The Launch of the CommunityOS

Near Community and nodes
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Hey Community!

These past few months have been exhilarating months of learnings and discoveries. This means we have increased our capacity to add value for our Communities and Projects while making this the place where WE ALL BELONG.

The MarCom Squad team is energised and fully aligned to execution of our mission: create and evolve the space for the emergence of self-reliant and empowered communities, projects and creators.

With this in mind, I would like to introduce the Community OS aimed at
empowering the next generation on-chain Communities.

TLDR: Community OS is the NEAR toolbox to prime organisations for success in the Web3 world. The Community OS is an integrated package that brings NEAR powered tools and principles/practices together to ease the experimentation and adoption of Open Web Applications with purpose and around common goals.

What is Community OS?

The Community OS is a blockchain-native Operating System, integrating the values of our ecosystem__Open Source, Connectedness, Sense of Belonging, Autonomy, and Purpose_ in a way that facilitates the adoption of Web3 apps with relevant and real use case application in the context of Communities. The OS can be modified and distributed by anyone around the world and it is meant to provide value to any type of Community. It can evolve to be many different versions, and represents a category of the “under construction” set of Community - Ecosystem Resources NEAR is developing.

Let’s start with the 3 Ps!

People

As a starting point, Community OS cannot exist without the people and the sub-groups of the Ecosystem they belong to.

COS will evolve to become a self service tool with the contribution from its experienced users. We will jump start this effort by covering and compiling all the frequently asked questions. At the same time, we’re connecting with Communities to make our expertise available via 1:1 meetings and office hours. We will also be working to connect with the efforts the new NEAR People Team are undertaking.

Platforms

Gitbook will be the first home of Community OS, and will house the WIKI the Community Team is jump-starting. This platform offers the practices, principles that communities members need to start experimenting. Other platforms such as SputnikDAO are also key components of the COS tooling. The live v1 UI allows for teams to conduct governance with counsel voting and incentivize bounties from a treasury. SputnikDAO v2 smart contract is live and allows for arbitrary function calls, giving DAOs unlimited flexibility. It’s a killer app especially when combined with NEAR transaction speed and cost. Live stats and data, and their insights, can be gleaned already from NEAR Explorer Stats and SputnikDAO Stats,

Look for social tokens, NFTs, badges, and other platforms and on-chain tools the NEAR Community Team will be prototyping on behalf of the Community so this knowledge and access can be built into the COS.

Practice

In the COS wiki, we will be detailing how our tested platforms can be used for efficient processes and overall community best practices. Find guides for tasks common to any Decentralized Autonomous Organization with resources covering how-to guides, playbooks templates, onboarding materials, etc. to easily navigate the world of NEAR Community (ex. running events, pitch decks, social tokens, giveaways, onboarding, education, outreach, and governance).

Finally, keep an eye on the Community OS category. We will be using the Forum to share the latest updates and progress on everything related to the adoption of the Community OS.

Feel free to reply with your thoughts and comments, and what you would like to see captured in the Community OS resources and templates. If you feel like contacting our team directly, just tag us @mecsbecs and @starpause are the main point of contact for Community OS.

Thanks for being for us this journey with us!

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Thanks for the post @Grace to start the conversation!

I think the big missing piece is outlining what is the Community OS is trying to achieve.
For example 1 year from now, what would this look like?

If Community OS is only a toolbox, what is this toolbox looks like (toolbox usually is just some set of software and best practices how to use it). If this is actually a product - what is the vision and goals of this product?

Generally “Operating System” is not very well defined term outside of the system that powers hardware and serves as middleware for developers to build applications. If I extend the analogy here, I can only see Community OS as a toolbox for developers to build other applications on top of the NEAR for communities. Reading the post above, it seems like it’s not a correct definition.

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Agree with Illia that it’s a great effort and assembles a lot of the pieces of what makes the community toolkit powerful. At the same time, it’s still not clear what in plain English is being delivered.

What is the succinct goal of this? What metric or target represents what success looks like for this project? (Is it how many communities or members or communities in the world are “on chain” because of it?)

Who specifically will be the first 50 adopters of it? (Eg is it web 2 focused communities like a meet up group that runs events in San Francisco around Javascriot frameworks with 1000 people or is it for the Instagram fans of some celebrity or a web 3 friendly community which tries to find lucrative NFT markets to participate in?)

Basically, what’s the classic 2 sentence elevator pitch that describes what it is to a random person and why it’s valuable?

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Thank you for the feedback, it is a process and we have just gotten started. We are working towards better defining the OS concept as CommunityOS means something different for everyone; reconciling those differences is still work in process.

The vision, however, is clear for us. We aim to empower web2 communities with technologies that facilitate their autonomy, mastery and purpose. This means communities can self-organize, develop the means to earn a living and achieve their mission with the support of web 3 tools.

To put it simply, these communities would be embracing web3 technologies in an non- threatening way and integrating real use cases to create value and get rewarded for it. For example: DAOs for treasury management, social tokens for reputation and rewards, NFTs for incentives programs that unlock member’s benefits
 etc.

The Community team is currently ‘dogfooding’ this process and creating playbooks for guidance towards achieving purpose with the support of web3 technologies. We are creating the environment for the new generation of Communities to take off.

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I just posted something that hopefully ties the bigger picture together for all these information sources: Information Journeys and Builder Pathways: How the Website, Wiki, Docs, Open Web Atlas and Community OS fit together

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