This is a proposal to formalize our team of Community Advocates. It’s being presented as a request for comment to facilitate discussion.
This proposal will:
Briefly provide background on the origin and current state of the Community Advocate role
Define the scope of responsibilities for Community Advocates
Suggest potential Community Advocates
Define how one becomes a Community Advocate
Ask questions to start the discussion
The Community Advocate role currently exists as an unformalized role for moderators on our Discord server. The role has a cloudy definition, even for community members which have been granted it. Still they are an important part of keeping the community and Discord server alive. So far it has been given out when needed to provably trusted community members.
What stands out is, that our Community Advocate role has a good coverage of native English, German and Spanish speakers.
Scope & Responsibilities
Community Advocates are trusted members of the PoolTogether community that are willing to help defining & archiving the communities values, mission & vision. Community Advocates should be equipped with server moderator permissions to be able to pursue their mission in helping the community.
Community Advocates help to align the community’s values, visions, wants and feedback and ensure we maintain a wholesome and healthy community vibe. Having this role officially formalized will help us in scaling the DAO looking forward.
Responsibilities:
Be facilitators of the community
Moderate the Discord server (eg. use the -ban command against users violating the rules)
Plan and execute community events & contests
Help & answer questions, especially in language-specific channels
Organize the chaos (eg. pin valuable & helpful messages)
Help other community members to find their spot in the PoolTogether Community & DAO
Act as bridge between the language channels and the rest of the community
Becoming a Community Advocate
I suggest basing the Onboarding on nominations on our Governance Forum. Possibile ways to confirm would be a governance forum vote vs a Snapshot vote.
All of them have proven their intense support and activity in the PoolTogether community and helped countless of members on Discord. I would like to propose to add them to the current team of Community Advocates.
Questions
After outlining the role I am left with questions I’d like to ask:
How does someone become a Community Advocate?
Should we create a dedicated category on the governance forum to nominate community members?
When does someone stop being a Community Advocate? How do we offboard inactive members? When does someone count as inactive?
Do we want to compensate Community Advocates? How?
First of all I actually have liked that it is an informal role. I remember back when I was invited to become a Community Advocate it was even posted as a Job on the PT Website but I have always viewed this as something community members become by heart rather by effort/duties. I think you described the things CA’s do pretty well. To me its being an ambassador both internally and externally. Supporting vibe, creating a welcoming atmosphere, helping people in need and ideally help bridge between other protocols to create synergies and a positive perception of the PT community.
It is important to flag that the CA group is nothing secretive and unfortunately there is no alpha re tokens or NFTs shared in a private group
With regards to future CA’s, a few questions come to my mind: how many CA’s does the community really need? What is the benefit of having many (think 20+) CA’s? Apart from rewarding loyal and contributing community members. Maybe the reward bit is what is most needed. That said I am against an overformalisation. Given how informal this role is I wonder about the need for offboarding, unless the group gets too large. But if a CA flips into a CA alumni club or the like isnt it an odd signal sort of “you’re out” / “i’m out”?
I’m with Gabor on this one, I think formalizing it is unnecessary really. The people who have been around and continue to stick around will/should naturally acquire the role as their participation shows. I would say that’s the case for all the members you listed. These are members you always read chats from in discord and almost always I see them helping someone!
To throw some comical shade, those that have answered above are all part of the secret club
Now for the serious stuff. I always assumed the Community Advocate role was something that is just divvied out when it’s needed. In the early days when most of the CA’s got the role pre-token drop or just after and they fulfilled their roles really quite well. As time has gone on, they have become less prevalent in discord, not because they aren’t around but because the community has grown. I also assumed the CA role would grow with the community, but it really hasn’t.
I think there definitely needs to be some sort of system to grow the role with the community. I don’t know how explicit what the role does needs to be, the community has functioned well with a vaguely defined role. But there certainly should be some sort of outline for when the role needs to be expanded and what the criteria should be.
I’m honored to be tossed in the mix to be added to the role. I felt awkward asking for the role as I felt I was active and engaged in the community enough, but I only received bits an pieces of the role - I can ban and pin but not much else - it felt odd to be given piecemealed parts of a role. That being said if push comes to shove and only a minimal amount of people can be added for whatever reason, those that are non-english speakers should be the focus.
I am a bit surprised by the reactions so far, as this was initially meant as a discussion starter. Maybe I should have started with more questions instead of trying to articulate the role already.
The intention here was not to over-formalize something, just to articulate something that is there already but still without a definition. It is to define what the role is and how we want to handle it in future. The role exists, but everyone I asked had a different or no definition for it.
If we describe it as an “ambassador both internally and externally”, I think there can’t be too many.
availability around the globe
decentralizing the DAO
the community grows, so the role should be able to grow too
The question then arises who does the picking? Currently we rely on @Leighton to pay attention and hand out the role I believe.
To me it already holds the power of appreciation, moderator permissions and a fancy color for the name.
That said, I personally believe we shouldn’t couple every effort in our community with financial benefits. This role is a heavy status incentive. When I was granted the role I didn’t need any more than that, because I felt strongly appreciated and suddenly a bit more a part of the DAO & community.
I believe this is something we can further leverage.
I do think some of the confusion came from timing of this posting related to Brendan’s timing of posting about the executive team role. This is a much different conversation.
Overall, I do think status / honorary roles are very important in a DAO. For some people they may even be more important than financial incentives. So I don’t think this needs to be a paid role but I do think formalizing how people join it and what it means is still valuable.
I think it would be worth doing a take two on this post incorporating the feedback presented here.
Most of the more recent additions were actually not suggested by Leighton. They were suggested by non-PT Inc. community advocates (like myself) and then if others agreed that member was added.
I agree it should grow but I also think it should grow slowly.
In my opinion it loses meaning if there are too many.
If everyone is a CA, no one is.
I think it’s a good time to start talking about this
My idea is simple, we have nomination to be advocate, why not have the same to offboard advocate? So people would be able to share story’s and thanks each advocate’s offboarding!
