“A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.” - The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Joseph Campbell

The First Call to Adventure

In the ordinary world of Fall 2018, the Maker Community Development Initiative, seeded from the core principles of Maker Foundation, announced its first call to adventure. Led by Head of Community Development, Richard Brown, the team kickstarted a series of initiatives for the community’s most motivated members to participate and contribute to the Maker platform. Today, we announce the sunset of the Community Development department in the Maker Foundation.

Crossing the Threshold

What started as a handful of open initiatives, Community Development’s programs expanded to support a growing MakerDAO. Community members experimented with micro-grants called Community Development Improvement Proposals, attended the Meetups Program globally, participated in ecosystem hackathons around the world, crowdsourced Awesome-MakerDAO, and built a community portal to house important educational content and information.

The Transformation

While there were roads of trials, and a fair share of winters and spring, a look back at the Community Development programs shines a light on the ecosystem activities, driven by its community members:

MakerDAO Development Grants:

Supported 45 teams across 8 Regions: LATAM, EU, NA, Africa, India, APAC

Of the 161 Milestones independently proposed, 142 Milestones were completed.

Supported 8 Audits

Bounties & Hackathons

Participated in 23 hackathons with 71 bounties

Community Development Improvement Proposals - CDIPs

41 proposals from 28 unique contributors

Meetups

Brought together 6,000+ people in 49 countries

194 meetups hosted by 122 unique hosts

Community Driven Initiatives

30 Community Collateral Calls

134 Community Calls

142 Governance and Risk Calls

133 G&R Summaries transcribed

45 Maker Relays (Also available in Spanish)

Translated content to 8 Languages

More details on the programs can be found under Archive in the Community Development Github repository.

The Return

Sufficient to say, the MakerDAO community has grown so vast, it developed its own micro-communities: Contributors, Governance, Integration and Collateral Partners, Keepers, Market Makers, Vault Owners, Domain Teams, Ecosystem Grantees, and more. These community members have started 100 initiatives and curated 19 tools to improve decision making and participation. Forum activity has grown 800% in just last year alone, with the quality of participation evident from contributions via 51 Maker Improvement Proposals from 29 unique members, as well as 119 sub proposals. 

Perhaps the greatest treasure of all, is the development of community contributor teams. Over 83 community members have contributed directly to our ecosystem by leading and maintaining through shared values of passion for DeFi, a sense of community, and contribution to meaningful work.

With this, the Foundation’s efforts to ensure the long-term security and sustainability of the Protocol have come to an end. While the Foundation’s journey concludes and the entity dissolves, MakerDAO and its community continues to flourish on its own.

The Next Call to Adventure - “Hello DAO”

As one chapter closes, another begins.

The Maker Community embarks on a new journey, shepherded by 6+ core units, which are autonomous teams working for MakerDAO.

Each community member has the potential to cross the threshold into a new adventure: participating in a fully, decentralized MakerDAO. If you’re interested in participating in the community, you can:

1. Contribute Maker Improvement Proposals (MIPs)
2. Participate in voting
3. Propose your own “core unit”
4. Join an existing core unit
5. Continue to participate in the community freely on the Maker Forum and Rocketchat.

Thank you to all that made this journey the adventure it was, and we hope to see you in the next chapter.

– Maker Community Development team