Community Etiquette

[illia]

Over past few days we have seen a flame war on this forum and across few channels. I’m deeply sadden by what have happened and would like to remind everyone what we stand for and how we should be working with each other.

NEAR Ecosystem’s values are:

• Transparency - unless otherwise limited by law, contract or morality, all the decisions and work should be open for the community to see and participate in.
• Growth mindset - we are continually learning, thriving on challenge, see failure as a way to learn and improve (not an evidence of lack of ability)
• Pragmatism - instead of focusing on the ideal solution, focus on solutions that drive value for ecosystem stakeholders
• Ecosystem first - regardless of where we each officially work, everything we do should put the ecosystem ahead of ourselves or a particular company. Don’t try to do everything yourself - engage people around you in community and bring new people.
• Ease of Use - we believe that open technologies will only succeed if they are easy to adopt and use.

Which translates into some relevant to current situation ideas:

• Be positive and welcoming to everyone in ecosystem. Not everyone will be, but you should project these values and attract more people who are positive.
• Never escalate conflict - conflict is not a growing mindset, conflict only appears when you think that everything that happen is fixed and nothing can be changed.
• Don’t be defensive. Don’t push back. It doesn’t show growth mindset.
• If you do see conflict or people being defensive - de-escalate it. Suggest ways how people can communicate better and grow together. Improve the mood in the room, don’t bring gloom.
• Trolling and attacking individual people is not the right way to maintain the conversation. The trolling, attacks or things that don’t make any sense don’t warrant a response - be pragmatic. See if there are real concerns and address them.
• Asking for more transparency is totally normal, as it pushes for better processes and accountability. This is why we are doing NEAR Ecosystem Treasury DAO. This is why we are doing many of the other DAO initiatives.
• It’s also totally fine to admit that the current process is not optimal, that some things are not yet working. Showcasing what results were achieved is important and it’s important to highlight what was learned as well.
• It’s important to be pragmatic and showcase pragmatism to others - sometimes there is no ideal solution but some things just need to be done. Example in point - marketing a global crypto project is a hard problem with no playbook that works. Trying practical things, learning from them, and continue to iterate to improve results.

NEAR stands for iteration!

This really means we never going to be perfect, but we are going to continue improving.
I hope as a community we can learn from this situation and get better.

Conflict situations will continue arise - the more people in the community, the higher the stakes, the more conflicting situations will appear. Remember the values and ideas above, handle it well and let’s build the #FutureIsNear we all want to live.

[Grace]

Thank you for reminding us why we are here. I have learned a great deal about lots of things in the past days. I welcome this opportunity to learn and try new things to improve the way we communicate our work. These moments make us stronger and resilient.

[satojandro]

Thanks for the reminder Ilia. Great source for reflection and growth.

Would you be able to expand on how the community should respond when there are gross violations of the etiquette? What we need right now are appropriate conflict resolution mechanisms.

The cancer that triggered some of the most prominent threads that had very serious defamatory allegations of wrongdoing is now spreading across the forum, sowing conflict and turning newcomers away. Just the most recent example I’ve come across from a recent proposal:

There have been repeated calls to ban some of the worst offending community members. And while the threads may ‘die away’ (discontent and frustration turns inwards) as people ‘do not defend themselves’ and ‘try not to escalate’, the community slowly dies as it becomes a breeding ground for toxicity dominated by rogue players.

I’m already feeling a chilling effect on community from twitter to telegram. Reminders of appropriate etiquette are appropriate and timely, but we need to follow through with action.

[zavodil]

Thank you for this post Illia, which aims to reconcile the community, not support just one opinion. I believe this is the right approach and I highly appreciate the opportunity to work under your leadership.

We are building a global ecosystem, we have grown and live in different environment so it’s clear that we will all have different mindsets and different workflows. Let’s not look for reasons to be offended at each other, let’s focus on our common goals and try to clarify the reasons for any incomprehensible behavior before making final conclusions and public statements. I am confident that we can find ways of proper cooperation between all of us. One way or another, we have no other choice, because we are building a platform for the whole world.

[chronear]

Thank you for your leadership Illia, I hope this settles the debate and all the contributors find more ways to collaborate instead of clashing.

On that note, while I do agree that a certain amount of transparency and debate are necessary to maintain a healthy level of trust among the ecosystem participants but it is also necessary that we don’t let hostility pull the community apart. There should be a proper code of conduct for the Forum and an oversight committee should keep a strict vigil to filter all the trolling, provocations and slander out.

We are in this together

NEAR fam!

[sashahudzilin]

@satojandro

I’m already feeling a chilling effect on community from twitter to telegram. Reminders of appropriate etiquette are appropriate and timely, but we need to follow through with action.

+1 on this, i think it’s important to enforce particular cultural norms in our community.

I want to establish a cultural norm around respecting talented folks who are willing to create something that didn’t exist prior (in case of Shroom Kingdom): we are primarily a talent network and should put our best effort into 1) attracting more projects like Shroom Kingdom to our ecosystem 2) helping projects achieve success over time, as we develop playbooks as we go 3) ensuring that our community is open to new ideas, open to supporting entrepreneurial talent, and open to contributing their time, energy and skills towards ecosystem success

I’ve also provided my five cents on Shroom Kingdom in original proposal thread as well.

[illia]

You are correct.

I suggest we take a 1-notice policy:

• if someone is clearly violating the rules, it gets a notice from community member, linking to this Etiquette post.
• if they continue offensive / destructive behavior - they get banned.

If you are a community member and see someone doing repetitive offense - please DM to the admins of the forum with link to original post + notice + repetitive offense.

I have just posted this in Funding the NEAR Army for July - #19 by illia and post this for @loca555 as well.

[Dacha]

Good morning everyone.

Dear, @illia probably, you got me wrong. Yes, some phrases should be more polite, my bad, sorry for that, but Ozy guys and whole Near marketing team don’t want to be transparent and open for Near community. Every one can easily to find out strong relationships between the marketing team, money flows, guilds and scalpers which pretend to true Near believers. They are established their own marketing club and with closed access for external people.

They are electing “marketing club’s” people everythere:

DAO marketing

Control all major DAO’s, for instance:

communitysquad.sputnikdao.near

KNIGHTSOFGONDOR.sputnikdao.near

Ignoring questions from the community and when I do my little research, because didn’t get any response, they are attacking me by their marketing paid members (from one template):

@satojandro in Ozy’s army, gets +300 NEAR a month;
@Yuppiefab one of Ozy’s army and merchants guild member, gets + 300 NEAR a month;
@Rejinderi one of Ozy’s army member, gets +300 NEAR a month;
@p0k one of Ozy’s army member, gets +300 NEAR a month;
@zangleerb one of Ozy’s army member, gets +300 NEAR a month;
@poddsy one of Ozy’s army member, gets +300 NEAR a month;
@Grace works together with Ozy
@ross works together with Grace and Ozy, etc.

I understand them, dependent people, want to show support to Ozy and save a spot in the club . (I have tons of questions to Ozy’s army and investigating it now). Actually, Ozy prepared his attack on me, because wants to stop my attempts to find out monetary relationships between marketing members, prevent encroachment on their closed club.

Dear, Ilia, I am on 100% independent member, I don’t have any relationships with people from near team, devs, marking, etc. Yes, we can play together in telegram casino just for fun, joined the same groups (En and RU community), but nothing more. I’m not a troll, not a communist as @satojandro said and don’t try to demolish something and other rant worlds which Ozy used in his speech.

I am a true Near fun, spend my own money here and support fantastic people like Sasha, Vlad and other hardworking people. You’re making our future right now.

Have a good day!

Ps: let’s do Russian language as a second official language here

[David_NEAR]

Well put.

There’s a lot left to be done in regards to nurturing the forum to ensure an open, transparent, and safe environment where everyone can thrive and feel empowered to make a positive change in the NEARverse.

It’s still early days, but we’ve started making headway on this.

• Community guidelines have been updated
• All new users who sign up to the Governance Forum will receive this as a DM upon account creation
• Increased vigilance from myself and other mods. This doesn’t just pertain to message content, but to abuse of the systems which are in place (e.g reporting messages which clearly are not spam as spam)

Still plenty of work to be done, and I’d love to see more discussion around this in this thread, for sure.

@illia

I suggest we take a 1-notice policy:

• if someone is clearly violating the rules, it gets a notice from community member, linking to this Etiquette post.
• if they continue offensive / destructive behavior - they get banned.

Agreed. We can get the guidelines updated to reflect this, unless anybody has an alternative in mind?

On a more positive note, the future is looking bright - LFG (let’s flipping go)!

[mecsbecs]

For the part I understand and am involved with as a NEAR Core Team member, please read this post: [GUIDE] Guilds, DAOs, DAO Verticals - what does it all mean?

Thank you for your understanding and patience as we go through these growing pains of establishing a new process.