Delivering Deeply Engaged Communities

How community governance starts with community engagement…
The Growth of Crypto Networks
The great crypto revolution is in full swing and, even though we are going through a little financial correction at the time of writing this, the long-term outlook is fantastic and transformational. Core Layer 1 protocols such as Bitcoin and Ethereum (amongst others) are laying the groundwork for whole economies to be built on top of them. Layer 2 solutions such as Lightning and Plasma are potentially solving the scaling issues. Many other platforms have now gone live and are looking to build the next layer of decentralised apps (“dapps”) on their networks. Everywhere you look there is a new project building the next big thing, with fast-growing communities springing up to support each project.
Governance Starts With Community Engagement
While scaling is one of the biggest problems being tackled right now, governance is an issue which will have a long-term effect on any platform’s likelihood of success. In fact, governance will be the key differentiator going forward. The networks that master governance will dominate in the future. But the tendency has been to jump to the “how” of governance. Will it be on-chain or off-chain? One type of voting or another? The real challenge of governance is not related to how to make decisions, it is around what decisions need to be made? What should the culture be? What principles do the community want to follow? What is the project looking to achieve? In other words, governance starts with community engagement.
Scaling Community Communication
So while we can see a path forward for scaling the networks, how do we scale the communities? As communities grow from hundreds on a mailing list / Bitcointalk / Reddit, to thousands in Telegram / Twitter / Discord, the signal disappears in the noise. When every user has an equal voice, it becomes impossible for the well-informed and the diligent to be heard. Spam, trolling, bots and scams will look to ruin any interesting discussion that arises. Factions blossom, personal attacks take over, misinformation / disinformation becomes the norm and consensus breaks down.
Weak Community Engagement
For crypto networks to survive and thrive as vibrant fully-decentralised communities, these communication issues need to be resolved. Most networks start centralised and look to decentralise over time. The top down communication and governance models that work in the early days will need to evolve to engage with the community. It’s important to start giving the whole community a voice in how to move forward.
Voting is often touted as the solution, but what is the fairest mechanism in a censorship-resistant network? “1 token, 1 vote” gives large early players with large token holdings an unfair advantage and too much power to skew votes, leading to low voter turnout as small players see their vote as worthless. Liquid democracy allows votes to be delegated to the most respected community members, which re-centralises power. Both only serve to reduce engagement.
Due to the limits of current mass communications platforms, communication often feels like it’s one way. Even the most transparent projects tend to focus on monthly reports, blog posts, video calls, transparent accounting etc. Some hold open community discussions, with Ask Me Anything sessions, but again these don’t scale well. Software development is a slow process, so sometimes there is very little to report. Small features might not capture the imagination of the community, while large ones can take many months or years to implement. The result is that the channels set up during funding events, become quiet or, worse still, solely focused on token price / “when moon?” conversations.
Market-Based Community Engagement
For many of the general public, it may seem strange to suggest that markets could be the answer to the problem of community engagement. But for many in the the crypto community, it is not that strange. We’ve long understood that that prediction markets could be a tool to help with governance. They allow the community to bet of future outcomes. Each participating community member providing an opinion has “skin in the game”, as they put their own money at risk. These types of markets are highly engaging. They are also a great way to filter out the noise of uninformed opinions.
Markets like these engage the brain like no other mechanism. By triggering dopamine, serotonin and norepinephrine responses, they combine FOMO, attention, social ranking, rewards, motivation, determination, pleasure and endurance. Markets deliver a state of deep engagement. We believe that channelling these responses in the name of community could be very powerful.
We believe that markets in reputation can lead to accurate measures of community sentiment. As Buffets says: “It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. If you think about that, you’ll do things differently.” These sentiment markets will allow communities to find out what’s important to their members, by giving everyone a voice which is weighted by how well they understand the community. These are markets in psychology, empathy and cultural awareness. They are really powerful tools to govern the commons.
Ethereum has done a fantastic job of engaging the burgeoning developer community. Many competing platforms have looked to follow suit. Dapps must start to engage with users on a whole different scale to create mass adoption. It is now vital that we find mechanisms to engage with new non-technical people coming into crypto. We need to bring them on the journey with us if we are truly looking for mass adoption. Tokens are all about community incentives but if dapps can’t fully engage with the people who bought the token, these projects will lose the momentum they built up in the run up to a token sale or airdrop. For non-crypto start-ups, engaging with their community is an expensive but vital part of growth. It’s no different for crypto projects. Sentiment markets allow projects to put up a bounty to reward the community members who add the most value to the project. They will be the essential tool for community engagement in Web 3.0.
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