The NEAR Guilds Program started as an idea to help community contributors connect and collaborate by way of incentivizing meetup groups within the NEAR community and has over the months evolved into one of the most impactful Guilds Programs in Web-3 today. The NEAR ecosystem has grown by leaps and bounds and so has our Guilds Program - adding tremendous strength to our community infrastructure and playing a pivotal role in giving shape to a grand vision to our collective efforts. Guilds have been some of the biggest drivers of visibility for the community and have been successful in getting a diversity of voices advocating for them, apart from also being an entry point for some of the most high impact community members over time. It is now time to think collectively about Guilds 2.0 as we build a community infrastructure for the future!
Why change the existing structure? We need to reduce and eventually remove NEAR Foundation’s hands-on involvement in the Guilds program by transferring the governance of the program to the community and address the following challenges or pain points we have encountered over the months:
- With more than 130 Guilds in our ecosystem, it would be unjustifiable if we don’t have a scalable program to complement this growth of interest in contribution.
- While we have seen several incredible Guilds naturally being born from the program, the actual impact of guilds in general has been unclear. Many Service Guilds had a low standard of delivery, hence lost their reputation and faded away as projects looked for support.
- The payments to guilds created community drama on multiple occasions because it was either too transparent or too opaque and experiments along the way created some coin-operated behaviours that weren’t culturally aligned.
- We have seen some success as several Guilds embraced on-chain governance but on the macro level, we have not been able to achieve the desired outcome from efforts towards on-chain participation.
- Guilds never became self-sufficient enough to stand on their own and continue to rely on operationally-intensive handouts from the NEAR Foundation to continue their day-to-day operations, which has kept the Foundation involved in community-driven programs.
- Onboarding for Guild leaders has been highly labour-intensive to get people confident with whatever they want to do. On the other side, Guild leaders too have to communicate actively for it to be effective, including finding the right people to even talk to about getting started.
- With no organised structure in place in terms of collective governance, funding, reporting - the experience is clunky for Guild leaders.
- Lots of expectation and pressure on Guild leaders with regards to reporting, which leads to some being seen as favourites (and they probably actually become favourites over time).
- Need to build a transparent, efficient pipeline for funding to enable any and all Guilds to access Community funds as long as they participate in governance.
- Need to iterate on better coordination experiments in the ecosystem as we continue to grow at a rapid pace.
What next? The proposed restructuring exercise aims to gradually remove the NEAR Foundation from hands-on involvement in Guilds program by facilitating the gradual transfer of governance of the program to the community - essentially transitioning from a “participatory support” role to “collaborative facilitation” vis-à-vis various community-oriented initiatives. Based on feedback by ecosystem stakeholders on many important forum discussions over the last few months, which clearly indicate a need to overhaul certain components of the community machinery, we are consolidating an ambitious plan that will help us build a launchpad for self-sustaining Guilds.
Roll-out of the new program: The new Guilds structure will be rolled out in phases to facilitate smooth transition from the existing structure for all the stakeholders involved by giving sufficient time for feedback, discussion and experimentation. We would like to facilitate a Governance Pilot as we shift gears by involving community members to drive the initiative forward. The roll-out will include the following steps:
- [This post!] Communicating the need for change
- [<48 hours] Introduction of an alpha proposal and call for community feedback
- [<1 week] Putting together a Wiki for the alpha proposal
- [>1 week] Running a Governance Pilot
If he was told to do so (considering he doesn’t have enoguh English) he would 99% give up and migrate to another protocol where they offer better Local support
