Could you please create 2 new top-level categories for both Marketing and Business Development?
Our approach to the forum has been to minimize categories until categories are dense enough to merit a split. This is a common tactic for community building - limiting the number of channels to create density.
Polkadot isn’t a business, so a Business Development category doesn’t really make sense.
Marketing posts can fit under ecosystem for now. There aren’t so many posts there as to be overwhelming.
2 Likes
Agree - but @danreecer how are you defining / thinking about BD in the context of Polkadot? Interested in your thought process / more context wrt this request as it might add some colour.
I think what Rob mentioned is fine for now. I just brought it up as I was posting about a marketing topic and had no where to put it besides Misc. For BD it could encompass infrastructure needs, multi-team deals (when topics can be discussed in public), custody, etc. but for now keeping it under Ecosystem is fine until it gets to be a big enough topic to warrant a category.
1 Like
Thanks. It might be useful if you expanded this a little as a separate post and shared some of your experience, learnings and challenges since you’ve been involved for a long time both inside Parity and outside?
There are lots of very experienced people here, but also a fluidity of domains - e.g. BD in a startup/corporate is a much clearer proposition than with a public blockchain - which I guess is Rob’s point.
For example BD could also be framed as a function of a parachain such as Acala / Astar to deliver partnerships - delivered by a core team / company / foundation. Since most parachains have a business model that is independent of Polkadot/Kusama, this confuses a general BD proposition somewhat.
In a Polkadot context - pretty much all treasury spend (hackathons / media / meetups / events / davos appearances - even the unbounded fonts) are a form of BD. In general the ROI of this ‘BD’ has to date been off-chain metrics - from developer numbers, to social media metrics, to partnership announcements.
There is a solid direction forming in Kusama around valuing spend in regard to projected and delivered on-chain metrics. If we were to define a Polkadot native BD - e.g. what does the network care about then really its about processes, strategies and experiments that can drive demand for blockspace and Shared Security as a Service.
We might even call this ‘SSaaS’ to borrow from corporate language.
WIth parachains its driving demand for blockspace dedicated to some particular service - which in turn provides the circular demand for relay blockspace and so on.
All of this to say, if we begin to stop using generic language like BD / Marketing / Awareness / Outreach and begin to orient conversations around common language and outcomes such as on-chain adoption / valuing spend / initiatives against their ability to convert something off-chain into something on-chain, then that may help people communicate better across the ecosystem.