Community Leaders Magazine - Issue 3

Web 3.0 and Community Management

Heidi Williams talked to Daniel Ospina about Web 3.0, blockchain, DAOs and what they mean for community management

CAN YOU GIVE US A POTTED HISTORY OF WEB 3.0

The advent of Web 3.0 is as much a cultural movement as a technological revolution and the two are happening in tandem. 2012 saw the birth of Bitcoin which was the first application of Blockchain to create a currency. Blockchain works through blocks and those blocks are essentially data packages which are synchronized across databases. If you lose one of the files or your laptop goes down the other files have another copy which makes it transparent and secure. The whole movement was revolutionary and in reaction to a parasitic financial system.

The first wave of applications on blockchain were around currencies but things have quickly evolved to more complex applications and the question becomes; how do we manage these protocols and who is governing these tools? Unlike a traditional programme in your own laptop or server, you deploy the code in a decentralised database, it’s out in the open so anyone can see it. The code deployed in the blockchain can encode things like ‘if someone sends some tokens to this thing, then those tokens are going to come to me’. You can add parameters and rules

Thats when governance and the idea of decentralised, autonomous organisations (DAOs) started to appear. They are autonomous because there’s this set of rules in the blockchain. It’s an organisation because there’s a group of people using it to coordinate different things, to create a company, to manage assets.

Fast forward to last year, and we have the ability to create these organisations in the blockchain and non-coder people like me could use and deploy. They’re still clumsy and there are a lot of things I cannot do unless I can read the code and interact with it but it’s becoming a lot friendlier. So we have the ability to create a token which only has as much value as you give to it, these can be inter-changeable or all different (tokens with differential values are called NFTs, non-fungible tokens). The code might say the owner of this piece of code owns a jpeg, or file or asset at this URL. And you can add utility – so only owners of this jpeg get access to this members club.

HOW DOES THAT THEN “GET OUT” OF WEB 3.0 TO BECOME TRADITIONAL CURRENCY

In the same way everything becomes hard cash, if people accept it as valuable. When there is enough trading in the market for you to have a market price which means that you know how much to transact it for. That’s how shells became currency at some point, they were rare so it’s not like you could create them out of thin air and people agreed together that they had a certain value and essentially they could trade it all around. You had that market price. You can then trade across any sort of assets so instead of trading shells for rabbit skins you can transact tokens for dollars. Suddenly it starts to connect to the rest of the ecosystem and people start to build software applications to make this easier.

SO IT CREATES A NEW ECONOMY, A SECOND HAND MARKET ALMOST - HOW DOES THAT FIT INTO THE CAPITALIST MODEL, HOW IS IT SUSTAINABLE?

One of the many innovations in this space has been a mechanism so that every time an NFT is sold part of the profits go back to the creator. Essentially you create say, a content asset, like training and people need a token to access it. I buy it for $100 and then I am going to resell it to someone else but you only created a 100 passes for this course. At the beginning no one wanted it now everyone wants it because it has become very popular. I have so many people want to buy that I can sell it for $1000 instead of $100. In the code itself it says every time it is transacted you get a commission. That is one of the possibilities.

But there is now a whole range of other applications that essentially talk about how you can have a prize yourself. You as the source can have a prize in whether you create new tokens which can be fungible or non-fungible tokens, they don’t have to be NFT’s. Algorithms program that, depending on how much demand there is, the price

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increases. You sell you first token for $100 you sell your second one for $105. Then there is a second-hand market and you get all sorts of market dynamics that you can design and there is now a whole profession who specialise in doing computer simulations of these market dynamics and advising you how to design them for your own application.

Coming back to communities, why I find this really revolutionary, is because of governance. You can give access to your chat which is the platform for your community where people meet each other and chat, or you can have events where you need a token to access, for example.

In the past centralised companies that governed those groups. If you created the group you decide what happens in the group and if someone doesn’t like it they can leave. However, there is also the option that people can make decisions democratically. In a traditional company, trying to make decisions like this is very clumsy and hasn’t been experimented with much.

In communities where people see each other more as equals, it’s more appropriate to operate like a nation state of equals rather than a private company monarchy or dictatorship. This is possible because you can create a voting system to make decisions to elect people or make decisions and you can play around with different structures. Now the people are not consumers, they are citizens, they are owners. If they can make decisions it’s like being an owner of this community.

THE BELONGING OF COMMUNITY – AND BEING INVESTED IS POWERFUL – BUT COULDN’T THIS ALSO BE QUITE ANARCHIC?

You need rules and processes for it to work – some programmed into the blockchain, some through community management. You find ways to communicate effectively. We’ve experimented very little with governance historically. To really work on governance, you need systems and processes. It is very easy when everyone agrees but when people disagree what stops them from breaking the rules? Nation states have so much at stake, there is so much to win or lose by being in power that no one was really thinking, what is the best form of governance? People were thinking how do I gain power for my political party and my interests.

“In communities where people see each other more as equals, it’s more appropriate to operate like a nation state of equals… now the people are not consumers, they are citizens, they are owners”

Experimentation has been slow and limited because it takes forever to change the constitution. Here in the Blockchain the rules are automatically enforced, they are a piece of code, they’re objective. It isn’t perfect but there is a lot that they can do automatically and objectively. This other mechanism enforces the rules, creates rules, test rules and groups of people to play around with it and see what works and what doesn’t.

WHAT PLATFORMS ARE THEY CONGREGATING ON? WHERE ARE THESE THINGS HAPPENING?

Usually you need a place for people to talk and that most frequently is Discord or Telegram. Quite often they also set up a forum, chats are very disposable, you want a place where you can keep documentation.

There’s a lot of platforms for this, Discourse, Notion and then there are a whole range of new ones that are purposely built for this purpose that are emerging. Then you need to have a sort of treasury if you want to hold and manage your assets and a way to make decisions. One of the most popular is Snapshot because it captures what people are saying and feeling. Then comes the complexity of how you actually design your governance, at the most basic you can say one person one vote, or one token one share.

WHAT DO YOU THINK ARE THE OPPORTUNITIES FOR COMMUNITY MANAGERS TO GET INVOLVED WITH DAOS?

Community is a group of people with a shared identity, with the added benefits of trust and wanting to help one another. Community managers have often had very little to do with any of that and instead they were trying to market and promote a brand. Now there is the opportunity to go back to the roots of community management and say, ‘how do we create a sense of community’? As well as how do we think about conflict resolution which becomes super important in Web 3.0.

You end up having a huge need for the skills of creating and managing the social tissue, that is the role of the community manager. Anyone who is now thinking about a career in community management needs to understand Web 3.0. You don’t need to read the code you just need to understand the dynamics, the language, who is who in the ecosystem and become part of that community rather than an outsider.

WHERE CAN THEY DO THAT? WHO IS TEACHING THAT?

There’s a fundamental skill in that you need to know how to research information and if someone can’t do that they are really going to struggle because every week you become outdated and you need to keep on learning. Web 3 is happening at a different pace than the traditional world because everybody is open, so many more people have a voice and a vote, because ideas travel more freely and there is more innovation so it just evolves exponentially faster than the normal start-up world. I would suggest googling community management Web 3.0, go on twitter and find people that you find interesting in the space, look at the conversations, see who they are following and tweeting.

WHAT NEEDS TO HAPPEN TO IMPROVE THE WEB 3.0 ENVIRONMENT FOR COMMUNITY MANAGERS?

A real focus on personal development, every community manager should go to therapy! For real. If we don’t deal with our traumas we can end up behaving in ways that aren’t helpful. If you want to be a good community manager go to coaching, go to therapy, learn about yourself. Also learn about conflict resolution and learning when to stop, you can spend 24/7 in the noise so it’s important to have clear boundaries.

If you’re interested in learning more about Web 3.0, we’re putting together a Masterclass which will be available soon – to get on the waitlist, please click here.

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