Intro
Hello Polkadot Community,
I’m Rick, one of the creators of OpenQ, a Developer Relationship Management Platform. We’ve collaborated with leading chains and web3 tools like BuildGuild, Filecoin, Polygon, Scroll, Aptos, Near, and Consensys to measure the ROI of developer marketing and relations initiatives through detailed developer activity stats.
In this post, I’ll outline what we do, our goals with Polkadot stakeholders, and our plans as we prepare for a treasury proposal. Your feedback is highly appreciated.
Why OpenQ What is the Goal?
As Polkadot decentralizes further, our vision is to be the go-to entity for all data collection related to developer marketing and relations initiatives. Here’s why OpenQ is crucial for the Polkadot community:
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Centralized Data Collection:
We collaborate with stakeholders to accurately measure the impact of initiatives like educational programs, hackathons and other events that bring developers to the Polkadot ecosystem, optimizing efforts for growth. -
Unified Ecosystem Effort:
As a data hub, OpenQ fosters collaboration across Polkadot, reducing reliance on external sources (like the developerreport from Electric Capital) and improving ecosystem representation. -
Enhanced Ecosystem Visibility:
Our tools help the community track and report developer activity, contributing to a transparent view of ecosystem health and strengthening Polkadot’s global standing.
How Our Platform Works
For a demo, check out my recent ETHcc presentation at the WebZero-organized Polkadot demo hour here.
General Flow
Access and Collaboration
Our platform is accessible to various teams within the Polkadot ecosystem, including a general team for the Web3 Foundation, ensuring broad access to insights.
Core Functionality: GitHub Code Search
A powerful GitHub code search and scraping tool lies at the heart of our platform, enabling users to analyze extensive code data without limitations.
Campaigns: Organizing Initiatives
Create "lists” to track marketing efforts like hackathons, educational programs, conferences, meetups or even the whole community. Our platform can also identify whether projects are deployed on Polkadot and provide comprehensive overviews.
Our Objectives
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Measure ROI of Developer Marketing Initiatives
Accurately calculate ROI for marketing and relations initiatives, supporting sustainable growth and empowering stakeholders to measure their impact to drive more value. -
Comprehensive Developer Data Aggregation
Aggregate developer data, both top-down and bottom-up, identifying active and at-risk projects to help stakeholders provide targeted support. -
GitHub Repository Discovery for New Projects
Use our project discovery tool to identify and support new projects within the Polkadot ecosystem. -
User-Friendly Platform for All Teams
Offer an easy-to-use platform for marketing and relations teams to add projects, measure impact, and enhance the accuracy of developer data through crowdsourcing. -
Identify Activity from Closed Source Projects
Address the challenge of capturing closed-source contributions, requiring manual effort but offering significant long-term benefits.
Stakeholders
Stakeholders are entities involved in developer marketing or relations initiatives, including marketing, event, or dev rel teams funded by grants, investors, or revenue.
Here’s who we’ve engaged with so far. If you’re not listed, contact me via Telegram to work with us together: @rickkdev.
Stakeholders:
- WebZero
- Polkadot Academy
- Parity
- Web3 Foundation
- Missing-link
- Web3JS / Chainsafe
Naturally, stakeholders will include developer tools for the Polkadot ecosystem, which are public goods funded by the Web3 Foundation. We will assist them in tracking their impact and developer usage, ensuring their tools are distributed effectively while also gathering feedback for improvement. These projects can reach out to us and request access.
Technical Details of Our Platform
The OpenQ process begins by importing repositories, GitHub users, or organizations. If you’re starting from scratch, we also offer features to help you discover relevant projects. The imported URLs are sent to a Kafka queue. These filtered URLs are then processed by a parallelized Go program called Gitguru. Gitguru clones each repository, analyzes each commit for specified dependencies across various files, and identifies genuine and relevant users, tracking when they started and if/when they churned. Relevant users or repositories are identified through a dependency tracking system that searches within files to see if a specific dependency was used. This allows us to determine whether a project is deployed on a particular chain or is utilizing a specific tool.
Once Gitguru has gathered this data, creating a deeply searchable database of GitHub repositories and users, our second module, the Evaluator, assigns various scores/ metrics to these repositories and their contributors.
FAQ
Where and how does your project fit into the ecosystem?
Our platform supports marketing, developer advocacy, ecosystem management, product development, grant review, and leadership roles.
Who is your target audience?
The Web3 Foundation, key ecosystem participants, Parity, and those responsible for ecosystem growth, improving developer experience on Polkadot and its Parachains.
What need(s) does your project meet?
- Quantifying Developer Activity: Identifying active developers in the Polkadot ecosystem.
- Impact Assessment: Helping stakeholders measure impact and prioritize tasks.
- Measuring ROI: Evaluating the ROI of events for developer growth or retention.
How do you plan to finance the project in the future?
We plan to license the platform annually, ideally through yearly grants after proving our value.
How do you intend to use, enhance, promote, and support your project in the short term?
We aim to become the go-to brand for measuring developer activity in web3, already partnering with organizations like Polygon, Consensys, Aptos, and others.
What are the team’s long-term plans and intentions?
To integrate our platform with every dev tooling company, ensuring self-sustainability and reducing reliance on grants or single organizations.
What are the costs?
We’re estimating 6-7k per month to operate our scraping services and DB/ hosting needs to keep projects updated and continuously track new ones (the platform will scrape hundreds of thousands of repositories to ensure a high level of accuracy which is one of our biggest costs), along with 2k per month for a dedicated team member to manage stakeholder communication, support, and reporting. In total, we expect around 100k for the first year, distributed on a milestone basis, as outlined in the treasury proposal. Next year, we’ll have a clearer view of costs and community usage. If scraping costs exceed expectations, we’ll cover the extra ourselves.
Summary
To wrap things up, OpenQ is here to help the Polkadot ecosystem grow by tracking and measuring the impact of developer marketing and relations efforts. Our goal is to give stakeholders the data they need to make better decisions and drive real growth. This is crucial for the treasury to make informed choices about which partners to support, whether they’re launching new initiatives or continuing existing ones. We want to help kickstart a new phase of ecosystem growth for Polkadot.
We’ll be submitting our proposal to the treasury soon and would love to get your feedback. Feel free to reach out directly on Telegram at @rickkdev if you have any questions or want to discuss potential partnerships.
Thanks for your support!