Africa/Diaspora Dev Tools & Events

Purpose of Proposal:

The WADA Team has started hosting monthly events in French and English after a successful funding round in Fund 4. We are looking to continue these events and more hoping to provide adequate content to address our rapidly growing audience. The goal of this next round of events is to launch events that dive into more specific problem solving and that give developers the tools they need to feel at home in the functional programming paradigm and in the distributed ledger technology ecosystem.

Project Description:

Through our next round of events we want to really focus on content creation, specifically Functional Programming training to developers all over the world using the resources we already have. We will do this with the help from Blockchain and DLT (Distributed Ledger Technology)teachers and experts in our network that can provide valuable content for our events and meet-ups. We will leverage our Francophone connection to create resources in both French and English and seek to provide access in even more languages as we grow. (See related proposal for other multilingual resources). We will design awareness campaigns that feed into the virtual events and courses expanding our reach even farther.

Example Developer Tools & Courses:

• Learning Haskell for Beginners
• Learning Plutus for Beginners
• Introduction to Cardano for Developers
• Creating your first dApp with Cardano
• Developing with Cardano for French Speakers
• Haskell & Plutus teacher trainings -- how to host a developer training in your area

Example Events:

• WADA Project Catalyst Hackathon (Spring 2022)
• Cardano dApp Workshop
• Project Catalyst for Devs Workshop
• Functional Programming Paradigm Workshop (for all ages!)

What Success Looks Like:

Monthly events geared towards: 

• Onboarding traditional software developers, and firms from within Africa and the wider Diaspora. 
• Teaching them about Haskell, Plutus, Marlowe and the wider Cardano ecosystem. 
• Assisting them in the process of building with Cardano and eventually implementing high impact projects on Cardano using functional programming languages and our army of WADA developers.

Weekly meet-ups for devs in WADA training programs/courses

Roadmap/milestones

3 months Expand WADA's event reach, onboard more developers and proposers
6 months Onboard more trainers and expand WADA's training model
12 months WADA network of developers, trained and ready to tackle projects

Key metrics to measure:

• No. of Educational materials created
• No. of Devs signed up for each course
• No. of Devs completed each course
• No. of Devs and others attending events
• No. of Devs into Proposers
• No. of Devs into Submitted Proposals
• No. of Devs into Successful Proposals
• No. of Social Media Posts

Budget (3 months): $30,000

• Trainer/speaker motivations $13,000
• Web hosting fees $1,000
• Marketing/outreach: $4,000
• Team costs: $9,000
• Prizes and rewards $3,000