Empathy toward people is the real heart of community. And this is ultimately a design problem — not a marketing problem.
“This network is robust in its unstructured simplicity.” — Satoshi Nakamoto, Bitcoin Whitepaper
“We have to pioneer what it is to be a company in this new space.” — Ethereum and ConsenSys co-founder, Joe Lubin
Many teams in this space are already taking this idea to heart. For example, Aragon is decentralizing organizations without borders, Democracy.Earth is blurring the boundaries between foundation and governing activist, Blockstack (disclosure: voucher holder) is taking pains to think fully about long-term decentralized design and data ownership, o1 Labs is thinking inclusively in bringing crypto scalability into primetime with verifiable computation; Orchid Labs is doing bananas R&D to create a layer making the internet free of surveillance and censorship; CIVIL is creating marketplace opportunity for newsrooms in accountable and responsible journalism; Golem is networking hardware worldwide to be a powerhouse agora for computer processing; there are countless other brilliant projects rethinking what it means to be involved here as companies…
We can go even further in the cryptospace.
We need to also pioneer what is it be within a Community.
Designing a vibrant community is meant to be a ‘challenge question’; to thrive, we know communities need to be connected, resilient (or even antifragile), healthy in their well-being, inspired, and inspiring, all for starters. There is no straightforward path, nor some well-traversed playbook to come in and “run the community organization” for any vibrant community, anywhere.
How might we enable these things in our decentralized & distributed ledger-based future?
Because everyone needs some architectural inspiration when living in front of computers all day. Source: Daniel Lee
I. Proposing Design
In technology, and especially up until now in the spaces around blockchains and the decentralized web, the approaches to community are made to seem as if building community were a marketing problem.
I will have to beg to differ.
Community, at its heart and core, is not a marketing problem — it’s a design problem.
A thorny, messy, nuanced, imperative — design problem.
The difference between them ultimately comes down to a difference in mindsets, and of paradigms.
With design, there is both a rational process, yes; however there’s also a certain kind of reflective practice. There are subtleties involved: there’s an undercurrent and modus in that vein of “doing stuff which sells itself without explicitly begging to buy itself”. And when we approach design problems, the unsettling reality is that design problems are inherently “underdetermined”.
“The design process doesn’t just begin with your idea, it begins long before that. So you have to interrogate the past, you have to understand the contemporary contexts within which you are making something.”
— Jennifer Rittner_,_ Designing for Inclusivity in Mind
Design at its best looks to north stars in creative concepts, and knows that most any type of ‘stratagem’ or ‘marketing plan’ will need a hell-of-a-lot more context and many more shades of gradient and gray.
It’s less about ‘executing plans’, more about bringing things to life.
But this writing isn’t meant to add to the seemingly perennial debates about “design vs marketing”; rather, the hope is to point out that within the burgeoning crypto-community, we have the chance to rewrite a lot of what has come before. For a long time.
“Starting over means little if we’re destined to repeat the mistakes we’ve already made.”
— Mike Loukides, “It’s Time to Rebuild the Internet”
Inspiration board #2. Source: Niti K.
II. Socially Anti-Social
Social media have amplified and proliferated what is one of the most human of things: voices. Now, however, there aren’t just individual voices, but supra-human beings whose voices are amplified and proliferated by platforms: that corporate Twitter account, those pet animal Instagram accounts, the runaway-train amounts of similiar-yet-not-the-same Facebook pages and groups, etc.
This has now abstracted voices from people — on a global scale. And that is fine, in a sense, and not necessarily negative, since it could actually also be a good if and when those tech platforms remember their humans, and ask themselves hard questions.
But we’re continuing to see that they don’t.
And what more could we expect, really, when growth somewhere became an ethical goal unto itself?
This is when this becomes a bad thing: when lots of very loud voices are systemically dehumanizing the people, enabled deeply by our own biases writ-large on our tech and social platforms. It begs the question:
“Now that the internet is central to so many people’s lives, how can we act with systematic care to maintain a fairer, safer, more understanding internet?”
We are well aware of how broken the current social media paradigm is, living in this world where even a true voice’s reach gets there based off of its volume or divisiveness more than value or meaning, and when digital identity is helping make corporate, behemoth ‘monopolies’ unfathomably powerful. And we still want to bootstrap all this to ‘growth’?
Source: Daniel von Appen
III. Beyond Fragmentation
Crypto could now offer to be the ultimate playground for evolving what community can really mean for our lives holistically merging between digital, physical, and beyond.
A core problem, though, is that as long as blockchain projects and decentralized teams focus their community efforts on “marketing aggregate growth” or “growth hacking” their “engagement”, they will miss the mark to foster more humanizing technology and communities. They will keep treating actual people as secondary to followers, likes, and views — and keep peddling the same-old “digital vs physical” myths.
“Digital & physical” have also been hot buzzword topics in the past few years. Again, this piece isn’t to get into these endless false dilemmas.
Here’s some food for thought, though, and it’s hardly a novel idea: our platform communities are digital, yes, but communities are people — and people are physical humans. Period. Myopic futurism should have no place in our discourse when it naively attempts to mistake technological evolution for transcending the physical.
The purpose of “technological revolutions” is not accidental, and they’re for evolving human society — not vice versa. Bitcoin et al.
“Online” and “offline” community, when they’re both made of living humans, are really two sides of the same coin. The common thread is always the lived experience of individual people.
Obviously, both people and their experiences are multifaceted, so it follows that they deserve multiple outlets to express different parts of themselves, and to give their contributions in a collective, group sense.
This is important all the more so for people involved in the cryptosphere with key points around things like anonymity and open-source work. And the point before about some of the good given to society by social networks online has to do with this truth.
A core tenet of the critique of many academics and researchers, though, concerning effects of social networks on ourselves and our society, is that our very psychology is being burdened by this synchronous fragmentation of our digital lives. Amongst other indeterminate effects. We can do much better.
Source: Wynwood Walls
IV. Communities Have A Sense of Place
A community, in our lived experience, often is understood as associated with place. A town hall for this, a ‘place of worship’ for that, where you go to exchange, a garden to grow things, community spaces for all of these together, etc. This same idea has so much potential energy behind it if experimented within the “digital” as much as the physical/built realm. This is all the more true for new paradigms with decentralization and distributed computing.
We very well might need to rebuild much of the internet, much like we rebuild and reutilize the architecture of our built environments all the time, and sometimes even the architectures of our personal relationships.
Imagine if the community we build around these projects, in this new era for technology, could be thoughtful yet meaningful, organized yet fluid, like a real “community” in its most ancient and contemporary of senses — full of mixed-use cases and polymorphic spaces, and new, more human, connection.
“Getting people talking, and encouraging them to do so …. is a way to to ease the shift between the digital world and their real-life experiences.”
— Katie Dill, Director of Experience Design for Airbnb
We are not in robust simplicity. We now need to think beyond “walled gardens” and “channels” (trying to “be everywhere” in Telegram groups, Slack channels, Reddit threads, Twitter feeds, the list goes on) into something more like a sustainable architecture of spaces that is welcoming and alive — and co-designing them with the community.
For this post to contribute even more value to the greater crypto/web3 community, maybe that also comes in the form of nascent ideas, whether it’s:
- launching a photography project as a creative challenge (like this one): What if we went about ethnographically documenting and conveying sensory experience within decentralized tech and crypto-in-the-world?
- cultivating community through food as a time-honored ritual: What if we thought about nourishing and flourishing as applied to coins and tokens?
- inserting design sprint here. Everything from the smaller micro actions to grander ambitions can all have merit. What if we considered a decentralized system for sourcing pain-points and contextual moments, much like we do now with bugs and bounties, to inspire more ideas for community?
- What if we considered that these are problems without easy answers, that can’t just be engineered away in some one plan or roadmap, and that need time to be fully understood?
- What if we git-committed to really going beyond crypto tribalism and superficial community divisions, toward more collaboration and cross-pollination in our ecosystem?
We need all of the creative inspiration we can muster, to really buidl the crypto ecosystem as something which will better our human condition. Community is paramount.
Netherlands Library, Museum, and Community Center ‘De Petrus’ / Molenaar&Bol&vanDillen Architects
V. Fostering Human Connection is Everyone’s Job
Blockchain has been called a technology that itself is all about creating one priceless asset: trust.
I would have to agree. “Trust-less” technologies and the advent of shifts that they bring does not mean trustworthiness should become worthless. This is because trust forever begets healthy social relationships —they are core to true human flourishing.
Leveraging P2P trust is not an antithesis to blockchain and cryptocurrency principles — it is an avenue to explore in P2P networks and trust-to-trust design if we are to reach global audiences.
And we are making strides in how to design for trust around a “trustless” technology.
Sometimes just “breaking a little bread and looking people in the eyeballs” is a start in rebuilding the very architecture of trust between myriad ‘tribes’.
People and their conversations need to flourish. And a community, whether on or off-line, has a responsibility to answer these calls for people. This is everyone’s job. There should always be attention to space that brings people together, gives them a chance to access transformational tools, to take pleasure in collaborative activities, foster inclusive dialogue, and develop thoughtful + purposeful voices.
Architecture and Design in particular as practices have come a long way in approaching how to address these goals — it’s about time everyone of us involved in building emerging blockchain technology did the same to architect and design our communities.
[Disclaimer: None of the mentions here are endorsements for investment, nor does the author ever give a project or team mention without disclosing any involved investment. If she is personally invested, she will disclose so.]
Gabrielle Micheletti ( @gabriellemic ) has an entrepreneurial, tech-literate liberal arts background, with previous work + study collaboration stints with Pininfarina (Mahindra), Designlab, the Interaction Design Foundation, Rails & JS Girls, Rhode Island School of Design, and others. A proud supporter of #WomeninBlockchain and the Blockchain Inclusive and Diversity Pledge.
I love to discuss Community with teams who are eager to better the world with decentralized & distributed technology. You can ping me here.
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Endless ‘peer review’ thanks to Jairo Vives, Artur Tchoukanov, Andres Pineda, and Edgar Alvarez for their help and support in this writing.