Plenary session: detail
Looking at our similarities
We should always be questioning ourselves - do we have the right people at the table, and how do we make it more diverse? Bunch of conversations already on this - but often we are not aligned on mission\
Meet people where they are. Don’t expect people to come to us; ask if they want us to go to them.\
In conventional businesses, inclusion is easier when there are specific places created for it.. But how would you do that in a decentralised community? I’d want to create spaces really collaboratively, not just according to my vision. But how to NOT just become hostage to the dominant culture of the group?\
There’s a lot of tensions in different DAOs. Communication between silos is vital. Decentralisation might happen progressively in stages - we can see this historically.\
We can feel paralysis in the face of wicked problems. Building legitimacy, we need the support of those who have been there before, and the psychological safety of realising we are in the same boat.\
I value trust. If someone does what they said they will, it means I trust the person I am working with. The success rate on this is quite high in Catalyst - and the trust is not purely transactional or purely about getting paid.\
We need to find new ways to establish trust, that are not face-to-face. How do we get those “watercooler scenarios”, the opportunity to ideate with someone outside your immediate team? \
A small team can bounce off each other so quickly. Trust in larger groups can be perturbed quite easily; we get a kind of stagnation that dissipates the energy, like 2 magnets holding each other in opposition.\
"The best way to learn if you can trust someone is to trust them." ~ Hemingway. Autonomy can mean that you have developed the capacity to handle breach of trust, whether through reversibility, accountability, or prevention. Once you accomplish this, it is much safer (brings risk within scope) to reconnect and cooperate.\
On trust - take dReps for example. Anyone can be a dRep, but how do you gain trust? How do we measure it? How do we respond when it may not reflect what was agreed to?
Agree 100% - I think it's fundamental to have some trust in people. If anyone can be anything, this is hard… I think everyone should yes have a chance, but somehow they need to prove value.\
Agree - trust people who have delivered and committed themselves !\
Assess by proof, or by reputation? What do people really need? \
And how do we go based on legitimacy and openness vs. Just a popularity contest? A large project-holder becomes a dRep, but they focus only on their own vested interest, which may be at the expense of the community. Compare that to someone who may be well involved in governance but since they aren’t a community name (project-holder for example), they get no support.\
What effect does this process have on the community and broader governance discussions?\
Can we use values to make a distinction between a working group and a community? A community has either expressed or unspoken/abstract values - does a working group? A working group might have more explicit values, but it limits the number of people in the group, to avoid too many conflicting viewpoints.\
This is one great method for writing out values: https://vbsd.super.site/4/writing-out-a-value\
Next time, we need a breakout room to introduce new people to what a DAO is. Meanwhile here’s a DAO primer from SNET supervisory council: https://public.singularitynet.io/decentralization_report_1.0.pdf \
Every group has a capacity problem and a sustainability problem. How can these be alleviated? If you put 2 groups together with these values, that takes more capacity…\
How do we address/mitigate the “incentivization” problem for governance work? A lot of governance work is unstructured with no final end point. How do we incentivize participation and sustain it over time? There is no real long-term funding to do this work and continue the conversations, build networks, collaborate. They are often undertaken for free or as an aside.\
Especially, how do we incentivise governance participation to achieve the broad community and inclusive networks that we’ve been talking about? Is it actually by gatekeeping? Not everyone can be on the US Senate - that’s why people like it.\
How do we document? We need to do it in lots of ways.\
What are we missing? What do other people need in order to understand? Do we need a repository of governance info so we’re not leaving people behind?\
We often underestimate the time and effort it takes to develop a common language. Example - in sNET Ambassador programme, and we started to look at different methods of decision making. After a few weeks, we could identify the different methods and recognise what was happening when we made a decision and what methods we were using. Making conscious decisions about what processes you will use is helpful; and knowing in practice how the different methods work. \
Do we need to develop guidance on different governance models?\
If we do - where are we taking info from? Are we asking marginalised groups how they do it, and including their thinking in our guidance?\
A process that might seem simplistic actually involves lots of different decision-making styles working together. How much do we explore, how much do we align, how much do we let people do their own thing? Will it be a feedback mechanism that happens once a quarter, or is it constant?\
Is “iterative feedback mechanisms” a values we share?\
Constantly creating ever-more-complex frameworks and processes and procedures is a very particular way of thinking, and can be really alienating to those who don’t like to work that way.\
Maybe people frame their problem, and use a tool to identify which decision-making method they should use. Can we create that? Drive the different ways of decision making, and inform people that there are different ways?\
Do we need more focus on activities - say “yes, this is the way we’re going to do it” and get on with it, rather than always discussing how we’re going to do it and never doing it. Pragmatism - focus more on what we’re trying to achieve, not how we’re going to achieve it, so people don’t have to second-guess.\
I’d like to see us go a bit slower, and let a wider range of voices speak and say how they make decisions, and listening and learnoing from each other - rather than working like a school textbook and asking everyone to “learn how”, assuming that they don’t know. Asset-based approaches, where we start from what our different groups already know.\
Gimbalabs says “yes, we do it this way here, don’t fuck around with it”. Should we do the same?\
Change disagreement into productive processes. “You do it differently, and I respect you, and your difference is valid - but we don’t let just EVERYONE in”. How do we protect our groups? Paradox of tolerance: If you let everyone in, then you let the nazis in…\
Paradox of tolerance and permissionlessness - there is no permissionlessness really. If you just let anyone say and do what they want, the power is implicit; if you have actual rules, that just makes it explicit. Beware of anyone saying “there is only one way of doing XYZ” - it’s a sign of centralisation at best.\
Discoverabilty - if someone comes in and wants to develop new things - where can they go within a community to do that? How do we avoid dictating or second-guessing what they do, and also make it discoverable?\
I see it in terms of engagement or investment. When someone comes in very aggressively- once their questions are answered, they can become really important members of the community. Complete apathy is on one side, and complete engagement - for love or hate - is on the other. Look beyond ourselves - this person is invested in their idea, so what are we not seeing? We need a wide feedback look to get beyond ourselves.\
Incomprehension can sometimes come off as aggression.\
I need people around me who challenge and question me, but in a productive way. We need to be honest enough with others to do this. I learnt that a lot in Swarm - do not tell people how to govern themselves. We set up all these Town Halls across the world, and brought the basic infrastucture - then we left, and they go on to make their own mission and values, independently. \
We need to know when to move on and leave people to it. Facilitate the set-up, then move on. We need to let ourselves become obsolete. Governance obsolescence is a key of healthy governance, maybe?\
Trying to create something that is several deviations outside the bell curve - going off into really crazy stuff is good!\
There is a difference between defining the "containers", like stating the boundaries of a commons (a meeting, a treasury, a geospatial area), and defining what is in the containers (differences and similarities). Further, if we then try to define the ways we exchange energy, it all becomes very top down.\
Maybe we restrain ourselves from defining anything more than the edges of the commons (and then try to make those edges semi-permeable).\
A group has to feel comfortable to say when there is a problem. This needs trust. Without that, even the best tools don’t help. Groups HAVE TO be able to communicate openly about negative things.\
Is this “Grassroots Governance” a feature of Cardano Voltaire? Debateable. People have different ideas of what "grassroots governance" means, and Voltaire might not go far enough. But Voltaire will have to deal with these governance questions. Can we as a community do that groundwork, since we are already working on them on our own?\
Is “starting from a position of learning” (about others, their views, their differences, similarities etc) a value we want to hold?\
The problem of getting governance work funded. Supporting community growth is a problem, because the entities don’t see the community as valid, they would rather employ a professional than do real co-production with the community. They say they support “community” growth - but they define “community”, and say who’s in/who’s out.\
We [in Catalyst] need the community to be recognised as part of the infrastructure, and paid for. Even after years, the entities don’t care about providing sustainability to them.\
By contrast, sNET really wants to develop community capacity.\
CO-PRODUCTION is what we’re aiming for. The entities do not invest in it. Note that we don’t have to refuse all business relationships with the entities - we should be able to develop co-production with them.\
The “blockchain governance experts” are emerging in a call like this. They’re us. There's a community here that knows more than the “professionals” will ever know if they live to be 100 - and we are learning more all the time.\
Does this speak to learning and education? How do we make our upskilling easy? Gimbalabs PBLs are the easiest thing I have ever done in terms of learning when I wasn't deeply focused on the topic. \
With sNET, there is an issue of visibility in the rest of the ecosystem for the ambassadors program. Is it the same with Catalyst in Cardano? The internal and external membranes need to be more permeable - they need to offer services to people inside and outside the ecosystem. This is where the governance experts are being made. To prove one’s value by showing it to someone else\
Give your community a hard test. (For example, in Catalyst originally there was no community infrastructure like After Town Halls. A few punks called Swarm picked it up; although it was hard, they delivered)\
NDAs (non-disclosure agreements) - none of the sNET Ambassadors have these, which makes it hard - they only get info when the public get it. Without being trusted with advance knowledge, they can’t make content that would actually be useful.\
Why is singularityNET not popular? I came across the Deepfunding challenges, and I said to my community they should apply, but no-one did.. I couldn’t understand why - they all apply for Catalyst!
Compared to Catalyst it’s much more specific on what you can propose, and the funds are smaller, and there's already experts proposing.
And it’s not a blockchain. sNET is an AI marketplace, so it’s a smaller ecosystem, more focused, less funds available.
I think some of it is the Crypto culture seeing SNet just as a coin AGIX
Familiarity? People know how much energy these communities require, especially if Catalyst was their first experience. Funding in Ethereum isn't remotely like this - it is always top-down.\
The sNET Ambassador program not being very visible might be a good thing: it’s not ready to scale, we are working on alignment. But visibility will come over time. There is a lot of content being created. We are in a good place and have time to build these mechanics that we can experiment with.
We need a new hybrid community that combines AI and Blockchain interests - which is currently quite niche. Becoming cross-chain by default takes more time, but may play out very strong along the way.
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