The Community of Communities Hits Prague

3 November 2018

The Community of Communities Telegram group has been strengthening relationships in the blockchain space. We’ve shared experiences, tips and more. But one cannot deny that, even though we work towards a decentralized, globalized, and frontier-less future, face to face meetings are very much needed. So we decided to take action.

On the last night of DevCon4, we transformed our community Telegram into a flesh and bone experience. Community managers, communications strategists, developer relations experts and growth and user acquisition people from a wide variety of Ethereum projects met to discuss community issues and to reinforce the community we’ve been working hard to build.

The meetup, sponsored by OmniSparx and Co-Matter, extended the spirit of the channel. Our goal is collaboration and decentralization — “how can we work together to help one another”.

Robbie Bent, who helped to start the channel less than a year ago, kicked off the event talking about the channel and the 3 goals going forward:

1. Community Management
2. Developer Relations
3. User Acquisition and Growth

During the planning phase of the meetup, we made an open call for speakers within the community, and found two very attractive proposals, which represented the values of decentralizaton and community growth.

John Light from Aragon spoke first about protecting your project from being de-platformed (when a platform you use to build and maintain a relationship with your audience removes your access to the platform) or how to be decentralized without losing all of your friends. This can happen a lot, as we have been seeing. Mailchimp stopped accepting crypto e-mail marketing. We know Medium and Twitter have been shutting down accounts without informed reasons. And the list goes on.

So John, who has been following all these censorship attempts, shared his tips and tricks:

• Build your email list
• Self-host your community platform
• Post on your own site, then syndicate elsewhere (POSSE h/t Indieweb)

View the presentation here.

Andreas Wallendahl from Kauri, Consensys, spoke on the interviews he has done with community members on how they are managing Developer Relations (DevRel). Even though the notion of DevRel is still very much tied to Web 2.0, we are working towards strengthening this front on our decentralized Web.

Andreas had the following conclusions:

• Differentiate communications and engagement based on user group type
• Let’s collaborate on community play books and OpenSource design improvements so the whole ecosystem can move forward
• We can learn a lot from web2.0 and opensource communities to make web3.0 dev rel more effective
• DevRel help devs contribute to projects and the ecosystem at large

View the presentation here.

Everyone was entertained at the meetup by rapper InverseK. You can view his videos here and here.

We ended the meetup with a discussion on how we can move the community forward and support one another. We are moving to run a number of near-term experiments to improve the value that the Community of Communities provides to its members.

1. We will be running bi-weekly “lean coffees” — where experts from our community present on interesting topics on a google hangout with a Q&A period. The sessions will be recorded and shared on the telegram channel.
2. If you’d like to propose a topic for a lean coffee — please reach out to @judygordon
3. Interviews are currently being completed with group members on community management, developer relations/onboarding, growth and user acquisition — the transcripts will be shared once complete. If you are interested in participating in the interviews, please reach out to @judygordon or @awallendahl on Telegram.
4. Some teams are working on Wiki / Discourse to save relevant information. We will add these links to an internal google doc
5. GATE — To increase communication and help all of us help one another, we are starting an exercise called GATE:

Give — Things we would like to give to the community

Ask — Things we need

Thanks — Shout outs to members of the community who have helped

Experiments — What I’d like to experiment with.

Fill out the Google sheet here to participate.

In case you weren’t able to come, worry not! We’re just getting started. We will host new meetups in different locations and grow our community. We are also gathering information towards great resources to help newcomers and push user on-boarding in a holistic but informed manner. We’re headed to mass adoption, but this will only happen if we work together.

The Prague meet-up was organized by Judy Gordon, Anna Leknova, MP Fernandez, Andreas Wallendahl and Robbie Bent. We are planning on organizing another one for ETH Denver. If you are interested in helping, let us know.

About the Sponsors

OmniSparx — Crypto is powerful — but it won’t be revolutionary until we all work together. Trusted co-creation for crypto communities, at last. Omnisparx. Join our telegram channel to follow discussions on community management in blockchain and crypto and follow us on Twitter.

co-matter — co-matter connects, educates and invests in community leaders around the globe. Our mission is to help people participate, share and create value together. We do so through our meetups, podcast, summit and annual research report. Meet us in Berlin and Copenhagen and say hi at hello@co-matter.com.”