Background:

As discussed on the forum, there's a clear need for someone to focus on Stacks-related technical documentation. In addition to the key focuses outlined, this role will also be responsible for delivering on the following goals over the next few months.

Goals:

• Write, review, edit, & organize new and existing content
• Distill complex, technical topics and turn them into easy to understand documentation
• Establish an efficient process for maintaining and updating documentation on an ongoing basis
• Actively engage and involve community members to multiply documentation improvements
• Analyze, gather feedback, and research effectiveness and impact of documentation to identify opportunities for improvements

Timeline:

• An initial 3-month sprint to level-set docs and bring the team up to speed, followed by a second 3-month sprint focused on process and incentives around making sure docs are well-taken care of by a larger group of regular contributors. I do think the initial audit and setup is key to setting up the ongoing contributions, hence the 3 + 3 suggestion vs bringing in two residents at once on this.

Background 

Boom is bringing new depth to the creator-to-supporter relationship through novel NFT utility and fundraising mechanics. From minting to collecting, we're pushing the boundaries of this decentralized artistic medium to ensure that all people, not just current crypto users, remain at the center of the next wave of innovation. All on the Stacks blockchain, secured by Bitcoin. 

Project Overview 

The next 4 quarters will be broken down as follows: 

• Q1. Foundation - Updates to contracts, standards, ui and Interface open source components.
• Q2. User Experience - Lean into sovereignty and Stacks options for true data ownership, user minting, community rewards 
• Q3. Innovation - Novel minting and interactive technologies 
• Q4. Evolution - Boom DAO, analytics, and beyond 

Scope & Milestones (Q1 of 1 Year Grant) 

Product Development 

● SIP-009 & SIP-012 compliant smart contract development for Boom NFTs and Boomboxes 

● Refactor Boombox contracts to support custom options 

● Marketplace auctions - enable auction smart contracts 

● Boom API Nodes - infrastructure to enable redundancy and distribute load off of Hiro servers 

Community & Standards 

● Semi-Fungible token standard - work on developing and aligning community around a standard 

● Public Office hours - further participation in community governance groups Stretch Goals 

● Off-chain Profile standards - work with the community to align around profile standards as interim functionality until profile updates are available.

Background

We have worked in the Stacks ecosystem since 2017 and 2019. During this time we've worked on and built some of the ecosystem's most prominent products, such as the Hiro wallet, Stacks Explorer, the Stacks docs, the stacks.co website, stacking.club, and many others. While stacking.club is already the home of the most up-to-date and detailed information around stacking and Proof-of-Transfer, we believe it can do much more.

We want to dedicate our time to making stacking.club a better home for all things stacking. Currently it's a great diagnostic tool, but it can become the place where everyone goes to stack, pool, and learn. There is no one true place where someone can go to learn about stacking and then actually do it — we think stacking.club can be that place and really advance the experience of stacking.

End Product

Throughout the residency, we'll make many improvements to the experience of stacking:

• Enabling people to pool (and potentially stack independently) directly on stacking.club
• Streamlining the pooling user experience
• Making the stacking and pooling data we have easier to understand and more actionable
• Personalizing stacking data (e.g. your own dashboard if you connect your wallet)
• Exploring how we can minimize the trust involved with pooling in collaboration with pool operators
• A general revamp of the UI

Roadmap

NB: These phases are pretty flexible and not in the exact order in which they may occur.

Phase I:

• A complete redesign and improvement to the UI / UX
• Improved learning materials

Phase II:

• Stacks authentication integration (via the web wallet)
• Improved user dashboards
• Improved user-specific data

Phase III:

• Pool data exploration and comparison
• Delegated stacking (pool participation) from within the web app

Phase IV:

• Trustless pool research and development

Background

2021 has shown how community can be the difference between success and failure in crypto projects, especially NFTs and games. While Ethereum has seen platforms emerge to support this like Collab.land and temple.fans, these tools still only solve part of the issue, and the Stacks environment remains lacking in these types of tools. Through this residency, we would like to test, build and validate features (using design thinking and lean methodologies) for an app that could solve these problems, launch an MVP platform to test and refine, and finish with a comprehensive middle layer for communities on Stacks. Key features include: the ability to authenticate users based on token ownership (NFT or fungible) linked to Discord, the ability to send token drops, Discord engagement tools and reporting features are also on the roadmap (see below). The end result will be to launch a “middle layer” app that can support developers getting their communities functioning quickly and integrated into their projects. Eventually this platform will cover the main aspects of community: membership, reputation, rewards and contributions.

Project Thesis

Stacks needs a platform for creating communities that integrate on-chain elements (e.g. token holding) with off chain behaviors. Additionally, this need is barely understood and only partially addressed in decentralized projects on all blockchain projects leaving many untapped opportunities to help NFT, blockchain gaming and DeFi projects with tools to better understand, interact with and grow the communities that are central to their existence.

Roadmap for first 3 months:

In the first three months of our residency, we plan on engaging projects on Stacks that are currently managing communities. We will conduct surveys and perform user research to better understand the problems they are facing and their current solutions. We will use best practices design thinking and product management techniques to design and spec out a community app that will do the following:

1. A connector that will enable users to link their STX address to their Discord ID via Hiro Web Wallet. This will be in the vein of what Collab.land does on ETH. Typing a command into Discord will have our bot send them a DM with a link unique to them. On clicking, they will be prompted to connect with their Hiro Wallet. Connecting will let them choose a wallet address, then the user will be completed and the project will have a record of the user’s Discord ID and their wallet.
2. Once we have users’ wallet addresses associated with their Discord ID, we can assign roles to them (e.g. “whitelist confirmed”), and even assign channels to them based on their holdings - holding an NFT in a collection for example, or a social token will grant them access to the #CLUB channel, etc.
3. Along the same lines, a community administrator can either export the wallet addresses to add to a smart contract (like a whitelist contract to enable users with those addresses to mint an NFT), or perform airdrops of tokens or NFTs to wallets in their collection.
4. Finally, to support engagement of communities within Discord, we are investigating creating interactive bots and have some ideas in the form of games and interactive chatbots. We plan on experimenting and launching with one of these tools.

If you're interested in working with Escape Labs to activate your Stacks community, DM them on Twitter at @esc_labs.

Background

The Governance Lab will bring indigenous commons & governance research and development to web3 and the Stacks ecosystem, enabling more accurate community representation through intersecting relationships, skills, & contributions of its members. The Advocates DAO will be used to gather voices & organize the ecosystem sustainably long term.

Upcoming Milestones

• By the middle of December as a Stacks community member you should have seamless onboarding to the advocates program, so that you can be rewarded for your contributions to the Stacks ecosystem.
• By the middle of February as a Stacks advocate you should be able to participate in a governance process so that you can make your voice visible to the community in many possible forms: Community grants, community policies, wieghts of rewards in the advocates algorithm, etc.