[FINAL] TechNERD program

ARCHIVED & OLD Missions
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S4 Intent: Technical Decentralisation

Proposed Mission: This Mission proposal is to run a training program for 5 techNERDs. This training will set the techNERDs up as technical support specialists. They will initially support developers building on OP Mainnet, and later expand to OP Chains. The training course will run for 4 weeks, and will be run by OP Labs. After the training program techNERDs will offer technical support to the Optimism Discord server during the remainder of Season 4 (approximately 6 weeks). The entire requested grant goes towards program participants and not to the Alliance. All program participants will need to complete KYC before receiving grant funds.

UPDATES: Program schedule

Proposal Tier: Phoenix

Please verify that you meet the qualifications for submitting at the above tier: Vee is an Optimism Foundation contributor.

Baseline grant amount: 21k OP

% of total available Intent Budget: 0.021%

Please check here if access to upfront capital is a barrier to completing your Mission and you would like to be considered for a small upfront cash grant: Yes

Alliance: OP Labs

Alliance Lead: Veronica

Contact info: @vonnie610 (Discord, Telegram)

L2 recipient address: TBD

Please list the members of your Alliance and link to any previous work:

  • Vee - Head of Contributions at Optimism Foundation
    • Established NERD program, Ambassador program. Technical background. More info here.
  • Mattie Fairchild - OP Labs Contributor
    • Runs DevRel at OP Labs
  • Ori - OP Labs Contributor | M.Ed. in Instructional Design
    • Runs documentation & tutorials at OP Labs. Point of contact for a lot of support issues.

Please explain how this Mission will help accomplish the above Intent:

  • In order to reach technical decentralisation, the Optimism Collective needs an army of developers building on and with the Collective. These developers will need high quality technical support in order to flourish. This Mission will kick start the techNERD program, ensuring that developers of the Optimism Collective can always get the help they need. This mission also scales this support function into the community (rather than inside OP Labs) which promotes organisational decentralisation as well!
  • The three alliance members will design and run a training course for TechNERDs. We will source potential nerds from the community (the sign up link will be posted durning voting). All OP awarded to this Mission will be used to make grants to the individuals who are participating in the training program.

What makes your Alliance well-suited to execute this Mission?

  • Our Alliance has high context on the Optimism technical stack. Ori has two decades experience running technical trainings. Mattie has incredible insight into the current struggles in the developer journey. Vee has established all existing Contributor Paths.

Please list the critical milestone(s) that should be tracked to determine if you should receive your grant in one year:

  1. TechNERDs complete training. 4 weeks after program kick off. TechNERDs should receive the cash portion of this grant during the training to cover equipment costs. Program participants agree to return the cash portion of the grant if they do not complete the remainder of the milestones.
  2. Each TechNERDs should be active in the Optimism Discord server (defined as a minimum of 40 messages a week), and close (solve) at least 3 tech support tickets a week, every week, for the 6 weeks after training to qualify for the OP portion of the grant.
  3. The TechNERDs program should, as a whole, answer a minimum of 30 support tickets in the 6 weeks. This info is not currently public, but will be posted every month to the governance forum by the Alliance or a superNERD.

How should Token House delegates measure progress towards this Mission:

  • Applications open on the 13th of July.
  • TechNERDs selection announced on the 24th of July.
  • Training starts on the 24th of July.
  • Training completed on the 18th of August.
  • TechNERDs start supporting the server 14th August.
  • TechNERDs finish supporting the server 22nd September.

How should badgeholders measure impact upon completion of this Mission?

  • Support ticket turn around time should go from its current ~36 hour turn around to under 10 hours. This info is not currently public, but will be posted every month to the governance forum by the Alliance or a superNERD.
  • OP Goerli testnet deployments increase by 10%.
  • OP Mainnet deployments increase by 5%.
  • Testimonials from developers helped by the program.

Breakdown of Mission budget request:

  • $1k per techNERD given at the start of the program to cover the equipment costs for running a node (terabytes hard drives, sufficient RAM, etc), as well as infra costs such as an RPC endpoint. This will go directly to program participants. The Alliance members will not receive any funds from this proposal.
  • 4.2k OP per techNERD for a minimum of 6 active weeks. All techNERDs will need to complete KYC to receive these rewards.
  • Should there be left over OP at the end of the program (for example, if a techNERD drops out or does not meet the minimum activity requirements) the remaining OP will be returned to the Governance Fund.
  • An application form for wannabe techNERDs to apply will be added to this proposal when the voting cycle starts.

I confirm that my grant will be subject to clawback for failure to execute on critical milestones: Yes

I confirm that I have read and understand the grant policies: Yes

I understand that I will be required to provide additional KYC information to the Optimism Foundation to receive this grant: Yes

I understand that I will be expected to following the public grant reporting requirements outlined here: Yes

17 Likes
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I am an Optimism delegate with sufficient voting power and I believe this proposal is ready to move to a vote.

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I think this is great!

I am an Optimism delegate [Delegate Commitments - #37 by linda] with sufficient voting power and I believe this proposal is ready to move to a vote.

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I’m a delegate with enough voting power to approve this mission proposal.

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This program is probably an essential (and I’ll probably be in need of tech support just as soon as there’s an OP client ARM released…) however, I wonder if these 2 metrics for success might not be the most relevant:

It doesn’t seem that these are really factors that TechNerds will be able to directly impact as there are surely bigger factors that determine where builders chose to deploy than the effectiveness of tech support? I wonder if just the other two (ticket turnaround time and testimonials) would be just as good a measure of performance without the deployment metrics?

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The deployment metrics are meant as an “above and beyond” metric for impact for the Citizen House. The Citizens House can measure impact however they see fit, the metrics laid out for the badge holders are suggestions of where we think real impact will be observable.

However I am not against removing them if you really think they are not worth keeping. Its more that we think if the program does super well it might have an impact on deployments, and as such we mentioned it. I think the other metrics mentioned in the badge holder section are more “reasonable” but the deployments would be an indication of outstanding impact.

@MinimalGravitas LMK if that makes sense or if these metrics are a blocker to your approval.

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I believe this is a very good idea!

I am an Optimism delegate with sufficient voting power and I believe this proposal is ready to move to a vote.

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While there are already 4 approvals, just wanted to voice my support for this program, and programs like this that’ll educate people about the in-depth technical stuff. It’s an often overlooked but critical aspect of decentralization.

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Looks like you’ve got enough approvals already, but as you point out, it’s up to people to determine which metrics to use so having extras isn’t a negative really. Glad this is going through to the next stage.

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We also wanted to voice our support for this program and are looking forward to seeing it move to a vote. 404 DAO is an Optimism delegate with enough voting power to approve this mission proposal.

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Will be voting in favor of this, nature of onchian voting cant be reversed so making it visible so that others can chime in if they have any query on my voting rational.

This is quite straight forward, we need more nerds to support our evolving superchain, request amount is clear with detailed plan and going towards nerds. Happy to support this and would encourage to see such proposal in future as well.

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Has the application started yet?

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:saluting_face: Calling all nerds, applications for joining the TechNERDs program are now open!

I am super excited to see this proposal come to life. Please help share the application form around so we can make sure this program is the best it can be :mechanical_arm:.

Applications close on Friday, the 21st of July. Training will start on the 24th. We will announce those who make it into the training on the 24th. Remember, even if you don’t make it into the program you can still join the training in the Discord and follow along!

We have moved the timeline in the proposal back by one week to accommodate the applications.

Stay Optimistic!

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We are overwhelmed by all the incredible applications we have gotten! We still need to finalise the list, but the top 17 have been tagged in Discord (see the wannabe-technerd channel).

Weather or not you make it into the program, you can come join the training! Each session will be held in the Optimism Discord and open to the public. Times for the trainings are posted below (in UTC+2 time), and are also events in the Discord.

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We are so excited with the response we have gotten from developers and projects alike, we hope to see y’all in training!

As always, stay optimistic :saluting_face: :sparkles: :red_circle: - :red_circle: :sparkles:

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We have reached our last Critical milestone of 30 technical support tickets closed by TechNERDs! This week we crossed 38 tickets closed.

See weekly Ticket Closes (cumulative)

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Trades3 failed to meet the minimum weekly ticket close for 3 weeks in a row and as such was replaced by Cactus.

As the support portion of the Mission started two weeks late, we will continue monitoring the TechNERDs activity for an additional two weeks in order to reach the 6 weeks of monitoring outlined in the Mission.

We will post a more detailed summary of the activity as well as a retro from program participants after the monitoring period ends (27th Sep 2023).

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Awesome, love to see the good results here!

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Hi @vonnie610!

As Season 4 draws to a close this week, we’re so excited to see how you’ve executed on your Mission! Please post an update for the community here outlining the milestones you’ve met this Thursday (9/20) by 19:00 GMT. Please include links to any final work products as we’ll create a final roundup linking to all Mission deliverables.

We also encourage you to sign-up for RetroPGF Round 3. You’ll be able to describe the impact of your Mission when you sign-up: RetroPGF Round 3 Applications Are Open

Thanks again for being part of this experiment and helping us build the Collective :heart:

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TechNERD Mission End of Season Update

The TechNERD mission proposal was designed to increase technical support in the Optimism Discord Server. We’ve learnt a lot from this program, but overall the program went very well! TechNERDs hit the ground running, making PRs for docs fixes, updating guides and most importantly supporting their fellow developers to deploy!

Critical Milestone 2 was set over optimistically and did not account for varying difficulty and size of support tickets, however the other Critical Milestones where hit, and the overall goal of the Mission (being developer support) was more than accomplished. As a result we believe this Mission should receive its grant.

Critical Milestones

Milestone 1: :white_check_mark: Training TechNERDs

TechNERDs complete training, 4 weeks after program kick off. TechNERDs should receive the cash portion of this grant during the training to cover equipment costs. Program participants agree to return the cash portion of the grant if they do not complete the remainder of the milestones.

TLDR: Despite the Mission proposal not receiving cash grants, participation in the training was good and resulted in 9 candidates.

Details on Training

Attendance started strong, peaking in the second week of the training. By week 3 the class attendance began to filter attendance. We finished strong with 9 TechNERDs-in-training.

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Training material was focused on deeper sections of the Optimism codebase. The idea of the course was not to take participants from 0 to 1 (no experience to beginner) but for participants already deeply comfortable with the web3 development environment, and ideally the Optimism ecosystem, to gain a deeper insight. This insight was essential for developer support.

Exercises during the training focused on topics that have a high frequency support need.

Milestone 2: :no_entry_sign: Supporting Optimism Developers

Each TechNERDs should be active in the Optimism Discord server (defined as a minimum of 40 messages a week), and close (solve) at least 3 tech support tickets a week, every week, for the 6 weeks after training to qualify for the OP portion of the grant.

TLDR: The aim of 3 technical support tickets a week was overly optimistic for developers who have not provided support before. Out of the 4 active TechNERDs, 0 reached this goal of 3 tickets a week consistently for all 5 (so far) weeks. This goal did not account for different sizes of tickets (some issues take significantly longer to resolve, for example, syncing a node can take up to 3 weeks as such debugging can take a long time).

Details

The support portion of this mission had to be pushed back by a week, resulting in the 6 week deadline being shifted by one week.

Below you can see the recorded tickets closed by each TechNERD over the course of the program. Notes that some TechNERDs start with higher numbers as they are supNERDs (non-technical support).

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We believe this overly optimistic goal should not redact from the real impact the TechNERD program has had on developer support, and that this goal should be considered met.

Milestone 3: :white_check_mark: Overall Developers Support Performance

The TechNERDs program should, as a whole, answer a minimum of 30 support tickets in the 6 weeks. This info is not currently public, but will be posted every month to the governance forum by the Alliance or a superNERD.

TLDR: Cumulatively the TechNERDs closed 68 support tickets, overshooting the goal by ~227%

Details

The distribution of this contribution was nicely spread between the TechNERDs, with Chomtana taking a strong but not disproportionate lead.

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We hope to apply next Season to refine and expand the program to meet the needs of the fast growing Optimism developer community!

As always, stay optimistic <3

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I’m one of the technerds and I’d like to add to the current situation: the reason the current tickets close goal is not met is because of an insufficient number of (dev)tickets, which results in technerds not being able to fulfill the goal. But at the moment we have been able to guarantee that the first reply to a ticket is received within 12 hours of its creation (in extreme cases it could be 24 hours, but this has never happened as far as I can remember)

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Thanks for the update @vonnie610! Please not that all Missions will be able to showcase their work tomorrow during a dedicated Mission demo day on September 28th, at 16:00 GMT on the Discord mainstage!