GM!
As most people in the NDC/GWG know, June was my last month in the Core GWG as Lead Social/Growth. As we’ve always been aiming to actively involve the community in what we’ve been doing, I thought it would be good to share my experiences here. So in light of transparency and potential learning points, I’ll use this post to share what I’ve been working on and elaborate on my experiences working in the GWG.
What I’ve worked on
At the start of the year, 6 months ago, @blaze and @beardduke invited me to manage the NDC Twitter account until the end of Q2. I accepted and quickly noticed that we were not ready to go to market or to start heavy promotion throughout the ecosystem. The only place to funnel towards was the Governance Working Group, which was basically unmoderated and the community there was frustrated and toxic. Funneling the NEAR Community to this Telegram group would be a bad and confusing onboarding experience. I proposed to change focus from growing the Twitter account to developing a complete funnel to build a healthy community - while still operating the Twitter account.
For this reason, I’ve started writing and implementing the NDC Community Hub strategy. We needed one place where we could funnel the NEAR community and where they’d be able to find their way deeper into the NDC. The NDC Community Hub is the place where you can learn what the NDC is, but also find out how to contribute, how to request funding, work on bounties, start (contributing to) a Working Group or just have a chat to find out what works for you. The Community Hub does this with welcome messages, recurring messages and topics.
But it also needed a personal touch, that’s why I hired and managed the NDC Moderators in order to turn the community into a friendly, welcoming and well-moderated community. The NDC Moderators are always on stand-by to welcome new community members to the NDC and help them find their way. In order to give the moderators the tools to effectively moderate, Matt wrote the Community Guidelines and I gave the moderators the tools to enforce those and allow the community to turn toxic conversations into constructive feedback. This helped a great deal to filter out the trolls and create a positive-vibing community.
The NDC Moderators also played a key role as Account Managers to the participating communities in the I-AM-HUMAN onboarding competition. I still believe that this Account Management system has the potential to play a key role in NDC’s distribution strategy (looking at you @RussLive215 
).
When the Community Hub was established and sustained a healthy, welcoming and positive community that helped anyone that joined it to find their way deeper into the NDC either with help from the NDC Moderators or the automated sign-posting and topics inside the group, I felt the NDC was ready to start inviting the rest of the NEAR community.
To prepare for the upcoming elections in Q3, we had the KPI to onboard 1,000 people to I-AM-HUMAN. As most of you know by now, I-AM-HUMAN prevents vote manipulation from sybil attacks by making sure an IAH-verified wallet is connected to one person. As the marketing resources at the GWG/NDC were very limited, the NDC was new and had a limited reach, I decided to develop a decentralized campaign that tapped into the existing NEAR communities and engage them to take ownership and responsibility for the future of the NDC and the NEAR ecosystem.
I did this by creating the I-AM-HUMAN onboarding competition in which NEAR communities are being incentivized to onboard their own communities to I-AM-HUMAN. All I needed from the dev side was the ability to create custom referral links that tracked registrations per community and a scoreboard on which the scores of each community were being tracked. With the great help of @janewang and the dev team, these requirements were taken care of very quickly and after a few hiccups, the competition took off really fast and we reached our goal of 1.000 I-AM-HUMANs (now 2.000+) much faster than expected, in about two weeks. The competition is still going on until the end of July and is now being led by Russell.
Resources:
Working in the GWG
I think I can speak for most GWG Core members that working in the GWG has been challenging. There’s several factors that contribute to this, the most important one is probably that we’ve been building a decentralized governance framework, which has never been done like this before. There’s no blueprint on how to build this, no history to learn from. The GWG, which has been establishing the NDC, has been pioneering this field and has been learning from doing (and making mistakes). This made working in the GWG challenging and often frustrating, but at the same time also very exciting and rewarding when things worked out well. I trust the GWG Core team keeps on killing it like we have been and improve where necessary.
I’ll sum up a few challenges here:
-
The marketing team (as far as that existed) did not have real autonomy or their own budget and was too involved in the process of establishing the NDC.
The marketing team was drawn into detailed meetings about bounty processes, the governance framework, voting mechanisms, polling processes, grassroots DAOs, KYC processes, etc. etc. It has definitely been interesting to be involved that much, but it’s been inefficient. The marketing team should be a separate team with clear roles and responsibilities, efficient processes and a structured way for receiving well-defined input from the GWG Core team (and other working groups) to be transformed into great content with a clear distribution strategy. Matt and I presented a budget before Q2 to spin out of the GWG Core team and become more autonomous, but this was declined, probably due to a limited budget. I understand that Sarah is now working on doing something similar so I hope she’ll be able to pull it off and wish her and the team all the best. -
Being underpaid and not receiving rewards on time.
Due to a limited budget, most Core contributors were being underpaid, I was only paid for 15 hours per week, which turned into 20 hours later on, but I was working at least 30 hours per week. I accepted this because I wanted to do this for the ecosystem, but it’s not sustainable in the long run. The same goes for the monthly payouts, there were serious payment delays each month, some people had problems paying their bills because of this. The people involved in this process should realize that there’s lots of people living paycheck to paycheck and they depend on the work they do in this ecosystem. Anyone providing valuable contributions to the ecosystem should be rewarded appropriately and timely, it’s the first prerequisite for a healthy ecosystem. I have not always felt that the people managing this process have shown they really understood the urgency to solve these problems. Even for me as a Core contributor, it wasn’t always clear what caused the delays in payments. Going forward I would suggest making a public statement each time payments are overdue, provide an explanation and solution and a sincere apology.
One more thing regarding payments that should be addressed, is the need for more clear guidelines on how we reward people in this global environment. As a community, we need to figure out how we come to a fair remuneration for all these people living in different countries with different costs of living. Do we look at the average income per country and adjust to that? Or do we look at the work that is done regardless of cost of living or average income? I think there should be a way to calculate a fair reward that feels less arbitrary than what we have been doing and it should probably be voted on by the community as well. -
Politics.
There’s been a great deal of politics between different actors and stakeholders. I’ve tried to stay out of it as much as I could and focus on the task at hand, so I don’t want to get into too many details, but I’ve noticed a few things:
- Conditions for success and lack thereof should be defined beforehand and measures should be taken effectively when those conditions are not being met. The person entrusted with those tasks should be able to function autonomously without constant interference from others. The fact that the success criteria were unclear, lead to a high degree of politics which really distracted people from the work that they actually were here to do. It then becomes easy to get more caught up in endless conversations and power struggles than in actually getting shit done or solving the problem at hand.
- It felt like certain things like the future (or lack thereof) of the GWG were kept vague. It creates a very insecure working environment because it felt like you and your team could get disposed of at any moment. People have been sticking out their neck and should be rewarded for that. I do have to say this improved in my last weeks.
- These things lead to an environment where it was hard to know if you were able to trust the people you were working with.
Besides the chaos and the challenges, working in the GWG has also been very exciting and rewarding and I believe it has enormous potential as long as it keeps iterating and learning.
I would like to give a special shoutout to the NDC Champion Blaze, with which I had often had heated debates and discussions, but in the end, we always managed to come to a good conclusion. I really admire all that he’s done for the GWG/NDC, all the different balls that he’s had to juggle and the insane hours he has been working for the past year. Even around the European noon which was in the middle of the night for him, he was always responsive, I don’t know how he did that. It takes someone special to do what he’s been doing and I take off my hat for that.
Also a big thanks to all the NDC Mods, who have shown tremendous value and dedication and have really been at the heart of this community. You guys were the biggest help in all the different areas you’ve shown your support and dedication. Also beautiful to see how being an NDC Mod can work as a stepping stone for much more, if you show dedication, you’ll be rewarded for it, with Yuen being the prime example. Thank you guys and good luck @rahulgoel007, @Kv9990, @Psalmy, @Aescobar and @Yuen. 
Personally, I’m taking off the rest of this month and figuring out what to work on next. Feel free to hit me up on Telegram anytime @J_Maenen.
