Transcoder Campaign: Decentralized Community Node

[rsap]

Hi! I’m Raffi Sapire, I lead operations and community at Livepeer. This post outlines the livepeer long term vision, the reason we are building the community node, and the ways you can get involved.

Node: 0x4f4758f7167b18e1f5b3c1a7575e3eb584894dbc

Why a Community Node is Critical in Livepeer’s Long Term Vision
Livepeer is in the snowmelt phase, an 18-24 month journey where we will design the protocols that leverage decentralization for video services and p2p distribution and transcoding. During this stage, we’ll be testing our economic assumptions, making it easier for users to participate in the network, and building community. Beyond this phase though, there’s an eye towards a 7-10 year journey building a fully decentralized web3 video stack (watch this community call from last month to learn more). Building a strong developer community to build the tools that improve the protocol and infrastructure will be imperative to achieving this longer term vision and getting us to the next phase. In a world where Livepeer distributes the majority of tokens at genesis, and the remainder were committed to investors and the team, how will those first ~20 dev hacks that improve usability, making it easier for delegators, transcoders or broadcasters to participate be built? A community transcoder node early on ensures we are able to support this early growth, and importantly, its transparent governance is one of the first instances of Livepeer moving towards decentralized governance

Overview
The community node will start at 0% Fee Share and 50% Reward Cut. We will campaign with full transparency as to what the inflationary token rewards will be used for with regards to building community, and provide weekly updates to the community with fun photos and content. The LPT earned through performing work will be used to facilitate contributions that improve the scalability and usability of the network through initiatives including:

• Bounty Programs to improve the stability and security of the network
• Grants that empower independent teams, developers, or academics to collaborate on research tracks as well as Livepeer core team’s development efforts
• Hackathons around dev and user tools that make it easier for delegators, transcoders and broadcasters to participate
• Community growth through meetups, school ambassador programs, and other efforts that grow community

95% of all earned LPT will be used for the above. The remaining 5% will be reserved for personnel resources needed to operate the node. The transcoder will become active in May 2018

Who we are
Currently, members of the livepeer team are managing the governance and work done by the community node. I’m Raffi Sapire, I lead up operations and community at Livepeer, with 8 years of experience building communities, investing in and supporting entrepreneurs in the US, as well as India, Africa and Pakistan. I am committed to supporting and facilitating technical contributions to the Livepeer Network in an increasingly decentralized, transparent, collaborative way. Eric Tang, the co-founder and CTO of Livepeer, will be running the transcoder node, ensuring that the transcoder is consistently performing work and claiming fees.

Why you should stake
Anyone can contribute to the community node. Funding development and improvements to the protocol will increase the value of the Livepeer Token long term. We’re all in! Join us in putting your tokens where your mouth is. Myself, Eric and Doug are all committing to stake 20% of our token towards this node for the first 90 days of the network launch. We are prepared to invest in infrastructure, time, and other resources should the community chose to continue the stake towards the community transcoder

With only Eric and Doug bonding the 20%, It will result in between 2000-7000 LPT being earned by this node for community use. With additional stakeholders investing, we will have more room to experiment and fund development with tokens.

Decentralization of Governance
I’m especially excited because the community node is a step towards decentralizing governance. How can projects and grants be distributed, meetups and hackathons be organized, and spinoff initiatives be led in a decentralized way? Join me in experimenting with different platforms like aragon and prism, different tactics like community calls, reddit threads, even survey monkey, and different groups ranging from developers to enthusiasts to see what ultimately drives value to the network and token

Results
From the beginning, we’re committed to collaborate and experiment with ways of distributed decision making. To start, we’ll be posting weekly updates on how much work the node performed, how much funding the community node has raised and/or spent .

In the first 30 days, I will:

• Create a newsletter that includes photos and updates on technical development and community programming. Sign up
• Plan a hackathon with @jozanza in New York
• Host 4 community calls open to anyone who wants to learn more. Add to your calendar here: https://calendar.google.com/calendar/embed?src=livepeer.org_bf2ckq8bk973faffua7bkbojj4%40group.calendar.google.com&ctz=America%2FNew_York
• Post a call for grant applications for independent teams, developers or students to contribute to the network along these research tracks
• Host 2 governance calls for anyone who wants to be involved with planning the above. Add to your calendar here: https://calendar.google.com/calendar/embed?src=livepeer.org_bf2ckq8bk973faffua7bkbojj4%40group.calendar.google.com&ctz=America%2FNew_York

For anyone who would like to get involved please sign up at livepeercommunity.org, feel free to ask a question below!

[chrishobcroft]

I have staked my MerkleMined Livepeer Token to the Decentralized Community Node.

Good luck, and let me know how I can help!

[dob]

Looks like we’re about 2 weeks into the network and this community node being in the top 3 transcoders on the network in terms of stake. Any updates on how things are going so far?

[rsap]

Bi-Monthly Transcoder Update

Performance

• The community node currently has 6517 LPT Staked towards it
• The community node has called reward for 16 / 16 rounds
• Distributing 3,527 LPT to delegators over the past 16 rounds, which has been around ~260 per day on average
  Thank you for your support!

Governance

• Livepeer Community Node hosted the first governance call, where we had one external participant join. We discussed how to use the token profits accrued to build community, and three approaches were approved for May. 1) Give LPT to those who attend community calls or 2) in person awareness events. 3) Lastly, for those who participated in hack day, which will be monthly moving forward. You can join the June Governance call by adding the calendar event to your calendar.

• We’ve got a handful of folks who have done these things and received LPT, which we are tracking here

Community

• 40 people have signed up to receive community updates, and will be receiving a limited edition Livepeer sweatshirt

• We had 4 new contributors to the LP project, working on issues you can see on gitcoin bounty

• We hosted a handful of online and in person events, including Livepeer.js, Community Node Governance Call, Women in Blockchain, and a Family and friends meetup

• We launched a new campaign for Hack Day - link to blog , learn more about what was hacked

[rsap]

See below for the latest!

[nryan]

Hi Raffi, what date will the June call be? It is still in the calendar as weekly events

[rsap]

Hi there,
I updated it - it will now be the third friday every month. Can add to your calendar: https://calendar.google.com/event?action=TEMPLATE&tmeid=NWRoazYyZWd0cWxsZGwwZGdyZnRtamk0cGZfMjAxODA2MTVUMTUwMDAwWiBsaXZlcGVlci5vcmdfYmYyY2txOGJrOTczZmFmZnVhN2JrYm9qajRAZw&tmsrc=livepeer.org_bf2ckq8bk973faffua7bkbojj4%40group.calendar.google.com&scp=ALL

[chrishobcroft]

Hey, congratulations to the Decentralized Community Node for earning over 10,000 LPT since the network launched!

[rsap]

Update on the Community Node:

Where we are today:
The Node has disbursed 2,278 LPT to date via 41 grants. Here is how they were distributed, not counting a research grant to truebit of 1250.

Some results highlighted include

1. HackDay Projects - Each month we host a hackday. Our first hackday, noone really participated. Our second hackday, 4 people joined a call to learn more and 2 individuals received 100LPT prizes for participating. Follow the tools built for the protocol on our hackday channel.

2. Community Sweatshirt - one of our members designed a limited edition Livepeer community shirt - sign up on our site to get one! There’s actually 3 versions - they each say “everyone has a voice, use it” in different languages!
   

3. User testing - we had tremendous help from our Discord community on giving feedback on getting and staking token which has been build into our new and improved explorer tool. In small amounts of 5-10 token, tens of members gave us feedback that helped us design our user journey to make it easier for more people to participate. Without them we wouldn’t have been able to reduce the time to mine from ~15 minutes to 3 minutes.
   

   

4. Community Building Events: We have hosted events with a diverse group of enthusiasts ranging from CryptoNYC, to Women in Blockchain, to NY Video Engineering, to India coming up later in August.
   

   

Where we are going, and how you can help

• At this time, the node has ~10,000 LPT to use over the lifetime of the project. As more of you bond towards this node, that pool of capital will grow
• Over the next ~2 months, the node will distribute ~1,000 - ~2,000 tokens via technical grants (~50%), community building events (30%), and micro-influencers (~20%) who can help Livepeer grow it’s developer and crypto enthusiast audience
• I see the real value of the Community Node coming into play in Q4 and beyond, when we will be able to resource scaling our developer community, and this node can play an instrumental role in delivering value back to the protocol through hackathons, bounties, and more. We are holding off on scaling that until we can support the developer community with our time
• We are excited to involve external stakeholders who care about community building to join us in these endeavors, and we have monthly governance calls (see calendar above). Please let me know if you’d like to be involved.

Thank you to my co-consiprator @ericxtang for running this node every day disbursing token to grant recipients!!

[rsap]

Technical Grant Program
Technical grants can be awarded to anyone who would like to be involved, whether its a feature, an update, or a new dashboard or application.

To submit a technical grant proposal, please reply here with the following information, and we can help you get started in a transparent, open way:

1. Scope of improvements and their goal
2. What exactly will you be delivering, and specs (we can help if you’re not sure, but take a stab at it!)
3. Time you estimate it taking
4. Timeline - when will you complete this by

Resources to help you:

1. http://livepeer.readthedocs.io/en/latest/developers.html
2. Project wish list: https://github.com/livepeer/project-management/projects/1#card-10371891
3. Message our CTO Eric Tang on Discord to ask any technical questions, or myself @rsap

[rsap]

The community has been super active over the past few months, with community contributions in areas ranging from bots to design to DApps. There’s a lot of great momentum and I’m looking forward to expanding the program and community even more.

Here are a few stats for you:

• We’ve doubled the amount of token we’re allocating monthly to over 4,000 LPT.
• We’re allocating approximately 30% of token income, so there is more token that is available to grow the community in the future.
• One of the biggest areas of funding has been research - we’re funding the development of verification to Epic Labs through this proposal.
• The second largest is to the user research, and resulting staking app and new tokenholder site full of resources and tutorials

Some of the Grant Proposals that are funded include:

Node Wish List: Alert Notifications for Tokenholders - 500 LPT

Name of proposal: Alert Notification and Staking Digest

1. By @adamsoffer
2. Problem it’s solving: Token holders have no way of knowing if their transcoder they bond to fails to call reward, nor do they know how much they earned from inflation the day before.
3. Objective: Create alert system for the Livepeer community,
4. Grant: 2,100 LPT

Name of proposal: Livepeer: Alert Notification for Token Holders

1. By @mgarciap
2. Problem it’s solving: Lack of alerts for Livepeer users. Want to provide an experience that will help LPT token holders to be updated and understand how the transcoders they are delegating the tokens to are performing in near real time.
3. Objective: Create alert/notification system for token holders.
4. Grant: 2,100 LPT

Name of Proposal: Livepeer Primer - An Interactive Microsite

By @adamsoffer
Problem it’s solving: Because Livepeer introduces so many novel concepts, it can be somewhat daunting for beginners to fully grasp and appreciate what Livepeer is and how it works.
Objective: Create a highly visual and interactive microsite called "Livepeer Primer" that leverages storytelling, illustration, and data from the Livepeer subgraph in an effort to cater to more visual learners, inspire more users to participate in the network and encourage more video engineers to build using the platform.
Grant: 1100 LPT +

Node Wish List: Translation + Sharing (#3)

Name of Proposal: Content Localisation Effort | Brazil
Content Localization Effort | French , Content Localization Effort | Russia, Content Localization Effort | Dutch

2. Problem it’s solving: Expand the international Livepeer community.
3. Objective: To provide the Portuguese speaking community with reasonably comprehensive introductory materials.

  1. Translation of Livepeer video
  2. Translation of Streamflow whitepaper
  3. Video re-recording/adaptation
  4. PR/Story publication on media
  5. Meetup presentation

dTok - A decentralized TikTok that allows tipping and pay-as-per-view

Name of Proposal: dTok - A decentralized TikTok that allows tipping and pay-as-per-view

1. By @bneiluj
2. Problem it’s solving: there exists virtually no easily accessible use-cases of crypto or blockchain—whereby somebody with no technical blockchain knowledge (and no wallet) can easily hop into a crypto-powered system and start deriving some utility from it.
3. Objective: To create a live streaming app that doesn’t have issues with censorship, while also creating a way to monetize live-streamed content (via Livepeer) free of middleman fees.
4. Grant: Waiting for a revised version to limit the scope.

Also coming up, are a new staking app and a new tokenholder website, both being designed by community members! We are SOOO excited about this and are looking forward to knocking your socks off in October with these releases. I’m interested in experimenting with ways of increasing community engagement after the new site is released, and am looking forward to hearing from you on that front! Please let me know any questions or comments.