organizational organics

I started writing a response in a Discord channel thread to a few members in an up and coming NFT project. There has been a lot of activity in the past couple of weeks in this server. The founders opened the project for whitelisting and thousands of people took interest. It is an aspiring DAO with an ongoing application and voting process for people to join. After about a week and a half, there are now 1000 members. The project membership has grown incredibly fast in a very short period. The whitelist is now officially closed.

It originally started on a smaller scale with an experienced, agile team comprising successful engineers, project managers and designers. It’s blossoming with several new members excitedly stepping into different roles as contributors or potential project leads. A little community is forming. There are small pockets of anticipation, worry, and uncertainty. Conversely there is also shared excitement and passion that is felt most poignantly at the beginning of any project.

“well, now what? What are we doing? How do we move forward? How to keep up momentum?”

It is currently the middle of December and many of us are wrapping up the year with external project deadlines and getting ready for the holidays. Some of us are feeling seasonal sadness with all of the nostalgia, tenderness, pressure that this time of year entails. Some in anticipation of the New Year are enthusiastically preparing fresh lists and tasks to start for the upcoming quarter.

Activity fluctuates.

Sometimes chats go fast, sometimes they slow down.

With tenderness, I’d like to remind you (and myself) that it’s okay to feel excited or anxious about something you deeply care about. This energy is precious and a sign that as a new project coalesces and scales up, that you’re committing to its growth. It can feel prickly and difficult to know what to do with that energy, especially when communication can be all over the place at times due to us being literal world hours apart. If anything, that is totally normal!

And for folks that may take more time joining a conversation or to feel confident in taking space to start a new one: it is a valid experience to need time to process new information. Collaboration is beautiful because it’s innately based in variance of skills and divergent thinking. Everyone shows up with different life experiences that can shape an organization. A healthy group dynamic makes space for different forms of communication to occur at their own pace. It is fundamental for a project’s longevity.

Not everyone is verbal and nor should anyone feel obligated or pressured to take part in conversations that make them feel anxious or unheard. We are (mostly) organizing ourselves around a general principle: that we want to partake in either the creation, holding, or observation of a new NFT made by an experimental DAO. This is pointedly different from a traditional workplace or startup. There isn’t any salary or certainty of success.

Usually product development or the beginning stages of a start up exist in tandem to the market’s growth rate. This can be simultaneously uplifting and stressful to team members. The sense of urgency proliferates from blurred boundaries created by incentivizing holding initial shares of a potential company or an imagined position of power that would come from being an early player. This is toxic startup culture at it’s finest. We start to see varying degrees of competition within our field: we need to meet this deadline for this competition in order for our profit margins to be fulfilled to scale up for this next round of funding, if we just get it out before them we will be a forefront for the industry, blah blah blah. You know how this goes, it is demanding. It is intense and addictive — we become accustomed to nonstop stimulus. Most of us in public education have been taught to be employees. We feel that in order to be worthy or valid we have to be as productive as possible in the shortest amount of time.

This leads to burn out. I say this because I know. Failures occurred due to pushing too hard and too fast when my colleagues needed more time to calibrate. Or sometimes it was the other way around. We were out of sync. It bred mutual insecurity and shame: they felt inadequate or burdened by my intensity, and I felt frustrated with their speed. We originally joined forces around a shared vision, but with mismanagement of skills and learning styles we gradually lost interest. In the start up world, they call this lost momentum, but I find this kind of language can lead to the accelerationist’s dilemma.

It is critical for any volunteer based project to not only encourage, but advocate for their members’ (both new and old) well being. This is not a platitude or some idealistic wishful thinking. People are more likely to want to do something when they are given the space to find their groove, their tempo, their momentum in whatever specific niche they most enjoy doing. Specifically this NFT project has the potential to greatly differ from others in the market. It is a creative process, wherein we all the chance to play different roles. This group dynamic is what initially creates value in the first place. It is not simply an investment decision.

Benjamin succinctly noted, “I feel like these things kind of just happen organically.” Reading that felt cozy and it reminded me of a time that feels long gone. I was dipping my toes into mechatronics and feeling overwhelmed by how much there was to do and how much I needed to learn. It is during that vulnerable time I learned humility. It was a lesson I was only able to learn with the help of my late mentor and the network he introduced me to.

Dale was a highly competent engineer that was fiercely adamant about the right to learning no matter what background a person has. It was his life mission. After decades of working professionally, in his retirement years he tirelessly built one of the largest makerspaces in the US from solely donations. Here, Dale took me under his wing. He had a captivating and huge energy. He was the first person to take me seriously and was the only one that showed me patience when no one else did. I will never forget that I was profusely sweating and shaking outside before entering the building.
“I saw you guys let people volunteer for trade hours?”
“That we do! When would you want to start?”
“Now?”
“That’s what I like to hear, well let me show you where our shopvac is for the carpentry area.”
He didn’t judge me for how I looked or the fact I was a drop out. He did not coddle me, but he didn’t shame me for being slow. I constantly frustrated my professors for being too slow in my electronics and systems engineering classes. It took several tries before a concept would stick. I would go to the makerspace after school and work through the problems with breadboards.

I wanted to give back to the makerspace because it gave me the chance to believe in myself and my ability to learn. I had a lot of ideas of what I wanted to do and well, I wanted to do them all. I was impatient and frustrated with my inexperience. Outside of the makerspace, and school, I was volunteering at a food bank. Sometimes I worked on the chain doing packaging of bags, other times I unpacked pallets and kept the line going. Other times I was in the organic garden where I found myself shoveling mounds of compost for worms and in the next moment knee deep bird shit cleaning out coops. One day a thought creeped into my head that screamed, “I WANT TO MAKE A GARDEN IN THE BACKYARD!”

Dale was able to break down my big ideas into more doable parts. He introduced me to his life partner (in crime and mischief) who was equally as strong willed, determined, and innovative. She is a master gardener and had 40 years of experience in organic permaculture and no till methods. They cultivated arid desert land to produce high quality organic potted herbs, vegetable plants, succulents and flora. They’d go sell at the local farmer’s market each week.

When I feel the impulse to go fast, or to question momentum, I imagine the process of creating a garden. Maybe a better analogy would be for us to think of farms, since they are affiliated with a growing period that produces results and products.

At first there’s a lot of preparation done to make sure the soil is good. If it isn’t, what needs to be done? Does it need to be cleared of weeds? Do we need to revitalize the soil? Is the soil so bad that we need to build a growbox? Are we in a climate where it’s hard to grow certain produce and we are willing to build a greenhouse? Each plot chosen has different parameters: size, location in relationship to the sun, and seasonal climate. This influences what is possible to grow.

There’s the gathering of those seeds you would like to grow, with consideration of the season and timeframe of your grow period. Each seed needs to be taken care of in little seed starters. Some never germinate, some have multiple sprouts popping off. You never know really from just looking at a bag of seeds. To plot them takes some patience and oversight. Some plants need shade, some direct sun. Once we know where we can put which, we then have lots of intensity once again in our little farm: we dig and plot and add some more top soil/protective coverings. If we are so inclined we may even in parallel try to pipe in a cool hydro system for automated watering.

In that time, there are moments where you may help it grow with wooden sticks if the stem needs structure. There are moments where you are so excited and can’t wait! Sometimes problems occur on the farm: there are either animals eating your crop, or there is a problem with weeds overpopulating your plot and siphoning water, maybe there’s a drought, maybe there’s a freak night freeze that you didn’t expect, or a heatwave that kills your fragile seedlings before they have a chance to progress.

Sometimes you’re growing potatoes and even if you really want to know how the tuber is doing, you can’t really. It’s best not to interrupt the process. It is a gentle process.

Sometimes you’re specifically growing sprouts and they are in need of consistent attention in order to harvest at the right time for market.

Some plants take months to yield a crop from seedling and some fruit very quickly.

Sure, there are bioengineers that crossbreed different plants in order for them to have a faster yield time or to make them more durable. Generally speaking, though: you cannot force the plant to grow any faster than it can. You can only provide it the best possible environment to do so, and even then: there are always variables which influence it’s life.

So yes, in response to the Discord chat, I’d like to iterate that what makes this group different and interesting to many of us in comparison to other NFT projects is the very dynamic that makes forming a DAO way more complex. But that can be very fun. We cannot force a community; it doesn’t arise out of nothingness. Connection takes time.

What will take root, will. Lets nurture trust, camraderie and fun — who knows what next season will bring!