With the Stacks Ecosystem larger than ever before, it's important we're able to set priorities based on community needs. At the Stacks Foundation, we work to surface and highlight these needs as well as point our own programming and resources at them. To do so, we surveyed the most active founders, employees, and developers from over 50 companies building on Stacks. We asked them about everything, from the most pressing technical improvements to their ideas for new resources.

In this post, we share the key insights from that feedback, outline how we’ve used the data at the Stacks Foundation for our organization’s OKRs, and share ways for you to be part of upcoming feedback sessions.

To make this easy to digest for a wide audience, we’ve simplified results into key insights. Please note, these results are non-binding and don’t represent any sort of dictated priority list for the community. These results are a tool for every contributor to reflect on as they set their own priorities and can help ensure we collectively address the needs of the community and align work in service of our mission.

Naturally an ecosystem needs great folks building on it, so we asked founders where they need the most help:

Last quarter, the Stacks Foundation kicked off work to make Stacks documentation easier to update. Going into Q4, we’ve allocated even more time from our direct team to work on documentation and are calling for more community contributors to support docs updates. Our focus on education continues to grow. We released several new tutorials via our partnerships with Pointer and Quicknode, with more to come. Hiro shared a tutorial by Byzantion, Fungible Systems, a Stacks Resident, dropped a new tutorial, and more proposed tutorials are on the way from a variety of sources. Existing and new tutorials will be indexed in the documentation very soon. Meanwhile, Clarity Camp trained over 100 new developers on smart contracts and we locked down the Whitelabel Clarity Residents to keep churning them out well into 2023. On the API front, the Stacks Foundation’s deal with Quicknode went live, making developers work easier as evidenced by these happy tweets here and here.

We intentionally left this question wide open, simply asking everyone what one resource they would add to the ecosystem if they could.

The answer was clear: More blockchain developers.

Core infrastructure improvements are capped by the number of blockchain developers. There are many ways we can, and must improve Stacks to serve founders and developers, but builders recognize we need talented blockchain developers to accelerate the shipping new blockchain improvements. Several organizations have open blockchain developer positions and the Stacks Foundation has kicked off an effort to help source qualified candidates to them as part of the Faster L1 Working Group. If you know one, contact recruiting@stacks.org, we offer a $5,000 referral bonus, paid in STX.

As you can see, developer turnout wasn’t huge - this was somewhat intentional as we really went after founders and business leaders. About the same time as this survey was out, we supported Hiro with their developer survey and they’ve just shared some great data that will guide their efforts as well as inform ours.