It is great to see professional discussion happening about the Ambassador Program. I’d like to enter this dialouge.
As someone experiencing the Ambassador Program for years and all the revolving situations around it I am sharing my reflections on it. Before addressing how we could potentially end up with a professional program, some key toughts:
- Restarting the program repeatedly from scratch would prevent any real progress. Each reset would erase hard-earned lessons and create a cycle of constant beginnings without meaningful growth.
- Success can only come from evolving what’s already been explored and worthy, using the positive aspects of our past to shape a viable future for the Program.
- There are many ideas here in this discussion that evolved from past failures - which is good. However live programs probably should not be running on a trial-and-error base, especially not when people are invited for a full time job.
- In the past Program (when it kind of worked), there were Working Groups and specific roles and responsibilities. It was not a big success program, sure, but we had Ambassadors all over the world pushing Polkadot and the drama level was way lower. I think this was possible because the structure was established and managed by responsible individuals.
We were thrown together by Polkadot’s community into a group and asked to figure out how the Program will work. 20 people and 20 different ways and the island effect started where people who have similar views initiated to shape the program their way. This led to an escalation of drama.
I wrote the insight article about the ecosystem for which barely any response arrive. At least those are positive, but people, especially publicly seem to focus on drama and fights rather than listening and evaluating for mindful moves. This needs to be different and I know it is not easy to change it, but:
Less drama, more success.
What I think we need to do is to have mindful discussions/calls exactly like this on this thread. Then, we can develop actionable plans by various individuals and teams for the Ambassador Program, allowing the community to vote on them.
It is the community’s responsibility to select the most professional and effective proposal on how the Ambassador Program needs to work. Unfortunately, this step was overlooked before the new program commenced and other than having a real job descriptions, clear responsibilities we got a text message stating only a few basic things.
I agree a new Program needs to be looked from a perspective that is not shadowed by the old one. Learning from past mistakes and failures, I think Polkadot needs to give one more chance to it, but this time it must become a professional Ambassador Program with clear:
- Goals and expectations
- Structure
- Roles
- Responsibilities
- Management
- Accounting
- Salary
- Defined working hours with reporting
If you look at any decent job in professional environments, you are going to find all these to be well answered and worked out in detail.
Regarding time and salary: I am brave enought to publicly say, at best from the 20 HAs only a few could have done potentially worked 40 hours a week since the program started. Honestly I am skeptical if anyone actually passed this - because I see our achievements. So far, I would not pay $10 000 a month for this work for myself or anyone else in the HA team - but some lower compensation or treasury tip for the past months I would. I think we need to be really clear on this and I find it a good idea to have full-timers and part-timers: most will fall in the latter one though.
For a real HA-like position where all the points I mention above are clear and everyone works their time off, a salary $10 000 is not a big number (consider after tax most get like ~$5000), but honstely, we are not there in this current shape. We can get there though.
I had really good 1-on-1 conversations with some of you responding here, happy to keep those going on and share refined reflections, ideas publicly.