The ecosystem that has formed around MakerDAO is widely regarded as one of the best examples of what a healthy crypto community can be. Our stakeholders are smart, engaged, and civil while remaining appropriately critical. Other organizations have noted what a stand-out group our community is, and asked us to explain how we did it. While there are many answers to the question, only one of them really counts: show your community that it matters.

We knew from the beginning that smart, engaged people want to be treated like rational adults, not products or sales leads or cheerleaders. They want to know that they are contributing to a greater shared ideal and that their opinions and expertise can help the project succeed. They want to see that they are involved with a Foundation that will do things like change its very mandate based on their well-considered feedback or trust them to govern the system correctly.

With this in mind, we’ve done our best to foster an environment where the Foundation remains as open as we possibly can, where critical conversations are encouraged, and where our stakeholders can speak directly to the teams involved with building out our products. This is the secret to MakerDAOs success; smart, talented people attract more smart, talented people.

It is this “flywheel effect” that has caused us to create a new vertical to formalize something critical to the future success of the Foundation and the greater adoption of Dai…

MakerDAO is proud to announce a new initiative we’re calling the Core Community Development Group (CCDG).

The group’s mandate is to directly foster the growth of the MakerDAO ecosystem by focusing on our community’s most motivated members. We’ll do this through a series of initiatives designed to create direct incentives and support structures to allow people to participate in and contribute to the success the Dai Stable Coin platform.

The Initiatives

There’s a lot of work and planning to be done here and it will take a few months to roll everything out the way we would like. We will be releasing further blog posts as new milestones are reached.

In the meantime, we’re firm believers in the wisdom of the crowd (or at least our crowd), and we like to release information as early as possible. One of the first tasks of the CCDG will be to get as much feedback as we can from members of our community and use that to help us shape the first iterations of these programs:

The Fund

One of the most important initiatives of the new group will be the identifying and incentivizing of third-party talent to contribute to the ecosystem. The initial iteration of this granting process will be dedicated to bootstrapping small projects with small to midsize grants. The funds will be released as the teams reach predetermined milestones. Successful projects may also gain access to internal consulting resources.

A blog post outlining the program and the proposal process will be coming in the next few weeks.

Bounty/Hackathon Management

Hackathons represent a significant source of potential developer talent; we will apply a strategy to ensure that the prize money fosters long-term relationships with the Foundation and gives winners a clear path to continue building for the MakerDAO ecosystem.

Community Education/Onboarding

We will fund community members to help create the resources required to get users up to speed on the ecosystem and to create a path for increased engagement. We aim to support projects that touch on a number of groups important to the MakerDAO ecosystem: stability seekers, risk takers, economists, voters, fund managers, partners, developers, etc., all require different levels of education and support.

Promoting Good Governance

As the governance process at MakerDAO comes to the forefront we will take an active role in facilitating debate, explaining the governance process, publicizing pending votes, and encouraging engagement with greater governance process.

Community Advocacy

It is the job of the CCDG to understand the needs of the community and bring them back to the foundation. The group is an ally and an advocate for participants in the ecosystem; it is the point of contact between the Foundation and its users.

As a part of the advocacy initiative, we will establish a process through which community members can submit proposals to the Foundation which will be evaluated by the relevant internal teams for consideration. For example, a group has an idea about a new feature they would like to see added to the CDP Portal, or a new incentive mechanism they believe would increase Dai adoption. They can write a document detailing their request and we will arrange a meeting where they can pitch the idea to the relevant internal stakeholders.

Community Representatives

We’ll be introducing a “Community Rep” program as a part of the larger Advocacy initiative. It’s our hope that people will use this program to organize meetups, organize local hackathons, host MakerDAO-related presentations, and promote local Dai adoption initiatives. Reps will be provided with a process to gain funding for expenses as well as access to honorariums to cover time and effort.

Community Content Generation

The group will develop incentives to fund or crowdsource FAQs, organize technical blogs, community-generated tutorials, articles, and opinion pieces.

How to get involved

If you have any ideas about how you think these initiatives should work, be improved, or if you are interested in helping out, please contact Rich Brown in email or chat.