11 Questions for Blockchain Community Manager, Auryn Macmillan

Auryn leads Community Relations at Colony — (Tools for organizing and incentivizing teams, projects, and communities).

He founded DAOhub and has worked in community, communications, and marketing with several of the most well-known projects in Ethereum.

Before being involved in the cryptocurrency space, Auryn played basketball professionally in Australia and Europe.

1) List five adjectives that describe you

➡️ Enormous

➡️ Inquisitive

➡️ Empathetic

➡️ Pragmatic

➡️ Resourceful

2) Which living person do you most admire?

It’s super cliche, and I’m not 100% sure that they are alive and/or one person, but I would have to say I most admire Satoshi Nakamoto. It takes an incredible amount of discipline (or fear maybe?) to create something as monumental as Bitcoin and then simply vanish.

3) What do you most value in your friends?

There are a few common traits between all of my closest friends:

• Positivity
• Honesty
• Empathy
• Integrity

4) Where would you most like to live?

I’ve had the pleasure of living and working in four countries and eight cities so far, and have travelled to a whole bunch more. In my experience, it is less about where you are and more about the who you surround yourself with.

With that said, I really can’t stand the cold. I live in Boston at the moment and as I’m writing this it is -14℃ outside. Sooooo, I’m not too thrilled to be here right now.

All other things being equal, I think my ideal place to live would be somewhere closer to the equator. Perhaps somewhere in Queensland, Australia (I’m from Melbourne originally), the Caribbean or South East Asia.

5) What is your current state of mind?

This is an odd question, it feels very tied to the particular moment in time that I’m writing.

So with that in mind, my current state of mind is something along the lines of “invigorated”.

I woke up early, at about 5.30am (which is not something I do often), to mess around with some Twitch streaming; my wife got me a green screen for Christmas, so I wanted to give it a try. After getting thoroughly pummeled in some PUBG live for the world to see (no worries, there wasn’t anyone watching), I had a great chat with Bruce from the Ocean Protocol. I learned a lot and it really got me excited about some of the potential use cases for Colony.

All-in-all, a good start to the day.

6) What is your motto?

So I’ve had this Aristotle quote in my email footer for a bunch of years. I even thought about tattooing it to my chest at one point; I was planning to tattoo it inverted so I could read it in the mirror. But then I realized I don’t really look at myself in the mirror all that often, at least not in a context where I could stand there and read the text on my chest. So I decided against it.

Anyway, the quote is:
“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, therefore, as an act, not a habit.” — Aristotle

Later I discovered that this quote is actually better attributed to Will Durant. So my email signature changed to this.

“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, therefore, as an act, not a habit.” — Will Durant (Apparently)

I have been passively in search of a new motto, by that I mean I am happy to replace this one with another should something catch my eye. The latest contender is “Strong Opinions, Weakly Held”. I might try it for a while and see if it sticks.

7) Why are you passionate about your project?

Colony represents a bet that, in the future, organizations will look different; they will be more open, more equitable, and more fluid. Somewhat audaciously, Colony aims to be the seed and substrate for a paradigm shift in how people organize themselves and their efforts; an evolution of the firm.

But more practically, and with much less grandiose claims, Colony is simply tools for organizing and incentivizing teams, projects, and communities.

I love building communities and Colony is a tool that I wish I had already.

So I am excited about Colony because I can see how valuable of a community building tool it can be.

8) Tell us the best story about your community

Colony’s community is in somewhat of a dormant mode right now in anticipation of the upcoming main net launch of the colony network and dapp. So I don’t have much in the way of stories to share.

In lieu of that, let me share a quick story from the DAOhub days.

It’s late April, 2016. A group of the core community are sitting in a slack channel trying to figure out how to deploy the DAOs code. Simultaneously, no one wants to be the one to deploy the code, for fear of legal implications, but everyone wants to be the one to deploy the code, because… well… it would be awesome to be the person that pushed the big red “launch” button on The DAO.

Sollution! Everyone / anyone can deploy the contracts in secret. We’ll come back in 24 hours and take a look at all (most) of the instances who’s bytcode matches and pick the one with the best blockie.

And thus, the quirky little brown blockie, that looks like a mix between an open heart and a space invader, became The DAO that we all loved, hated, and/or were awed and frustrated by.

9) What are three things you find the most challenging about your job?

➡️ Staying in sync with a team split across ~13 countries and ~7 timezones.

➡️ Keeping up to date with the immense, and ever-growing, volume of awesome projects in the space.

➡️ Trying to reconcile web2 UX with web3 security; Universal login FTW!

10) What are three things about your job makes you feel the most fulfilled?

I’m going to list just one, because I think it is at the root of my fulfillment in this role.

Being able to inspire lightbulb or ah ha! moments on a regular basis. Colony is such an interesting idea, but it is one of these weird abstractions that more often than not needs to be grounded in the context of a user’s individual use case. I love the process of exploring someone’s project, connecting the dots, and then all of a sudden their eyes light up and ideas start spewing out as they realize the potential of this product to enhance their vision.

11) What is your biggest accomplishment as a community manager?

Founding and running DAOhub, with the help of an awesome team of community members (now friends).

Connect with Auryn

You can connect with Auryn on Twitter and Telegram @auryn_macmillan

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