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.