Hello! I’m Matt and I look after various bits around how the GWG and NDC communicates with the world. My background: I’ve been a journalist on and off for 20 years, I was the co-founder of Decrypt and the editorial director at the NEAR Foundation. I left the NF to start NEAR studio, a creative agency specialising in the NEAR ecosystem.
We’ve been getting a ton of feedback as to how things are going, and we wanted to take the chance to replay some of it and say, “we get it” and maybe, just maybe, provide a bit more clarity wherever we can.
We’ll be running these every Friday to hopefully try to share a bit more on what’s happening on this side of the fence. If we can do better, or miss something, or just want to talk, come one, come all.
What we heard this week
You’re frustrated: We’ve heard this from all corners this week and we get you. We’ve been amazed by the desire to start projects, initiatives and DAOs to take the NDC forward. But we’re just not there yet to unleash all of you to start creating.
Decentralized governance is a hard problem to solve and we all want it to be working and doing the thing it’s promising to do. If you’ve been in the space for any period of time you’ll have seen what happens to projects when the rules aren’t robust enough to stop bad actors taking over. This is the last thing we want. And, though you don’t know us yet, it’s not who we are.
But we know we can and should do more to show the status of things, how far they are away and when they will be ready.
You don’t know what’s going on: totally get that. We’ve been working on the best ways to get the word out to you, and really what that word should even be because governance on NEAR does not exist. But we’re listening.
We’e trying to understand the conflicts. We’re asking for input. We’re up late creating and drafting and posting for you. We hear that even when we share it’s a lot to take in. We agree. This is a messy process. Some things are taking way longer than we’d like. Other things turn out to be dead ends, and many things we’re still trying to work out the best way of sharing.
We are swarming now, generating ideas together, and that’s what we see our role as – not dictators, but listeners – taking the temperature constantly to understand the layers of this ecosystem – which is really exciting, complex and needed. So, we’re here to listen for you, without agenda and without a need to control the outcome.
What’s the incentive for all of us taking part in this? A great question that has many answers. Governance isn’t cool, or sexy, but the outcome of it can allow all that jazzy stuff. Being involved in shaping this means you get a say on what it goes on to be. But mainly, for me, and for those in the current GWG we want to be of service to this amazing thing of making self-governance work for everyone. It’s not about the money. We are, none us, paid at IRL scale to work on this and we don’t have a plan for or a need for this to be our full time gig. All on the GWG get paid for completed work on the bounty system (though we have created a budget because we know a plan is needed).
Now, for all of you, we know that nobody should work for free. We recognise that. However, the budget is extremely tight for getting this first phase live. Everyone is working on a bounty basis, and no one (again, none of us) is on a salary for this work.
That said, there is now a process for anyone to start up a workgroup to help solve some of the challenges of getting a decentralized project off the ground.
Who is this cabal of collaborators running the GWG and how did they get their jobs? Totally see that. Crypto is bad for obscuring who runs things and how they ended up being in charge.
We want to change that. The GWG’s goal is ultimately, to disappear once all the building blocks are in place and good enough to support all the amazing work that will come out of it.
The people in the GWG are, essentially, those who put their hand up, and wanted to take a crack at solving a really hard problem: how to create a decentralized community with enough rules to keep everyone honest, but enough freedom and flexibility to be able to adapt and change with time.
We are all putting up personal statements in the coming days on the Forum about ourselves, our work, our backgrounds so you get a deeper sense of us. And I mean not “us” as a cabal, but people from the community who came to be of service and are available to you for the growth of the NDC movement.
What we ask
It would really help is your engagement. We’re learning as we go, and we want to create something empowering for everyone. We will get things wrong, and we will make mistakes, but we believe, ultimately we’ll get there.
