How to Build a Community – James Waugh

hey everyone my name is James Ward and I'm one of the contributors to meet acacho as well as doing a bunch of interesting stuff a tech co.labs sort of game theory that type of thing but today we're talking about meta cartel and building new digital communities for those that aren't familiar meta cartel is basically just a dow that gives out grants and does things for people and for different projects and different hackers so we've done a bunch of community events over the past year and really it was a spin up from Moloch Tower which was Abdal that funds 82.0 we just heard from Amanda talking about marketing Dow which is funding all of the funding marketing on aetherium and medica tell us the data in between those two steps I guess right it's funding the applications on top of etherium so here's some lovely photos of us hanging out and doing fun stuff so wTF is medicates out really it's the old cider with the idea of meta transactions right how do we make transactions easier for people if i've got to go in and like open meta mask and have gasps and sing the things and do the other things it's a lot of admin right it's pretty hard for a lot of people and so how do we bring that barrier from like a hundred out of ten difficult down to like a five out of ten difficult and that's really where the idea of meta transactions and meta cartels started and so now we're at Dow with 900 Ethernet roughly which I guess as long as the number keeps going up then it keeps looking like we have more US dollars so roughly you know 200 grand sitting inside the the bank the guild bank and that's held by about 65 different members right so there's a bunch of different contributors around the world and we're all sort of looking to push forward applications on top of aetherium oh nice all the communities so what started off as mole actor then was iterated into Medicare Medicare tell and the Medicare was iterated into a million different versions of itself right we're basically the fundamental idea is that you have a doubt that holds money and then you have a community that dictates where the money goes right and so these are a bunch of different efforts I'll go through like give a quick explanation just because there exciting and you know you guys want to get involved with one of them so the first one is meta clan medical ends basically like you mentioned pocus taking where if you want to play poker you're really good at poker and you can prove that then someone will stake you right so they'll give you $1,000 to play and then you can play that game well medic lands the same thing but for video games right so if you want to play a crypto game you can get given all of the items you need so you can be the best of that game meta Factory the next one in the middle is basically in if it's an innie of T which is also an amazing jacket or amazing pieces of apparel and they're making a system so that you can almost game a fire how you sell clothing right so imagine if I move 3d meant meets like st. Fame or like another one of those sort of digital ecommerce type things but with a bunch of cool economics behind it meta game is sort of the the widest scope right how do we turn what is you know the crypto ecosystem into actually more of a game like structure right so you can incentivize every different type of action and reward that in that same way there's a really cool app that's been developed by MIT again raid guild is another one which is basically a dower that all works together so you know you have ten people in a group they all have different skills you get a bunch of deal flow coming in because there's so many people inside of the dowsers and then what the radio can do is provide basically any service right so there's front-end developers back in developers people who do game theory people that do all different marketing you know sales all the different roles sort of held with inside a raid guild and then we can work really efficiently Dow house is basically a platform we can summon it down really easily Marketing down hopefully people are familiar with marketing after that Amanda's presentation basically its funding eighth it's marketing eighth rocket down which Alex Alex left I was gonna give them a shout out but Alex made rocket down and it's basically in if teased loans against any of teas right so how can you have a crypto Kitty and take a loan and die against that all of these groups have been started by the meta cartel and sort of surrounding ecosystem members and really it's all been done on telegram right so it's like a bunch of nerds sitting in like twenty five thirty six seventy telegram groups together just spamming each other and that's what's made all of this happen right so there's now probably five six hundred people that are contributing to these different working groups and all of it has started based on tell groups and cool ideas and funding right from medica tell so digital versus real life community digital communities are pretty good in a lot of ways right they're really accessible really open but there's some downsides so that as well right because you'll it's that idea of always surrounded but always alone right the Internet is quite good at making you feel like that sometimes where you can have a million lights on something but you end up sitting there being like oh no one's actually talking to me right and so really what we've done is combined those two ideas where we have the permissionless trustless layer being aetherium right for where we store the money and then we have you know the permission trusted community elements for how we actually interact with people and so it's that combination which has been rasuu per effective and and you know combining the idea of using the backend of crypto but not relying on it as the only thing right if we just have a digital you know a community then we have something like a forum or we have something like you know even holding a token right holding a token isn't actually that compelling to join a community versus having something that's a little more permission and a little more like exclusive is the wrong word right that you don't want some random you know Justin son if Justin son tries into trouble join me to cartel it's probably gonna be like a no right I mean if you bring us like 20 million dollars we might say years but otherwise it's like you're a little bit of a dick you're kind of scamming people you're not allowed to join the doubt so community doesn't beat it's built itself so for those that don't know the Summoner of meta cartels called Peter Pan Peters currently sitting in Sydney right now and he's like super upset that he's not here he's like the digital receptionist of medical right now for Denver but really you know the idea it's been floating on Twitter over the past couple of weeks that the idea that having a dictatorship that you can rage quit straight away so what these dowsers allows this idea of rage quitting right which means that if you put in a hundred dollars the next day you can leave with ninety dollars and there's no risk right there's an instant transaction and so the idea of having a dictator where you can instantly leave actually isn't too bad right because that because last night were all sitting in the middle cartel house and we call Peter and Peter says why haven't you done this this needs to be done this we're like we're at a conference Peter it's okay and he's pushing us through all these things right so the idea of having someone driving that ship is actually really important because otherwise you get into the situation which is a lot of digital community have with it's like everyone's the tragedy of the comments right everyone wants something to happen but no one actually wants to do it if you have someone like really making you do it it works out a lot better and that's certainly what Peter has is and has built himself the next thing is that culture is key right so the Internet is this culture I think it is in the case of me to cash out right we literally have formed a community on the back of the Internet as the primary culture the internet and the idea of decentralization and crypto are really the two fundamental building blocks that have made this all happen and that's probably the most common thread through medical and through the other dowsers is that you know people get the internet right people understand the importance of the Internet and that's really what has allowed the the data form the way it's hard the way the way it has so you know culture is really hard to build if it's just an open system if anyone could buy a token it's impossible to dictate what the culture of that token is right if it's only a select group of people could join a community right if you've been contributing if you want to help if you're pledging money if you can sort of align people at the start then you can build that culture in a really good way and the other thing is that the culture is built on blood and sweat right how much work have you done you know if you've done a hundred hours of work for the medical gel you will certainly be bought in instantaneously right if you give a hundred million dollars if you give a hundred dollars in the medicate out you'll be bought in instantly but really it's that idea of like lead follow or get the out of the way like that's sort of the idea of meta cartel is that realistically it doesn't matter what you do as long as you sprint down that path right if you have no idea what you want to do and what you want to help on find one of those you will go back find one of these projects that sounds the most interesting and just like reach out to them right there's a bunch of Helen gray groups you can help and just sprinting down one path really is the key and order to make it all happen nice okay so ecosystem overview this is a super nice graphic which was been built up outside of meta cartel so about six months ago there was sort of v1 of this graphic and it was probably like 1/10 as much information right attend as many people attempt as much grants it was significantly smaller not that long ago and now we've built it into this huge universe of meta cartel and so there's a bunch of things around the outside of that universe that has sort of the Media right like the debt the podcast the telegram groups the tutorial Island and then also some of the service providers which we'll talk about a little bit and ii like that raid guild idea right we can all help a company for the right reasons then you also have all the grants at the bottom so a bunch of amazing projects that have been funded purely just based on people like myself and other medical members who just want to push the theory of space forward you know 600 odd created a six hundred odd community members and through i don't know how many telegram groups and i don't know how many if it's a lot it's in you know sixty odd probably seventy close so now down members and we've deployed about sixty k worth of grants and that's certainly going to continue hard into this year we really like pushing forward debts and pushing forward you know different experiments and actually giving them the signal right again oh it's okay a little bit at second but the idea of signalling the signal being worth significantly more than the money really is the key of mehta cartel right having two hundred grand sitting inside of a multisig isn't gonna change the world right but having sixty founders who are deep in the crypto space who can do basically the full stack and we point at you and we say we want to give you money we want to help you that has done a lot of things for a lot of these grantees right basically a hundred percent of them have said the couple of grand in a grant is useful the signal we got was 10x more valuable than the money we got and that sort of is the point of meta cartel so you know when looking at how to build these digital communities a really important piece of that sustainability and really what this is here is the the pentagram of our service providers and these are a bunch of different companies raid guild already talked about it's a decentralized collective a bridge is an amazing group basically working on dow ops and visual data and visual smart contract design honestly in the guys behind our house they've built an amazing instant tower deploy button a website open law they've done a bunch of amazing stuff about the combination of sort of smart contract logic and in traditional legal logic and then axial ab sets me and Callum and we just hang out and do game theory and try and break economic systems and things like that but you know these different service providers really are the keys of the sustainability of meta cartel and actually be able to push these groups forward right throwing in some money is good organizing some stuff you know doing some work is also good but we need to be able to build for the term right so how can a company come in and we can give them a B C D and E about the best ways to move forward and really that's what's being built up here the next thing is about building communities you know with money versus signal so over the past couple of years in crypto we've seen a lot of people try and build a community with money right it's like hey we have ten million or better example we raise two billion dollars to be an aetherium killer right how are we gonna get people to build on top of our blockchain well what we'll do is we'll just pay them two hundred grand each to build it an application on top of our blockchain that hasn't worked right this is very few debts on top of a oh said illegitimate and no one really cares because just throwing money at teams so that the build on your blockchain really isn't that convincing I mean that's certainly what we've seen here with with meta cartel and the different initiatives going on there you know coming up with a bag full of money and striving at someone I'm sure they're gonna be really happy about it but like six months down the Train a year down the Train where are they actually at right and what's been built with the Medicaid sale and now a medic hotel ventures which is basically a for-profit version of the grant-giving tower we're really you know traditional okay most traditional VCS sort of come in and just douchebags all the time right it's like hey I have a bunch of money and if you you know can sell me the right enough story I'll give you a little bit of money you can put my logo on your website it'll be amazing you'll get way more money it's awesome versus actually just helping the project right so if we have 50 people inside of Medicaid hell ventures we can actually really really help a project from all pieces of the puzzle right we want the experiment to work so we will make sure it works by helping every single project as much as we can so medica tell us everywhere we were telling it enterprise which is a co-working space in Denver we were there for like four three or four days there was a bunch of different meetups from companies none of them are really that full Medicaid holders are made up the rooms packed right everyone's there to learn it really has been an inflection point since you know sort of Oh psycho maybe a little bit before that weird hours are eating the world you know there's a lot of talk last year that said 2019 was the year of the Dow's I mean maybe it was a year of some days but I think 2020 will be the year of more days and we're definitely seeing that with a bunch of medical help inches just launched yesterday there's probably gonna be a bunch of other for-profit dowser they're gonna launch over the short term as well as the idea of grant giving dows being implemented and a number of tokens so I think my take is that the tokens that are being built that have been built in the past are all going to start to pivot to some type of dowel mechanic in order to build that community right rather than just speculating on a trick on so we have a bunch of hacker boxes so if anyone is hacking we upstairs and we'll be walking around giving them out they have a bunch of stickers and cool stuff inside of them look there's a bunch of us hanging around with little pens or just generally look for people that look kind of crazy and you'll probably be able to identify medic I tell people we'd love to chat a bit about what you're developing how we can help everything like that so thanks very much there's if you want to go to medical to a website go there Thanks any questions yeah oh you can just yell it oh no yes we've got about five minutes for questions so speaking about community has there been a conversation about like a upper limit on a real life not like a number for an actual community where you know everyone there yes so sort of like um what's it called Dunbar's number like the number of people you can know yeah so when we were in did there a few months ago the medical trial we did sort of eMCON one and we were talking about we wanted to grow medicate our right we're at sort of forty members and we were like by Denver we want to have a hundred that would have been nice right now it's sort of 6070 we've got halfway but what we found is that over that time period a number of other dowsers of spun up right so it wasn't that we grew up it was that the Dow's grew sideways and I think sort of you know thinking that it's gonna be ten thousand people dows that are like Interop interoperating with each other maybe aspirationally in the future but if we can have you know lots of towers with a hundred people in them or a couple of hundred people in them all interoperating I think that's how you can sort of you know get around some that stuff but I agree as you scale the community it is going to get to a stage where like natural hierarchy forms right there's people that don't know each other etc etc agree yeah any other questions I need you guys do a lot of technical base grants so there anything you know more outside outside of that space you know Khan the marketing or community like physical meetup community side of it so so definitely the grants have been pretty purposely directed it you know hackers and ideas that they can sort of push forward but we are very open to doing cool things so those boxes railway those boxes there that we have upstairs you know that was a couple of thousand dollars of stickers and boxes and random stuff as a guerilla marketing effort right things like that always get funded as well so if it's you know pushing a theorem forward a theorem gaps forward madoka toe forward there's been a bunch of grants given for that kind of stuff outside of just like individual projects as well nice anymore cool well thank very much come for me to tell [Music] you