The Missing Pieces for Polkadot

Ecosystem
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Note - see the Google Doc

Background

This year has taken me down the rabbit hole into how Polkadot works. It started with the Polkadot Blockchain Academy (PBA) in Hong Kong in January, which was a five-week intensive introduction to the fundamentals of blockchain and Polkadot. The PBA inspired me to contribute to Polkadot, which I did by taking a three-month term as one of the first Decentralized Voices, where I reviewed every single one of the hundreds of governance proposals in detail from March through May. And most recently, the journey has taken me to the position of Head Ambassador, where there has been an open mandate to define the ambassador program as well as bring new adoption to Polkadot.

Since becoming Head Ambassador just under two months ago, I have been going down the rabbit hole of Polkadot in order to better understand what we need to be successful as an ecosystem. Initially this started as an examination of ecosystem needs around business development (BD), where I started BD working groups to better coordinate the decentralized teams working on Polkadot adoption and to be effective myself in moving BD forward. However, I realized quickly that BD doesn’t work in a vacuum – marketing, strategy, vision, product, technology and culture are all facets that need to work together to find success. At this point, I feel like I have turned the corner on exploration and am ready to work towards building the ecosystem that we need to meet upcoming challenges. I hope to start to expand on what that means here, and I hope these ideas can inspire purpose and action for the ambassador program as well as the larger ecosystem.

I have identified three areas that I consider the “missing pieces” for Polkadot to achieve the adoption it should have. The items come from my observations of the ecosystem over the past year, as well as conversations with people in the ecosystem. They are:

  1. Leadership means focusing on people
  2. Strategy is about being different
  3. Embrace decentralization

Leadership means focusing on people

It’s difficult to think of the human side of building in crypto. Polkadot is famously “the best technology” and blockchain is frequently associated with ideas like “code is law” that, (only) on the surface, seems to negate the relevance of the human side of things. Coupled with the fact that we are natively remote and communicate over the internet, it can be easy to dissociate the people from the accounts we interact with.

This makes it easy to forget that crypto and blockchain (and web3 and decentralized computing) are being built to be a more fair foundation for society i.e. “for the people.” On a global scale blockchain is at a very early stage of adoption, and Polkadot is a small part of that. What has been collectively built so far is only a tiny fraction of what will be needed to be built for Polkadot to make a dent in regular peoples’ lives. Gav frequently references a 10 year journey, and this is the timescale that we need to keep in mind when we think about building Polkadot.

The key aspect that Polkadot needs to be successful moving forward has to do with people and human capital, not technology, and to make this happen there are two key responsibilities of leaders (generically) in the Polkadot ecosystem:

  1. Communicate the forward-looking vision
  2. Create the environment where people can thrive

Communicate the forward-looking vision

Most believers in Polkadot do see a vision that represents true web3 values, but lately we have let it sink below the surface, especially as the relative market cap of Polkadot has declined. Today the ecosystem is in a state where more attention is paid to the present (e.g. “what should we spend money on”) and the past (“what crazy things have we spent money on”), rather than on the future. When the present and past overtake the future, we get into a game of assigning blame rather than focusing on the challenges ahead. Leaders need to recognize that the vision has been muddied and take responsibility to continuously re-assert our North Star.

In the words of John Doerr, we need to create “missionaries not mercenaries.” This is sneakily hard in crypto, because so much of crypto today enables the opposite – the tokenization of time/attention/assets creates a culture of granular reward for contributions, which can be a trap that can focus individuals on the reward rather than the goal.

We do have technical leadership, as evidenced by Gav’s vision, Parity’s technical direction, JAM and the decentralized teams that are solving important problems, but we need to communicate the “Why” of Polkadot to a much broader audience and ensure the idea resonates. Polkadot’s success over a ten year horizon is not going to be because of just the technology - it will come about because we successfully compete in the marketplace of ideas, and we convince people that the vision of Polkadot is worth participating in. Ideas are more powerful than VC funding or bag pumping, and this is where Polkadot can, should and will prevail.

Create the environment where people can thrive

We need to not only bring in skilled and talented people, but we need to make sure they contribute their best work to Polkadot. This means creating the right environment and culture that lets ingenuity and hard work take hold. We do have to think about ethics and fairness, and think about how we balance the needs of different stakeholders in the network. But we should never forget that we need to work together in the ecosystem, respect each other, behave with integrity and work to focus each other on the future.

An interesting example of the degree to which we might create the right environment comes directly in the Fellowship Manifesto, which is a founding document speaking to how to ensure decentralization (e.g. resilience) of the protocol. From section 2.3.2: “If Members cannot afford the time, equipment, accommodation, sustenance, dependents, and leisure activities which life demands, then dedicating themselves to Polkadot becomes unsustainable or unrealistic.” Even in this seemingly technical organization-focused document, we see unexpected examples of how the culture and environment of people should be taken into consideration for Polkadot to achieve its goals.

Success in the market and in the grander scheme of real-world adoption will come from the heroic efforts of many people – in fact many people who haven’t yet joined the ecosystem – and it’s the job of leaders in Polkadot to foster an environment where these contributors can be welcomed and supported. For leaders, this involves ensuring the vision can flow outward via communication pathways and the environment leads to execution.

Strategy is about being different

We should take some time to think about what “strategy” is. Strategy is a choice to do something different than the rest of the market, with the goal of eventually outperforming the market. Strategy is not about trying to do everything. Actually it’s the opposite - it’s an explicit choice of what to do and what NOT to do. If choosing what NOT to do is not in the conversation, then we are not having a credible strategy conversation. We are confronted with limited resources, so we need to choose how to use them.

Strategy is also different from budgeting. Strategy helps to inform our budget, and to some degree a budget may constrain what strategic possibilities are available, but largely they are different topics.

Today, as a decentralized network, we are not having a conversation about strategy and the choices we want to make as a network. If we can articulate a strategy, then we can focus our resources in a direction, and this can a) help us make decisions in OpenGov, and b) help decentralized actors to understand how to contribute themselves to moving the network forward, whether that is with technical proposals, marketing, ambassador activities, etc.

Some additional key points to help shape the strategy conversation follow.

It’s important to focus on differences

One key aspect of strategy is that we should focus not on how similar we are to other blockchain ecosystems, but how and where we are different. A great phrase that captures how we need to think of strategy is that we need to create a “vector of differentiation.” It’s not about creating a point in time where we happen to be better than other options, but it’s about creating a different direction that is magnified over time. We are actually already on this path, given the decentralized multi-chain ecosystem infrastructure that we have built, the new aspects of Polkadot 2.0, and arguably this differentiation is increased with the direction of JAM as decentralized general compute.

Given the technical roadmap has us already heading in this direction, we need to embrace it more as an ecosystem and bring the message outwards to find users that appreciate Polkadot for its differences. Customers that don’t appreciate Polkadot for its differences will not be sticky.

If we allow ourselves to be defined by other blockchains, then we will always be chasing them. This is a “red ocean” in strategy terms. Instead, we need to define our own playing field that speaks to the strengths and differentiation we already have, and use this to find market adoption.

The strategy depends on the customer

The second key aspect is to realize that a conversation about adoption requires an understanding of the customer and their needs. Currently in our strategy discussion, we have various categories (Developer Experience, User Experience, Public Perception, BD Infrastructure, Liquidity & Capital Rails, etc.). But actually, the relative weights of these categories may change if we go after different customer segments.

For instance, take the following potential customer segments: Retail, DeFi power users, Enterprise, Institutional, Gaming, Government (not necessarily mutually exclusive).

Attracting a retail use case to build on Polkadot may require liquidity and users, because the retail service benefits from the network effect of activity that is already present on the chain. But, a hypothetical enterprise use case may not require that, if the enterprise brings its own users but just needs secure blockchain infrastructure. So not all strategic possibilities are “equal” once you take the potential customer in mind.

At the same time we figure out where we might want to allocate resources, we should think about the return on investment, which takes into account the difficulties of customer acquisition, which is based on the characteristics of each customer segment. For example, within the category of “Developer Experience” there might be some projects that accelerate us towards our strategic goal, and others that have no impact. We need to have strategy conversations that take the short, medium and long term goals into mind.

Strategy and execution are always linked

A classic shortcoming in business is to define a strategy that is too out of touch with the reality of execution. A strategy needs to be: a) understood, b) believed and c) executable. We operate in a decentralized environment, which comes with its own challenges for all of these aspects of consensus and decision-making. We need to allow for iteration and learning as we go.

Embrace Decentralization

I believe since “The Decentralization” that started around Q4 of 2023 (and before), we’ve been on a one-way path to becoming a decentralized organization. This is a purposeful move that is directly due to the fact that decentralization is a key component of resilience, which is a key goal of the design of the protocol. This had led to a lot of turmoil as teams were disbanded and reformed as more independent units. Nobody is used to working in this kind of environment, because it has never existed before in our professional lives.

We’re no longer in a place where there is a C-Suite that can be replaced if they don’t perform, and it doesn’t make sense to either try to claw this structure back, or set up a similar structure in its place. In order for us to find success, we need to first embrace the decentralization, and then figure out how to achieve success in our goals. What follows are just some of the ideas of how to become successful as a decentralized organization. Keep in mind that “the book” has not been written yet (though we can get some good examples from the Starfish and Spider).

If you see something, do something

In a centralized hierarchical structure, there is always someone to tell you what to do, and to guide you on the path, according to the organization’s history and needs. This is not true in a decentralized organization. If you recognize that something is missing from Polkadot, you should try to do something about it:

  • You might do it yourself
  • You might socialize the idea and get others on board, i.e. form a working group
  • You might start a bounty that is assigned funding to tackle a problem
  • You might find the right person to contribute and find the way to help them get started
  • You can find and encourage the people who you see stepping up
  • You can help to design the system to make it easier for others to step up

At the same time, the easiest thing to do is to complain or blame others for things that are not happening. Please try to avoid that, because in a decentralized organization, nobody is to blame and everyone is to blame.

Over-communicate & promote understanding

Globalized remote work across cultures is prone to misunderstandings and miscommunications, yet this is the native state of a global decentralized organization. We need to have tolerance for differences and a buffer for understanding. We have to account for the learning process that is needed to work together with people that have different backgrounds and communication styles. When tempers flare, forgiveness can go a long way.

Write history together

We are on a long journey together that ties together not just technology, but a new way of working together. There is a trifecta of new challenges to solve - building a blockchain for the world, building a permissionless decentralized computer for the world, and building a decentralized organization to make it happen. LFG!

What can I do?

Thank you for making it to the end!

A lot of what is here is meant for the leaders of the ecosystem. Not just the existing leaders of the companies and protocols, but you, the future leaders of Polkadot.

As a decentralized ecosystem there are many ways to step up and participate, and anyone can contribute:

  1. Participate in governance - Join a voting group like The Kus and discuss governance with the community, or just vote by yourself in OpenGov
  2. Participate in BD - Join the Open Ecosystem BD Working Group, or bring opportunities to Polkadot yourself and get rewarded
  3. Help define the strategy - Participate in Alice and Bob’s BASED Budgeting Strategy Discussion
  4. Code for Polkadot - Fix bugs, join a product team or start a new project
  5. Join the Ambassador Program - the program will open up soon to new candidates

Finally, this is a call to action – we need leaders of the ecosystem to permissionlessly step up and address the most pressing issues so we can focus forward:

  • Clarify the vision and articulate it to a non-technical audience
  • Create an environment that attracts the talent needed to accelerate Polkadot
  • Articulate a strategy that meets short, medium and long term needs
  • Experiment and learn how to effectively drive forward a decentralized organization

Feel free to reach out on TG (@replghost), or discuss here.

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This is one of the most level-headed writings I have read for sometime in Polkadot. Thank you for sharing your thoughts!

I sometimes worry that we might be in cycle of collectively being anxious regarding Polkadot’s “perceived” (by the general crypto media) decline, especially in Market Cap, which leads to many people working too hard to “fix” it in hectic ways, which leads to either burnout or anger, which exacerbates the initial condition and the cycle continues. And this perhaps fuels a negative mentality around the ecosystem that often prevents peaceful collaboration.

Conflict is sometimes good, and needed, but as you put it, we should not lose sight of the fact that end of the day we are on the same team.

For what it is worth, I just shared in another thread why I think this is not a factor to be worried about. State of Polkadot - React or die - #17 by kianenigma. To rephrase, I am not saying that Polkadot can never fail, but I am saying if it does, it is not because of a number assigned to it in a chart which is mostly players of a different league in.

Another representation of “different league”:

Indeed, I strongly think that Polkadot has massive untapped potential and is moving the boundaries of what resilient Web3 technology can do, both in terms of application, and in terms of scalability.

I will commit here to formulating a few of these points (why I think Polkadot has potential) in a concise, easy-to-understand writeup for our community, either as a standalone blogpost like this, or as a playbook, like this.

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Thanks Kian!

There are definitely good resources here from both you and Shawn. Looking forward to more of your writeups. As I have been thinking about this, I have realized that the vision is shaped on the technical side but doesn’t always filter outwards all the way and we can do much better on this as an ecosystem.

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Hi,

thanks for the thoughtful post,
a few comments from my side to try to make Polkadot a better place:

Polkadot is famously “the best technology”

This is I think an over statement that we have a hard time to prove. We definitively have good technology but not necessary for all use cases. Some introspection would help us to focus better on our weaknesses. Also, even if it was true, it does not mean that it will stay true.

Today the ecosystem is in a state where more attention is paid to the present (e.g. “what should we spend money on”) and the past (“what crazy things have we spent money on”), rather than on the future.

I believe in the vision! That does not means we should not have plans for the near future. The vision is critical but having a business view is also necessary. That’s one of the many polarity that we should manage. One does not work without the other.

In the words of John Doerr, we need to create “missionaries not mercenaries.”

It is a catchy sentence and I think I get the meaning. At the same time, missionaries carries their own history and I would prefer another term, maybe dedicated. One way to prevent too many mercenaries is to have people fairly compensated with a stable environment. Another is to interview for the trait. At the same time we are not a church and a good engineer doing his work well is also welcome in my opinion.

Polkadot’s success over a ten year horizon is not going to be because of just the technology

This I fully agree with: we need business acumen, product owners, b2b and b2c strategies, investment etc

Success in the market and in the grander scheme of real-world adoption will come from the heroic efforts of many people – in fact many people who haven’t yet joined the ecosystem – and it’s the job of leaders in Polkadot to foster an environment where these contributors can be welcomed and supported. For leaders, this involves ensuring the vision can flow outward via communication pathways and the environment leads to execution

First I do not like this hero persona (see here for example). We are here for a marathon (10y) and we cannot rely on heroics. We need a plan. We have enough money to staff what needs to be staffed.

On the fostering part, I think we can be more friendly toward outsiders esp. on the missionary part. If we restrict hiring to missionary people, we cut ourselves from most of the talent pool. We can convince people over time. Some openness on our side would help to bring more people in. If you don’t know Solidity you can learn it, that’s no big deal.

We could also possibly make the system less transactional. You do one thing and you will be paid for this one thing (bounty for ex). That’s fair but most people are uncomfortable with it. That adds a lot of uncertainty in the day to day : some people thrive with the freedom and pressure, some prefer a more corporate environment. That’s fine.

It’s important to focus on differences

Yes and no. As you pointed out, it depends a lot on what customers may want now. Many services, platforms, ecosystems died because they didn’t listen enough to their potential customers and too much to their own ideas.

Solana, Base or Arbitrum have low latency block time and market it as a strength. Should we have low blocktime solutions? Note that we are very performant on throughput and finality but customers care a lot less about it: throughput because nobody can use all the available capacity (except Solana) and finality because most transactions can go on without it. We should communicate a lot more around our strength be be aware that may not resonate with most builders.

At the same time we figure out where we might want to allocate resources, we should think about the return on investment,

Fully agree. And again we should balance short term and long term ROIs.

I agree with the other part of the post. One possible way to improve would be to spend more time on the strategy upfront and get to a consensus. Then decentralized the work. We should strive to partition the work such that we limit competition internally. Do we need N block explorers? one day sure. But if I have the choice between 2 block explorers and 0 front end library or 1 block explorer and 1 front end library, I would love the consensus on the strategy to converge on the 1 and 1. We do not really need to compute much inside the ecosystem and should focus on competing against the Ethereum L2, L1 and a few others. If we are successful, then internal competition will be welcome to lower prices and improve resilience but I think that it too early.

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Very interesting reply, the hero link was cool. Great to see someone central at parity in here and discussing these topics. Hope to read a lot more from you.

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Fantastic post, thanks for your work in penning.

It seems a few of the ‘leaders’ in the space have fairly similar views on the structures and organisations needed moving forward. Unfortunately these thorough posts are getting relatively little interaction (Alice’ Based for example.) it is hard to get anything close to a consensus like that but ultimately there is not much counter argument either.

If this status quo continues then what are the next steps forward to start getting momentum behind and hopefully putting some of these frameworks into operation?

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Nice post @replghost

I pretty much agree with all your points here. However, I will be honest that it does seems like a long and mostly undefined path to solve the problems you are pointing out.

I would point out that there is an interesting conflict between your points here:

  • communicating forward vision
  • coming up with strategy

in conflict with

  • embracing decentralization

Truthfully there is just so many different perspectives people have of what the vision of Polkadot should be and what our strategy should be. And conflict arises when two passionate people both look at this product and community differently.

Here are some of my takes on your points:

  • Communicate the forward-looking vision

    • For this, I think we really must focus on Philosophies, Mission, and Goals.
    • Philosophies of Polkadot should really never change, and should really be the underlying heartbeat of our whole community. You are a part of Polkadot if you believe in the philosophies. I think we have mostly established those philosophies in the Polkadot ecosystem which are:
      • Less Trust, More Truth
      • Against Blockchain Maximalism
      • The best solution today will not necessarily be the best solution tomorrow.
      • And perhaps this list of driving factors and web3 maxims recently presented by @gavofyork
        • Resilience
        • Generality
        • Performance
        • Coherency
        • Accessibility
    • The mission of Polkadot may change over time, but shouldn’t change frequently. I think the mission is best defined today as: trying to create a ubiquitous world computer. I think this has pretty much been the mission since the Ethereum days, and I think you can see along with our philosophies, we have almost always been building toward this.
    • Finally, the goals of Polkadot are the things which may change most frequently, but always in alignment with the philosophies and mission. The goal of Polkadot was originally this idea of Parachains and other concepts captured in the Polkadot Whitepaper. Now the Goal has shifted forward a bit with JAM, and has better resembled a product which satisfies our mission.
    • If we can first establish a community around the Philosophies and Mission, I think then our conversations become around what goals are best for our community, what goals we can achieve, and how. I think it is possible to have multiple goals, and try to execute on them in parallel.

  • Create the environment where people can thrive

    • There are many dimensions to this, but I think the one we are missing out most on right now is creating a truly OPEN platform.
    • The Parachain model was likely cursed from day 1 since it only allowed a small number of teams access to the value proposition of Polkadot. I think open systems find fast success because they allow anyone to experiment on their own ideas and let the community decide if the product provides values and solves problems.
    • We NEED Plaza as soon as we can get it, and then open the doors of Polkadot to the whole world. I really don’t see how we look to solve deeper problems until we enable everyone to be able to build their ideas of solutions for Polkadot.
    • For example, I might imagine one of the first things that happens after Plaza is that teams design custom DAOs to help coordinate, and then request treasury to fund those DAOs to deliver on goals for Polkadot. Right now everyone is constrained by our inflexible pallets, and have designed a range of over-engineered to under-engineered manifestos describing how those communities should behave off chain. I believe on chain DAOs will solve some of these problems, and allow Polkadot to find a winning set of formulas for decentralized coordination.

On top of what you said, I think somehow we also need to shift the community from “doing work” to “achieving results”.

In some way this touches on the intersection of Strategy and Decentralization.

I really have a hard time formulating concrete thoughts on exactly how to solve this problem, but I think it is important to call out.

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V much agree @shawntabrizi . At first i was vehemently against your general opinion of paying retrospectively on results etc. - especially wrt to HA program - but with the seeming lack of production/basic interaction from select individuals since then i am very much coming around to the notion that perhaps that is the only practical way to drive the above.

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@ pierreaubert :+1: Agree with you.

I think the value of decentralization is that it is not limited by country or ethnicity, nor is it limited by a centralized network structure.
It doesn’t mean there isn’t a need for a team of professionals to manage or gather ideas, integrate them and suggest improvements.
That doesn’t mean there isn’t a need for leaders who have the ability to make changes and assign work content.
In a decentralized structure, 99% (of token holders) don’t do anything on their own initiative.
No one wants to work for Polkadot after hours. (OpenGov??)
Decentralization does not mean a perfect ideal utopia.

Everything in the world exists because of people’s habits.
If we do not think about human nature, there will not be any development.

I think Polkadot lacks a strong experienced CEO.

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Thank you Pierre, I really appreciate the feedback and valuable addition to the conversation.

I have been thinking a lot about polarities given the number of them we deal with, and thank you for bringing up that term. It’s a good way to articulate how we need to view things. Among others, some of the polarities:

  • vision vs. business plan
  • technical vs. non-technical
  • large entities (w3f, parity) vs wider community
  • tokenholders vs. stakeholders
  • short term vs long term
  • mission vs. adoption
  • heterogeneous chains vs. plaza
  • global vs local
  • revenue vs adoption

I understand the concerns regarding the hero persona, and how it may lead to unsustainable operation as well as how it may obscure issues that need to be dealt with. I wrote it this way because there is a lot of chaos right now in the “DAO,” and concern that money is not being spent in a fair way. One could say that there is a lot of money, but not really a plan to spend it due to two factors:

  1. The bottom up nature of OpenGov (as opposed to top-down strategy)
  2. The opaque decision-making of larger voters, and uncertainty over time of what will get funded, coupled with the community’s loud and occasionally critical opinions, which may or may not align with larger holders

While hopefully a lot will be addressed in Alice and Bob’s BASED Budgeting and strategy initiative, I think this is leading to “casualties” where motivated people do not feel like they are in an environment where they can contribute, and who try but don’t see their efforts go anywhere. Therefore we do need people with a stronger constitution who can tolerate the uncertainty and bring a better order to the “wild west” of the DAO today. And to build out the environment where a marathon can be run.

We definitely need people to choose Polkadot as a destination. I think this starts to get into the actual strategy itself, and a question I have been thinking of is, how do we get alignment on strategy in a decentralized ecosystem? Now we have a number of different parties which are much more independent than before - roughly: W3F, Parity, large voters in Opengov, Fellowship, Decentralized Marketing & BD, the community.

I don’t quite think we can somehow get alignment on a strategy separately from working, just due to the uncertainties of getting and retaining agreement over time, although aiming for something like that is a good move. We’ll likely need to have a very iterative approach to be successful in the decentralized environment we are in. And I believe it requires each party to be much more communicative on what they think the strategy is and their execution towards it – I will hopefully be able to write more on this topic later.

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Thanks Shawn!

We definitely we need to figure out the path to solving things, rather than just trying to characterize where we are.

I think this is one of the most interesting things that comes out all of this thinking — how do we converge on a strategy/plan in a decentralized environment?

And thank you for reminding me and all of us of the Philosophies, Missions and Goals. I think that was one of the most impactful talks from the PBA. These tenets shape the technical development and direction of where the protocol is going, but they are lost in the day to day of OpenGov, and I think that is a problem.

For everyone, here is a presentation where Shawn takes us through the topic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XefDNmmSMYo

It’s interesting that something so important is not really in the zeitgeist today. Imagine if the ecosystem aligned on getting adoption of this as a high priority for the rest of the year. We could be thinking about how all the different initiatives going on fit into having success with this, and how having this leads to success with all of our other initiatives.

The ability to catalyze action and get results is a goal that we should build the ecosystem towards. When I was talking about “environment,” I was referring more to creating the DAO environment (outside plaza) where contributors can to work together, collaborate and align to achieve results. But if Plaza can provide the environment due to it’s concentration of liquidity, users and new energy, then that is really a new day for Polkadot.

I appreciate hearing this addition to the vision of Plaza that I understood from before - this kind of more open communication of the why and how of achieving goals is missing today.

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I would point out that there is an interesting conflict between your points here:

  • communicating forward vision
  • coming up with strategy

in conflict with

  • embracing decentralization

I do not see the conflict. Decentralization does not mean that we cannot get a concensus on the next steps and for exemple how we want to manage the $ in the treasury.

A concensus does not mean that everyone agrees. We could also vote on it.

What I think is missing is a strategy. I am happy to see that people realize that we should have one. We should be able to explain “why” Polkadot and what we want to do.

Not having a strategy is a strategy.

Another option is to time box the exercise once a year:

  • 1 month brainstorm
  • 1 week cleanup
  • 2 iterations of the above

We could get some clarities on what to do next. We would do it in a company so why not in a DAO? Large companies are in a way decentralised in the decision process: there are some top down decisions but in practice most decisions are taken bottom up (since that’s where the knowledge is). Sure they do converge somewhere and there are some oscillations. I expect the same in a DAO.

I like the small steps forward to solve complicated issues:

  • things don’t need to be perfect
  • improving on the worst mistakes from the previous years is a net improvement
  • partitioning the prb into smaller ones is realistic; being sure we have someone accountable to drive each area (marketing, dev, b2b, b2c, security, …)
  • writing docs instead of 100s of 1:1 or 100s of forum post because having a reference is useful.

I think we collectively shy away for writing one and use decentralisation as an excuse.
We can do better.

I can certainly help in getting one if people think it helps.

FYI: we are doing it internally at Parity and I have learn a lot from the exercise around Polkadot strengths and weaknesses.

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Yes please! Totally agree.

Let’s do this.

Would be great if you can help. Happy to do legwork.

What kind of docs should we get started with? What other actions to take to get this rolling?

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Meanwhile I am doing lots more 1:1s and forum posts :laughing:

Here is the latest one:

In order set up the ambassador program and direction, we would like to gather a more clear picture of what is important to Polkadot, short and long term. It would be great to have your views!

I’m kindly asking for your input on this 10-20 min survey: Polkadot Mission Survey (Community) | Formbricks

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