Community scale is based on parallelisation, not sequential speed. Investing in core foundations to support multiple decoupled projects is the key.
Reflecting on this thought: why does it feel like traditional companies are constrained by this? What are the characteristics that help parallel execution vs. coupled dependencies?
It seems like the pyramid is meant to work as a compromise between sequential alignment and decoupled work:
A traditional Org has waterfall communication and ambiguity interpretation. Each manager level is in charge of converting strategy into Ops and action.
But the parallelisation is capped by managerial span of control limits. The intentional human oversight is a cap.
Each layer in the Org could be thought as a proxy for sequential communication. This makes sense - and it’s one of the reasons the Big4 consultancies is obsessed with increasing span and decreasing layers.
In digital communities though, a well articulated North Star and emergent philosophy of experimentation probably 10xed the “span of control”. Automation at the core means the central core can manage thousands of teams (in a near future).
Currently, I’m not sure digital communities have hit escape velocity on the span of control limits. DAOs are mostly shifting to delegate boards and councils instead of successfully moving to an automated core.
That being said, similar to tech firms, digital communities are benefiting from parallelisation in developer ecosystems, and extending this now to content creators. This is probably the start of something bigger.
The biggest unlock though is yet to come for most DAOs. L1s in many ways have escaped though: each DAO is a parallel and decoupled initiative off the primary “holding L1 co’” (eg ETH)
Once DAOs evolve from product, data and content studios to their own L1 automated core, there’ll most definitely be another step change in the ecosystem.
Strange times ahead.
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This week we will be looking at the DAO Digital Space Design - thinking holistically about all the virtual (and physical) interfaces that community members interact with:
Once community comms infrastructure in place, then comes parallelisation: mission, projects, incentives, governance.
But no scale until reliable comms in place for community mobilisation. A strong influential network lead is a shortcut… but unsustainable, point of failure.
In the short term, effective. In the long term you need to replace personal network influence with tech power. And that means inspiring comms delivered at scale. In other words: fan development.
Key issue tho is that fan base can be double edged sword. So you want sober active advocates for long term community sustainability.
Every community should have a living manifesto, that get's reviewed every season, and re-written from scratch every age (4-5 seasons).
It is the north star, a call-to-action, and summary of values, and a primary form of alignment between new members.
A well-written manifesto should be an articulation of the vibe, a spawner of memes, and a decision framework for potential as well as current contributors.
✨Some news✨
I'll be joining @viamirror team as their DAO Lead! 🪞
My journey into web3 started in 2014, as a crypto-lurker, then a year and a half ago I fell into the rabbithole of digital communities. And barely 2 months ago I decided to go full web3.
What a ride.
In the role, I'll be supporting Mirror's journey to full decentralization:
- Building community infrastructure
- Mobilizing the most talented group of web3 writers, creators, and communities in our space today
- Nurturing an ecosystem of mutual support and D2D partnerships
A short reflection - because wow.
A year and a half ago I came across @ribbonfarm, which led to the @yak_collective and @JonathanHillis's writing, which in turn drove me to community twitter and @rosiesherry's incredible course on building minimum viable community.
Five types of community messaging:
- Sharing (Ideas, News)
- Signalling (Direction)
- Scheduling (Events)
- Summary (Newsletter)
- Sh*tposting (Connection)
We need interfaces that can handle them all, and create feeds tailored by type.
Sharing ideas evolve often from a dedicated channel, into some signalling milestone - then into gDocs, knowledge mgmnt or exploration interface. Very fragmented today.
Signalling evolves often into soft and hard voting. From various channels into proposal drafts (gDocs) finally into polling interfaces (Snapshot)