Happy New Year friends =)
If anyone would like to work together on a reboot of AAG in a “Second Age of Polkadot” (products/services for billions) , please indicate your interest and your thoughts!
I’d like to an online meetup or two to say hi and just dive in and JFDI this month.
Probably we need to do some post-mortem and psychotherapy together – but just saying hi to old and new friends is a good start.
Maybe @Dotcast could be interested, they have experience handling media and they are committed with the project.
@RocoDotcast we need you.
You should also try to contac Tommi (Alice_und_bob) who ws also trying to revive “AAG”.
We shouldn’t use this name anymore by the way.
See this
Whoever picks this up, start by testing these small changes, iteration is the most effective path: https://x.com/LVweb3/status/2008888112278299113
It may be useful to redirect previous efforts. While the old formats served their purpose, they didn’t meaningfully reduce polarization in the ecosystem.
Shifting away from pitches and reactive, political-style discussions could help create more space for ideas, products, community, collaboration, and broader, constructive conversations.
A simple, high-impact adjustment is to move, fully or partially, from
[YouTube & X Live + Google Meet] → [YouTube & X Live + X Spaces].
This adds a distribution channel familiar to the wider “CT” audience and makes participation easier for new voices.
By iterating on the formats and expanding the type of content included, it becomes easier to connect the Polkadot ecosystem with the broader crypto industry and encourage more open exchange of ideas.
These sessions can also evolve beyond an exclusive focus on OpenGov proposals, becoming open, informal meetups where builders, community members, and contributors can engage freely without the conversation narrowing to highly niche governance debates.
Another consideration: more independent hosts running these conversations creates a healthier, more diverse ecosystem. Relying on a single commentary source limits reach and perspective.
The narrative and content focus can shift:
from politics → toward resilient systems
from proposal debates → toward tangible products
from budget arguments → toward supporting talent
I agree with @ThomasR that the name AAG(Attempts At Governance) is no longer adequate, especially since the emphasis on governance is not relevant at the moment given the current state of OpenGov.
As proposed by several community members (including @alice_und_bob and @sourabhniyogi) having a space for community discussions could be beneficial, but let’s learn from past mistakes and try to iterate in a way that allows for more decentralization and more participation from different community members (existant and potential, like @LV5 says).
Ideas to consider (some of which have been mentioned by other community members publicly or in private):
Curious to hear more opinions and ideas and how we can move forward together.
I wouldn’t approach here by defaulting to more decentralization.
Decentralization is just a tool, meant to solve specific failure modes, where exit is costly and capture is dangerous. And desiring it every vertical usually just leads to lowest common denominator convos, process heavy noise.
For community spaces, convos, calls, any social informal coordination; primarily you need quality, taste, clarity/direction, charisma and accountable host than rotation, representation, formal fairness rules.
After all, the cost of exit is near zero. Bad spaces lose audience naturally. If people are unhappy, someone can just fork it, iterate it. Eventually good hosts attract gravity organically.
Better consider and optimize for high signal first and then see where any form of decentralization actually adds value rather than friction.
For the distribution side, I agree with @LV5.