@nearlove.near [Posted on DevHub](https://near.social/#/devgovgigs.near/widget/Post?id=1445) ## Idea: **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 proposal is to secure funding for developer education programs and workshops aimed at onboarding and retaining developers within the NEAR ecosystem. These educational initiatives will provide valuable resources, tutorials, workshops, and documentation to empower developers with the knowledge and skills necessary to build on NEAR and BOS platforms. 1. Enrich the NEAR & BOS Curriculum We already have one of the most comprehensive NEAR curriculum in the community with over 40 lessons that covers all kinds of topics: https://hackmd.io/@L9ZnGph8Tbaio2GVX_z-EA/rJRH-zMn3 We propose to continue updating and expanding the NEAR & BOS Curriculum to provide comprehensive and up-to-date educational materials to the developer community. These include presentations from invited speakers in the Chinese dev community, such as Intro to Ref SDK, Intro to Keypom, BOS gateway engineering practices (use Dap Dap as an example), etc.. The total working hours dedicated to this initiative will be 20 hours per month. Previous Lessons (Apr - Jun): BOS Curriculum by Robert Yan - Lesson 1: Introduction to BOS ([slides](https://bit.ly/near-bos-cn-2023-04), [recording](https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV1qa4y1V7zJ)) - Lesson 2: BOS Engineering Best Practice ([slides](https://bit.ly/bos-app-dev-2023-05), [recording](https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV1Gm4y147pS)) - Lesson 3: Build BOS Gateways ([slides](https://bit.ly/bos-gateway-2023-06); [recording](https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV19u41187ct)) Previous Lessons - Rivers Yang, core developer from Octopus Network, presented [NEAR-IBC](https://twitter.com/NEAR_China/status/1672964547941113856), the implementation of IBC protocol on NEAR, in NEAR and Cosmos Chinese dev community ([slides](https://bit.ly/near-ibc-2023-06); [recording](https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV1Xk4y1T7xY)) 2. NEAR Certified Developer We propose to resume the NEAR Certified Developer program that we have run for over 2.5 years, which has been held on a monthly basis. This program will require 8 hours per month to organize the events, assess and certify developers who have demonstrated proficiency in developing on the NEAR platform. Previous Work: Accepted Demo in Aug 2023: https://bit.ly/ncd-cn-demo-2023-08 3. Workshops In Q4 2023, besides NEAR Certified Developer and the NEAR & BOS Curriculum, we plan to host another 3-5 workshops to provide hands-on learning experiences and practical guidance to developers. The total working hours dedicated to these workshops will range from 18 to 30 hours. The previous workshops have covered topics such as NEAR Rust contract development (by Coffee), Smart Contract Security Auditing, Taoism of Rust smart contract, etc.. Previous Work - [Intro to NEAR Rust contract development](https://twitter.com/Tintinland2021/status/1684795095072354304) by Coffee, during the Rust course collaboration with TintinLand (July 29) (5 hour Preparation work + 1 hour Presentation) - Robert Yan: [Smart Contract Security Auditing](https://medium.com/oct-network/aduiting-smart-contracts-best-practices-pitfalls-42e090067bf8) Twitter Space with Octopus, BlockSec, Meta Pool (3 hour Preparation work + 1 hour Presentation) 4. Tutorials Besides all the above live sessions, we want to continue to create tutorials in local languages (Chinese) that help developers to learn with ease. It doesn’t mean that we will translate existing English docs or examples to Chinese, we prefer creating blog posts with our own ideas. The tutorials will include posts about Rust smart contract, BOS components & gateways, etc. Previous Work - NEAR Rust Contract Tutorials: To cater to the Chinese developer community, we propose the creation of NEAR Rust Contract Tutorials in Chinese. These tutorials, developed by Coffee, cost 40 hours of dedicated work. 5. Collaborate with Vibrant Dev Communities for Education To make it possible to outreach tens of thousands of developers, we work together with vibrant developer communities in China for education programs and more initiatives. This requires extra at least 10 hours per month planning and coordinating initiatives together with the organizers and contributors of the communities, providing content and resources that they need, and joining events that they host, etc. We will also maintain relationships with blockchain associations and top universities in China, organizing events to engage university students. Previous Work - We collaborate with Rust CC + Tintin Land communities on Rust courses, and we’ll certify and reward qualified projects on the demo day. - Work with openbuild.xyz to upload our NEAR & BOS curriculum to their platform, and advocate decentralizing frontend and BOS with the Web3 Frontend community that they’re building. **Budget Breakdown** $10K USD per month Personnel - Around 30% Content Development - Around 20% Infrastructure and tools - Around 10% Events and workshops - Around 20% Promotion and marketing - Around 10% Conclusion By funding developer education initiatives, NEAR will empower developers with the necessary knowledge and resources to build on the NEAR (BOS). These programs will foster a skilled developer community, facilitate the creation of innovative projects, and contribute to the long-term growth and success of the NEAR ecosystem.