How to BUIDL a Mesh Network of Human Beings

Six ways to incentivize your network & successfully create collective action.

Hands down, my favorite feature of Gitcoin is the network of participants. Everyone in our network is a 3-dimensional human; with their own skills, personality, and vision for the world.

Gitcoin is a network of 8,000 Blockchain BUIDLers from 6 continents; organized around the mission of growing open source

Our primary challenges as dApp designers are figuring out how to connect these people together in a way that constructively brings value to each individual. By building this type of network of individuals, we hope to achieve Gitcoin’s mission of Growing & Sustaining Open Source.

It turns out that there’s a name for this type of network topology that we are designing towards. It’s called a mesh network.

In traditional computing, a mesh network is a network topology in which nodes connect…

Directly Dynamically Non-hierarchically

…to as many other nodes as possible. Nodes cooperate with one another to efficiently route data from/to clients.

While a traditional mesh network is comprised of nodes (computers) and transfers data, Gitcoin’s network is comprised of individuals, and each transfers value.

We got to wondering what Gitcoin’s mesh network of Open Source Developers looks like.

After some furious D3.js coding, we’ve built tools to visualize this network. In the below graph, both projects and contributors are nodes; the Gitcoin bounties they’ve done together are edges:

This concept of a mesh network of jobs was originally introduced in our piece entitled Open Source Money Will BUIDL the Open Source Ecosystem.

In that piece, we articulated why the intersection of blockchain and open source is so compelling. We believe Open Source Money — through multi-billion dollar platforms like Ethereum — will encourage Open Source Sustainability. Gitcoin is building a mesh network of jobs at this nexus.

The objective of this piece is to generalize what we’ve learned at Gitcoin about building our open source mesh network, for our friends in other web3-based open source projects.

To read the full story visit: https://gitcoin.co/blog/how-to-buidl-a-mesh-network-of-human-beings/