What Makes a Community Great

Transitioning from enthusiastic community member to joining the Keep team

Published in

Keep Network

8 min readOct 19, 2018

I started as an enthusiastic hobbyist when I first joined the Keep community and it has been a dreamlike journey for me to join this amazing team. This team that is tackling one of the most important issues facing blockchain adoption — privacy. I have set out to reflect what drove me to become involved in this project. I went from discovery to engagement to employment and I put together the 5 primary values that drove my interest and involvement in this project and community. My hope is to inspire many more from our community to get engaged and maybe, just maybe, do the same thing.

A Captivating Project or Protocol

The base of any great community is a product or project that gets people excited. A project becomes captivating when the greater community can clearly see there is value in what the team is building and it is something that is undoubtedly going to make a splash in the space that it is entering.

When people are passionate or excited about something, one of the first things they do is tell others. If I’ve just found an awesome project, I am going to share it with my friends and family right away — I want people to enjoy the splendors of my find. When I find people who are just as enthusiastic about something it makes it that much better, we get to share our passion together and then we might even introduce that person to other people we know who are interested as well.

Beyond just Keep, Dfinity is a great example of a project that is creating a ton of buzz. It is an incredibly ambitious project with a solid team behind them and if they can succeed in what they are creating it will have significant implications for not only our space but distributed systems as a whole. It’s hard not to be excited about Dfinity, and the community is rallying around what they are building.

Here at Keep, we are also aiming to build a community where people are passionate and excited about the project and want to share it with others!

Shared Knowledge

One major hurdle for me sharing my enthusiasm with other people is my level of knowledge of the protocol. If I don’t fully understand how it works, it will be hard for me to explain to my friends and peers. And if they can’t understand it they will remain skeptical and un-intrigued. My favorite projects have inspired me to learn more and deepen my understanding, and their teams have encouraged this and given me tools to do so.

I have found that a common problem for the crypto space as a whole is the lack of basic knowledge (although, that basic knowledge is quite advanced in this space). We have sophisticated systems dealing with computer science, cryptography, game theory, and economics. If you couple that with systems that aren’t intuitive to use, many questions and fear arise. Personally, I think there is more than enough information out there, it just isn’t easily consumable and is also hard to digest.

This problem also extends beyond basic knowledge. In my experience people who are new, as well as experienced users, still suffer from anxiety using wallets, sending transactions or interacting with DApps. For example, I was helping my cousin send some Ether, and he refuses to do it without oversight from me. He’s too scared to send transactions because they are confusing and there is a chance he might lose his funds. I’ve even noticed some members of the Keep team describing the anxiety they have when sending transactions. Hopefully sometime in the near future sending a crypto transaction will be as thoughtless as swiping a credit card.

When I first joined Keep I realized the problem they were aiming to solve, but there are many complex components, and it isn’t the easiest to articulate the mechanics behind the network. There is something so satisfying being able to learn something and then teaching or explaining it to someone. It has been said that you don’t honestly know something until you can teach someone. My knowledge of Keep is expanding daily through research, writing, helping onboard new coworkers, and explaining what I do to unsuspecting golf partners.

Here at Keep we are working on helping onboard new members and the biggest problem we face is how to provide information and education that is concise, compact and easy to get through. We have been creating a Decentralized Education Series to help educate community members on some the core building blocks of how the Keep network works and to create a base of shared knowledge.

I am looking forward to better UX/UI and simple knowledge bases, like district0x’s education portal, becoming more available and popular. These are important things to think about to bring new users on and ease their fears about using the systems.

“shallow focus photography of books” by Kimberly Farmer on Unsplash

Responsiveness and Trust

When someone is using the systems for the first time or exploring a new project, they are inevitably going have questions. Sure, users can use Google or YouTube to help, but one of the best ways to learn about something is asking a question directly in the community. There can be a ton of information out there on the project, but we can’t always be sure of its validity.

It is very easy to feel like an outlier in this space and it can be intimidating to ask questions as a newcomer in a community. At Keep, we are actively challenging that status quo — we want to create connectedness and foster a place where people feel comfortable asking questions.

As a Community Manager, I believe the best way to create a bond between team and community is to always be there to respond. This comes from my experience as a community member — I always felt more comfortable and became more engaged when I had the opportunity to interact with the team members directly. It made me feel like a part of the tribe and once I was a part of the tribe I wanted to help newcomers achieve the same thing. This behavior is what eventually led to me getting hired at Keep and is what we are striving to create in our community.

Granted, our core team can’t be awake and online 24 hours a day, but we strive to make sure to respond to everyone that reaches out or has a question. We have also started frequent visits from other team members, so that our community gets the chance to interact with them and ask questions.

When community members feel like they can ask questions and be vulnerable, trust is being created in the community. Trust between the community and team are the cornerstone of a project.

Humility

Admitting to not having all the answers is something that is extremely important, especially in this space. It reminds us that we are human and it’s okay to still be in the process of learning and growing. Everyone in the space is more or less in the same boat, we are navigating uncharted territories creating the tools as we go. Some of those tools work and some of them will fail. Being able to admit you don’t know all the answers is okay, in fact, it’s a breath of fresh air.

Min Ho Kim, founder of ICON spoke about this recently at San Francisco Blockchain Week:

“…We are learning as we go. You don’t have to have all the answers to start something….just get started.” — Min Ho Kim

Humility was the underlying asset that brought me into the Keep community and got me to participate. When I first got involved, Matt and Laura were around to answer every question from the community, from basic to advanced, and they encouraged it by their commitment to respond. They have also taken community suggestions to heart from the beginning, showing a willingness to accept that none of us have all the answers. I find people dedicating their time to helping and listening to others extremely admirable. Since they were taking time to help me, I wanted to reciprocate and help others when they came to the community when they were not around.

This selflessness and humility also carries over to our company culture. When I joined the team all my suggestions were taken seriously and considered. And I have never been made fun of or for asking a simple question or not knowing something.

This is something we want to continue to foster in our community. Come as you are, ask questions, provide honest opinions, and participate. We’re here and excited to help and to learn from you all.

It is also vital for us to remain “right-sized.” There is a lot of ego in this space, and it can feel like competition more than collaboration most of the time. We need to applaud the great work being done by many teams. We are working from similar bases of knowledge and building in what we believe is the best way to achieve our goals — it’s okay for someone to be different. One of our community members brought up that NuCypher is investigating fully homomorphic encryption. Matt was the first to point out that it’s different than our approach for secure multi-party computation and that it brings different tradeoffs to the table, but that he looks forward to seeing it in production.

Fun!

If a community can succeed in the categories mentioned above we have a groundwork for a lively community. We have a place where people are excited about the protocol, they want to increase their knowledge and share it, and there is trust between them and the team. The best communities allow people to express themselves and have fun. We can’t and don’t want to take things too seriously, besides security and the development of the network, and want our community to be a place where you can have fun. Not only online, but we also want people to feel comfortable and excited to come to participate with us at conferences and meetups.

Conversations in our Slack are mainly focused on our tech, that is what we want it to continue to be, but we as a team have our lighter moments and so does the community. We have created Keep Network Jams! A Spotify playlist for anyone to add songs to so we can listen to your favorite tunes as we work. We also had a blast sharing and and testing Nik’s demo app with the community. The app uses a stub contract of Keep’s random beacon and generates random avatars, we had some awesome creations.