Community Utility

Given this as a talk at EthCC[6], here is the recording if you prefer:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nhEiFpEIcvs&list=PLm6V2qdPAeaUBG-qBewmpopLdgVtpqaXM&index=23

If you didn't know we are part of many communities together, i can tell that even without checking your Twitter or wallet addresses. In particular, we are all part of the core Ethereum crypto world and crypto Twitter. And we have collectively participated in a not-so-nice community event recently.

One of the longest-standing and most successful exchanges, which even IPO-d a few years ago, and symbolizes a big pillar of our community, Coinbase was and still is under scrutiny/attack, being sued by the SEC. This threatens all of our work projects and the legitimacy of the space, but i am not here to be an anchor for old news.

What i want to focus on is how we regrouped as a community for the Coinbase fiasco, how we: projects, individuals came together, proliferated the news, the validation, the meme and stood up to support our fellow innovators.

This is but one way a very large and spread out community can come together temporarily to be lit up and activated, but there are many more smaller, day-to-day usecases worth looking into, so let's do that.

As we could see in this previous cycle we are still only scratching the surface in the realm of revolutionizing communities and human coordination. Scams, rugpulls, bubbles of projects, I am sure many of you, just like myself have at least a few NFTs in your wallets right now that you bought last year with the promise of it being your key to the new Bored Ape Yacht clubs or FWBs of the space. Which of course didn't happen because there wasn't much more to do together after everyone got their new PFP and entered the chat.

These campaigns seem exploitative and give the feeling that they aren't really going anywhere.

Minting an NFT should not be the only step in community activations, just a part of a larger experience. We can build more fun, engaging, retaining journeys for more bidirectional value exchange with members.

Community has become a buzzword because we are not defining it, but here is the definition:

What does the community give in terms of value to web3 projects in the first place?

Sustainability, Legitimacy and Distribution.

If what you are building and calling a community does not do either of these three, it is not a community, it's something adjacent to that.

What are ways we can bring out the most utility in communities and ease the tremendous manual tasks without harming the necessary human elements?

The answer is Roles.

Setting up proper role structures can automate:

• onboarding

• education

• marketing campaigns

• targeting

• loyalty

• retention

all through some form of access to roles.

Why are roles so important in a community? There is a saying that goes: “Dictatorship at the door and democracy on the dance floor”. This means having a strong curation system at the entrance for access and then let the crowds self-organize and act more freely once they are in.

The importance of having roles though is that there isn't just one room or dance floor so to speak, but many that fit members with different interests, status, assets, contribution levels and internet history in general. Having these rooms be as overlapping or segregated as in each community will be different based on their goals, mission and purpose.

The most successful converationalists have the mindset in interactions with others of assuming the other has knowledge that you don’t, and also that you have something in common even if its not an obvious thing.

With automation, good curation and technologies that are in our hands as tools we can make these commonalities so much more obvious and interactions more intentional and contextual.

We are going to go through 3 examples of community utility that allowed stronger bonds, and more value to be created in communities. Granting much more of that Sustainability, Longevity and Distribution to these Guilds.

Guild works with the Guild Model of: Requirements, Roles and Rewards.

Important web3 community features such as cross-platform reputation, shared ownership, growth, shared decision-making, prestige and positions not just from financial aspects ALL LEAD TO ROLES.

Roles are the atoms of participation, the basis we can build any logic, games, campaigns, and structures on.

But let's see some examples:

All projects even without a marketing budget use community as part of their growth strategies. There is plenty of tools that allow you to set up basic tasks that people have to complete to get a reward. On Guild the difference is that there are roles in the middle there, which abstracts from any platform or any one campaign. These roles allow campaign participants to flow into different layers of the community automatically based on their interests and internet history.

So here we have 3 major challenges with the growth efforts now:

• expansion without losing stability

• keeping participants engaged

• bots

Solution:

• curating paticipants

• providing the next step

• hidden requirements

Linea is using hidden requirements to qualify new members to join their community, claim a Guild Pin, which is a non-transferable NFT, a “proof of join” so to speak. This Pin then lets members who passed the qualifications continue on a different platform, in a different phase of the campaign.

After those quests are over the members who have completed them can be directed back here, given a special role for it and funneled into proper membership structures if they'd like to stay and aren't only here for the hype.

Thanks to the blockchain, there is so much, more openly available data that we can use to our advantage.

Targeting is the process of identifying members with a special orientation, level of involvement or any activity.

The main challenges of targeting are:

• finding highly engaged members

• channel towards high-value initiatives

• form sub-groups based on interest and context

Giving product feedback and testing opportunities are one great advantage of communities we cultivate.

Solution:

• roles for different member personas

• roles for different initiatives

In PoolTogether they created a Guild Role with requirements filtering for highly involved members:

1. POAP holders of different events in the last few months

2. Code contributors to PoolTogether holding a GitPOAP

3. Holders of any NFTs created by PoolTogether’s cofounder

Thanks to this Role they identified and activated a subgroup of a couple hundred, highly engaged members to the new initiative and give them access to a gated document introducing their new protocol.

Is the member's devotion to a brand as expressed by their willingness to continue participation.

Challenges are:

finding members who are:

• active, retained users,

• evangelists,

• identity aligned with mission

Solution:

Roles for different activities:

In the Uniswap Guild for example, there are roles to segment members who are providing liquidity in Uniswap V3, and those who have been using the protocol actively as an exchange, or even hold their Unisocks NFTs and haven't burned them yet for physical socks.

Let's make the internet fun and enticing again, so we don't just mint and dip but are incentivized to stay curious, stay longer and explore relationships with our fellow community members.

I am here today to motivate builders and founders to add value to their audience's experience through tangible, executed examples in the Guild ecosystem. This way our individual and group participation can give rise to a greater sense of belonging and can improve member retention, thus conversions and quality of connections, because as we saw it's absolutely possible and should be our focus, the tooling is here for it.