11 Questions for Blockchain Community Manager, Ziggy Zeidan
Ziggy Zeidan is a Community Manager for POA Network — POA makes products for people who believe that the Ethereum protocol must be cheap, fast, and scalable and are focusing on bringing the best developer experience for blockchain professionals. He has a background in front-end development and has worked in various tech companies before discovering the exciting world of cryptocurrency!
1) List five adjectives that describe you
➡️ Outgoing
➡️ Pragmatic
➡️ Curious
➡️ Empathetic
➡️ Driven
2) Which living person do you most admire?
I don’t think there is JUST one person. Currently, in my home country of Sudan, a lot of people are fighting for the freedom of speech and press and are getting shot down and killed by the tens every day. I genuinely admire every single of them going out there everyday with their brevity and courage they have in fighting for what we all believe in.
I take all the freedom we have over here for granted, so whenever I hear of news about the Sudanese people, I get a sense of gratefulness of my situation and where I currently am.
3) What do you most value in your friends?
For me, the most important qualities in friends are honesty, self-awareness, and the ability to not take yourself too seriously!
4) Where would you most like to live?
I grew up in Ireland and moved to Toronto a couple of years ago, and while I love it here, I do get the urge to live in another place that’s a tad bit warmer (currently its -10 Degrees as I am writing this). I’d love to live in Berlin for a period of time. The city has so much to offer, and being in this industry I have made a lot of friends living there who I’d like to be closer in proximity to.
5) What is your current state of mind?
Excited and curious. I been working with Blockchain in the industry for about two years now, and I am still as inquisitive about it as I was when I started. I find myself always asking questions about the latest innovations or technologies and to this day, I get very excited when something new is happening. The latest example is the use of xDai and Burner Wallet in Denver and seeing how much everyone loved using it.
6) What is your motto?
“When you’re finished changing, you’re finished”. I always liked that specific quote because I believe that in modern times, and especially in the industry I am in, we are forced to adapt constantly especially with the speed that new information becomes available. For someone like me, my curious nature relishes in that environment where I am constantly changing and learning something new.
7) Why are you passionate about your project?
For POA, I am proud to be part of a team that is constantly making strides and constantly shipping products. My passion in POA stems from the way that no two days are the same, due to the various products we have and the various ways our platform is being used. One day we are analyzing stats on the Bancor and POA Kenya local community project, and the next day deploying a new sidechain for a specific use case or integrating a new network to BlockScout. It is fantastic and makes every day that I work here exciting.
Recently, my passion has been elevated even further after seeing the reaction to xDai from the community and seeing how we are breaking down various barriers when it comes crypto adoption.
8) Tell us the best story about your community
The POA community are fantastic, and they love and are appreciative of our products. Often, enthusiastic members like to try and have fun with POA. An example is “Proof of Pizza” which one of POA’s validators decided to recreate the famous pizza story of Bitcoin where two complete strangers, separated by an entire continent were able to communicate, coordinate, and get work accomplished (namely feeding the validator, Jeff).
Why is this interesting? Staking of Identity is one of the core responsibilities of validators and one aspect of the project that I suspect many are not fully aware of the implications so having Jeff take part in that experiment and having the community take part showed the community how POA Network’s identity-at-stake model worked in the real world.
9) What are three things you find the most challenging about your job?
➡️ Never turning off
➡️ Engaging community constantly
➡️ Trolls
10) What are three things about your job makes you feel the most fulfilled?
I love seeing other community members help out. I found that since the bear market has started, a lot of communities in different projects have become toxic and sour, including members of our community. It’s great however when you see other community members ask and talk about the project and the technical details.
11) What is your biggest accomplishment as a community manager?
It’s hard for me to answer that question, as a lot the things that were accomplished in the POA community was done in tandem with other team members including the tech lead Igor Barinov. I think our greatest accomplishment, which stemmed from an idea he had, is moving our community from mostly chatting in Telegram, to having meaningful discussions and conversations in our Discourse based forum.
This was a big change but the results are starting to really speak for themselves. The quality of conversations that the community is having in the forum now is much higher and better, with other projects team members like Uniswap and MakerDAO also joining in. We are hoping that by doing this, the community will grow not just in members quantity but also in quality.
Connect with Ziggy
You can connect with Ziggy on Twitter at @ziggydakid.
Connect with OmniSparx
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