no play. I don't think it's like easy to just like, show up, I get coin and be like, Okay, I know exactly where to start and have this like one place where I'm like, Okay, well if I'm this person and I'm looking for this, I can go this way. So that is kind of like some of the gaps right now it's funny to talk to Harry because I'm gonna be working with Harry on this stuff is like creating this kind of like user community member experience. And it also really depends on what you want to make sense of, if you want to make sense as like there's just we have so many stakeholders as well. So like get coin grantees want to make sense of the get coin grants programs. But the other thing is like maybe you're just a fan and get coin and you want to make sense of how you can contribute. Or maybe you're you run a grants program somewhere else you want to start making sense of how can get coins knowledge running 20 rounds so far, can can you leverage some of that experience or whatever it is? So yeah, since making I think is like a huge opportunity space. And it's extremely complicated because there are so many user groups, and there is so much going on and get coin as well. I was just talking to all of our like, delegates yesterday, basically, that's another key stakeholder group. And there's so much going on. And all these delegates, especially the highest value ones, they're all working on very other significant projects around the web through ecosystem. So how do we get the right information to the right person at the right time and the right amount of information as well. So I think those are kind of some of the challenges that we we have right now as like an opportunities if we can nail this, we can get like we can, I think significantly bolster the amount of contributions we have and the amount of excitement in like a dedicated community to seeing get coins goals come to fruition.
Yeah. So I'm curious if you had some kind of like deliberate sense making exercise over the last few months, maybe, like maybe you or someone else at gitcoin, like tried to facilitate this process?
No, I don't think so.
So if I hear you correctly, basically saying that it's kind of basically it's depends on the working groups or some kind of like teams and they feel the need for that they do it themselves, but you don't do this as like a Bitcoin. Core team or something like that. Right?
Precisely. It was. So what happens is we recently restructured like literally two weeks ago, we announced this thing. So it's I think that a lot of that is changing right now. What happens is communities were very fractured in terms of who owned them and who or what communities I can claim for a long time. This was a huge contentious point, but like the PGF workstream, who ran the grants program, like they are responsible for grantees. So they weren't I don't know what kind of sensemaking they were doing for grantees. And we would you know, as a marketing team, we would execute on some things for them. But mostly it was up to them to determine that sense making. Same with the passport team. They're responsible for passport holders and their experience and for you know, stamp providers and for integrators, all of those experiences are responsible for passport is under passport, and that's still the case. And then we also didn't have a governance rep for I don't know, like close to six months. And so that's something that I've only recently started taking over along with all the other responsibilities. So that's also been kind of like top of mind, and we are going to be introducing a number of initiatives but haven't have it. i Oh, sorry. Actually, I did do a sensemaking call with our delegates in December and I posted about it in our governance form as well.
Okay, cool. So I can find that thread, I guess.
It's like you just search for the word stewardship. And it's this like really long post that someone else posted. And then I posted a post under it where I'm like, Okay, thanks for meeting everyone. Like here's what I'm seeing and here's the recap. And then I just had a meeting yesterday with the delegates again. And so I'm going to be posting another summary of kind of like the continuation of that conversation, hopefully sometime this week.
Okay, cool. Can we talk a little bit about this? And by the way, John, I'm I'm very sorry, I have made a like so I forgot to ask you if I can record this video, of course. Yeah. I'm very sorry. I kind of
said something. That's fine. No problem. Okay.
Appreciate that. Yeah. So can you tell me a little bit about this sense making call with delegates like,
yeah,
maybe how did you prepare for it? Like, how did he facilitate it? How did you process the responses and so on? Yeah,
so I can even share with you the mural board, although I asked that you keep it in confidence and you don't share what people put down. But basically, like I took over the steward calls and one thing I noticed is that we were basically having like these meetings, where when I took over governance, like we had workstream leads that were coming in and giving these updates to stewards and like there was almost no conversation. It was just like updates. The calls were really intense for work stream leads. And so they were doing like tons of work to prepare for it. And I just like wasn't clear on what the payoff was. And so I kind of decided to have a meeting instead of like, instead of doing updates, let's meet about why we're meeting and what we want to do while we meet. And so I had this meeting. And basically what I did is I created kind of like this working session, I created this like mural board. And mostly that mural board although the answers are helpful, it's mostly was just to kind of like get the conversation started. And we also ran a poll on discourse like on our on our Governance Forum, about what people want to do in the meetings. And so getting more clear about how delegates are perceiving their time and how they want to get involved and what they see the challenges are, and then my recap was about like, what I heard them say and what I think is creating those tensions. So that's kind of how I prepare for it. I just thought of like, like Design Thinking like I started like, super divergent. I started with some brainstorming just like super above pie in the sky. And then I converge a little bit more and getting more specific with how do we want to actually solution around these. And then I record the meeting and I took time to synthesize all the notes and I put that in the gut for most hoping for some more back and forth. We didn't get a ton of back and forth. But I think the answers were pretty on point. And then at the meeting yesterday I just presented a lot of what I was see and ask people for the reaction. Some people agree to some stuff some people disagree. So it made for some good conversation. And yeah, I don't know how to move forward quite yet. I need to like synthesize the notes again and figure out what to do next. I have some ideas, but I need to think it through more, a little bit more.
Okay, cool. super interesting. So how long did it take for you to synthesize those, you know, that input that you received during the workout? Oh,
I don't know. Like maybe an hour or two at most. Okay. Yeah, I guess it was also because I had to write on the Governance Forum. So I'm like writing a post making sure it makes sense. It's not just like my like, you know, dribble notes or whatever it is and making sure it makes sense so that anyone reading it can kind of like catch up really quickly and get a hold of what's going on. So yeah, probably probably a couple hours.
So that was a call with delegates, right? Yeah,
that was a call with delegates. We call them Declan Stewart's, but they're essentially delegates. Yeah,
I see. Yeah. So how many stewards are there?
I mean, I think total number are something like well in the hundreds by active delegates. It depends what you mean also by active people who are active on the Governance Forum, I would say that there are I don't know a couple dozen at most, some some more active than others. People that are actually voting, we get something like 2000 unique votes, voters on any proposal, but the vast majority, those people are not going to get formed. They're just voting on snapshot. That's where we do most of our votes. And then we also for our meetings, it can depend anywhere yesterday. We only had like 10 people, whereas the meeting before we had like 25. And the meeting before that, we probably had like 15 to 20. So I'd say kind of between like let's call it between 1515 to 20 on average. And yeah, yeah.
So you mean 15 to 20 people join the calls
on the calls, the monthly calls? Yeah. And the monthly calls, I've started publicizing them in discord, the the Governance Forum, try to do two weeks in advance. And then we also have an event invite that I need to clean up because there's about 100 people who have accepted and the vast majority of those people are not active stewards anymore. Like they have delegations maybe not maybe some large delegations, maybe some small delegations, but they're definitely they haven't I haven't seen them. Like I've been used to it for a long time. So like they haven't shown up for like at least a year. Yeah. Yeah.
And so this particular call that you facilitated, yes. How many joints that call yesterday? How many whether you facilitated in
this one in mero? I think there were about 20 people
okay, okay. Yeah. So um I'm just wondering like, what is the like the conversion from you know, the this kind of delegates group to actual workshop like you invited everyone I guess, and then only 20 joins, right. It's
it is an absolute mess right now hard and it's like a super mess because there have been a bunch of governance coordinators who have tried to do this and failed and I hope I'm not making the same mistakes as them but we have like on this we have this like event invite that kind of goes up and there's like 100 people these are like long OG stewards that are literally just not showing up anymore. These people are working on like projects all over the web three at like you and a slob and optimism and all this kind of stuff. So I think these are just like event invites that are just like still in their calendars. But they're not active. So the vast majority of people are not showing up, but there still are dedicated stewards showing up every call. We also have a steward Council of about 12 people I would say about half of them were really active and showing up to every call and now that we're winding down the steward council I imagine most of those people will drop off and not start showing not show up for those calls. So it's kind of hard to say it's been kind of like up and down. And I'm changing these meetings away from just being updates, very, very passive. Like you could just kind of tune in and listen to what the update is. And I'm changing it to much more active like I'm asking you a lot of questions because I want to get to the bottom of like, What the heck is going on here? Yeah, so that might scare some people we'll see. So that's
that's what you do with the with Zoom calls, right? Like you're using zoom for that. Yeah,
to get like live feedback about these calls. Yeah. Yeah, because I don't want to waste a bunch of people's time. I don't want to waste my time either.
I see. Okay, cool. And so you mentioned that now, after this meeting that happened yesterday, if I'm understood correctly, that you are thinking like how to proceed with the, with the results, right? Yeah. Do you think you will write something like a proposal based on this or,
um, I don't know if it will be a proposal or more at first, I'm just going to synthesize the notes. I actually need to rewatch the meeting. It was a very juicy meeting. There was like lots of like, very interesting things that were shared. So what I want to do is I want to capture a lot of those notes and I want to post them in the gut flora. I'm like, here's what I heard. And then I might have some recommended next steps in there. There's also just a lot of moving pieces right now. And I want to make sure that I'm not like jumping too quickly. And I think I'm going to focus mostly on just getting the notes out. And then the next meeting we used to meet monthly, I've decreased that significantly. I started having this meeting quarterly. So that I can like really think through. There's also a lot of tensions in terms of like, what is the priority for gitcoin in terms of its governance, so I'm seeing like, my lack of agreement internally, about how much we should prioritize and get coin I have some very large token holders who are like guys, governance is not important right now. Like we need to find product market fit with our products. That's the only thing that matters. So we should focus on that. And we should worry about really fixing up our Stewart governance in the next three to six months. And then I have other stewards who are like literally, this is the crux of the problem, and if we don't solve this, nothing will work. So I'm dealing with kind of like different perspectives on these things. And I'm trying to find kind of like a middle path of like, how do I not spend all of my time working on this, but spend enough that people who are showing up again, leaders in the web three ecosystem are not showing up and wasting their time and we're not losing our legitimacy, our governance legitimacy, and I'm actually like, moving forward a little bit at a time. So yeah, that's kind of what's on my mind about
that. Yeah, yeah, I understand this question. I have to ask you, like we like, are running out of the original time slot, but like, can we talk for like 10 minutes more or you have to jump off now?
I don't have to jump off. But let's cap it at a hard stop at the 40 minute mark.
40 minutes. Yeah. So we have 10 minutes more 10 minutes. Yeah. Okay. Cool. Cool. I just wanted to ask you about, like a very specific things. Like, if you like use them and like what's your experience with using them? Maybe you don't use them at all. So the first thing is surveys like Do you use any kind of tool for serving the community?
Yes, Google forums often enough. responses have been very mixed word usually, like with stewards. Almost no one else no one responded or like random people would respond, but I don't really care about what they have to say.
Yeah, okay. So the second thing, do you use any chat bots on your server? Yeah, I mean Discord server.
rabidly I'm not super aware of what bots we're using on our Discord. Server. I don't personally use bots. We're also not hosting a lot of governance conversations right now on Discord.
Oh, you just I just lost the sound from you. Okay, there we go. Um,
my internet connection is still not very good. Alright. Can you hear me? Yep. Can you hear me? Yeah, I can hear you. Okay, cool. So the third thing that I wanted to ask you about is Changi PT like do you use charger PT? You know, when maybe like, doing this sensemaking activities like, at any point
I don't use it. I don't use chat TPT in. I used to have DBT all the time. I literally just have constant conversations with Bard, LR chat GBT to make almost all of the documents that I posted on the Governance Forum even just to get me started. I'm using it nonstop. I don't use it in any other way other than to help me write documents.
Got it. So you don't synthesize
the stuff that people I have not tried that yet. I might. I might do it with this meeting from yesterday, but not yet. I might do. Probably I'll probably run the transcript through it. And then I'll go through again and add my own notes because it's gonna miss what I think it was most important, and it might just put in other things that I don't think are important. Yeah. Okay,
cool. Dude, can you tell me like why you haven't done that before? Like, has something like stopped you from that? No,
no, I just haven't seen the need for it yet. Specifically to specifically to take transcript for meetings and summarize notes.
And so the last thing that I wanted to ask you about is so it's not like software. It's more like facilitation, like approaches, techniques, frameworks, like have you or someone else and key points right to use some of that stuff. And I mean, you know, things like maybe like just like examples like sociocracy liberating structures, like anything like that. I it makes sense.
Yeah, we have practice that like overall like a coin are crossbeam Dao operations or leadership team practice like consent decision making for a while in terms of very quickly into consensus faces or making it was like really terrible. Myself and my partner, Mike co lead. We have been leading the marketing team for the last year and a half and now we're going to be leading this new group called the ecosystem collective. We consistently use a whole deconnick approach to all of our things. So we are all about self managing teams. With decision rights and responsibilities that are being held accountable to those. I have not dived into liberating structures yet for some reason. I know I know of it and I haven't like sat down and just like gone through and actually practiced it in a group safe. So I would say the vast majority of people especially full time employees, like a coin are not aware of any of those things.
But you would want them to be aware that you would want them to use Oh, yeah,
all the time. I mean, we're in a debt where a doubt. Hell yeah.
Cool. And yeah, like you. You said that you just haven't, like, started to implementing that like, like, maybe like you can tell me like the reason like you just didn't you had like more pressing Yeah. stuff on your plate. Yeah,
I've been leading the marketing teams. So like, I don't know, like liberating structures, like I'm planning like our eath Denver events. I'm not I'm not like facilitating tons of sessions necessarily myself. Personally. I have these Stuart's things that I've been doing and like I said, until, until recently, they were just updates there's nothing to facilitate only recently when I wanted to, like conjure up answers, there was more facilitation. I'm probably gonna be doing more of that. In the coming months as we take on more decentralized initiatives. We move away from leading the marketing team. It just like hasn't happened yet, wholly because I think I've been missing the opportunities to really like use these structures, but that's pretty much it.
Okay, cool. So I'm going to turn off the recording now. Sure. recording stopped. Stop the recording. I will try I will try to turn on my camera. And yeah, I just wanted to say like a big big thank you for sharing me sharing this stuff with me because it's incredibly useful. And I will try to write, you know, like an article based on the interviews like this, and I will share the article. Maybe playzee. Useful for you as well. That sounds wonderful. Yeah. Yeah. So thank you. Thank you so much, and all the like, good luck with all your endeavors.
Thank you. Yeah, good luck to you man. Best of luck with this project sounds sounds super cool. And I'm looking forward to seeing what the end result looks like.
