Filecoin ESPA - Community & Marketing Content, 5 Mar 2022

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From YouTube: ESPA Module 2D - Community Engagement and Business Development

Description

Stefaan Vervaet (Ecosystem WG) with Protocol Labs discusses community engagement and business development at the Enterprise Storage Provider Accelerator (ESPA) bootcamp week that took place in February 2022.

Data is growing at an incredible speed and much of this data is archived and/or simply lost by enterprises. Our program will accelerate net-new Enterprise Storage Providers into the ecosystem, using a Web3 protocol with an impressive incentive model called Filecoin.

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I wanted to spend some time on how to engage with the falcon community. It's a uh never-ending um uh evolve evolution. I would say like every time like we we talk about it and every time I summarize how to communicate.

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um We also we we see new things coming up like great stuff, like community calendar working groups, so this is the status of today. First of all, your community is your best friend they're here, for you. So don't forget that there's so many people that actually, you know, come from the web 2 world and are very surprised to see how tight we are working together and how we can rely on each other, because a lot of the questions on the slack channels are actually answered by storage providers like stu or kevin or patrick or charles.

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So take advantage of that. um That's my number one recommendation. So a couple of things I want to walk through so one is slack, is still our main way to communicate. So if you think about protocol labs in falcon foundation, we first and foremost go to the slack channels, and you have new community engineers that are also sitting in the room here. That will be helping um with that and help monitor and also provide more knowledge base, articles and and support, and how to find your solution.

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When you have an issue, but, first and foremost like go to uh the storage provider channel, so we have other channels as well, obviously, for developers, I was more focused on the storage providers here, but that's also where we will announce new um new releases or um if we want to do a survey like we're now going through a survey to kind of explore if sealing as a service would be an option or not so you'll find there us reaching out, but also you should reach out there.

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If you have any proposals or if you need any help, my recommendation is just to post it. There don't feel afraid I get a lot of dms personally from you know, potential sps that are like hey. Where should I go? I'm like? Are you obviously you're on slack because you're pinging me, but you know post it in the slack channel? I don't know if I feel comfortable with that, because you know I'm like no, I mean there's 500 or a thousand people in that slack channel like yeah.

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That's that's the nice thing about it is that at least one or two will hopefully respond. um So yeah, that's the the first thing. We also are very. um We push the web to vendors. We engage with or partners or parties that we engage with to come on slack. A lot of them are not necessarily using slack they're using traditional email.

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We try to avoid to use email as much as possible and we live in an async world. So try to do the same thing. I would say document as much as you can. That will help us and it will be easier for you to get an answer from not just us, but the community in general.

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Two is the community github, I'm sure how many of you have been on to our github. I assume everyone right by now. I hope so, uh if not, I'm not sure how you're running your systems, but uh so github again um still like number one. Where you'll find all the discussions, the engagements um you know, I did get the request.

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Sometimes like hey, can you create a new landing page, or can you create like a a more consolidated view like on top of github, so we're working on that we are working on a storage provider landing page, um it's not released yet, but the goal there is to have, like an you, know, kind of end-to-end buyer's journey, so in this case the storage provider journey from beginning right.

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So, like hey, I want to know what it takes to be a falcon storage provider or just in general, what's going on in this ecosystem, all the way to like actually building solutions.

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So our goal is, to you know, look at this ecosystem, as we mentioned right as a service providers of web 3, and so that my goal personally is to like have other technologies also featured on that page eventually, and not just look at falcoin, but actually try to look at the full solution that we can offer together with other parties, so github there as well you'll see that we'll post stuff on slack github, we'll typically do a blog when we do new updates and we'll typically also have in our newsletter a reference to what's upcoming.

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So the newsletter is also one of the main ways for us to communicate. So I would definitely recommend um to to sign up for that. Okay, that was another slide, uh but third join the community of your falcon implementation. I forgot that because we do have different implementations. We are focused primarily on lotus this week in this accelerated program, but we do have venus uh forest and fujam.

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So don't forget those because you'll you'll see their similar uh accelerator, not not exactly the same, but there's other incubation programs that we support that uh support venus, um which is more used in in asia. Very supportive of this whole ecosystem for lotus in particular. We- I don't know if some of you have noticed, but we are more public in in also our internal activities, meaning we have made some of our notion pages public that were previously internal only so our goal is to be as public as possible.

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That also includes our mission and vision, the road map. What we're working on uh today, like you, know the community engineers, for example- they have their. They have a notion page and you can actually go to that notion page and check out what they're working on right. So that's something that's very new. A lot of us haven't maybe seen this.

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We also have an all hands um that normally was only internal uh that we're now uh broadcasting on a monthly basis, because we did get the feedback like hey. You know, there's so much. Every time we I've been on storage provider.

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uh Working group calls where you know one working one one social virus from the moment I sneeze, I feel, like I've, missed something right because you came up with another program or you know, there's something new that was developed that I didn't know about, and that's really true, I mean there's so much activity, there's so many tools um that you know that are being built as we speak that it's sometimes hard to keep up right.

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So my recommendation is that you actually go check out these notion pages take some time to read and go back to it. So look at it, as you know, your um your way to connect with the the engineering team, that's behind it and the community engineering team. That's supporting you so check it out.

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You also see the community calendar, so the other thing that we're noticing is that you know a lot of sps want to actively participate right, so they want to know if we're at eat denver or if we're at south by southwest and how they can communicate with us. So obviously we're doing our best we're trying to uh do our best to communicate this back. To you, but you know, if you want to look at it, just go to the community calendar sign up for it and then you'll see in your calendar as well.

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What's coming up. Also, if you want to add your own events, you can add your events as well. So if you let's say you know you're in texas- and you want to organize in a local event, then you can even apply for grants now to organize a marketing event, so we have actually transferred as well and you can make it available or public to the rest of the community so that they can join, uh follow the falcon roadmap. So we've now built uh we have. We have a roadmap that is currently available on github.

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It's a community roadmap I'll send the link in a second. But our goal is to update the roadmap on a quarterly basis and not just look at the lotus roadmap, but look at the whole ecosystem. Robot because, as I mentioned like it's sometimes overwhelming right, you know you sneeze, you lose you say or whatever you you, you stand up, you lose, um but in this case um you know this will help us not only to show you what lotus is working on or what venus is working on, but also what maybe you're working on like.

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If you create an awesome tool- and you want to make that public or you want high adoption of it, then you can add it to the roadmap. There's also a slack channel called phil lotus announcement. This is specific to lotus. You can actually see all the announcements there, but obviously you go to github for for the latest. There um well yeah one more thing like file new bug, so if you have new bugs, I don't know if there is a session on that this week, but is there no okay? Maybe that's in the?

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Maybe we can add that in the next couple of months, right or in the next couple of weeks, but we can walk you through, like what does it take to file for a new feature, request or file, a bug which are totally different, but a fib is, um you know, feature improvement right that has to be officially filed in github and it has to get support from the community.

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And so um definitely if it's a protocol change right, then it requires a fip. So there's a whole. We can walk you through what it would take. If you have a great idea, if you have a great proposal, don't feel afraid to like you know, put that out there, because you'll actually get a lot of engagement with the engineers as well on their you know their thinking process um also when it relates to uh burning tokens, uh I don't know david.

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um You could always add that question there too, because uh that will uh that all the all the discussions happen in the open. So I recommend you uh to have that on that um on that github project as well all right. So this is the community roadmap. We just took a first stab at it a month ago, so very recent. um We still you know, I think you know this is a great first start, so you'll see the the diff.

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So you see the core protocol enhancements right, that's number one um for each one of those, you can actually dive deeper and you can see you know the description of the of the proposal like, for example, fem right. You can actually see when it's coming, uh what they're working on and then um the second portion is the the implementation enhancement. So these are really by projects you can see: fujon venus, forest and lotus, and what they're working on so we're asking. Basically venus has different capabilities um as lotus, and so they have.

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You know the pooling concept. They have um some other cool stuff that I definitely recommend to have a look at it and then the featured ecosystem projects is where you can add yours right. So here we see like you know, we see nfd.storage, that's optimized for nfts, but we also see chainsafe, which is like a sync and share.

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Actually this itself could be multiple pages right text style. You know you have all sorts of uh data management tools, but then you also have um you know, applications that are really like fully fully integrated applications, and some of them are going to be shown this week from what I understand like like cid gravity, I assume you're going to have that okay, cool they're not listed all of them on there.

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I think this is part of us trying to like engage with the community as well, because not everyone saw this, because we are relying on the community to submit these right. So if you are building a tool, please submit it and you'll get exposure right away um newsletter. I can't uh the newsletter is like we've gotten feedback from multiple people- investors as well like. If, if we haven't, we have uh multiple investors coming at us and they're like hey. We want to invest in your ecosystem. How do we do that?

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How do we connect with the ecosystem while it's like? Well, it depends what kind of ecosystem you know do you want to invest in like apps? Do you want to invest in nfds? Do you want to invest in uh tooling enterprise tooling? Well, it's like, or do you want to invest in storage providers? Well, you know kind of depends from the type of investor.

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For now what we recommend everyone is like go to this newsletter sign up this newsletter. Has I don't know how many thousands of followers, but it's it's the best way for us right now to kind of proactively push um to all these people that investors, developers and other ecosystem partners, so people seem to forget it, but just please keep that in mind, so we, you can also add your own updates right. So if you have something, that's really significant that you want to create, you want to add it in the newsletter right now.

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The newsletter is basically for all the ecosystems, but I think we're going to get to a point where we may need a separate newsletter. We discussed this already for storage providers alone, because there's so much of so many updates there, but we'll see how we evolve. This um register on youtube, of course here as well. This shouldn't be a one-way street, meaning we provide as many of these as we can, but we're very open for you to come in and present something we're always looking for storage providers to step up. We do across the year.

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If you go back you'll see a ton of the search providers are here that are guiding you right. Look at benjamin with his uh you know, architectural design overview and then stu on a panel kevin. On the panel I mean we invite everyone to participate, um and that could be on any topic as long as it you know, contributes and brings value to the community um or if you are organizing in events and you're like hey, I want to get some exposure once I have some help from falcoid um the falcon foundation or the ecosystem.

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Let us know how we can help you with that.

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Just reach out done events I mentioned it before. We now have a storage provider public calendar since last week.

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So please go to this page um you'll, see immediately where we are located or what what events we're organizing uh you can see that we were at eat denver last week, we're going to be at south by southwest and we'll do a public storage provider working all right, we'll do a storage provider meetup! um We haven't been doing a lot of meetups, obviously because of the whole pandemic, but we'd like to spin that back up and be more actively in the field.

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So if you have a, if you know of like a great location or a great event where we should organize something, please let us know, because it's not that we don't want to it's just we're all so busy that sometimes we don't always know where the uh the next hottest uh event is so but look at it and you can add it yourself, there's a link on the top just to add your own events um and then you get exposure uh to the whole ecosystem and we'll keep promoting this right.

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So this will be the calendar we'll keep promoting in our newsletters and our blogs. Also, if you, if you want to be more active and engage with the ecosystem working group, so what we did last year is we we started the concept of these working groups and the working groups are typically organized by region. So today we have five regions that are represented by a storage provider working group and these storage providers come together on a weekly basis and they discuss pretty much anything.

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So it's more like an active forum instead of on slackware or github, we basically come together and we brainstorm on. How can we grow the grow, the network right and that could be anything it could be. We have discussions around um collateral, we have discussions around features, uh competitors, um marketing events, um how we can do better and for you know, for us this is great as a sound board like for us, it's great for us to like really like come in with some very specific topics and and and brainstorm around it.

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um The outcome is, typically, you know, content or a program, or um you know specific, like follow up with the engineering team to kind of figure out. You know what is the feedback? What's the vibe or what is the the the uh the status in general on like a certain fit right?

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So if you want to be more actively involved and- and you want to participate in any of these working groups- just post your interest or reach out to me or post your interest on one of the the general storage provider, slack channels and the way you can join is you have to present yourself?

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The working group will decide if you can participate or not they're in charge, they're they're in charge of the governance of these working groups and yeah, I would say just reach out and just tell them why you would want to collaborate, but these are very instrumental, um definitely for us to help, grow and and come up with great ideas that we can implement ten um yeah bounty board. So we have a bounty board, which I don't know how many of you knew that we have a bounty board yeah all right.

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So um most of you don't know about this. But again this is an outcome. This is like a perfect example of what came out of the working group, so in the working groups we had this constant dilemma of hey. We need a white paper on zfs or hey. We need someone to run the calibration nodes um and then immediately we all look at each other like who's going to do it right, I mean like who's the volunteer and then typically they would look at protocol labs and follow a foundation like hey.

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Why don't you guys do it? um Well, the answer is no, I mean you know it's. It's we're a network right protocol, labs and falcon foundation. You know we're basically all and the storage providers here we're all one big network, so we have to give the network an opportunity to contribute and the way we do that is by throwing out bounties.

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So that means that anyone of you that has a great idea can come to the table and say you know what I would like to see a video on deal making or I want to see a white paper on something or I want us to run this service, and I want the foundation or like, in this case, the foundation to pay for it through grants, and so what we do is we can set a target price to on it. Like there's an example here, um it's a tutorial on how to create these are real ones.

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I just took a screenshot of open boundaries, so there's bounties out there right now for 500 to create a tutorial on how to configure pneuma right. So, but if you have something that you don't have time to implement, but you know there's an expert out there, you can put it on the bounty dashboard. You can also connect the expert directly with the bounty dashboard and basically just pay for it, so this will be paid for by the foundation.

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Then right because we're always we're always trying to improve, but we don't know um at times what exactly is required. So here's a way for you to pay someone else basically to get something done. One of the requirements is that it has to contribute to the ecosystem as a whole right it has to be. If it's ip or development, that's done, it should be open sourced and two it should contribute uh to the whole ecosystem. So you know, let us know if you have any ideas, but um all these great discussions, these bounty proposals eleven.

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So uh this week, you'll hear from vuk who's in the back of the room uh on phil. Graham uh so last year we had um with all these great reputation systems out there and we, as I mentioned yesterday, right, we have more than 400 requests, just in the last two weeks coming to our website asking for you know, um educational support, but also of the 400 that applications. I just looked at the numbers, one quarter so more than a hundred we're actually asking to get in touch with a storage provider. Well, that's great.

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We've got some here in this room, um so we know this so last year when we we looked at okay. What is the flow uh for a client? Well, the client can go to different locations right. We have different reputation systems, but we didn't really have um like one dashboard, that where clients and a storage provider can both like promote and connect with each other, just like an airbnb interface or a yelp style interface.

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So vook's been working on that and he's going to show you how you can connect your miner ids, how you can claim them and then eventually promote your your data center and your services through this website, and so we'd recommend everyone to sign up for that. Because then you can.

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You can start pointing our storage clients to this website and then they can select either uh by country region and then eventually also very specific services that they're looking for and then eventually our goal is that you, as a storage provider like here in latvia, for example, right the person that owns this miner id can basically register, can claim it and luke will walk you through that.

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How you do that um and then you can start to like promote your um your services, so our goal really is to build this out um so that we can easily make those connections instead of having to manually. Do the introductions um 12 grants. I keep talking about grants. I've got, I get questions on it, but there's a great whole, a website on community grants and developer grants, and they range from 5 000 to 30 000 to even custom very custom grants, um so I would recommend to look at it. So you know.

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Typically, it's more application focused, but you know tooling. We need a lot more tooling right. We need um enterprise tooling to help you as a storage provider, but also our storage clients, and some of our storage providers have gone through an accelerated program. uh That is not. Storage providers focused as well.

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So some of our sps have like started to develop like cid gravity is probably a perfect example right: they they were storage provider, they created a tool for storage providers and when then went through an accelerated program um and uh now have you know, built out a whole business around uh the tool that they built, which is great, um but initially they started with a grant and so we're here to help you during this whole process, 13 um yeah. We also built a sales referral program. So let's say you know, you start your business.

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You know a couple of sales people at a var, a reseller distributor. Of course you you know, you don't want to spend too much money on them, but you can throw them this right. You can say: hey, look right! Now. I have a program in place that will pay you for bringing customers to our network. So here uh we have. We give away a hundred fill for 100 tibs uh of data set that they bring to the network. 500 fill for a pip of data set that they bring to network.

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So this is active till april. We can always extend it. The requirements of this program is that the customer is willing to be a case study or a customer reference. So what we do is now we have a few that we're writing up that will uh that came to this program and the goal isn't to feature them on our website right so yeah point it out there. It's it's one of those programs that people don't know about. But when I talk about it hey you know, 5 500 fill right. Now is what is it like?

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It's still, ten thousand dollars right, that's still a lot of money for a sales, rep, um and so the requirements here are that they they don't necessarily have to wait until the full pip is uploaded to the network. As soon as the first sector is written, you know the salesperson or whoever gets the fill paid right and so again we're trying to like give you the tools.

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Hopefully that will help you to uh to to bring more data to networks and, last but not least, like also, I would say like be the community right help, others out, um because what we've seen is that the strong relationships that you build help you build your business as well. um You know if anyone who brings a customer to the network uh will typically want to store data on other recipes.

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Like uh you know today, the typical cop, I think today we see like three to five copies right, sometimes six uh copies that are being stored across different storage providers. So you know it's in your interest to like help the community out as well um and uh really take advantage of uh the economies of scale here all right. That's it.

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