What is the NEAR Developer DAO?
Developer DAO (DevDAO) brings together individuals and organizations to build a decentralized NEAR developer ecosystem. We provide social structures and tools to empower anyone to ideate, implement, review, and support projects in the NEAR ecosystem.
Mission
Build a growing self-sufficient community of NEAR developers to enable a thriving NEAR ecosystem.
Values
- Decentralized: We are building together.
- Transparent: All decision making and communication is open.
- Self-sufficient: We do not critically depend on any single entity.
- Robust: Any role or team can be duplicated or replaced.
- High-velocity: We need to move faster than classic OSS.
Vision
We are building an open source developer community on NEAR that owns all aspects of its own success, including coding, event organization, promotion, fundraising, partnerships, etc. DevDAO establishes and maintains the structure and the processes to grow our developer ecosystem.
Example areas of involvement include:
- Technical decision making: Partnering with recognized experts to review technical proposals and making decisions based on the needs of the community and ecosystem.
- Creating deep tech awareness: Working with marketing partners to create awareness on interesting projects and technology areas.
- Organizing events and local presence: Organizing events and empowering community leaders with resources to grow their local communities.
- Managing documentation and public repositories: Managing a variety of documentation and public repositories that support NEAR developers.
Roles & Responsibilities
DevDAO provides various social structures to support developers:
- Work Groups: A formal committee of selected subject matter experts who make official decisions on proposals and questions in their ecosystem focus area. Each work group has the authority to review proposals using a strict process, suggest funding to a DAO, and hold grant recipients accountable. They also engage with the community to understand their needs and encourage ideation. As of April 2023, we have six Work Groups with more underway. There is also a Moderators Work Group that supervises and facilitates other Work Groups.
- Community Groups: An informal self-organized group of people interested in a specific topic area. While this group does not make official decisions, it offers a great opportunity to connect with others to share ideas and submit proposals. Each group is not controlled by anyone but the people who are organizing it. We have about 15 Community Groups as of April 2023.
- DevDAO Operations: A minimal group of operators managing the legal and the administrative side of DevDAO.
Sponsorships
Our goal is to grow an ecosystem of developers who are here because they like the technology and community. Given that there’s a lot of time and effort that goes into this, we have financial means to compensate for some activities and projects for the involvement areas above. Our budget comes from our staking pool, the NEAR Foundation, as well as other partners in the ecosystem.
We use the NEAR Dev Hub as our main platform for sponsoring projects and individual contributions to the NEAR developer ecosystem. The Funding Board shows all the projects that we approved for funding.
If you are interested in applying for funding from DevDAO, check out our funding guidelines.
