Ponder is best app to run Surveys and Q&A’s on Farcaster. They have been building on Farcaster long before frames. The initial product a survey bot and now they have excellent frames, composers actions and cast actions. Ponder let me test a new Bounty Feature where you can reward people who give you the best Q&A answers. I used it today, along with 15 OP to incentivize people to send me their best questions about the Scout Game and Waiting list. I’ll answer them here:
What's the easiest way to scout the best devs?
The Home Screen and the Scout Screen allow you to browse and search for builders, including seeing the most recently scoring builders and those who are hot and/or trending.
What was your ideation process?
That would be a whole series of essays itself. I should write more about it. I will say with regards to the Scout Game it started as a feature in a different app and then when we iterating on it realized it was the best part of the app and we should drop everything else.
What's your plan to source devs beyond github? Other protocols + platforms in mind?
GitHub will be our main proof of work platform for Season 1 but we’ll also be integrating data from grant programs in the near future, given our expertise in grants. The Scout Game starts with Farcaster and Open Source Crypto Repositories, grows to X and Telegram builder/scout communities. At that point I want to break outside of crypto repositories and support Open Source at large.
Is there an underlying identity angle to Scout Game?
Yes! All actions that earn points for Builders are issued as Attestations against their fid. You can almost think of it as a GitHub oracle where we validate Pull Requests and then bring them onchain via Attestations. If you’ve scored points as a Builder in the Scout Game you’ll have onchain proof of work. One reason this is important is because it allows anyone to verify the results of the Scout Game onchain and another is that it becomes a composable unit of your work history that can be used by other apps.
For Scouts, is the ability to dig into or ‘read’ code in any way an advantage
I don’t yet know what everyone’s emergent strategies will be but I don’t think there is a big advantage to being able to read code as a Scout. There probably is an advantage to learning how to navigate GitHub and getting a feel for someone’s velocity. As much of that as possible will be in the App but we won’t cover everything that is possible with GitHub.
Could developers choose to opt out of the game?
Joining the Scout Game as a Builder is an opt-in process. You have to explicitly decide to be a builder.
How long have you been working on Scout Game and are you the only member of the team?
The Scout Game is being built by CharmVerse. We are currently a team of 10. We have built CharmVerse and The SUNNYs and now the Scout Game. We have been working together for 3 years. In a lot of ways 3 years is how long we’ve been working on it because the Scout Game is a result of things we’ve learned about the future of work from working with DAOs, Ecosystems and Grants Programs.
Why did I go from mythic tier to epic tier
The Waitlist is actually a leaderboard. As other people score points and climb the leaderboard they knock others down the leaderboard. The leaderboard is based on how many clicks your frame gets. For example if you are in the top 95% of people who get clicks then you will be Legendary.
It’s important to note that the Waitlist Game is not the Scout Game. It’s just a mini-game to decide who gets to play first and with how many free credits. The credits are used to Scout builders in game. So if you are Legendary you’ll be the first to try the Scout Game AND you’ll have 50 credits to play with.
What is the Scout Game
I wrote a comprehensive thread about it on Farcaster.
Sign up for the waitlist
If you made it this far and you haven’t signed up for the waitlist yet, you probably should. Check out the cast belowz
