Dear DotSama community!
In this post, I’d like to address two topics:
- increasing engagement in the existing community (creative content, code contributions, participation in the discussions, etc.)
- bringing new audiences to DotSama
Both are frequently brought up in the ecosystem (and for a good reason). I think it’s important to address them together as a vibrant community is a prerequisite for the ecosystem’s growth.
A common denominator for community engagement and active expansion is Incentives (whether monetary or not). It’s fair to suggest that by improving the tooling and simplifying the ways to incentivize contributions (for everyone), we can give a substantial boost to the existing DotSama community and create (and test) mechanics of serving and engaging much wider audiences.
With the Anagolay team, we are working to bring tip-as-you-go functionality to the ecosystem (and beyond). The idea is to make supporting quality work super simple without sacrificing accountability.
With a simple browser extension, anybody can tip a verified creator, contributor, or even
- a GitHub PR and comment, a Tweet, or a YouTube video.
Essentially, any verified online identity, like a web (sub)domain, a social media account, or a federated identity, can be used to send and receive funds: as community contributions to support a verified creator or their particular project.
To get a better idea of how it works and test it yourself, check this step-by-step tutorial we put together: https://anagolay.dev/blog/chrome_extension/installation-and-step-by-step-tutorial/
- as an MVP, we’ve already implemented the verification for web domains. If you have a website, you can verify yours and test it
- with Anagolay browser extension, you can already tip to any verified web-domain
From the get-go, in the current implementation, the tips can be sent in IDI (our native token). Eventually, our goal is to enable tips & recurring contributions in any DotSama token, scale Anagolay solution, and streamline creative workflow from publishing to monetization for all independent creators.
For more details, feel free to check the full proposal we put up for discussion here: https://polkadot.polkassembly.io/post/1665.
One last thing to highlight: we’re also working on simplifying proposing a tip to Polkadot or Kusama treasuries: with Anagolay Extension and with the PR submitter’s GitHub username verified, anybody can propose a tip and select to which treasury it will go. No servers, no bots, and works on any repository.
But then again, not everything should be incentivized through treasury spending, and with the community contributions tooling, there are plenty of opportunities to explore further.
We’d love to hear from the community on the ideas above and chat about how we can take them to the next level. Let’s work together to build and grow a vibrant ecosystem that lifts up and empowers creators and builders of all kinds.