Unlocking the Powers of BlockChain Developers Communities
Pitching new technologies to superhero developers with genius IQs has traditionally been a challenging endeavor with hazy ROI forecast, to put it mildly.
You are generally confronted with a healthy dose of skeptism resulting in sharp questions, designed to differentiate your offering from your apparent competitors.
Instead of illustrating your proposal’s economic potential, which is often sufficient for the average users or investors, you almost always need to dive deeper into the haystack of technical details, in order to properly demonstrate your solution’s superior usability, efficiency, and/or scalability. When your technical audience has been convinced from the technology standpoint, you will then accosted by the practical-oriented question, “it sounds great but what’s in it for me to be an early adopter?” Incentives for adoption has always been a challenge to quantify.
Pitching a new blockchain technology to developers, however, could just prove to be different, and potentially much more impactful, provided incentives and talents are properly aligned.
While the industry is still in infancy, growth of the blockchain developer community for the past few years has been on an overall incline. Just as the industry often experiences volatility, blockchain developers are quick to adopt but just as quick to move onto the next.
Blockchain developers are also active in social media, having joined and formed groups and forums, in order to keep themselves abreast with the latest trends. Blockchain developers with notable projects on their resumes play the role of key opinion leaders with significant influence within their respective communities.
These phenomenons unique to the blockhchain industry are not to be taken lightly.
While new blockchain technologies are popping up on a weekly basis, the concept of blockchain leveraging tokens to foster growth has remained an essential quality. Knowing to properly reward your pioneers is key to the success of your developer platform.
Just as crypto miners get rewarded for contributing their computing power, developers that contribute their code to the blockchain technology should be rewarded for their coding power.
*Incentivize coders based on the size of their repository followers, commit frequency, number of stars and relevant measures of code visbility and popularity.
*Compensate testers based on relevance and impact of issues reported and publish a clearly defined reward table.
*Invigorate communities by organizing fun hackathon events and competitions with interesting reward mechanisms. For example, in addition to token compensation, issue blockchain-verified certificates to winners, fulfilling a dual-purpose of participant recognition as well as platform promotion.
Make your reward policies transparent, publish your whitepaper and build into your underlying infrastructure smart contracdts.
Having a well-known developer authority to vouch for your technology and spread word to fellow coders can reasonably prove to be much more impactful than hiring a social influencer to read teleprompter script on something they otherwise would otherwise never engage with, and set the right tone right from the start !
