During the retreat, we decided that we have too many calls. That our time may be used more efficiently by reducing the number of calls and being strategic with how we use the time that we do spend in calls.
It was brought to our attention that maybe having a weekly community call is too much and that it may not be the most strategic to get the whole community into a call just for WG updates. This forum post is to suggest a few ideas, gather advice and insight from all of you, and formulate a plan for evolution of the community call.
Here are a few ideas that have been presented thus far:
Instead of a weekly community call, we can have a monthly townhall
Instead of focusing on updates and things that happened in the past, we can utilize our time together to align on where we are going rather than where we have been.
Reevaluate the audience of our callā¦ who are we having this call for? Maybe we can use it as more of a marketing opportunity to bring in people and engage them?
We can create a Weekly Updates channel in Discord where Stewards can post their updates for that week so that we still have a way to receive the updates but donāt need to waste everyones time in a call
Here are a few concerns that have been presented thus far:
Praise culture will take a huge hit. Without a designated weekly space to give praise, maybe no one will praise anymore. Maybe we can address this by making space for praise in our other calls.
Community Spotlight opportunities will be few and far betweenā¦ we will no longer have a way for the community to find out about collaboration opportunities in the space and be able to ask questions to the presenter. The forum could be an alternative however most people are not very active in the forum.
I would love to hear from all of you!
How would you like to see our community calls structured moving forward? What are the benefits or disadvantages to how we have been doing things? How do you foresee the flow of the call? Should we still use slidesā¦ etc
A monthly stewards call, where each WG steward can bring up thing that they want to do coming up, do a bit of resource management & roadmap alignmentā¦ and then agree on a direction. This would be a small call, with the purpose of really getting leaders on the same page & can be up to 2 hours where everyone can debate.
A monthly community call where stewards give broad updates about the direction we all agreed onā¦ explain things that have been done & things that we are moving towards. The audience would be mainly Giveth contributors, so everyone can get in the loop & on the same page - and essentially also know what to prioritize.
I donāt think that it makes sense to have a performative call for the external communityā¦ unless weāre doing it more on Twitter.
I like the Weekly Updates Channel on Discord replacing the Community Call format as it is right now. To be completely honest, I struggle to stay engaged during presentations, and I find it easier to absorb information through written updates that I can choose to read at my own pace.
What are the primary objectives we aim to achieve with this effort? Is it about increasing community participation? - If thatās the case, I suggest an āX Spaceā with one or two hosts, which could potentially be more engaging and efficient. However, Iām not entirely clear on the purpose of the community call or townhall meetings.
At DoinGud, we used to hold a Townhall with investors and stakeholders to present updates, ensuring transparency and accountability in the use of funds. On our case the purpose is let contributors know what to prioritize? Or, community participation?
Sorry to ask but, I would love to get more clarity on what are the objectives we want to get out of the Community Call or Townhall in order to provide better inputs.
Agree - the community call doesnāt seem to be fitting the original purpose of connecting with external web3. As Mitch stated, most of our calls are something like 95-99% Giveth Galaxy contributors (donāt quote me on that percentage range ) but there still is great value in having the team know what every WG / Circle is up to, but again, most of our information from WG to WG seems to be overlapping on these slide updates, as well. So how do we limit the calls, limit the info overlapping to value peoples time but insure the galaxy is up to date on internal workings of each group. Do we have the stewards continue to update the slides each week and then it is just posted in a channel? Do we only do the call bi-weekly? Do we do a stewards call, gather the info, put it one big DApp slide(s) and distribute on a channel?
what happens to Praise & Spotlight, as Ash mentioned?! Maybe we switch to bi-weekly, continue to do praise in the channel and then in the bi-weekly call but during that bi-weekly call its just Griff hosting, and a revolving steward giving the main slide updates to condense time but still have Praise & Spotlights.
What if we do a monthly townhall meeting instead, maybe we can remove the community call all together, because that would be enough for the internal contributors to know what each circle is doing. Do our working group projects really turnover or change more times than a once a month call could cover?
If that is the route, do we still do a weekly praise & spotlight call? As both of those items are extremely valuable to Giveth and the external community.
Either way, I think we take the top 3 or 4 and try all of them over the next couple of months. No reason we need to stick to just one idea at this time, as we are a DAO and have the flexibility to try and adapt.
last thought, anything meant more for external use would have more value being on X platform instead of discord, as discord doesnāt seem to be producing the external numbers we would like to see in our community calls. Lets do the info pushing external calls as twitter spaces and see if that yields any more newbies to the community.
I agree to having a regular Stewards Call that is an hour long and hits more of our objectives in getting aligned. Thatās already planned and will be happening at least bi-weekly with @Griff at the helm.
However I donāt think an internal community call makes sense in the way you are suggesting:
A community call with 30-40 people to listen in and ask questions is not a great format. This causes major participant fatigue, its long, hard to pay attention and having so many opinions in one place rarely allows us to arrive at a feeling of making progress. Maybe some people donāt even care but they show up cause they feel like they have to!
I believe the best way to transmit information internally is to have an announcement channel as some have suggested. WGs can post updates at whatever frequency fits for them, or we set a cadence that everyone agrees to respect - be it bi-weekly or monthly. This allows everyone to see the information at their own pace, regardless of what time it may be for them.
It would make way more sense for the stewards to get aligned in a smaller space and then to transmit that information to their relevant WG contributors - either asynchronously or synchronously - at their discretion.
This allows us to work and participate in smaller groups which have the benefit of being more focused and easier to arrive at decisions.
The idea of subDAOing is to break us up into smaller groups that can coordinate more efficiently, so putting ALL of us into a call to listen and discuss is an invitation to madness and a step backwards.
ā¦So my concrete action steps would be:
Longer Stewards Call - Bi-weekly hourly or monthly for more than one hour. @Griff is in charge of it and decides when, how often, how long and the format. This call is open and āmandatoryā for all Chapter & WG Leads.
Written WG Updates - A permissioned discord channel that allows WG leads to post written updates - could be the same content we put in our CC slides currently - This could be mandatory to post at x intervals (every 2 weeks or 1 month) - All contributors can view these updates.
An external Community Call - Similar to what @OyeAlmond mentioned - I feel the original purpose of the CC was to give updates to our external community (maybe Iām wrong) so for me the CC hasnāt served this purpose for several years. A platform like Twitter is good place to start; a place to tell the broader web3 community what weāre up to - people can tune in if they wish and they donāt have to join our discord or do anything complicated.
We can even still have community spotlightās albeit not with video sharing or slides - but they can talk and share links, similar to what many people do already in all those shill spaces
Add Praise to GIVernance - We can add praise to our bi-weekly GOV calls, allowing space for everyone to check-in as usual and dish a single praise. I would also have the DAO/Rewards crew post some mid-week reminders in Discord for us to take breaks and dish some praise - I was doing this in the TEC for a while and it yielded some good results.
My suggestions and thoughts after reading all the comments above.
1. Engage with our external community solution
Monthly X space āWhatās up in Givethā to provide updates for our external community and give sneakpeaks into what we are planning. One or two hosts. No reason for the spotlight as this would be for external peeps. Maybe itās only 30 minutes long to keep it concise and effective. And we can offer a space to respond to any questions from the audience. This doesnāt really need to include many contributors, but I can see that it may help in many ways from outside community engagement to have something to show for investors within the fundraising team, etc.
2. Internal alignment
I agree that it is important we stay aligned as a team, I am not sure how benefitial the stewards call has been for stewards but for me as a contributor I donāt feel like Iāve received very many transmissions coming from these calls. If stewards feel that there is a need to keep having these calls and make them longer and perhaps a different structure, all good. I support. Having a channel to post updates sounds like a good enhancement. I would advocate for updates posted after each biweekly steward call.
But something that is very special that is being criticised is the fact that community call IS the only call where most of us get together and that itself is special. I WANT to feel and connect with team I donāt work with at least in this way, sharing one space togetherā¦ So in spirit of continuing this but adjusting to our current needs, I like the idea of monthly townhall where we get together, we do praise party, we host spotlights and we align on our future month priorities across the board.
3. Praise culture and spotlights
As mentioned in my point above, I think we can have a praise party during the townhall and and besides that stewards would start encouraging praise at the beginning of every call.
Spotlights could be hosted also during the townhall, only collab opportunities tho. We would filter only the projects that are offering a collaboration. If there is too many requests for collab, we can ask them to post in the forum and make sure we interact with the post, and perhaps check these posts during our gov calls. That way we could ensure to have more interactions with these types of posts.
Hereās my suggestion for the Giveth Monthly call schedule, with calls relating to this forum post.
Week 1 - Internal Giveth Town Hall update (with Praise) Week 2 - GIVerance (with Praise) Week 3 - Twitter Space for āWhatās up with Giveth?ā Week 4 - GIVerance (with Praise)
*Week 1 and Week 3 would also be the bi-weekly internal stewardās calls.
My concern is for onboarding contributors. The pace of weekly CC is really helpful for newbies, for the first 1-3 months, by then they get the feel of the Giveth. However, I agree weekly internal CC is redundant and I think we can be more strategic and intentional with our time.
These calls in my suggested schedule total 4 calls a month, which I think is a good amount for fresh contributors onboarding. As along as we sequence one call per week. I think this schedule maintains continuity with the culture of Praise. I think keeping the integrity of Praise should be a priority. In my check-in calls with new contributors, Praise is one of their most favorite parts of onboarding to the Giveth Galaxy. Praise culture is so unique to the Giveth Galaxy, and I think overall helps with longterm retention, motivation, and workplace happiness.
Iāll also echo with Nikola, I donāt feel like I receive many transmissions about what is happening in the broader strategy of Giveth, and I think a monthly update from the Stewards would be very helpful to keep all contributors informed.
I would only add an optional stewards update on week 3
I feel like we might want to have that stewards call more frequently for the time being, thereās a lot of stewards issues we have to discuss I think for the next few monthsā¦
Once things settle down Iām all for doing it monthly.
What type of community participation do you envision this could bring for Giveth? In what ways would we want community members to participate? Are we looking for more contributors? Are we looking to speak to potential project owners? Or are we just simply sharing technical updates for transparency? Maybe it is important to define the audience we are speaking to and what is the outcome that we are hoping for by taking this route?
I think that it is also worth mentioning that these spaces only stay on Twitter for a limited timeā¦ if we do decide to have the new call in this format, we should have a plan to create a Youtube playlist or something in the same way that we did with the GIVtalks.
Thank you to everyone who provided feedback on the matter!
It seems that there are a few things with unanimous support such as an updates channel in Discord and the need for more steward aligning calls (something that has already begun).
I can also see that there are a few decisions that need to be madeā¦ Poll time!
The new cadence of the call should be:
Biweekly
Monthly
0voters
The new call format should be:
a āTwitter (X) Spaceā hosted on the Giveth account where we can speak to our broader community letting them know āWhatās up on Givethā and increase community participation. (no slides or screen-sharing).
Townhall in the Discord server similar to our current format with Praise and Community Spotlight where contributors can come together for the purposes of team connection as well as alignment. (more team oriented)
0voters
Once these two key points have been decided on, we can move forward with the next steps to making this happen!
Thank you so much for all of your input thus farā¦ it is helpful to hear the voice of the community when making decisions for the community.
The votes have been tallied!
It seems that we will move forward with a monthly Townhall on Discord to replace the previous weekly community call.
The first one will take place on January 4th at our normal Community Call time and continue to happen every first Thursday of each month. Itās already changed in the Calendar.
Posting WG Updates to Maintain Internal Alignment
I have created the channel in Discord already for WG Stewards to post their weekly updates so that the community can still stay informed on their own time. You can find it under the āNotice Boardā section of the Discord server here:
Letās try our best to maintain the momentum there because team alignment is something that is important and we want to make sure we keep.
Praise
Praise should be encouraged in all other calls so that it does not fizzle outā¦ WG Stewards, please try to allow for at least 1 praise from each attendee at the beginning of your sync calls and remind people to type it in the channel.
Letās not kill our praise culture that we all have grown to love!!
Community Spotlights
Community Spotlights will still happen in the Townhall. We should also continue to brainstorm ways we can create space for these types of interactions and demos from potentially beneficial collaboration proposals. The forum is OKAY but not ideal as there doesnt seem to be too much engagement on posts like this and the communities really like being able to present something.
Twitter (X) Spaces and External Facing Calls
I can tell that there are some people commenting in this thread showing support for more than one call and adding an additional external facing call hosted through an X Space that brings Giveth updates to the broader Giveth Galaxy and community. I am not opposed to this ideaā¦ and I think that if the people who would be championing the facilitation, marketing, comms, hosting, etc of this space have the bandwidth, resources, and desire to make it happenā¦ then they have my blessing.
In my opinion, if the X Space thing is going to happen, then it is important to address some questions before we start. Who is the audience? What are we looking to get out of hosting this? Are we attempting to get more participation this way? If so, what type of participation are we looking for? We should definitely weigh the value that something like this could bring with how much work and team resources it will require. Remembering all of the things we talked about in the retreat with budget contributor time, maybe we should spec it out before we jump on it?
Remember this is just somewhere to start and that we are a flexible community!
) but there still is great value in having the team know what every WG / Circle is up to, but again, most of our information from WG to WG seems to be overlapping on these slide updates, as well. So how do we limit the calls, limit the info overlapping to value peoples time but insure the galaxy is up to date on internal workings of each group. Do we have the stewards continue to update the slides each week and then it is just posted in a channel? Do we only do the call bi-weekly? Do we do a stewards call, gather the info, put it one big DApp slide(s) and distribute on a channel?
