Working meeting, 30th June 2022
Meeting recording
Present (in order of first speaking)
Nori Nishigaya (facilitator); Kriss Baird (IOG); Harris Warren (IOG); Joey Chessher (Toolmakers and Maintainers); Tomi Astikainen (PAs sub-circle group); Felix Weber (CF); Quasar (General Ada-Holders sub-circle).
Speaker percentages
Nori (23%), Harris (21%), Tomi (16%), Kriss (16%), Joey (11%), Quasar (9%), Felix (5%)
Meeting summary
0:03 Ways to include the community in planning for Circle v4
a Pol.is poll on what Circle should be about
After Town Hall on Weds 7th, to present the Pol.is poll and to discuss CCv4 election.
Twitter Spaces.
Harris 3:28 Update on Code of Conduct: we've engaged the IO attorneys and we'll share a version in the next week or two. Kriss 6:54 How to publicise the poll; and concern about trolling Tomi 9:04 Kriss's original blog post defining Circle is a year old. Still valid? Harris 9:44 We can keep it as it is; or rewrite it, as something for people to disagree with; or get feedback from the community first, to create a revised version. Prefer the latter.
10:54 Issues to address
Felix 10:54 A recent Swarm session felt the current Circle is more a working group to figure out the election process and any changes to structure and purpose for CCv4. This could be a reset – we can start from scratch, but with the experience we’ve gained. Because Circle as it is now creates friction in the community. Kriss 12:24 The friction in my opinion is due to degradation of personal relationships in CCv3, not the process. Joey 13:36 We need methods to handle conflicts within Circle, and to remove someone from Circle. Harris 14:41 People don’t know what Circle does, although we described it every Town Hall. Community input on what we should be doing and how, allows us to re-set. I love the idea of sub-circles but we need to define how they work. Should there be any elected positions now? or should people be drawn in from sub-circles?
Roles in Circle
Nori 16:29 Looking back, some reps have struggled because they didn't have a natural community they were connected with. It's backwards to elect someone and hope they find the people they're representing. Self-evolving sub circles, groups that can prove they have an identity, could start to sense problems on their own, and then pick someone through election or appointment to represent their community at Circle.
Nori 17:44 If the independent communities in Catalyst have issues, maybe those are the correct issues for Circle to talk about. Instead of artificially creating structures, look at what's actually happening. Decentralisation means you push decision-making out to the edges as far as possible. Only when there's things that need to be talked about between groups, do groups need to meet each other; and it only needs to be the groups that it pertains to. Don’t start with a structure and try to fill it - let communities that are already strong, represent themselves.
20:03 The current roles in Circle are proposers, proposal assessors, toolmakers, general ADA holders, SPOs, and CF ambassadors. What about referees, mentors, dReps, challenge teams, and VPAs? And does it have to be roles? Or could it be categories? 23:26 The purpose of this meeting is not to figure out the roles or the categories, but to figure out how to include the community voices on discussing it. 23:58 Could include the question of categories, roles, or seats, and which they should be, in the Pol.is poll. Quasar 26:57 People serve multiple roles – it’s difficult to choose a category or functional group to belong to. Categories could work, but it's a division of labour and /or product; similar to industry classifications, which doesn't foster innovation. Tomi 30:58 - a slide on his suggested approach based on the Balanced Scorecard performance management tool. No challenge-setting; funding would be given to categories, and the community could set mid-term or short-term objectives within this framework. Could set different requirements for the representative for different groups; and people could apply for the role, e.g. on IdeaScale. The vote could be during the “cooldown” between Funds. Or maybe they don’t even need to be voted at all. I think all this is decentralisation. Harris 36:01 It will be easier for IOG to add items to a ballot in the short term, than to wait for the fund vote to finish and then do a special voting session. That is possible, but harder to do. Or – if there's already a community of PAs or SPOs, for example, they could have their own election outside of this general election process. General ADA Holder, I would suggest, probably needs to be on a general election, because it's such a wide-open role. Maybe it needs to be split into multiple roles by categories, or geographies. We can pose those questions to the community to see what they recommend. Joey 39:19 Voting from within your own role fulfils Nori's point that things come up from the community you serve - but it's what we already do. If we continue with that, the voting process and the timing should be consistent. Nori 39:55 Harris has mentioned holacracy before now. It doesn’t involve voting or reps; a group decides amongst themselves that this person will represent them in a meeting; so it's not like an elected representative with perceived power, it's more just a person burdened with the task of reporting what this group is doing, in this other meeting. In a decentralised setting, it's important to get away from the power, middle structures, and all the garbage associated with that, so that people aren't vying for popularity or notoriety or trying to get something. "Push it to the edges", and don't make this a political thing - make it how we work together and collaborate. Tomi 40:56 To reiterate what Quasar said before: it's really difficult to choose what should be my group. I've done most things; I'm a funded proposer, CA, PA, VPA, Toolmaker, I'm going to be a dRep, and I am in challenge teams. So it doesn't make sense for me to be structured like this. Nori 41:44 You can be everywhere, if you want to - but you don't actually have to fill the role to represent all of them. That's why we have a decentralised community.
IOG's role
Joey 42:03 As a community member, if I have an idea, I would want to present it to someone who would take it to a Circle, and a decision be made on it. As Circle, we have to collaborate with IOG and CF to actually make things happen; so we need to figure out how that works. Harris 42:40 But we want to change it so it is run outside of IOG, and so there's an organisation that can make decisions on its own. That's the mindset we need to start building, in trying to create the structure to enable Catalyst to be run and decided on by the community. Joey 43:34 That's a goal; but I think that now, the perception in the community is that the final say is IOG’s. Circle can present stuff, but we can't make changes without IOG's permission.
Harris 44:06 No, you definitely don't need IOG's permission.
Quasar 44:26 If the community brings things to Circle, and Circle presents them to IOG, and IOG signs it off - for me, that counts as making change. A lot of people are okay with that. But Project Catalyst has had a product manager, and a project manager, to oversee things - what is that functional group or role in this type of community? Harris 45:41 It's not a hierarchy – IO just want a seat at the table. There are things we can influence; and we will have an opinion and we want to submit that; and we also would like the opportunity to be a service provider, add value e.g. by supporting APIs for a time. But that doesn't necessarily make it a hierarchy. It should be permissionless and decentralised. Nori 46:53 To comment on the Circle bringing things to IO, I think that's even limiting. We saw some beautiful stuff happen when Mercy directly connected with IO to change the payout scheduling. It doesn't have to be the entire Circle working together - if it makes sense that two sub-circles can figure it out, they should. Joey 47:34 But someone still has to give the go-ahead. Even with the example with Mercy, she went to IO and IO said, yes. It wasn't that Mercy said yes. I know IO wants to transition to where we could decide, but we're not there yet. Harris 48:21 That's a valid point - in that particular case, we happen to drive that process as a service provider. But some processes will be owned by people outside of IO in the near future; so we need to start experimenting what that looks like. Tomi 51:12 I just want to point out regarding the slides I showed before, that it's not far away from what we're already doing. If you don't like the titles, you could name them after the Circle members.
52:21 Next steps for the Pol.is poll and the After Town Hall
ACTION ITEM Felix, Rhys, Joey and Quasar to work on After Town Hall.
ACTION ITEM Nori will start Pol.is poll by sending it to Circle members, who all add statements, then share to their communities; then Friday 8th, include it in the Catalyst mailout. Also announce at Town Hall.
ACTION ITEM Twitter Spaces – Quasar to organise, and to create a calendar – and will document and return info to the team.
ACTION ITEM Share any Twitter spaces and other schedules in advance with Danny, and Tim Richmond (marketing and communications lead in Catalyst) so they can publicise.
Who is now part of Circle
Nori 1:06:59 There's still 7 people, but we may have different people subbing from time to time. Mercy, Rhys and Joey are still on Circle; Quasar is replacing Dimitri at the meetings; Tomi is replacing Nadia; Felix has replaced Bullish Dumpling for CF; Kriss will be replacing Harris for IOG.
1:07:23 Jokes and goodbyes
Meeting ends 1:10:48
Verbatim transcript
Last updated