Proposal: Updated Evangelist Program

Community
#1

As part of decentralization efforts following the launch of the Stacks 2.0 mainnet, the Stacks Evangelist Program will soon be moving to the Stacks Foundation (yay!). Evangelists are core leaders within the Stacks ecosystem and we couldn’t be more excited to work with you all. While we don’t anticipate any major changes to the program, this is an opportunity to reinvigorate the program. Moving the Evangelist Program to the Foundation means more resources, more support, and more opportunities for growing the Stacks ecosystem.

Below is a proposal for an updated Evangelist Program under the Stacks Foundation. Feedback, ideas, and suggestions are welcome/encouraged! Please also keep in mind that this is a proposal for an early version of the program; this program will inevitably change over time as the community grows.

Stacks Evangelist Program Proposal


What’s the objective of the Stacks Evangelist Program?

To bring Stacks to people around the world, empowering them to truly own their identity, data, and wealth.

What do Stacks evangelists do?

Evangelists grow the Stacks community in the ways they know best, whether that’s through writing smart contracts to help developers build apps, creating educational content for end users, or hosting meetups to build local Stacks communities/affinity groups.

Who can be a Stacks evangelist?

STX holders. For dedicated community members who have yet to hold STX, there will be easy ways to earn STX through community bounties.

Why require STX? Because when it comes to building strong, intentional communities, it’s important for each member to have “skin in the game” as proven by the Freehold model. Plus, holding STX opens up a number of interesting possibilities for incentives and long-term funding, like Stacking pools for evangelists. (More on this idea later.)

In addition to holding STX, we’re open to other requirements such as serving as a moderator in the Stacks Discord server. The idea though is for potential evangelists to prove their commitment to the community, not for us to impose greater barriers to participation.

How will the Stacks Foundation support evangelists?

When it comes to growing the Stacks community, evangelists know best. The primary role of the Foundation is to enable evangelists to build strong, sustainable communities, not dictate how that should be done. We plan to support evangelists in the following ways:

  • Evangelist grants: Have an idea on how to grow your your local community (e.g. a hackathon, meetup series, etc.) but don’t have the resources to pursue it yourself? You can apply for a special grant to fund your initiative through the Stacks Grants program. Review/approval of evangelist grants should be facilitated by evangelists themselves and not by the Stacks Grants committee (i.e. grant applicants would need to gain the support and approval of their fellow evangelists).
  • Evangelist bounties: If you don’t have any specific ideas but want to get involved in growing the community ASAP, there will be opportunities to earn bounties for doing impactful community work.

What is expected of evangelists?

At a minimum, evangelists are expected to maintain some level of activity in the ecosystem, which can be easily verified based on their presence in the grant program or on other community platforms like Discord, GitHub, Telegram, or the Forum.

We also expect to collaborate with evangelists on quarterly objectives. So, while evangelists are free to grow the Stacks community in whatever ways they think best, they should still contribute to big picture goals like onboarding new developers, creating more educational content, etc.

What are the benefits of becoming a Stacks evangelist?

  • Access to evangelist grants
  • Access to evangelist bounties (opportunities to earn STX!)
  • Premium STX swag
  • Amazing community

How does the evangelist program differ from the Chapters Program?

The Evangelist Program is for individuals and small groups working to bring Stacks to their local communities, while the Stacks Chapters program is for larger, more established communities working to scale Stacks on a regional or even country-wide level. Stacks Chapters typically have dedicated teams, a large network, and region-specific goals on which they work independently of the Stacks Foundation. Both programs are funded by the Stacks Grants Program.

Evangelists who feel prepared to run a chapter can apply to do so. Evangelists who are local to Stacks Chapters are also free to collaborate with those chapters. A more formal proposal for the Stacks Chapters Program is coming next week.

Future considerations - These are ideas that still need to be fleshed out but are worth considering for the future of the Evangelist Program:

  • Access to an evangelist stacking pool: Not quite sure about the terms yet, but the idea is to allow evangelists to participate in stacking with a very minimal amount of STX. The Foundation would put up the majority of STX and rewards could either go directly to evangelists or to some kind of community fund. For accountability purposes, perhaps evangelists should be required to complete one successful term as an evangelist before they’re allowed to join the pool?
  • Decision-making power: As representatives of the larger Stacks community, evangelists should play an important role in community decisions. This could materialize in a seat/vote on the Stacks board or greater voting power on community platforms like Discord or GitHub.

Call for feedback: Please share feedback, ideas, suggestions, and questions! We’re hoping to launch the Foundation’s Evangelist Program very soon and need your help finalizing the details :slight_smile:.

8 Likes
#2

This is awesome! Happy to see the proposal. So many great opportunities for evangelists. My first thought is, it will be good if the entry criteria for evangelists will be a combination of “Holding STX” plus active involvement/interest in the Stacks ecosystem/community.
When we say, holding STX, is there any bare minimum?

One more idea, how about another entry criteria, wherein CMs in Discord / evangelists vote to promote some active member/highly contributing member as an evangelist? Something like an evangelist referral program?

Evangelist bounties are a great way for supporting evangelists. I loved the idea of voting within evangelists to approve an evangelist grant.

Evangelist Stacking pool sounds interesting. Again, here the entry criteria should be a bit tight, probably in terms of involvement, contribution/participation?

Overall, this is a great proposal. Excited and looking forward to the new program :+1:

4 Likes
#3

Will Joe be part of the program? Is there a difference to Developer Evangelists?

I like the concept of Evangelists grants!

Benefits could be also access to prepared material/slides.

5 Likes
#4

@jrmith I love these ideas. Especially the hodl model. +1.

Additional proposal:
I’d like to propose changing the name of the program to something less … evangelical … Today we are already in an environment that fosters “religious” debates about which chain is better/faster/whatever … Some communities use words like “army” and “crew” to define themselves. I’d like to see the name of the community program confer the idea that we are more focused on education and support, and less about STX is better than X.

Something like “Guides” or “Sherpas” or even just “Leaders”.

11 Likes
#5

@jrmith I agree with everything Dan just said. This is :fire:. Ty kindly for putting this up.

2 Likes
#6

This sounds great! I would like to become a Stacks evangelist. I am currently a Freeholder so the outreach opportunity could be hugely magnified.

2 Likes
#7

Good ideas, tks for sharing!

In advancing Stacks adoption I think there are some strategic partners as universities, startups accelerators and venture capitalists. They are hubs that can leverage our communication to many entrepreneurs and developers. I have a good network in Brazil, could help on that.

The actions with them could involve sharing information and educational content about stacks with their networks, hosting events, etc.

Very happy to see Stacks community moving forward.

2 Likes
#8

Excited to see this program be revamped. The long wait is over. I think @jrmith’s idea of adding the threshold was the right call especially having skin in the game.

I’m also in the process of proposing a moderation grant for Telegram(Token commmunity). For example, this initial threshold with the community moderation challenge is a good step for anyone to get involved and quickly learn the ecosystem’s ins and outs. One of the best ways to learn STX is thru conversations with various OG and new members.

The evangelist grants should be led by a community board member, which I know the foundation is currently working on.

Here are some requirements I was thinking of for the probation period, which is vital before they get the title evangelist. I.E.

  1. An active STX community member for at least three months and traces of community contributions can be found in Hiro, Freehold, Daemon Technologies, New Internet Labs, or Stacks Foundation.
  2. A chapter can only be made if there are more than 500 active Stacks community members in a certain country or a field of interest. (Minimum 500 members across all community platforms such as Reddit, Telegram, 4chan, discord, or any other social media.)
  3. I think we should also be biased towards action. We want to see momentum before anything else.
1 Like
#9

I started a newsletter about this with Jun Gong, who’s in the ETH community. Protocols are not religion. I agree with Dan here, crypto isn’t a zero sum game afterall. There’s so much we can do as a community especially if we start opening up to more protocols. Learn about what their building, collaborate, etc.

Shameless plug here: F*ck not another crypto newsletter - The Crypto Community Handbook

3 Likes
#10

Happy to see you here. <3

#11

Added this issue for our community: # of total addresses with positive STX balances · Issue #369 · blockstack/explorer · GitHub

1 Like
#12

Thanks for all the feedback, everyone! This is really helpful. Here are the questions and suggestions I heard from you all:

  • What’s the minimum number of STX that community members need to hold to become evangelists?
  • Perhaps another way of promoting community members to evangelist positions is through referrals from other community members
  • You’re all generally on board with the idea of evangelists (and not the Grants Committee) being the ones to approve evangelist grants
  • Evangelists should have access to prepared materials/slides for their work
  • We should consider a different name to “evangelists” since that evokes religious undertones
  • In addition to holding STX, community members should be able to demonstrate some level of activity before becoming evangelists

Here are some open questions and thoughts from my end:

  • How can community members who can’t get STX (due to crypto regulation) become evangelists?
  • Should there be a monthly deadline for evangelists to approve evangelist grants? This would be put in place to make grants fulfillment easier for the Grants Committee.
  • How can we minimize the work for evangelists approving grants? Perhaps evangelists can do it asynchronously by reviewing, commenting, and voting on proposals on GitHub. The proposals that meet a minimum number of votes by the monthly deadline would then be automatically funded by the Grants Committee.
  • What kinds of bounties should we set for evangelists? Can we collaborate with Freehold on these?
  • What’s the best way to easily track evangelist activity? For now, maybe the automoderation bot on Discord would be the fastest way?

If you have any followup answers or thoughts to these questions, please feel free to share them below! I’ll do my best to address and provide suggestions for them in the final proposal (coming soon).

1 Like
#13

Evangelist is fine. Crypto is a religion! :laughing:

#14

This is great effort . Thanks @jrmith for promptly getting on this . Few interesting points people brought up here . “evangelical” or " religious" undertones might not be ideal for what we are trying to achieve here . Another point friedger raised is to think about how to categorize types of supporters - developers or non devs . Devs who are already in the grants program can be excluded ( just a thought ) however developers who are actively committing to GitHub but not in grants definitely should be there . i mean then there is an overlap there too if a dev is both in a grant and actively contributes to github with code and tooling. So there is a grey area there hence including some and excluding some might not work either. just to make things simple but not simpler and fair for everyone having a baseline reward that is randomly generated and distributed periodically might be easy to implement with very low overheads.

#15

I’m late to this but here are some thoughts:

Agree with Tarun’s suggestion on Discord regarding that "evangelist(s) should be awarded small % / amount ( or stacks ) randomly and periodically ". This makes a lot of sense for people who are actively growing the community.

Don’t agree with the skin in the game concept as applied to evangelists. Most evangelists work hard to grow the community. It’s fun but it’s hard work. If Louise had told me that I needed to pay to become an evangelist (because that is what it is when you require people to own Stacks to participate), I’m pretty sure my answer would have been “no”.

Since working on the Code of Conduct - I resonate with the idea that our community should be better than the communities, states and countries we come from or live in. We should actively conspire to support people to be their best, give their best. Making the evangelist program a pay to play program only encourages participation by those who are privileged enough to be able to buy their way in.

There are many ways to have skin in the game. It’s a concept often used about founders who have worked for years for no income on a project they are deeply passionate about. It’s a measurement for the investor that shows the determination of the founding team. This type of commitment is very different from pay to play.

One thought that came to me after posting this is using stacking or pooling to create an evangelists “share” to be distributed to the evangelists who are actively working to grow community. Also, I see that community leads are receiving grants to grow their communities. As Tarun said on Discord - some percentage of those grants could be set aside for evangelists. In the case of stacking or pooling some percentage would be set aside and contributed to the stacking or pooling mechanism.

#16

Great, i love everything about the stack evangesllist program. Thanks alot for the info.

1 Like
#17

It wouldn’t necessarily be pay to play. Evangelists would be given STX to participate in a stacking pool. This is mentioned in the proposal and the pool is very much underway. It also incorporates Tarun’s suggestion of randomized rewards, proportional to contributions. If you’re interested in the dynamics of this pool, some community members will be discussing the smart contract for rewards distribution on Friday. Let me know if you’d like to join.

#18

Note that the idea has evolved since this post but it is very much a reality for the evangelist program.

#19

Confirming that randomized rewards will be part of the first trial of this! Thanks for the idea, Tarun :slight_smile:.

#20

+1 and for what it’s worth. I don’t think that even if you did require these folks to have some small amount of Stacks on their own or to join initially, that it would be bad. All kinds of ways to make this super accessible. If you aren’t hodling, are you really a (complete) evangelist? Can you be? To me it’s largely symbolic (not about how much). It’s also a helpful form of dogfooding.

1 Like