The main thing we jammed about was our near-term strategy for moving beyond the current state of our Ecosystem. If we were a traditional software company, this would essentially be our Sales strategy:
Outbound
Do we have a marketing strategy? Should we be actively looking to shill SourceCred and acquire new “users” of SourceCred?
Inbound
What is the process for handling inbound requests? What do we do when someone says “hey SourceCred is great, how do I run this in my community?”
We all agreed that Outbound Marketing should not be a priority at the moment. We should not be actively trying to convince crypto/open source projects to use SourceCred. Why?
We want a small group of projects using us, not a large group. This helps ensure that the few integrations we have are able to use us as successfully as possible. “This project tried using SourceCred and it’s just not usable yet” is a sentiment we’d like to avoid. It is not so trivial right now to go from looking at the SourceCred docs to actually turning it on successfully in a community. There’s a lot of friction still, and we need very motivated members from these external communities to do the work and in many cases integrate deeply with our own SC community. The current state of our 4-project ecosystem fits our Dev and Community bandwidths well. We could probably start to handle more than these 4 projects, but the combination of inbound requests and word of mouth will probably do more than enough to bring these potential new projects our way.
OTOH we have already started to receive Inbound requests. These take the form of DM’s to the community and public requests on the Discord/Discourse. For now, we thought together that the best way of responding to these requests was by sharing the How to Set up SourceCred doc, and inviting them to a community call. SourceCred doesn’t currently have the bandwidth to hold too many projects’ hand as they integrate. Participating in a community call helps us to see if they are value-aligned with us before we spend too many resources in trying to onboard them.
Under what circumstances would we prioritize growing our Ecosystem?
After validating and solidifying our economic model (tithing, metacred etc)
After answering “how do we deal with the tokens we receive from other communities”?
After solidifying our practices around the differences that accrue to a project that tithe 10% back to us versus 5%
After solidifying our model of “keystone members/ambassadors” have infrastructure there to empower SourceCred community members to raise their hands and say “I can help this external community to integrate SourceCred successfully”
I’d personally add to this list a more human and internal element: Good procedure/support/bandwidth for the Ambassador Team and Ecosystems as a whole.
You’ll eventually want a team of well-trained, well-connected Ambassadors (or Keystone Members, lordy, can we choose a term for this?) to be operating without the need for a ton of direction or input so that when the strain of bringing on even MORE User Communities hits, the Branch won’t break under the strain. They’ll already have an effective and smooth system for doing this work that they can lean on when the unexpected or intense happens.
From my perspective, there are some things that need to be super easy and frictionless before Ecosystems could go hog-wild with bringing on new User Communities:
Protocol for evaluating a new User Community and whether it’s a good fit for SC.
Training the wider SC community on how to handle or direct interested User Communities to the Ecosystems Branch (or Community Call).
Onboarding a new User Communities into our technology/culture.
Recruitment of Ambassadors.
Clarity on the role and responsibilities of being an Ambassador.
Training for Ambassadors in hosting cross-community meetings and other relevant skills.
Protocol/system for Ambassadors to choose or be assigned to new User Communities.
Protocols/systems for Ambassadors to log feature-requests with our devs on behalf of their User Communities.
An Ambassador Team Lead to emotionally/logistically support all Ambassadors and report important changes/needs to the Ecosystems Lead.
There’s probably more, but that’s what I can see with my Cultivation Eyes. Happy to talk more about how to create these kinds of things in the future.
Agreed, I see your post as a first crack at the problem I mentioned in my post of solidifying our model of Ambassadors. Definitely down to talk more about this.
Also from here out I’m just gonna say Ambassadors. I have spoken.
a tool for getting the pulse of your community // any article or thoughts on this @LBS ? Do you or anyone else from sourcecred use our instance for a dedicated purpose around community management
[…]
some key ingredients to have, given our state of development & bandwidth, for getting other communities to make a trial :
the community is not decentralized enough
some individuals inside the community are familiar with SourceCred and will act as evangelists
some members have attended or attend one of our community call
[…]
In terms of development, there is always some time (usually longer than expected) to get people on board. Although we have for the next 4 months no availability, it’s actually a good timing for putting seeds in the other communities you are part of : Sharing some update / providing info & feedback from our experiences so far / invites to community call.
Do we know how much time it took us from “the first notification/intro to Sourcecred” to the first day of running sourcecred with the current communities? @s_ben@sandpiper@youngkidwarrior
Interim Ecosystem lead here.