolving Rust jobs posting a comment section is designated for experienced devs to post their CV, hopefully they drop an email but from there it is direct communication. Roughly 10-15 new posts of those likely 4 or 5 get contacted . I weed through this section looking for keywords that might make them an optimal candidate- opensource work, experience level cetc. I got to the number 40 as I backtracked a year because I wanted to fully tap the source. (Official /r/rust "Who's Hiring" thread for job-seekers and job-offerers [Rust 1.57] : rust)
This I think serves as just a single point of potential developers. I am looking into ways to find more contacts including twitter direct communication, github work often there are links to contacts, personal rust tech docos have contacts, and research journals have contacts.
Of the 40 contacts I’d received positive feedback, often times they had already found work (as I was backtracking the resource) but they appreciated the contact enough to respond in kind saying the project was interesting and that they would keep an eye on it. Then 3 I think showed more direct interest making keybase and asking questions.
I personally think the work and effort is worthwhile, developers are diamonds- the first iteration may not have onboarded however this was the start- with more refinement of messaging, channel utilization, and coaching those who join the community (get them wishlist items, how to forum post work order things like that) I think we may well bring new developers to the project. Keep in mind this is the strategy now and I am focusing on expanding in creative ways to catch attention of community developers in different ways
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