Promoting mutual communication

In addition to sharing information, the ICON Developers Portal will serve as a venue for communication among ICON’s interested partners. This, the managers hope, will help satisfy the ICON community’s desire for more information. “So far, ICON hasn’t communicated much with developers or users,” says Kim. “So many people are simply saying, ‘good job, great job. Keep up the good work.’ We take it as meaning we should go further, that they are hungry for our voices. They want to know.”

De:Nexo is particularly interested in making the portal a fun place to be. “We want many people to come to the site and enjoy it,” says Kim. “We want them to put questions on the forum and get answers – not just professional or tech answers, but casual answers.”

“We don’t want the site to just push content from our side. We want other developers to develop content and collaborate.”

Admittedly, the portal has a long way to go before this becomes a reality. Says Kim, “This is because we have limited resources, but this is not going to be an excuse.”

As of writing, the English language community forum had just 10 posts. To be fair, this was 10 more than in the Korean language forum, where there wasn’t a single post. The lack of a delete function – a quirk wryly noted in the very first comment of the English forum – has scared off some users, especially on the Korean side. The delete function – or won’t thereof – was a feature, not a bug, albeit a feature the managers are now reconsidering. Kim says, “We’re in the blockchain world. We’re tracking every history.”

De:Nexo has put together a task force to develop more content. The task force, composed of people from ICON, De:Nexo, AD4th and other stakeholders, will set content priorities. “The portal should generate exciting questions and answers and back-and-forth. We know this, but we haven’t generated it yet,” says Kim. “I think this is because we should provide informative content first.”