Initative - DXhackathon

[0xVenky]

Hey, this is a short proposal for trying out hackathon for contributors within DXDao.

A few years back, I worked for a startup, where every quarter we used to run an internal hackathon for 2 days. The CSO, head of product used to give a challenge, and we formed small teams to hack a solution. If they were great product ideas, we added them to backlog. If not, well, it was a great experience to try out some new stuff, try to work together with new team mates and was fun to see the demos and get inspired by the kind of ideas that went flying.

There are a lot of benefits with these hackathons:

1. Fun way to stay creative
2. Push ourselves to be uncomfortable and try new fun stuff with products.
3. Cross collaborate with different teams / devs / designers that we have never done before. We are pretty silo with our work (even within the squads).
4. Keeps the environment very light / approachable / encourage to fail.
5. There are a lot of soft and intangible benefits to this that will improve the org culture.
6. Lots to learn from each other.

How could this work for DXDao? My take here with some tentative timelines:

1. Decide on a date for hackathon, lets say whole of Thursday and do demos around the Product strategy call. (Dec 15 to Dec 16 perhaps?)
2. A week before atleast, gather ideas for what could be hacked on. Would also request product leads to give some ideas around DXdao products if contributors need some inspiration to hack.
3. Find team mates that are interested and wants to join hacking the same topic / idea. 2to 3 members good number? (Should we invite anyone from outside DXDao to hack as well?)
4. Form teams before the hackathon starts, a short 1 min talk about what u r going to build.
5. Thursday and Friday hack time.
6. Demo day on Friday where teams present the built product / concept and explain.

How is this different from other hackathons? - This is just internal that we will be able to develop the “builder” / “hacker” culture.
Once every month / quarter, we could take 2 days to try and come up with an idea / concept that could either be integrated into one of our product, else we gave this a go FFS and got better team camaraderie.
We could keep it very open for the first hackathon and then follow certain themes on the future hackathons.
These hackathons also comes with challenges. Critical delivery, bug fixes, feature releases might take priority for some, we should be mindful of that as well of course.

I bounced this with some of the other contributors and have got some positive feedback.

What are the prizes? Who are the judges?
The biggest prize is to see this integrated into the product or be a separate product I don’t think this should be looked as an activity to win certain prizes, but where we adopt this as a culture to build fast and break things and how DXDao encourages contributors to do this together.

Or, we could use Coordinape where each other can give an “impact” score to the other ideas.

Cost of this activity:
2 days of the all contributor cost, atleast most tech contributors. I am guessing this will come to around 15K USD approx. based on my very rough calculations.

If you have any other question / comments / feedback, please write below and we can find answers together.

We will explore this in one of the upcoming development call.

Should DXDao pursue this initiative?

• Yes
• No

[Berteotti]

Love this kind of initiatives.

It is a cool way to work with new/different tech, an opportunity to use new libararies and frameworks, with new contributors, outside our confort zone.

This can not only validate new ideas but also validate new ways of building.

Already did this in previous companies and it was a blessing. Our team tested ways of building that were easier, faster and provided an awesome dev/user experience.

Looking foward to this.

Also, this cool be an opportunity to learn/practice other languages (e.g. solidity for me).

[hughesconnor]

Great idea, and in full support.

@0xVenky

Cost of this activity:
2 days of the all contributor cost, atleast most tech contributors. I am guessing this will come to around 15K USD approx. based on my very rough calculations.

Not that I think it’s a big ask, but purely because we’ve seen how important absolute clarity can be elsewhere recently, is this $15k additional, or included in peoples’ normal worker proposals?

@0xVenky

The biggest prize is to see this integrated into the product or be a separate product

@0xVenky

we adopt this as a culture to build fast and break things and how DXDao encourages contributors to do this together.

Love it.

[0xVenky]

@hughesconnor

Not that I think it’s a big ask, but purely because we’ve seen how important absolute clarity can be elsewhere recently, is this $15k additional, or included in peoples’ normal worker proposals?

Hey @hughesconnor I understand Just a little more clarity around how this 15K came about.

Monthly contributor expenses for entire DAO = approx. 160K USD in stables.
Cost of taking these contributors outside squad roadmap for 2 days / 22 days, approx 15K a month.

If we do this after Phase 3 of restructuring proposal and squads are working on the 6 month squad budgets, I am hoping that these would not be under squads’ cost, but would go under DAO’s budget.

[dinocres]

I like this idea a lot.

From what I could experience at the Infinite Hackathon, moving fast and breaking things was super helpful in discovering an idea’s strengths and blockers.

We encountered technical and design challenges we didn’t imagine at the start, forcing us to revisit and pivot on what we were building (in that case, on- and off-chain batch voting).

Also, this gives us opportunities to explore ideas that naturally come as we work on a product. Usually, those ideas involve some non-negligible work to prototype or implement and don’t fit in the current development cycle of incremental upgrades. Without this, we have to tinker with the ideas in our free time after work or on weekends.

About regularity, we need time for new ideas to grow. It should also work with our current development schedule. We still have deadlines (sometimes soft, and other times more strict) and a flow to maintain. So I’ll prefer to lean on the “not-so-often” side. Two days every three months? This also lightens the burden on the squad budget since it’s just four days in 6 months (4 out of 120 days).