Evolution of Community

today we have to begin with a panel called the evolution of community it's moderated by manu and we've got amy vanessa lindsey and elena goodness what a panel so i'm gonna go ahead and get off the screen here and uh say hello to our panelists hello good morning hello hello hello if you're ready the floor is yours have fun all right yeah hello everyone super glad to see you all happy monday happy monday all right let's get started um i'm super happy to be part of this with all of you guys uh this is amazing i i know that you guys are building communities within all the different projects that you're part of so yeah let's get the conversation started the first question that i had uh was when you're getting when your organization got started what were the characteristics of the initial community members where did they live and how is it now for instance bitcoin got started from a cyber punk email list and now people from all over the country from all over the world are part of this bitcoin community um so yeah i'm gonna wanna get started with that unless uh amy you wanna start with that yeah actually you know would be cool is if we can go in like order of um like community maturity i think that would be such a cool evolution to see that's true that's true let's do that listen that sounds like nothing on yeah let's let's start with c cash then that was i guess the oldest one um was it the latest one or were we uh i guess around the same time um but yeah i'm happy to start uh so elena yeah um and let me know if my mic isn't coming in very well i'm currently in a uh apartment lobby um so yeah i think it's a great question because it gets to this kind of crux of like what is a community who counts and then how do you join or add new people um so i really don't believe that crypto communities in particular start out with one set of characteristics that's maybe one way in which web three communities are so different from web 2 communities right like you can have a subreddit for cat videos but um a decentralized protocol for for virtual money is is like quite an order of magnitude different um but that said zcash first launched in 2016. i think it definitely has always had a well-earned reputation for attracting people interested in kind of like the bleeding edge cryptography so zero knowledge proofs to recursive proof composition kind of like this really heady super crazy magic moon math um and uh over the years as the community has grown and more and more people have kind of joined it's uh i've been pleased to see zcash kind of expand its scope from outside of the you know hardcore academic cryptographers to activists people advocating for for privacy and digital human rights um and also people just interested in seeing kind of like how do you design privacy within a like regulatory or compliant framework so i think who counts in your community is is a an interesting question but i'll leave it at that because i'm curious to hear how other people's communities have evolved but yeah we definitely started in the crypto world and now um we're growing and and hopefully uh all of crypto is growing into more mainstream audiences elena before we move on can you tell us where where did the community got together was it on a private show or a blog how how do you get started oh yeah the origin story of of z cash well so there were seven founding scientists who first wrote can you hear me okay yeah so there were seven founding scientists who first uh wrote the zerocoin paper and then that became zcash um they uh i think like the origin story when zcash first launched it was in um kind of like a rented house in boulder colorado and that was like where where they first launched the protocol i should know the story better but then i think the physical community gatherings were at z-con and that's organized by the z-cash foundation the first one was in montreal and the second one was in croatia so yeah it's it's cool to get together in person and those conferences were awesome all right thank you so much helena now i guess amy maker yeah well i guess technically makers should have gone first that depends on when you consider starting the community so um in 2015 the the kind of paper called what you call e dollars was posted on reddit so it was really a kind of like digital first community at first and i wasn't there um at the time when everything started so i can only tell you kind of the myths and the readings that i've gone back to the post um and since then when um the maker foundation started it really um focused on the goal of like bootstrapping the maker dao and the maker dell community and so where we are now is is crazy leap because a lot of times people ask me like oh what is the community think and that's a such a hard question to answer because within our community we have so many groups and some so many subdivisions like you can start from the center which is kind of like the more protocol focused and that's like people who are actively participating governance who are like keepers ball donors mkr holders even the foundation itself is like a member of this like protocol community um and then that's like even now we have domain teams or teams that are working like inside um for the dao itself and then we even have like contributors and they go from like developers to like people who are creating like die action groups that are going out and kind of creating local economies then we have like a user base which is um people who are kind of more focused on like the adoption side and kind of their main thing is how do we integrate something maybe a business is using maker um or or die and then you have kind of like greater d5 people or protocols as well like dow dao um so we've got this like very full community and that's kind of crazy to see and i'm really excited to see actually what that looks like after that like what's the next level there um so that's kind of where we're at with maker and neighbor foundation does that mean i'm next chronologically maybe probably yes probably um so status nutshell um 2017 um it got established and obviously for as far as status is concerned it really has always kind of well it came to be and it continues to evolve based on uh its core 10 principles which are very very focused on um you know the the idea of human freedoms the idea of privacy the idea of security the idea of transparency the idea of openness um all of the good stuff that we have somehow in the evolution of the internet and digital um spaces have kind of forgotten that those are like the important bits that we should you know build with and um enjoy um as users and and as humans and so on so for us i think it's it's a very interesting um evolution in itself where we are seeing how the different elements of status are being used how the communication piece is being used by groups that you know need that safe space to communicate in without fear of repercussion without censorship without being de-platformed and so on um the transaction elements where you do want to make transactions uh across borders without it taking 10 days and potentially i don't know how many fees although fees is a thing at the moment um but you know you you want to be able to to do that um without needing uh recipients to be part of the swift network and by the way not a lot of people are um geographically part of the the giant bank swift network um and then of course the exploration of the web 3 space right that's that's a very important piece where you want to be able to once you are in it go for a journey around it figure out where it is that that um you want to go what makes sense for you to build and and get involved so i think it's it's an ever evolving and ever um i guess um enriching experience i want to say um just from from the perspective of discovering all of this good stuff um amazing simona thank you i guess now sello great um vanessa started in 2017 and then we launched in 2018 so when i joined there was no community um but i think that the things that we did early on like the first thing i did when i joined was create a code of conduct and we developed community tenants and trying to create like some scaffolding i know elena was talking earlier about the differences between web 2 and web 3 but having been in tech for a while i wanted to prevent a lot of the like negativity that i've seen in other kind of tech communities online um but i think the like most like the best example of what our community is is actually a retreat that we hosted that i got to hang out with elena at um called the prosper retreat which was in november before the world shut down and we had 60 people from 20 countries and it was this cross-section of all these people who wanted to use this technology for good especially around finance and social impact um and so a lot of our like validator community a lot of our entrepreneurs building on cella now um we're at that event and so it was actually like 60 seeds that were planted that are now like starting to blossom and i'm really excited to see these projects and individuals that continue to grow but um it created this like strong philosophical foundation for what cello is and what we're trying to do which is around prosperity which we define as basic needs being met people helping each other and people growing along their unique path and so all the projects being built on sale kind of aligned to that ethos um with the goal and the technology being focused around um adoption on a mobile phone and so that's kind of like the other element or flavor is around usability and like products and that's how actually i met amy um because we did a lot of user research early on and she was like yeah designers research people so we connected in berlin um and had the pleasure of working with her for a bit and so yeah so there's definitely this like fintech kind of social entrepreneur and then also like products and made for mobile and phones um and yeah like marco who is at our who's at prosper um built a ubi project on sello um that is now has distributed two hundred thousand dollars um to over ten thousand people in 53 communities around the world and so these folks are actually getting paid in seller dollars every month and being able to like um buy food and kind of support their families and so it's a great example of kind of that initial seed kind of maturing thank you so much vanessa how about you lindsay how foundation got started and where the community was living at that time and how is it now cool so foundation started in 2020 we launched um the end of may i joined the day before the launch so i got caught up to speed very quickly um but our founders had come from the d5 space but in their personal lives they were really invested in the cultural space and so they had this hunch that maybe they could put the two two and two together um my background is coming more from the cultural space auction houses museums galleries working in the digi focusing on digital art so we were all coming together even as a team i think reflected what we were trying to accomplish as a company which was merging uh contemporary art and music and fashion and design with crypto and our first uh attempt at that was we had this theory that we needed to abstract away a lot of the crypto elements in order to appeal to a larger audience so we first started with this really clean product and i was going out and talking with artists and they were coming to foundation and it sort of looked like a web 2 marketplace but it didn't function that way um it had a lot of exciting superpowers in the back end that were just hidden and so what we learned over the last year was that the artists and creators musicians designers um who are in our community were coming to us because they really wanted to learn about crypto and the crypto space really wanted to get to know those creators also so we relaunched last wednesday actually which i think qualifies us as the freshest here in this group uh we relaunched last wednesday um and we're not hiding any of the crypto anymore and it's been really cool to see the community um adapt and become really sophisticated and be able to have these really fluent conversations with our engineers and challenge them and question them and we're building much more collaboratively with our community now so i would say we introduced ourselves in a way that almost had a roadblock but over time figured out how to remove that roadblock so that we can um really look at the technology as it is and um have really um powerful conversations with um the creators and work with them much more collaboratively so that's where we are now um we are very active on discord um we're doing a little bit in clubhouse i don't know how i feel about that space mixed feelings but we're doing a happy hour there each week um obviously very active on twitter um but it's it's been really cool to see um technologists and musicians and digital artists and painters and fashion designers like all come into this space and be learning together collaboratively and that's really what we're about is creating that intersection so everyone has a voice at the table and is helping contribute to the health of the community great thank you so much linsey many of you said that there are soup communities within this big community that you might have within within your projects and i'm wondering what are the different type of tools and channels that you're using in order to nature those different type of community members and also uh just to be mindful of the time if you guys can also tackle the next one which which is basically how do you measure the health of your community with these different tools that you're using um anyone wants to start with that i'll jump in on that um i think that uh one-on-one conversations are the most impactful way to develop and organize a community i have my schedule is basically a list of one-on-one conversations with different community members throughout the day and i find that that's really valuable on both ends because it helps us really dig in deeper on issues that people care about and then with that being attuned to all these different community members i can help them find their common issues and weave together relationships that will allow them to feel more empowered to speak up in the more public spaces and i find that's really important especially for people who don't feel comfortable on twitter or don't feel comfortable expressing themselves on on discord so i think um for me it's less about going from one to a million it's more about going from one to two a thousand times over to really ensure to answer your section second question to really ensure that there there's health that people are heard and they feel connected and validated and i'll i'll follow um that with you know this whole because we're talking about the evolution of communities actually i feel that that's what web 3 is doing is empowering individuals and communities to achieve whatever it is that they want to achieve right giving them the tools and the spaces and the power to achieve those things we no longer have that dynamic of the centralized organization that basically tells it hey this is the way it is you like it you don't whatever this is all about and as far as i'm concerned at least it's creating those spaces where people and communities and individuals feel empowered to communicate to find the tools that they need to access them to use them for whatever it is that they need them for um and it's one of those um i think we're kind of moving to this 3d way of looking at people versus we're not flat anymore it's not that too one dimensional space it's multifaceted and everybody has so many different sides to who they are to what they enjoy to who what skills they have to where they choose or what communities they choose to belong to it's a proactive choice versus oh i'm born here this is what i do i guess i'm part of this community right it involves that choice and i think again web 3 is about the choice and about the empowerment on the point of community household elena um but you're talking about this like uh i actually i'm quite keen to bring some tools from like more like self-assessment like i don't know if anyone's familiar with the wheel of life where you look at your like personal finances and your relationships and kind of all these different measures for how you would measure yourself how you're like thriving and i want to apply a similar thing to our community so one thing we talked about was like organic contributions so like number of community members who are doing things without grant payments or some other incentives and that's showing that this system is working as intended that people are kind of aligned to the end objective of overall community health versus individual gain and i think there's a lot we can learn from like self-development there so that we're not looking at like strictly just twitter followers or people in discord or a number of people holding the token etc um and there was a follow i saw a question in the comments about um how do you scale the one-on-one and one thought or one thing that we've been talking about we did some research with developers um last december and it was like like access to the core team is like really important to also understand if the project is trustworthy and so one of our like design principles from that is like scale the core team like in quotes is like how do you actually create like we have an ambassador program and things like that but it's like maybe it's like rotational programs it's like how do you kind of instill the ethos and like principles and kind of like the structural foundation and then let people do do what do it may but i think sometimes in web 3 like we're like oh the old system is crap like let's just do the new one and then we like tend not to have a lot of structure and then i think that's where things go wrong and you have to have some sort of like scaffolding for people to operate in um i was playing monopoly this weekend and i was like this game is terrible it's like like just take take take and then like two games in i was like i'm coming for you you know it's like it's like people adapt to the to the system that you put them in and so you have to put enough structure so that incentives are aligned and people are kind of working um together in a way that is towards the objective you're trying to achieve yeah i want to chime in here because i think like um the nitty-gritty kind of tough part of community health is as your community becomes more diverse how do you negotiate or manage people's different values or different incentives so one of the coolest things about web3 communities is that um there's a much stronger incentive to be an active contributor versus like a passive consumer so i'm not just scrolling through my instagram feed i'm not just um kind of consuming memes as they're served to me i'm really able to take agency and and guide the project in a direction that i want it to go um the other side of that is that you have you might have a community that doesn't have um 100 shared values so some people are really motivated by a technological innovation other people are really motivated by social impact or real world use cases and other people really just might be motivated for financial gain like this is an alternative asset class it's really exciting it's a new type of finance and there's nothing wrong with wanting to invest in that um and so i think like one challenge to keep in mind with community health and vanessa kind of alluded to it is like how do you create a scaffold that can align in different types of incentives to kind of like um an overall common objective or an overall common road map um and i think like uh the health of the community is i love the metaphor of like comparing it to the health of a person so there's some observable things you can see like if you grow really fast or if you're really really tall or if you're really really loud that might indicate that the community is doing very well but it also might just indicate that the community is like on a sugar high and eventually that isn't sustainable and so something else might need to be um kind of evaluated or explored um so yeah i think like the the tools the one thing we haven't talked about um on this question is governance and like how decisions get made as a group and i think um for a lot of communities the fact that governance happens in public and everybody can see it and everybody can weigh in and chime in um that makes it really challenging but also makes the system more resilient as a whole i know we've probably all felt some of the growing pains of governance in our own communities um but uh i don't think that has to be kind of like the wart or the thing that we're ashamed of like oh just because our community disagreed on on a really important point um whether it be minors or a certain feature the fact that there is healthy disagreement is a really good sign of um of of the power of the community in my opinion even though like it gets hashed out on on crypto twitter or or on the headlines in ways that you might not want to see it but that's evolution right it just yeah it's painful messy but but that's how you know it's working exactly yep all right um just very quickly is any kpi that you guys are using within your teams for measuring the health of the community and what's that kpi if there's any very quickly just elena lindsey vanessa ayami simone man kate it's it's that whole like let's use web 2 um tools to measure the future it's it's a little bit like let's try to see if this works um i think the health of the community is definitely the way to do it and i think being able to tap into those underlying measurements not just uh how tall how just linking to what um elena said earlier those very superficial metrics hey we have 10 000 followers on twitter hey we have so many people in telegram what are those people talking about what are the conversations are there um things that you are seeing that people are using your project your product your protocol for that is actually moving the needle in terms of leveling out the playing field in terms of restoring human rights for people the right privacy the right to transact the right to access information without censorship and all of that jazz that's the type of stuff that we should be focusing on and maybe we need to um you know come up with a new set of metrics call them something else web3pis but yeah i love i love that all right just to be mindful of the time um the next question now that you have experienced it how communities evolve so fast and so differently uh what conclusions have you taken from this we know that building communities really really tough are you optimists are you pessimists are we going to have a better world in the in our lifetime and we're going to see uh global human coordination for making the world a better place where where your takes on this i'm feeling really optimistic right now honestly i'm but i'm open for the pessimist perspective because i think that we need to have that too but i'm feeling really optimistic especially this week we had a lot of artists who were pretty successful right out of the gate at foundation and immediately they came back to lend a hand to new artists who are coming into the space to place bids on their pieces to talk to them to educate them give them tips and just seeing that immediately happen um was really encouraging and i think we're just gonna start to see even more of that it's it's redesigning how culture works and um helping helping creators really help each other it's awesome very encouraging yeah i'm forever the optimist it's gonna happen we're good we're on the right track all right yeah i'm also super optimist as you can see with my big smile uh so yeah thank you all for this beautiful conversation and i hope to talk to you very soon thank you thanks thanks everyone