Saddle Finance: Community Strategy Addendum

Author: Shaun Geer (DancingPenguin) · Bankless Research · July 2022

These are additional topics in community strategy discussed internally that did not fit into the main research themes. They are presented here as a supplementary addendum.

Tiered Community Work

Goals

• ·Build competence and trust within the community over time.
• ·Direct work to contributors based on demonstrated competence.
• ·Find a consistent, low-cost way to reward members for community contributions.

Recommendations

• ·Assign competent community members (such as Stallions) to manage workstreams and report to Saddle core staff.
• ·Allocate external-facing work to higher-tier, proven members. Reward unproven members based on impact rather than effort.
• ·Allocate specific tasks from the Kanban board to community workgroups. Prioritize quality contributors for mission-critical work.
• ·Consider a low-touch compensation mechanism for community subgroups: such as Coordinape or a similar peer-allocation tool.

Saddle has a wide range of talent across its community. Community work should be explicitly tiered: trusted members with proven competency should be placed on important, externally-facing work, while newer members contribute to internal projects under supervision.

First-tier (internal) work can be organized around group-driven projects and rewarded via peer-determined mechanisms like Coordinape. Second-tier (external) work involves mission-critical, complex tasks that require more oversight and explicit compensation.

Hackathons

Goals

• ·Attract and motivate technical talent.
• ·Generate interesting technology starts, particularly around front-end and UI/UX.
• ·Connect to existing partnerships and events to reduce marketing costs and increase reach.

Recommendations

• ·Run hackathons in as broad a way as possible: preferably co-organized with a partner DAO or organization such as FRAX to share marketing costs and expand reach.
• ·Advertise hackathons at conferences and events where Saddle already has a presence.
• ·Keep hackathon prompts as open-ended as possible. UI and analytics projects are especially well-suited to this format.

The primary purpose of running a hackathon is to increase brand awareness and create relationships between Saddle and technical talent. As part of registration, Saddle should collect structured information about participants: their background, skill set, and interest areas: to build a talent pipeline.

Bounty Board

Goals

• ·Provide one structured method (among many) for the community to contribute to Saddle's projects.
• ·Engage and reward community members for work that is useful to the core team.

Recommendations

• ·The bounty board should not be the primary mechanism for introducing work into the community.
• ·Bounties should represent specific, well-scoped tasks that take no more than 40 hours to complete.
• ·Bounty boards can serve as advertisements for larger community tasks, but these should feed into a coordinated group project, not operate in isolation.
• ·Bounty board work should be seen as part of a larger community engagement strategy.

Bounties are best suited to three types of tasks: specific, well-defined microtasks with low coordination overhead; tasks that can surface high-competence community members for future work; and entry points (paid in SDL) into larger community-driven projects.

For example, Saddle should seek to be listed on every applicable yield optimizer. A bounty can be structured to identify and approach these integrations, retaining community members with data and analytics skills in the process.