Aleo Community Call #76: Viv Ford, the Head of Community, provided updates on current topics and answered questions.

Viv Ford, the Head of Community, provides updates on the ambassador program, the process for reviewing deploy incentives submissions, and zkCamp — a course on building zero-knowledge applications with Leo. She also shares information about past and upcoming Aleo events. YouTube link.

Viv: I haven’t seen you guys in a while. I was biking the perimeter of Taiwan, and as it turns out you can do that. There’s a route called Route One around the perimeter of Taiwan. We held a meetup in Taiwan, actually. A really fun meetup. And there’s quite an amazing group of ZK enthusiasts, but I guess ZK crypto devs, in general, in Taipei. So we held a really cool meetup there and then I cycled the perimeter. If anyone is interested in cycling I would highly recommend it.

What is the topic of the call? So today we’re going to do kind of like an AMA, overarching general topic conversation, we don’t have any special guests today. We’ve had special guests I think for the last two weeks or two, out of the last three calls. So figured today to just kind of do a more casual catch-up call for questions that you guys may have.

There’s obviously quite a bit happening and so we want to make sure that everyone is in line and aware and is kind of up-to-date on everything. So let me quickly just go through General announcements. So, first, let’s cover the ambassador program round seven. The list has been finalized so by the end of this week all applicants should have received KYC. I know there are some complications with KYC. I know some people. I’ve mentioned many times, we use this service called ‘With Persona’. And they’re great. They’re also a third-party provider, which means that there’s always a middleman, which is super frustrating when things don’t work out well. And we’ve worked very hard with them to basically come up with the ideal flow for us of approvals and who’s not approved. And we’ve been clear with you guys that if you’re from a sanctioned country you don’t pass KYC. We’ve made sure that is clear on ‘with Persona’ as well. ‘With Persona’ is a third party though, we are using them so if there’s an issue — we can’t go into the system ourselves and fix it. We are reliant on their customer service to contact them to say: “Hey, what’s wrong with this? Why isn’t this happening?”. So in the past, we had issues with ‘with Persona’ being able to read Chinese characters. So that was a whole delay then. We had problems with them being able to read Ukrainian passports. That was a whole delay. So we keep finding these little quirks and weird things to kind of work out and then we have to sometimes resend links if that affects a whole bunch of people. So KYC can be super annoying and I understand. So we do appreciate you guys being patient with the process. That is just a requirement to be an ambassador.

Grants program update. There are three new categories, that we’ve included Ignition, Blueprint, and Launch. Eugene posted the grants program in the community announcements so please check out there if you’re interested in submitting for a grant. We also have a bug bounty program, we want to continue iterating that. These are very very good ways to get literally involved with Aleo. There are many different steps to getting involved with Aleo and probably I think the most kind of symbiotic relationship that’s useful for you guys and beneficial for Aleo are these Developer Grants and Bug Bounties. They give you guys cool projects to work on and direct access to our engineers and it gives you a chance to explore the code and understand what Aleo really is at the core. And I know we have a big push always for developers and for getting engineers into the community. And part of that is really because you have to ask yourself “What is being built that will be used and that I want to see in the world?”. If you have an idea of that — you should be the one to build it. And we want to basically help people build the thing they want to see in the world. So the grants program is an attempt at just trying to inspire people to actually go and build. And then the Bug Bounding program is a fun way to catch bugs and get rewarded.

The big news is that we have our Aleo boot camp in collaboration with ZK Camp. This is very exciting, I can put the link. The link is simple, it’s zkcamp.xyz/aleo. Applications closed on September 25th at 11:59. If you haven’t applied, go ahead and apply. The next cohort starts on the 7th, by the way. This is something we hope to continue doing. So it’s not like a one-and-done type of thing. If you guys don’t know ZK Camp, they do a ton of different cohorts of learning different aspects of crypto.

Other things, there are events in Aleo Nigeria ZKTalks on September 29th. Aleo Nairobi on October 6th, lots and lots of events, if you guys didn’t know. 25 different event ambassadors that basically work with our Events team to put together fun events all around the world. And so we have just been shouting out to our Events Coordinator or Events Manager Annie who, I’m sure a lot of you guys have been working with, who has put together this easily accessible Aleo-in-a-box, where if people want to host events wherever they are, especially the Events Ambassadors, we want to make it as easy as possible for them to do such a thing. So yeah that’s been pretty great.

Deploy incentives. I wanted to cover this. So there were a bunch of applications for Deploy incentives. To just give a recap, we had a Deploy incentives period go for a few months a few months back. And what we decided was we want ambassadors to be part of the review process for the top applications deployed. And there’s a rigorous set of expectations that we have had on what constituted a good application, what was fair. Everything from “It works, it is actually deployed” to “It is a good user experience, the whole thing”. And we want it to be as impartial and unbiased as possible and as focused on technical specs as possible. We decided to take the top 25 Aleo Points holders (Aleo points are points that you earn by doing different tasks within the ambassador program, they hold no inherent value) to help review the applications. All of this will be explained in much more detail. We’re waiting a bit on the grants and biz dev team.

Nodari: I guess at the end of this week, we need to contact selected ambassadors, we haven’t. Yeah, I think it’s 25, it’s still not finalized yet we’re waiting for a response from the Grant team so as soon as we get any information we’re going to contact you guys.

Viv: This week we are going to send applications to our ambassadors to review but it’s not going to take too much time. There are going to be 25 ambassadors to review it pretty fast. So we decided to do 25 because it was just a simpler way to get everyone involved and then basically it’s going to be a bit of a learning curve to understand what we’re looking for with these applications and what qualifies as a good application. So we just figured having a smaller amount of people review would be easier than having a huge amount of people review.

Nodari: Next week they’re going to be voting on which emojis you want to see on our Discord. It’s going to be open for everyone who is verified here next week. There are going to be three options so you’re going to decide which emojis you want to see.

Viv: All merch should be shipped. So we’re shipping out a few things ASAP, I think. I mean we have the stuff at the office that just needs to be sent out. And also the book will be shipped from the Aleo New York office with the signature. Howard signed the book, which is very exciting. Howard’s in the New York office.

Q: What types of activities are most valued by the team as part of the ambassador program?

Viv: Great question. Most valued from the points perspective, so in the Ambassador blog you’ll see what kind of activities are getting certain points. Things like pull requests, and things that are technically focused tend to earn more points, partly because we understand that takes a bit more time. It also takes a level of skill that you have to develop to be able to understand what to do in terms of a pull request and what not. So technical skills tend to be valued more, that’s not to say that we don’t like the non-technical aspects. It’s just a different skill set. So infographics is a very different skill set than submitting a pull request. So the thing that is valued most is dependent on the points table, you can see there is kind of what we value most, but we obviously value it all. I mean, goodness, gracious look at this entire crypto culture — it’s basically all memes. So clearly memes mean something.

Okay, let’s see what you think about the redesign. It’s interesting when a company redesigns a few years later because I think there are just more data points. There’s more of an understanding of exactly what you’re doing, and exactly kind of where your niche lies. So I think personally the new logo is to me more on brand. It has defined a bit more what Aleo is trying to do. The new website, I really think they did a fantastic job. We worked with a company to help us with that and they just did a great job. It’s insane how much work it takes to launch a new website. I truly did not know I was unaware of how detail-intensive it is, which sounds obvious, but boy.

Okay, upcoming events are going to be basically fully tech-focused. Ranging from dev workshops to hackathons — the entire umbrella of Aleo events will be technical. And that falls for me too, I got to learn how to run an entire technical workshop. Just basically how do we onboard more developers — we get everyone to understand what it is to be a developer, and then see where it’s hard and see what needs to be changed and what not. We have a lot planned for Devcon. We have a lot planned for Istanbul. The entire community team will be there. Aleo will be doing a ton of different events, community-specific and general as well. We have 25 different event ambassadors that Eugene works with on a daily basis. Eugene, do you have any insight into a Polish Meetup? Put all the pressure on Eugene. We’re doing a lot in terms of localized events.

The next ambassador round. This has been up for debate, my friends, because ultimately here’s the deal: we have some great ambassadors, overall every ambassador is great, but the problem with doing all of the ambassador rounds is that the quality inevitably goes down when you hold so many ambassadors. And we really want the quality of ambassadors to stay high, we have a strict ambassador program specifically for that reason because we do value keeping the quality of ambassadors high. There are like 240,000 people on this Discord and there are 300 ambassadors. I would like the heart of the community to be represented in the 300 ambassadors rather than the 240k, because in my mind I think the 300 ambassadors are probably more interested in seeing Aleo succeed, seeing the technology behind Aleo succeed, and just knowing more about the project rather than the 240k, who are here for who knows what reason but probably not solely for the technology to succeed.

By the way, you mentioned the December 1st date. It’s not confirmed. Mainnet is coming this year, we’ve said that time and time again. I think it’s a little dangerous to put such an intense date of December 1st simply because it’s dependent on the engineering team. It’s hard for us to state December 1st is the date if they need two more weeks or whatever. But we have said time and time again we are pushing for Mainnet by the end of the year. As always, thank you guys so much for being here, have a wonderful week, and we will talk to you next week!

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