12 developers, working together to rapidly develop projects and expand their blockend skills. That's the essence of what WAGMI Squad (WS) is. Its members are composed of people from around the world already, which will ensure a plethora of previous experiences, ideas, and perspectives.
The purpose behind this group is to have a dedicated group of other developers that are working to become competent blockend devs themselves. Smaller teams within the squad form to build portfolio projects and participate in hackathons while collectively providing feedback and support. I thought the name was well fitting with a core belief that we are all going to make it and become blockend developers that can contribute and build the next big web3 projects.
This group is targeted at people early in their journey to become developers building smart contracts, dApps, DAOs, NFT projects, and so much more. Who it's not for, are established developers that have been working in the industry, and that are competent enough to find employment or go full-time DAO anywhere.
Here's an introductory look at where we're at now.
Essentially, WS will be a DAO-like organization composed of members that are learning and building together while trying to become competent blockend developers working in the industry. Membership is restricted to 12 active members at any time.
Depending on your definition of a DAO, you might call me out for using that term fairly loosely. WS is DAO-like because it'll be incorporated on the blockchain, use on-chain voting for decision making, lacks any single leader, and its membership is spread out across the world.
The organization will also have a reputation system that allows members to recognize one another for their efforts and contributions to projects and the ongoing efforts of the squad. This system will be based on a non-transferable token system where tokens are sent to a member’s wallet following a vote. These tokens are strictly reputation-based and will never have any monetary value. Recommendations for the quantity of reward tokens for contributions are still be to determined.
Sam Hart, Toby Shorin, and Laura Lotti convinced me of capping the group at 12 members with Squad Wealth; arguing that a 12-person group is the ideal size if the members are trying to be present with one another and support tight coordination. So that's all the reason I'm giving for this, it's easier not to reinvent the wheel, so I'm deferring to the experts on this.
Each member will be provided an NFT that signals their membership within the organization. The current members of the squad will be able to propose a vote for membership anytime there is a vacancy, they vote on a specific wallet address to decide whether to extend membership or not. If the vote passes, they receive the NFT which comes with voting rights.
At any time the holder will be able to resign from active member status by calling a 'retire' function that updates the NFT to show that they are now alumni. Alumni members won't have voting rights within the organization, but they can earn reputation still for volunteering their time by joining feedback sessions or helping with code reviews.
While there won't be any single source of leadership within the organization, we will have some need for roles to help manage components like the website (used to provide information on members and to showcase completed projects). Designating who would have a role and when to take that role away would be done through the voting system and efforts would be rewarded with additional token distributions.
At the time of this writing, WAGMI Squad is Telegram chat. There's no DAO structure, code written for any of the previously mentioned systems, or NFT art. Just a group chat actively working to decide the final components of the group and preparing to build a website while sharing resources on whatever topic we're individually learning.
We are already at capacity for the group size and we've got a waiting list of others who are asking to join. The demand for this is definitely high. It's made me consider making this into more than just a squad but I want to keep it to the 12-person structure that's been laid out. I would encourage others who are in a similar place as us to consider taking my structure here to create your own squad.
Most of us are working through Patrick Collin's Solidity & JavaScript course, so a tall order of business is to get through that material and use it as a springboard for jumping into more projects.
One step in front of the other is the surest way to reach the destination. The next step for our group is to just start building projects. We've got a small group working to figure out the website, another will form to help properly establish the DAO.
While we currently exist as a Telegram group, I've quickly realized that a Discord server is much more appropriate for our needs. With working groups needed for different projects like creating the website and the DAO they will need their own separate chat space to declutter the main chat, and so will each team that will be working on projects or hackathons together.
Of course, the members are encouraged to self-organize into smaller teams at any point to start building projects as well. This organization acts as a sort of accelerator for creating strong junior-level devs and the sooner projects start getting built, the sooner these members will have the potential to find their next opportunity.
After these foundational components are built, I'll provide an update to this article with a look into how each section was built, the tools used, and reflect on any challenges that present themselves.
The fact is that it costs ETH to set up a DAO and it costs ETH to get the website up and using ENS. So I'm turning on that NFT option for this article if you'd like to support this squad of developers as they attempt a journey of growth and become blockend devs.
Any funds collected from this article's NFT sales will be used in their entirety to pay for the creation and upkeep of WAGMI Squad as it seeks to complete its mission to accelerate new developers into their first opportunity in web3.