Decentralized Community Building Guide #1: Introduction
Original: What We Can Learn from Decentralized Community Building[07/21/2022]
Written by: Bethany
Compiled by: Misaki, Diamond, WhoKnows DAO
In the past two years, we have witnessed an explosive growth in the power of decentralized community building. In a crypto-native era where ownership is paramount, users choose to spend their time in digital spaces not only because these spaces offer a better user experience, but also because they provide users with more autonomy, expand their influence, and decentralized communities adopt more economic incentives to accelerate connections among users, ultimately making the community more engaging.
As a result, from the inception of a new crypto-native project idea, more questions about community immediately arise. One of them is: "As a web3 entrepreneur or builder, what do you need to understand if you want to integrate community into your project? How do you present it in a decentralized way?"
Before 2020, I spent a lot of time analyzing the ins and outs of best practices in centralized community building, most of which came from my own experiences as a user of web2 internet applications (Foursquare, Meetup, Twitter), or as an employee of platforms (such as Stack Overflow), or from my research while at Union Square Ventures. Last fall, I consolidated many of my observations from building web2 communities into a presentation, using analogies (and also posing some open-ended questions) to analyze the implications of web2 experiences in the web3 world.
However, when I began working closely with a web3 builder community called Zeitgeist, I realized that the questions posed by entrepreneurs were sharper.
- How do we get started?
- How do we get work done in a decentralized way?
- How do we shift people's mindsets from participants to builders?
- What are the criteria for measuring success?
To address these questions, I began extensively searching for best practice cases of decentralized projects, from NFT networks, crowdfunding platforms to gaming projects and DeFi. This article outlines the best practices that web3 entrepreneurs and builders need to keep in mind regarding "how to build a decentralized community for my product." The purpose of writing this article is to distill my research into core insights and share them with web3 builders and entrepreneurs interested in the crypto world.
I will also add two additional parts:
A series of 12 independent stories, each project has its own narrative, and I will introduce them one by one based on how things started and where they stand as of today (July 2022). Next month, I will write these contents on Mirror, with the first case being PartyBid/PartyDAO.
A complete open-source library, containing all the links, articles, and resources referenced throughout the project research process. You can find a complete list of articles and also submit your own links.
I hope this can inspire your ongoing interest in learning and exploration, help you find like-minded individuals who enjoy collecting bits of knowledge to collaborate with, or assist me in maintaining long-term updates.
