How to grow decentralized communities

https://medium.com/1kxnetwork/how-to-grow-decentralized-communities-1bf1044924f8

it is grassroots community leadership and ownership that enables the long-term success of a token network.

. Without a sense of ownership, you will struggle to attract the necessary contributors to decentralize different areas of protocol operations, such as governance and working groups, for your token network.

We can think of the community building process as a 3-stage funnel that takes a potential member from the community discovery stage to sustained positive-sum participation. In building this funnel, community builders should aim to do the following:

Creating opportunities for people to discover the community/project
Creating ways for people to get involved meaningfully
Creating opportunities for participants to build a sense of ownership

Early on with token networks, a large part of your focus should be generating ‘top of the funnel’ awareness to attract community participants.

This work might include:

Community branding and communications
Content creation and features in media publications
Retroactive token distributions and airdrops
Collaborations and partnerships with other relevant communities
Community events such as hackathons, panels, and community calls
1-on-1 external outreach to potentially relevant potential contributors

Your goal here is to attract primarily intrinsically motivated community members as opposed to purely extrinsic reasons.

Intrinsically motivated network participants are driven by internalized reasons, such as alignment with the project’s ethos, mission, or even other personal or professional goals. Intrinsically motivated community members form strong communities and sustain their participation even when the monetary upside is uncertain.
Extrinsically motivated network participants are often driven by external rewards such as financial gain or attention and often optimize for zero-sum short-term self-gain. Extrinsically motivated community members form the basis for weak communities and drive away other, more intrinsically motivated participants. This is especially common in bull markets, where you’ll notice an influx of extrinsically motivated people in your communication channels driven by token price movements.

Like attracts like, and this applies both ways.

The biggest mistake projects make here is overly focusing their marketing around monetary incentives, such as token liquidity mining programs or price movements, which attracts the attention of mostly extrinsically driven participants.

Instead, focus on creating awareness around what differentiates the community: from how the product was built and designed, ways to participate in the community, the community’s existing contributors, the people behind the project, its mission and values, narratives, memes…

minimum viable contributors

minimum viable participation.

The goal of minimum viable participation is to foster a relationship, from which further trust and engagement can be built.

This process looks like:

1. Community member self-signalling

One way to surface these individuals is to enable people to self signal their intentions.

I want to contribute” or “what we need” threads/channels where community members can signal their willingness to get involved and express how they want to get involved. This could come in the form of bounties to attract open source contributions or creating structured grants programs catering to developers or specialized network contributors such as liquidity providers, stakers, governance participants, etc.

Eg. Bounties are more useful to those who want to contribute but don’t know how/where to start. Bounties scope out the work to be done and minimize the coordination overhead for those that want to jump straight in.

The key is making sure there are call-to-actions for the different community contributors you are aiming to attract.

Examples:

MetaCartel introduce yourself thread
Gitcoin’s Stewards program

2. Relationship building and community member success

Once you’ve identified community members who want to participate meaningfully, you want to better understand their goals and needs.

What brought them to the community in the first place?
What does their journey into crypto look like?
Are they aware of different opportunities to get involved?
Is there anything they are particularly interested in?
Are they working on anything else themselves?

The goal here is to focus on building a relationship first and only then can you better understand where someone can fit in the community and how the community and help them each their own goals. This can happen through ‘new contributor’ community onboarding calls or even 1-on-1 outreach calls to the most actively engaged community members you identify.

3. Directing community members to opportunities to participate

As you have a better sense of a community member’s level of capacity to contribute and preferences, the next step is to continuously share and create opportunities for them to engage and contribute. As each contributor invests more into the community, you need to match those efforts with relevant positive feedback — whether it may be social recognition, monetary token rewards, or even more responsibility.

You want to think of monetary rewards as a means of acknowledging the value that a community member brings to the community as opposed to being the direct incentive to participate.

3. Fostering community ownership

only once community members have grown to become familiar with a community and invested enough of their time and energy, is it possible for them to grow an ownership mentality.

And once you do, much of everything else in between takes care of itself.

Once community members are sufficiently involved with a community, your next goal is to create an environment where community members can safely express their voice and sense of ownership. This may include:

Being given opportunities to influence and participate in key community discussions, decisions, and forums of importance. The key here is making sure community members feel heard and feel empowered to have a real impact on the future direction of the community.
MetaCartel Paladins role
Index Coop full time retention proposal

Being able to foster this sense of ownership is key to retaining key community contributors and participants.

There should always be some level of progression on these levels.

Conclusion

We are still in the early days of understanding how to properly build and leverage the capabilities of decentralized organizations to their fullest extent.

Your community is the future of your decentralized network.

If you hadn’t started, the best time to start is today.

feel free to reach out to ask more questions ~

More about my work at 1kx

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