- Prelude - Sense of Community
- DAO Onboarding is hard
- Joining a community = all about momentum
- PoolTogether’s Onboarding Experience
- Things to improve:
- A Winner’s Mindset
Prelude - Sense of Community
Sense of Community Theory David McMillan & David Chavis, 1986 ”A feeling that members have of belonging, a feeling that members matter to one another and to the group, and a shared faith that members’ needs will be met through their commitment to be together.” Four Factors: - Membership - Influence - Integration/Fulfilment of needs - Shared emotional connection
DAO Onboarding is hard
Some reasons onboarding people is hard:
- The DAO operates across time zones 24/7
- Interactions are intermediated by technology
- Onboarding is open and gradual
- Org structure is still WIP & undefined
- Not all work can be paid (at least not in terms of financial capital)
As a result, onboarding can be chaotic. More than one tool is necessary to solve this.
What makes up great onboarding for you?
- educating members & keeping them up to date in an effective way
- designed for all audiences, accessible,
- validation & recognition
A great onboarding design should:
- Help new members build context for the DAO’s purpose and goal
- Encourage conversation and proactiveness
- Limit disjointed information on joining
- Be structured around ease of involvement
Joining a community = all about momentum
- Navigation
- Activation
- Learning
→ make many connections & become a node in the network.
Goals:
- DAO Fluency: DAO contributors have a clear understanding of how to contribute and make changes to DAO structure.
- Collaboration: DAO members are able to work effectively with one another.
Questions:
- How do you navigate a community or DAO?
- What makes you go from passive to active?
- high levels of validation
- How do you learn? What’s your preferred format?
- Learning takes time → onboarding material, give time
- keeping people around
PoolTogether’s Onboarding Experience
PoolTogether’s onboarding process is currently very broad and mostly permissionless. We allow contributors to get involved in many ways:
- Provide value and become a member of the Coordinape circle
- Apply for a Grant
- Join a Team
- Work on Bounties
- Suggest Bounties or Features
- … or just start something new.
- this is missing
- this could be cool
- why doesn’t this exist?
Finding your spot
There is a variety main spaces to educate yourself about the PoolTogether DAO and engage with the community:
Guides
Things to improve:
What's so great about the concept of DAOs? You can initiate change!
- What can be improved?
- What aspects are identified as "tough" for newcomers?
- What parts are you "lost" at?
- Which paths aren't available?
- Better formalize the onboarding process overall
- Define becoming a full-time part-time member of a team
- Create on- and off-boarding guidelines for Coordinape
- Create an Onboarding Quest using Dework or similar
- Personal greetings & talking to new members -> we can get a lot better!
A Winner’s Mindset
At PoolTogether we are living the No Loss spirit. But PoolTogether isn’t just about not losing, it’s also about winning & celebrating those wins! We want to make a big thing of winning. Winning can be anything from winning prizes, finishing a project, or achieving a goal.
- Celebrate your own wins: When you achieved something great, make a big deal of it!
- Celebrate the wins of others:
- Celebrate internal & external:
- Turn losses into wins: Own up to your failures & reflect collectively. This builds trust
Like the 1st day of school, it takes time to understand the vibe & context:
Onboarding is the "introductory period" for new hires
Ensuring smooth transitions of new employees to their roles/organization
Without onboarding, people don't understand the business on a basic level
In DAOs, the term WAYFINDING is a better-used term
It shows how people align themselves in spaces throughout the community
Wayfinding reframes your thinking, using concepts related to:
For DAOs, digital wayfinding is used to help new members understand how contributors:
- Observe people fitting into the environment
- Know how to make their first community contribution
- Recognize the options that work for them
A hard problem in DAO onboarding is *context building*
Before you can take action in a DAO you must
1. understand some of its goals/direction
2. map its ecosystem (users, competitors, market...)
3. situate yourself in the project
It's permissionless contribution
That said, there are so many ways to join the fun
One easy way to help a DAO is by observing the onboarding process:
Help fix these problems, and you're now a contributor
What's so great about the structure of DAOs?
You can literally change it
Document current and potential practices
This can display consistencies and gaps in the system we have now
What do I document in the Wayfinding process?
3 Parts:
Finding - New member questions on community, people, model, and process
Harmonizing - Tuning the right mindsets, cultures, and languages
Shaping - Members bringing perspectives/knowledge to change the community
Need Infographics for
- Onboarding
- Protocol & DAO Overview
P 65
Emergence, complex systems, flock of starlings, Ironically the act 9r predicting the path may be the obstacle to achieving the purpose (Peter block, community)
Community = compass > map, compass points to a specific direction: purpose, north start
Why (purpose) & what (actions) differ, the how (activities involved in forming them) stays consistent
- Clarify purpose and principles - doing, constitution & community guidelines
- Convene the people - done, community calls, events, onboarding calls (bringing people together simultaneously to create more connections)
- Cultivate trust (mutual confidence) - trust not to be confused with liking or agreement. Trust for impact. Hold the tension through disagreement & conflict, find common ground, and work together to achieve mutual goals. Trust = byproduct of other activities, takes time to develop. Focus on getting to action & let relationships develop naturally over time. Networks move at the speed of trust.
- Coordinate actions - flows of information, knowledge, resources
- Collaborate for systems change - a small shift in one thing can produce big changes in everything (donella meadows), first see the whole system from many perspectives, everyone focused on a certain piece of puzzle, each important, but if work is done in isolation, the understanding of the whole is limited. Three conditions make the network approach valuable: local knowledge, separation, complexity - > council meetings
Without seeing the whole system, we have little chance of creating the systemic changes we wish to see. Meaningfully addressing complex issues requires bringing people together who collectively hold the pieces needed to engage the issues from many angles at once. (p. 55-56)
Networks cannot be forced to grow in a certain way
Liquid contribution is a blessing and not a curse. We encourage members to not only contribute to multiple DAOs, but perhaps even start their own. I offer any advice I see fit and have a life-long open door policy.
Ultimately, your team is everything. I was shocked at how poorly we were at celebrating wins internally. This is what we all live for. When you’ve achieved something big, make a BIG deal!
A win shouldn't just be celebrated internally. If applicable, share it with your customers. Share with your investors. Share with press. Share on your social. Have your team share on social. Now you have 5X the reach.
This one’s probably a bit cliche. But when you fail at something internally, own up to it -- this builds trust with your team. Do a retrospective -- this helps you learn from it. With these simple two steps, you can't lose.
Not all work is paid
But all work helps to form new connections, and ultimately helps PoolTogether grow. This is good for users, contributors and token holders.
Every DAO needs a wiki
But those who have the knowledge are too busy to document it
A useful onboarding task -> new members document at least one process
Improves docs + gives new ppl an excuse to reach out to others in the DAO
a set of [permanent members]
a [lobby] of contributors
a [recruiter] assembling teams for each initiative
Motivation 3.0; intrinsic value and meaning-seeking behaviour where we all are self-motivated when we are given the freedom to do the work we enjoy and are genuinely passionate about. A similar term is the westernised interpretation of Ikigai(生き甲斐), where work is what the world needs, what you love, what you are good at and what you can be paid for.
