NEAR Community Update: February 14th, 2020
COMMUNITY
February 14, 2020
The event season begins! Starting off, you can find us at ETHDenver and Developer Week in San Francisco. Our team took extra care to create an amazing booth experience. Check-out the video below: 


At #ETHDenver we’re excited to bring our engineers, product, and accelerator team together with developers. If you are around, come chat with us at NEAR’s Friday ETHDenver workshop. Kendall and Illia will be talking about how to write, deploy and interact with Rust, TypeScript, and Solidity smart contracts on NEAR. You can find all the information you need about our hackathon prizes and workshops in the following blog. 

#DEVWEEK2020 @ilblackdragon on stage at @DeveloperWeek discussing #openweb participation. 🌎 pic.twitter.com/H295AEnidi

— NEAR Protocol (@NEARProtocol) February 13, 2020

New Release: The Open Web Collective Incubator and Accelerator
Many teams create exciting new projects at hackathons and then face the difficult decision of whether or not to continue them as side projects or even potentially as businesses. To help teams navigate this decision and then take the next step with their projects, we are supporting the launch of the Open Web Collective (OWC) Incubator and Accelerator.

The Open Web Collective, which is supported by NEAR, is a community of crypto-native entrepreneurs and mentors who are pushing past the hype and building the projects that will bring the vision of the Open Web to reality. They are looking for hungry and talented teams who need support from ideation all the way through funding.

Learn more and apply at https://openwebcollective.com/

Content Highlights
We released Doomslug, our new block production technique, a month ago. As a follow-up to the paper (and to make the content more consumable), we recently released a blog post that highlights how Doomslug compares to PBFT, Tendermint, and Hotstuff. Please let us know what you think about it or if you have any open questions. 

How You Can Get Involved
Join the NEAR Contributor Program. If you would like to host events, create content or provide developer feedback, we would love to hear from you! To learn more about the program and ways to participate, please head over to the website. 

If you’re just getting started, learn more in The Beginner’s Guide to NEAR Protocol or read the official White Paper. Stay up to date with what we’re building by following us on Twitter for updates, joining the conversation on Discord and subscribing to our newsletter to receive updates right to your inbox.