The Best Questions and Answers of the AMA, Summarized! - April 2021

Welcome to the summary of the Reddit AMA for April 2021. During the April AMA, we had some great questions. The questions revolved around 6 main topics: Community growth, team building, features, migration, hackathons and other projects in the Golem ecosystem. Below we’ve created a summary of the questions and answers.

We’ve included a TL;DR at the end of this post.

Community Growth

We had a lot of great topics around community growth. It’s really great to see that the Discord has turned out so well and that people enjoy the live discussion format the platform offers. We can really use it to split topics up for essentially any type of stakeholder and the type of discussion in each channel can reflect what topics each individual is interested in and it can all occur in parallel. Many developers (and non-developers) have Discord as an application on their system already so in most cases it’s not such a burden in trying to convince people to download a new application for them to be able to join the discussion.

Saying that, there’s also still a lot of value in the formats that other platforms provide. We don’t see it as, the Golem community Discord is the most active so that’s an indicator on how successful that channel is. We see it more as platforms like Reddit, Discord, Twitter, Telegram, etc. all offer different features and each have their own benefits for the Golem community to use and decide which ones they prefer.

We dove deeper into specifics on community growth, particularly revolving around requestors. Remember that requestors. For this, we want to expand the available features that developers can utilize to build applications, incentivize developers to build their ideas, continue with external reach-out.

Some really fun questions to have received in the AMA was from people in the community asking things like “what can we do to help build Golem and the community”. These are both fun and tough to answer. We can give suggestions and love talking about it. At the end of the day, each individual is different and has different strengths, remember that you are the best person to judge so it’s completely okay for you to take your own spin on a suggestion we give or decide on a direction that you think would suit you more. Following on that topic, if you want to start contributing to the application side of things on Golem, the best place to start would be getting familiar with Python. As a non-dev though, you don’t need to even have Python experience to run other developer created applications. It just needs some basic CLi, which is covered in the handbook many of the README’s on the list of applications found on Awesome Golem.

If you’re interested more about Community Growth then María Paula, Advisor at Golem Factory, brought up some cool topics about it in her presentation on generating healthy ecosystems and attribute contributions.

Team Growth

While most of the development team is focused on yagna right now, we have an integrations team that’s just been formed, and on a top management level, we focus on long-term thinking and development.

We are constantly looking into ways to extend the project while Golem platform and protocol as a backbone are being built. After yagna Mainnet launched, we restructured the team once again, to continue evolving and avoiding a linear path.

As of time of writing, there are 33 people working for Golem Factory. We gathered some comments from recently joined team members.

Features

Now that the Minimal Viable Product (MVP) is out for Yagna, we’re looking towards building up from there. We’re very excited about adding more features and helping the ecosystem have more and more things to help it thrive. Questions we got around features and support:

• Internet access for providers: This feature is understandably very desirable for opening up the potential applications that can be built on the Golem platform. We also view this as a core feature to integrate. There is no strict timeline yet. We don’t think it’s unrealistic to try to offer some sort of internet connectivity around the end of Q2.
• Services: for the potential to offer self-hosted services and web hosting on the network, these are tasks we’re working towards.
• OS support: For other platform support, we have this on our radar although for the next couple releases they will not be the primary focus.
• Blender: The support for blender rendering will continue, this is already possible within Yagna. However we want to avoid making this the primary focus of Golem since it’s very generalized in the application that can be built.

Don't miss out the cool new Golem stats page. It's in it's alpha / experimental stage so almost new things are being updated daily!

As for questions on the roadmap, we understand how important for us is to share our short/mid-term goals with the community. We’re working on a more transparent roadmap to share with you.

Migration

We’ve had a few questions about an update from Coinbase on their GNT -> GLM migration. The latest update from Coinbase on the topic of migration (received on the 31st of March): “We had to push out all upgrades till Q2 as we are working on streamlining the process. We do recognize that the Golem upgrade is critical for our customers and it is still top of mind for us - I'm working with the engineering team to get it done asap. We are addressing some final items and we should be able to get it done in the coming weeks.”

Coinbase has been very good at responding to us on migration overall.

Hackathons

Our current hackathon has come to it’s submission deadline, Golem + Gitcoin GR9 Hackathon #2: mainnet is here!, and judging has begun. Winners will be announced next week. Looking forward, we will be participating in 0xHack. We are actively collaborating with the other sponsors of the event on promotion, panel+talk organization, inter-community connectivity, etc.

Conclusion

That’s everything for this AMA summary. We want to voice a big thank you to the community for getting involved in the AMA and giving some really great questions for us to answer. Here as some resources for you to follow onto to learn more and keep up with the Golem Project.

Website: http://golem.network/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/golemproject
Discord Chat: http://chat.golem.network/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/golemproject/
Youtube https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCl3fxgrSML2sL3UYZrynbMg
Github: https://github.com/golemfactory
Handbook: https://handbook.golem.network/

TL;DR

Community Growth: The search for new techniques on tools to help our community grow is always continuing. We try to capture all stakeholders of the Golem community in our efforts.
Team Growth: We’re looking for talent to join the Golem Factory team, currently senior Python and JavaScript developers. There are 33 people working for Golem Factory currently.
Features: we’re working on getting internet access for providers out in its first form around the end of Q2. We’re also making more services possible on the platform. Direct support for other operating systems is on the radar, although other features have priority.
Coinbase Migration: is acknowledged. They are addressing some final items and we should be able to get it done in the coming weeks.
Hackthons: the current hackathon has reached its submission deadline. The judging has begun and winners will be announced. The next hackathon will be in collaboration with other projects at 0xHack.