Devpost has been in talks with Nick Tong at Perpetual Protocol to organize a worldwide virtual hackathon to drive new projects especially relevant to the grant space. I’ve typed up a full proposal which is linked here and goes in-depth on our services, results, and approach to running a successful virtual hackathon. A very brief summary of the proposal is also included below
Proposal
Would propose that Perpetual Protocol uses Devpost to run a 3-month virtual hackathon, engaging Devpost with our full marketing and administrative services to maximize the reach of the hackathon, use our expertise to design the most effective engagement, and shift most day-to-day hackathon management to Devpost.
Devpost will serve as the administrator of the hackathon and lead all efforts within the project.
Perpetual Protocol committee will provide strategic guidance for our planning, co-marketing, and specific technical support on the protocol.
Ultimately, the expected outcome would be 20-100 fully working projects built on Perpetual Protocol.
Cost
Full detail of Devpost's Project Management and Marketing efforts can be found in the attached doc
Thanks for submitting this post! Given the ask is above the 50K for the grants program we have to run it by the community first before going to a snapshot vote. I’m personally quite excited for this hackathon to happen and would love to see more developers building on top of Perpetual Protocol!
Thanks Dave! Exciting proposal. Can you give us a rough headcount on how many dedicated staff will be posted to support this Hackathon for the 3-months period? Cheers.
Thanks for the response! So the Perp team leading the engagement would work with one of our Project Managers, we also have a marketing and support team who would contribute. So one project manager who can pull in others and coordinate as needed.
My main query is whether 3 months for development is too long. In my mind a hackathon is a weekend to build a proof of concepts, whereas 3 months is MVP.
If we make the program shorter and run more often, for similar cost we’ll get more community building impact from the publicity/socials and we’ll see more teams and concepts.
The products would be prototypes rather than MVP, but prototypes are enough to determine promising teams and products to bubble up.
Good question! So we encourage the longer virtual hackathons for a couple reasons.
Having everyone in the same room is a great motivator for getting everyone to finish a proof of concept over a weekend and it’s difficult to replicate that engagement over a weekend without a physical location. We recommend at least 6-8 weeks of a submission period to help reach as many devs as possible in the Devpost community.
You’ll see more fully functional projects instead of proof of concepts, I’d push back a little on prototypes being enough to determine products for bubbling up. Though proofs can help onboard, we would always prefer to deliver fully working projects if possible. Plus developers get a lot more experience using the protocol and can contribute some valuable insights into the docs/functionality.
Finally you’ll get a broader range of developers. There are a lot of professional devs in the Devpost community and they’re more inclined to schedule regular time to work on something than to do a 48 hour sprint. And devs that are inclined to treat things like a sprint can still do so!
Sorry to go on for a bit there, but in summary we’d strongly recommend against a weekend virtual hackathon, but can definitely be closer to 6-8 weeks if you’d like to focus on doing recurring, shorter hackathons.
Hey guys, is this proposal still a thing? I don´t see any voting on snapshot.
I do like this proposal a lot but would actually encourage the DAO to provide more capital for the prize pool. 20k in prizes and 80k for Devpost cost seems totally out of balance. These numbers should be at least equal. More money means more encouragement to develop higher quality projects too and we can spread out meaningful prizes over more ranking slots, encouraging broader partizipation even more.
I mean, lets be real, who in crypto cares about a 500$ prize somewhere on place 10 if you can actually develop code and get paid 10k per month being employed in a random startup?
Prizes need to be meaningful and in proportion to overhead cost.