Call for Board Nominations

[whoabuddy]

Following up on items discussed in call 17 #61 and call 16 #58, this issue a placeholder for actions related to the Call for Board Nominations on the forum.

• Nominations are still open and can be submitted via Blocksurvey
• Once nominees are contacted and confirmed, that info will be shared with the group
• More research is being done for a community board seat (separate issue #66 )

[hozzjss]

I propose for a bottom up representation to fill this role

[joberding]

I second this proposal and add the idea presented by @herogamer relevant to the creation of a community CAB.

[Hero-Gamer]

Subject: Brainstorm solutions

Greetings all,

Below is a bit of context to the call held yesterday (apology for the long-winded text):

kick-start & revive the conversation regarding Community Representation & Community Board Seat Nomination

• For those who weren't able to attend this meeting, I was throwing some ideas around the topic of Community Representation & Board Nomination, and see which idea might stick or vibe.
• To be honest it was more to try move this conversation forward from being idle for a while (seems to date back to mid-2020, and ever since I joined the Governance Working Group calls this topic has been brought up every meeting but no solution of yet).
• From the discussion I've seen on Github, Discord, and community calls, one of the biggest reasons this "Community Board Seat" fill has been idle for so long, appears to be due to the challenge of finding candidates with the right sets of criteria (such as the right experience, legal responsibility/liability, etc someone could elaborate more on that..), particular with a position as high up and public facing as this, it would be difficult to just pick someone just OK from the community.

My 2 Sats: shoot for Toyota first before shooting for Ferrari

• Each week goes by is each week our well intended thoughts of having our "Stacks community be heard" (on the more officially capacity) missed.
• With no immediate solution to the Community Board Seat in sight, I feel we could try out an in-between step. (Let's build a Toyota first, we don't need to build a Ferrari first. We can take baby steps to get there (I prefer Tesla tho :P )
• i.e. let's have a some representation first whatever form or shape or means or level of influence. Let's prove its usefulness first, let's prove it brings value to Stacks ecosystem in practice, with actual evidences of concrete real examples & actions and achievement and value in Stacks community. We can do all these with still the bigger goal of having a Community Board Seat in mind.

Suggestions to kick things off Extract from SIP-000 "To the greatest extent practical, the SC shall create and foster the development of Consideration Advisory Boards in order make informed decisions on subjects that in which they may not be experts. Any group of users can form an unofficial working group to help provide feedback to SIPs, but the SC shall have the power to recognize such groups formally as a Consideration Advisory Board via at least a two-thirds majority vote." *Consideration Advisory Board = CAB

Some ideas in the order of level of influence: Route 1: Community Advocates/Squad/Committee via Stacks Advocates

• Ievel 1 - Community Advocates: Form an Official Community Advocates/Community Representatives via Stacks Advocates (a clan?) providing general community feedback to Stacks Advocates core team, core team then passes feedback to Stacks Foundation
• Ievel 2 - Community Advocates: Form an Official Community Advocates/Community Representatives via Stacks Advocates providing general community feedback directly to Stacks Foundation team

Route 2: Unofficial Community CAB

• level 1 - Community CAB: Form an Unofficial Community CAB working group - which provides SIP feedback unofficially
• level 2 - Community CAB: Form an Unofficial Community CAB working group - which provides SIP feedback unofficially + providing feedback to Stacks Advocates core team, core team then passes feedback to Stacks Foundation team
• level 3 - Community CAB: Form an Unofficial Community CAB working group - which provides SIP feedback unofficially + providing general community feedback directly to Stacks Foundation team

Route 3: Official Community CAB

• Ievel 1 - Community CAB: Form an Official "Community" CAB - which provides SIP feedback officially
• level 2 - Community CAB: Form an Official "Community" CAB - which provides SIP feedback officially + providing general community feedback directly to Stacks Foundation team

Who might make up the people in such group?

• Potentially have 1 suitable person from each significant area of Stacks sub-communities (advertise to community to gain interests, select a panel of people who have the right value alignment to opt-in join)

• The group would be keeping a pulse on the sentiment of the whole Stacks ecosystem, acting as a liaison between/across/among sub-communities, Hiro, Foundation, Trust Machines, Stacks Ventures or more. Bring valuable feedback the the Foundation, help manage community and communications across the ever growing ecosystem, help us give THEM the power to have their voice heard, needs met, the bottom-up way: 1 x NFT Community 1 x DeFi Community 1 x Developer Community 1 x OGs Community maybe more..

• This group could be an extension of the already existing structure of Stacks Advocates DAO. Bottom up community ethos, value aligned, should fit quite well.

• My current thought is, what name we give it to this group matters a lot less than putting this group to the test, in practice, and find out what the possibilities and learnings from it, then we can rename this group accordingly if need be.

The purpose of this post:

• is not the define what the set up looks like, is to provide a starting point of conversation and action, to get our brain juice going, have some ideas banter.
• to drive to get something set up soon, provide a basic skeleton, to start trialing a setup no matter the level of influence, start to understand where the value add is, and how to evolve from there

Next step:

• I hope people can have a good read first, and we can convene at the Thursday bi-weekly Governance Working Group meeting to hash it out on a call, probably more time efficient.
• Then after the call & we can find some consensus on the next step to take.

What do people think? Please share your ideas the more ideas the better! Let's get the community heard asap in whatever capacity?

Thanks for listening/reading. :)

[Hero-Gamer]

I'd just like to add a bit more to this topic.

• Sleepi and I had a meeting last Friday with Joe Bender at Hiro. It was to about Community Management in general after seeing the message he posted in a Hiro discord channel: https://discord.com/channels/621759717756370964/986979449096519690/986983033229963265

• His comments resonated with the stuff I proposed above. Some extract from Joe: "That's why I thought it would be extremely beneficial if all the community managers in the Stacks space had a Discord Channel to come together and share research, discuss successes & failures, and highlight the importance of a strong community in the blockchain world."

• I was wanting Hiro to have at least have some commitment to supporting end users (average non dev users) when they most needed, e.g. particularly during mempool blow-up, when users are most in need for wallet help, Hiro was not there to help users (for the most part ), which are quite self evidence in Stacks #General channel #Support channel & Megapont discord where most help were needed.

• I wrote a big paragraph to Hiro letting them how much complaints & confusions we've had from users, for the purposing of increasing their awareness, hoping we can get our heads together to have better coordination going forward: https://discord.com/channels/621759717756370964/745197302255321108/992225889381269534

The mental model we could have about this:

• Stacks Foundation has interests in having ecosystem community representative having their voices heard
• Hiro also has interests to leverage the community managers across the ecosystem
• Stacks Foundation + Hiro + a team of "Ecosystem Community Leaders". (Trust Machines?)
• This team can benefit everybody in the ecosystem, the entities, the users, the builders. I can also leverage this team to support some SIP work if I get to be the SIP Resident.

Next step:

• Sleepi and I are arranging a meeting with Joe, Mark, Fara, Kyran (or whoever appropriate from Hiro side) this or next week, continue to push the general community management effort with Joe despite the conversation going on on the Foundation side in this thread.
• I will keep Foundation updated of our progress should you guys think it might be worth to do joint effort in this.

Thx

[Hero-Gamer]

Hi all, a bit of update:

Re Ecosystem Community Leaders/Community Representatives, there isn't been much movement mainly due to:

1. Unable to structure a time effectively method that doesn't duplicate efforts -
2. I've been busy doing working on other things like SIP Resident

What now?

1. I recommend if someone who is interested picks this up and lead it. So we can continue finding ways to integrate community's voice officially
2. There has been some effort in Stacks Advocate & Chapters Program re a Ecosystem Welcome Team, which I think can be leveraged with our thought here.

Re: Community Board Seat

1. There has been some movement by @RagnarLifthrasir proposing to do a Community Board Observer https://github.com/stacksgov/Stacks-Grant-Launchpad/issues/665 I essentially think this is a positive baby step way forward. As I described above messages, I don't think we must shoot for the moon, as history tells me that approach hasn't gotten us anywhere. I'd rather take a practical approach forwards the eventual goal.

To conclude, thinking about it just now.. I think these two topics are two different plug-ins into the Stacks ecosystem, however they compliment each other. If we have both set-up, we can really get the pulse of Stacks community at large.

[Hero-Gamer]

Update:

• Due to the recent influx of ENS guys coming into Stacks for BNS, our server been overwhelmed again with inquiries which Hiro or BTC.US site guys are not there enough for to handle. Therefore I've restarted the conversation with Mark at Hiro again about getting funding for support.
• I had a chat with him yesterday. He seems to beginning to understand it, asked me to help him demonstrate more cases.
• Not all inquiries are created by Hiro infrastructure, some appears to be created by btc.us website.
• I've also communicated my proposal to btc.us in DM about the idea of funding.
• No matter what happens, imo the realistic way to go forward with getting more support from them imo is to leverage community members. So I'd suggested we can use Ecosystem team for handling inquiries, so that it is a holistic solution.
• Which then in terms may have some overlaps with the Community Representative.

I think the next step would be to figure out exactly the structure of all teams and the connections. Needs to be super clear and efficient and effective taking into account all ecosystem initiatives going on right now so we don't duplicate work.

[Hero-Gamer]

Update: Looks like we've found a home for community representatives (or if we call it Community Stewards) under the Community Grants Pilot Program (Decentralized Community Grants Program). Will continue to hash out exactly the selection process and draft Stewards committee. https://twitter.com/herogamer21btc/status/1691323062547800065