@nearlove.near [Posted on DevHub](https://near.social/#/devgovgigs.near/widget/Post?id=1444) ## Idea: DevRel: Chinese Developer Community Building **Executive Summary** Creative Pro Asia, a NEAR-focused developer studio, is seeking funding of $10K USD per month from Dev Hub to support our Developer Relations initiatives in Greater China (including online communities in covered timezones). The requested funding period is from September 1, 2023, to December 31, 2023 (Q4 2023). **About Creative Pro Asia** Creative Pro Asia is a NEAR-focused developer hub based in Hong Kong. Our primary focus is to support a wide range of DevRel initiatives for NEAR Protocol and its thriving ecosystem in the Greater China region. The team consists of previous NEAR Foundation employees and early contributors of the NEAR ecosystem who have extensive knowledge and experience in DevRel, Rust, and community building. The NEAR Chinese community is one of the largest communities in the NEAR ecosystem and consistently ranks as the top region on Binance in terms of the number of NEAR holders. Currently, we have approximately 27K+ NEAR community members across various social platforms and 1,000+ NEAR developers. **Our Team** Creative Pro Asia consists of 4 team members who are specialized in developer tooling, ecosystem project support, developer education and community building. *Robert Yan,* the first NEAR Engineer in Asia, has been involved in dev tooling, ecosystem project support, and dev education and community building since January 2021. Robert has handled various toolings, including contract SDK, API, CLI, explorer, wallet, and wallet selector. He aided the launch and development of the NEAR Certified Developer program in China and Vietnam. He is also a core organizer and judge of MetaBUILD I, II, and III hackathons. Actively building a NEAR Chinese dev community with around 2K developers, Robert is a significant and consistent technical supporter of core ecosystem projects in NEAR, including Ref Finance, Octopus Network, Sender, Orderly Network, etc. Robert graduated from Chu Kochen Honors College, Zhejiang University, with a major in Computer Science. With over 11 years of experience as a full-stack developer prior to joining NEAR, he served as an Engineering Director at MicroStrategy and contributed to open-source projects such as Ethereum and Steem. *Daniel Wang* has over 2 years of experience within the NEAR ecosystem. He has notably contributed to major NEAR protocols like LiNEAR and held an advisory role at Ref.finance. Concurrently, he has played a key role in expanding NEAR's developer community. This entails contributions to open-source projects like the NEAR wallet, alongside the organization of both online and offline developer meetups for the NEAR community. He is also very active in developer education in giving lectures for the NCD program and guiding NEAR hackathon participants. Daniel graduated with a B.S in Computer Science from Fudan University and M.Sc in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University. Prior to NEAR, Daniel has over 5 years of experience developing big data and distributed systems. He co-founded a VC backed startup as the CTO, and worked as an engineer at Salesforce and Gilt. *Coffee* has 5 years of experience working as a developer. He has been actively participating in the NEAR Chinese Community for 2 years and has been a moderator for both the user communities and the dev communities. He has worked on various developer education programs about building NEAR smart contracts, offering dev rel support online and offline to people building on NEAR. Coffee graduated with a B.S from East China Normal University. *Murphy* has been serving as the Chinese community manager for NEAR since July 2022., focusing on the development and building of both user and developer communities, promoting developer education, and organizing developer events in China. She had amplified NEAR MetaBUIDL Hackathons and the NEAR Certified Developer program in China. As well as helped NEAR participate in various well-known Chinese developer events, Additionally, Murphy has assisted NEAR in establishing partnerships with top universities in China, such as Peking University, Zhejiang University, Fudan University, and has organized over 5 developer education events for university students. Murphy graduated with a M.Sc from Zhejiang University. **About Greater China** China is the second-most populous country with a population exceeding 1.4 billion, 80% of which are internet users. As a result, China has a rather large developer base, with some of the largest tech giants, such as Tencent, Alibaba, Baidu, Bytedance, etc., headquartered in China. Similarly, China has always been at the forefront of crypto and blockchain development, especially on the application levels. While operating a crypto exchange or issuing an ICO are strictly banned in mainland China, the use of cryptocurrencies are allowed. In fact, President Xi has publicly endorsed blockchain technology on multiple occasions. Hong Kong, a special administrative region of China, has been leading the efforts of promoting blockchain technology. has been attracting a great number of Web3 builders (NEAR in HK Web3 Festival). In short, it’s very important to continue supporting the NEAR’s Chinese community given the potential impact due to the large user and developer base. *In the context of our work for NEAR, Greater China includes mainland and various regions of China, as well as all Chinese speaking communities, despite where the community members are physically located at.* **Objective** The objective of this funding request proposal is to secure financial support for our Developer Relations initiatives. Our goal is to foster an active and engaging developer community, provide comprehensive developer support, ensure excellent developer experience, manage the documentation translation, help with developer events marketing and host local developer meetups. 1. Support Local Dev Community To create a vibrant developer community and help resolve all kinds of challenges faced by developers, we propose the following activities: Office Hours (1.5 hours per week): We plan to resume weekly office hours to provide direct support to the Chinese developer community (Chinese, 8 PM GMT+8, every Friday). Dev Support on Social Channels: We will allocate 10 hours per week to provide support and engage with developers on our social channels. This includes managing a WeChat group with approximately 2,000 developers and offering technical support on platforms like Telegram and Discord. 2. Documentation Translation Robert Yan is the owner of the NEAR Docs Crowdin project: https://crowdin.com/project/near-docs . He helps with the technical review and approval of the translation of various languages including Korean, Vietnamese, Chinese, etc. This requires 8~24 hours per quarter, depending on the number of translated strings for each language. Previous Docs: support Korean translation in July, fix docs compilation memory leaks, etc. (8 hours in July). Sometimes there are technical challenges and docs compilation errors so it actually takes 20~30 hours in Q1 & Q2 to support Korean translation by working together with Damian. 3. Dev Tooling While dev tooling is not our major focus at the moment, we have contributed to most of the NEAR & BOS dev tooling in the past. Developer experience is one of the major advantages of NEAR and we do whatever we can to answer questions, provide feedback, share/summarize feedback from the community, share the latest progress about dev tooling, fix any noticed issues if time allows, and build innovative solutions. We allocate 8~20 hours per month for dev tooling to bring better developer experience to NEAR builders. Previous Work: BOS VM enhancement: Embed component in Markdown 4. Marketing We share the latest news of all kinds of developer events and updates in the community, including the latest hackathons and events (with Chinese translations), latest updates to developer tools (e.g. ReadRPC), etc. This requires 4~8 hours per month if translation is needed. This also includes increasing awareness of NEAR among developer communities as a technology. We continue working with communities to maintain the reputation of NEAR among developers, and help more developers (especially the top talents) to fall in love with NEAR and build moon-landing projects. 5. Meetups We plan to host 2 meetups (one in Shanghai/Hangzhou, and the other in another city) per year, to have local developers gather and share their development and entrepreneurship experience on NEAR. These can be side events of some major Web3 or dev conferences, or standalone meetups in local communities. Every event usually costs 12 hours including planning, marketing, organization, meeting and post-event follow-up, etc. **Funding Request** In total, we are requesting funding for a cumulative effort of 75 hours per month to support our Developer Relations initiatives. The funding will be allocated towards compensating team members involved in these activities and ensuring the success of our community-building efforts. Budget Breakdown Budget: 7.5K USD Personnel: Around 80% Partnerships and Collaborations: Around 20% **Conclusion** In conclusion, supporting the Chinese Developer Community's initiatives is crucial for the continuous growth and success of the NEAR builder ecosystem. With a vibrant community of 6,000 developers, investing in community building efforts will help retain our current pool of talented developers, ensuring their continued engagement and contribution to the NEAR platform. By providing the necessary resources, we can foster an environment that encourages innovation, collaboration, and long-term sustainability within the NEAR developer community.