If you are a developer in Solana chances are youâve seen tweets about the community's efforts to go live on stack exchange. ICYMI on the public community call earlier this week, Superteam is excited to announce that weâll be awarding XP to anyone who provides quality answers on the Solana stack exchange.
This essay will be useful for for:
Solana developers who arenât in Superteam
Developers who are looking to break into Solana dev (either from other ecosystems or new to crypto)Â
Developers who are already superteam members or contributors
Why should you care about Superteam XP ?
The value of XP is obvious to members & contributors. But, if you arenât already in the community, you might wonder why this is such a big deal. And more importantly why you, as a developer, should act on this. Hereâs some background.
Superteam is a community of talented people building in Solana. The north star metric is Community GDP - i.e. total $$ earned by members from opportunities discovered through the community. This is currently ~$747k, you can read more about it in our August update. To be super clear, Superteam does not charge a commission or take-rate on this. This is entirely earned by members from opportunities they unlocked through Superteam.
In general, you can enter the community either as a contributor (level 2) or member (level 3). Membership is currently capped at ~150 (Dunbarâs number). You can request access as a contributor if youâre looking to actively work on projects in the community by dropping in to the proof-of-work-channel. Once inside the community you build your reputation by working on projects.
This is a unique opportunity to build your reputation within the community before you even enter. This will help you stand out and gain valuable access to community members. Even if you arenât looking to work through superteam right now, it sets you up for success when you would like to join. If you are looking to find work as a contributor it gives you an edge as someone who is creating public goods for the Solana ecosystem & complements your other proof of work.
You can find other talented devs and members to work with, get access to exclusive earning opportunities, find collaborators across skills for your projects etc. Our members are some of the top contributors in the Solana ecosystem - past hackathon winners (Wordcel) , DeFi bug bounty winners, full time contributors to the Solana foundation & much much more. We also most recently submitted 13 entries to the Solana Summer Camp.
See the live standings of XP split by roles on our reputation dashboard. Learn more about how we designed our reputation system here.Â
About Stack Exchange
A quick background for those who are new to stack exchange. As per wikipedia, it is a ânetwork of question-and-answer (Q&A) websites on topics in diverse fields, each site covering a specific topic, where questions, answers, and users are subject to a reputation award process. The reputation system allows the sites to be self-moderating. As of August 2019, the three most actively-viewed sites in the network are Stack Overflow, Super User,[7] and Ask Ubuntu.â Btw - I checked and these are still among the top sites.Â
Solana Stack Exchange Beta
The stack exchange community is not messing around. Getting a site live is no joke. Communities need to demonstrate strength in both numbers & quality. Each new site goes through 4 phases: Definition, Commitment, Private beta and Public beta. You can learn more about the process here.Â
The Solana Stack Exchange is currently in the Public Beta phase. As you can see in the image below, one of the areas that needs most work is answering questions (kinda makes sense given thatâs the whole point of this website). We want to do our bit at helping create this public good.Â
Which brings us to this next section.Â
How to claim XP for answeringâŚ
Claim your XP in 3 easy steps,
Answer a question on the Solana Stack Exchange
Wait for your answer to be âacceptedâ
Fill out this form. It will take under a minute. We only need your email, stack
exchange id & a way to reach you. Keep in mind, you can ( & absolutely should) claim XP for your answers that have already been accepted.
You will be awarded 5XP per accepted answer. If you submit a total of 10 accepted answers you can unlock contributor access. Even if you donât get to 10 answers, the XP you earn will strengthen your case when you apply for contributor access with other proof of work.
Shout out to Chester King for building this program. The process is currently manual but we do plan to automate this soon. The desired state is that you only need to connect your stack exchange account with us once and we automatically read updates from there.
Thatâs all for now folks. Thanks for reading. If you found this exciting, get cracking with answers on the Solana Stack Exchange. And if youâre at the Dilli HH - all the best for demo day!
Cheers!
Updated cover image: Midjourney
Previous cover image credits: Nigel Sussman (via tech crunch)