Polkadot Hub - Launch Campaign

Ecosystem
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Heya Tommi, thanks for the post, and apologies that I missed it previously. For those that don’t know me, I am a project manager in Parity’s Product Engineering team.

General responsibility for launches

At Parity, we aim to coordinate product launch-related activities as part of our product work. While this doesn’t mean we “do” everything ourselves of course, we do take on responsibility to ensure that key launch activities happen, information is shared, and things are not “missed” in this decentralised environment.

FYI, this :down_arrow: is a very high-level summary of a template for managing successful product launches in Polkadot (worked on last year with Distractive and Parity stakeholders). It is obviously an evolving process and involves many other teams as well as those listed here.

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Polkadot Hub launch

I’d like to echo what Nate (and some others) have said here, especially the breakdown and of tasks and responsibilities and the steps to date.

We were managing the smart contracts release according to this template process described in the screenshot above, and with the Polkadot Hub narrative subsuming this, we’ve pivoted to this product and messaging.

In terms of the actual activities that are happening:

Events:

  • Parity is sending speakers to key events in the Web3 / tech calendar to speak about the various features of Polkadot Hub, especially smart contracts.
  • The Events Bounty has highlighted a number of events for sponsorship. We (Parity) are providing many speakers, who are tasked with fitting mentions of the Hub into their talks.
  • We have also identified a number of other events where we are submitting speaker applications, independent of sponsorship. Obviously this is dependent on speakers being accepted.
  • If others in the ecosystem would also like to go and speak about Polkadot Hub (or any technical topic) at events, we’re also very happy to give any technical feedback or support needed to give a great talk. :blush:

DevRel:

  • As you noted, Papermoon is working on documentation and resources to support new smart contracts users.
  • W3F (Radha) is coordinating teams across the ecosystem like OpenGuild, Papermoon, Web0, EasyA, Pala, etc. to ensure developer outreach efforts and messaging are aligned.
  • Radha and I are coordinating teams putting on Hackathons for Polkadot (including some nudging to get these off the ground) to ensure we’re highlighting smart contracts at these events, providing good resources for testing and getting user feedback.
  • So far there’s been two hackathons with smart contract tracks, we have two more underway (one this month and one in May), and there are more are in the pipeline / planning stages for the rest of the year, including tracks at ETH conferences.
  • As a general rule, hackathons are being funded by the Events Bounty.
  • We know we can always do more in the DevRel area and this is just a start. There are a number of initiatives both in Parity and across the wider ecosystem being kicked off to focus more on developer experience and relations underway, so we hope these will help plug some of these gaps.

Tooling

  • The engineering team at Parity is doing a lot of work around Ethereum tooling compatibility (Remix, HardHat, etc). When the first Kusama release is available, @Jan-Jan (Smart Contracts TPM) will share details of what’s already available and the roadmap for the remaining tools here on the forum.
  • There is an OpenZeppelin partnership underway.
  • R0GUE is working on Ink! (and Rust) compatibility for smart contracts to bundle into the Polkadot Hub launch.
  • The BD Hub launch working group (Aleks at W3F (posted the link to his update above)) is also doing work on partnerships with tools like oracles and block explorers to ensure these are ready in time.

Comms and Marketing:

  • Marketing is being managed by Distractive, with some product messaging / input from Parity.
  • Comms efforts will follow the staggered launch, with blogs, socials, newsletter updates, a Hub website landing page, etc. around the first and second stages of the Kusama smart contracts launch.
  • There will be wider marketing activities for the Polkadot smart contracts launch, and which will use the Polkadot Hub narrative.

I hope this is interesting and helpful. :slight_smile: :slight_smile:

Appreciate there are still some questions from your first post that aren’t addressed by this; after the first release on Kusama (imminent!) and associated comms we can see what still needs to be answered and get back to you.

cc @Cyr06130 Product Engineering TPM :slight_smile:

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