FutureMinds: Monthly Peer Strategy Forum 1

General
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The federated approach to Peercoin governance allows for several independently autonomous entities including the Blockchain, the Team, the Markets, the Foundation, and the Community. While they each influence each other and some people wear many hats, they can each have independent sources of leadership. Community leaders, in particular, can be decentralized and permissionless, and can act as a wide base from which to draw leaders for other roles in the ecosystem. With this in mind, I would like to define a Monthly Strategy Forum called “FutureMinds” which will provide a living thread here on the Peercoin Forum that documents different leadership approaches. It will be autonomous in that each month the previous host will select the new host. It is permissionless in that anyone can start a new leadership chain if they think there should be one other than the existing FutureMinds, simply pick a new discussion name and post a new starting thread.

Host responsibilities:

  1. Create initial post on (or around) the first of the month. Increment the forum number.
  2. Facilitate discussion by providing topics, making regular posts, or other efforts such as on discord.
  3. Summarize discussion at the end of the month in the thread.
  4. Pick the next host and prepare them for the following month.

My question to start this month’s discussion is “What is a leader?” I am asking this in the context of Peercoin and decentralized communities. How can we encourage leadership in our particular community? What kinds of leadership are necessary? How can we cultivate leadership in a permissionless, decentralized fashion? How can we avoid gatekeeping leadership, while still maintaining a clear message and well-kept community spaces?

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From @indiamikezulu on the Peercoin discord:
“‘What kinds of leadership are necessary?’ Someone recently made a great point about ‘team’ and ‘community.’
At least three ways ahead are identifiable. One is an inwardly-focused group of long-timers who take what profit they can. The second is a genuine community, but still pretty much focused on developing and trading PPC. The third is a community/leaders focused on cryptos vis a vis the worsening madhouse of authoritarianism and tech-overload sweeping over us. The original crypto vision – the vision I signed up for – was one of giving the middle finger to The Man, of taking cryptos to the world. I’d like our leaders to have this third perspective.”

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Repackaging the previous post:

  1. Leaders sustain the effort, and provide stability. With regards to posting on e.g. discord, what maintains the effort? I notice indiamikezulu posts xeggex prices every day, thereby increasing attention for a Peercoin market. I see this as a form of leadership.

  2. The community allows for Peercoin to work on itself amongst people who understand the goal. This is a vital way to evolve and grow, and requires back and forth of conversation and discussion. Really, anyone engaging in the chat or posting on the forum is doing this, you dont have to be a developer to help lead the discussion and build into new areas.

  3. Leaders can have vision, and lead in a new direction. There is often a disconnect between the vision people have with Peercoin, and the practicality of implementing it. Still, perhaps there is a better way to provide tools to share a vision. The RFC process is an example of a way to formalize future directions, but it can be daunting. How can we become a better home for future leaders with a disruptive vision? Or maybe we already are, and we just need to exercise that muscle.

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@selfwithin continues the discussion by prompting:
“why does Peercoin Need Leader?”

As well as:
“we should consider how to encourage leadership that aligns with our community’s values.”

@Nagalim (myself) asks about how to assign values.

@selfwithin states:
“First distribute power across all members, ensuring that no single person or entity has control. This decentralization allows decisions to be made by consensus or through a democratic voting process, which aligns with the principles of transparency and equality.
Enforceing rules without human intervention. This reduces the need for a central authority or leader to oversee operations, as the Value itself governs the organization. incentives are often aligned so that participants act in the best interest of the organization. Coin holders or members are motivated to contribute and make decisions that benefit the entire group, rather than relying on a leader to guide them.”

@Nagalim mentions the sybil attack when distributing power, then states:
“The community is people, it is more than abstract values, and it does help to have leaders to maintain institutional integrity and memory, to keep improving things, and to search for a more magnificent future. Especially that last one cannot be done algorithmically, but we can still discuss the best approach to generating leaders capable of such strides.”

@mattlm replies:
“When it comes to maintaining consensus and producing blocks, the “power” is in the hands of the active minters, so buying PPC and actively minting is the way to express that.”

@indiamikezulu responds:
“My background is anarchist political theory, so I am on comfortable ground here: ‘leader’ needn’t be quite the same as ‘being in charge.’ The more energetic or talented community members are ‘leaders’ in a way. I can’t code, so in a way the dev team is ‘leading’ me. Moderating threads has emerged as a relevant issue over the years. Even the most libertarian communities have mods, who are a little bit ‘leaderly.’”

@selfwithin:
“We(peercoin group) need active Active Participation from all community member. Updateing Fork Should not take this long unless you have issue. community manager needs to do Regularly host events, AMAs, and discussions to keep the community engaged and informed. Comminity manger needs to Introduce reward systems for contributions to the ecosystem, such as development, marketing, or educational efforts. This can motivate more people to contribute actively. Peercoin(we) should seek Partnerships and Integrations (possiably with Bitcoin cash) : Form strategic partnerships with other blockchain projects, companies, and organizations to increase Peercoin’s visibility and adoption. Integration with popular wallets, exchanges, and platforms is crucial for growth.”

@peerchemist:
“We (peercoin group), do not have a community manager.”

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I feel it is safe to say we have established the need for leadership in the Peercoin community. A central “community manager” could be a direction to go in here, but the direction I was hoping we might move in is with regards to decentralized leadership. The approach of the blockchain is to temporarily assign chain tip “leaders”, in a sense, based off criteria such as PoS or PoW. In the original posting of this thread I described a kind of way we can assign leadership at least of this leadership forum via a recursive definition: the old leader picks the new leader. By allowong for a low threshold of new thread creation and responsibilities to continue the chain of threads, this appeared to me an approachable way to promote leadership in the community.

Are there other ways to assign community leadership? Things like event hosting like AMAs and so on can be very interesting, but we have yet to see any community members take up the mantle. It appears that having peers assign each other to limited-responsibility tasks may be a way to do this. Things like democratic elections only work if there are multiple leaders to choose from for a given task. At the moment, we have the opposite concern: we have concepts of things like events to host, but no volunteers to host them. Generating a culture of leadership may be the best way to encourage such volunteering, as people are more likely to take up the charge if they have seen others do it.

Is a regular forum thread hosted by various up and coming community leaders the way to do this? Or should we e.g. define explicit uncritical roles that can be occupied or unoccupied based on whether we have leaders to fill them? Is the issue lack of infrastructure/tools for effective leadership or merely lack of the needed cultural atmosphere?

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From @indiamikezulu:
"‘Peercoin has several independent entities’

Guys, I’m not gonna write about our present situation, but about the form of politics in which we are involved (whether folks know it or not). You may call it ‘anarchist’ or ‘hyphenated anarchist’ or ‘decentralised’ or ‘libertarian’ or ‘open source’ or ‘consensus.’ Doesn’t really matter.

In 1975, Queen Elizabeth of England had Her Guy sack the Australian Government. She can do that. How? Because Australia has a centralised political structure.

Somewhat across the spectrum is a republic like the U.S.’s, which is characterised by plenty of centralization, but with the ‘checks and balances’ you’ve heard mentioned.

Further over on the spectrum you have anarchists and hyphenated anarchists – that’s us. ‘Formal’ and ‘informal’ and ‘consensus’ and ‘near-consensus’ swirl about. For example, anarchists operate on the principle of consensus. Nothing happens without everybody agreeing. But they use the ‘green/orange/red card system’ when they vote. Green is agreement. But orange is ‘Okay. I will go along in order to go along. But I think it’s a dumb idea!’

Involvement and personalities become really important on this section of the spectrum. Suppose I set up ‘The Official Peercoin Thread.’ If I am an important part of the coding team, and I am active every day, it’s likely that the community won’t launch an insurrection against my use of the term ‘Official.’ I have unofficially made something ‘Official’!

And that’s how communities like this puddle along! Action and balls-iness and perseverance are ‘official.’ And people arrive. And drop out. Some contribute more. Some contribute less. Some get shaken off. Stuff gets done. Stuff doesn’t get done. You play Whack-A-Mole with the wankers. Ya got no idea, guys, how much cryptos resemble the sorts of anarchist groups I’ve worked with over a life time!"

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I think the bar for what is “official” is even lower than either being a member of a team or being regularly active. I think the community will not “launch an insurrection” if you merely produce something worthy of being official, and that bar is also low. An honestly positive contribution is usually seen positively, or at least that is the general hope i think. This is the supposed “meritocracy” that is carried out on e.g. github. There are those that hold the keys to merge requests or other actions, but they are often just checking that things are above-board, they are often not a terrifying gate to pass. Especially for community activities there is a lot of flexibility given to people who want to take charge.

There are ways to increase “balls-iness and perseverence”. Implicit permission is one direction, where we try to give a sense of the “right” to make something official through automated or semi-automated fashion. This thread is an example of trying to make an implicit source of permission. Another direction is to create the tools necessary for community leaders to step up and achieve what they are looking for without taking on too much obligation. This could look like, for example, templates for how to do community activities like AMAs. These templates or checklists could serve as a starting point, and could be updated as people find better ways to do things.

With some of this in mind, I think we should spend the second week of this thread discussing and advertising an AMA or “Strategic Discussion”, which could be Monday September 16th 11:00AM-12:30AM GMT. Selecting a date for an international community is difficult, and I welcome comments about how to go about choosing a date and time for these sort of things, as well as how to advertise, and what the event actually will be. I think the best place to host is on the “General” voice chat on discord.

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FutureMinds Strategy Session
In the Peercoin Discord General Voice Channel
Monday September 16th 2024
11:00AM-12:30AM GMT

Open to anyone in the discord, we will loosely discuss Peercoin strategy or other topics of interest.
Here are some possible discussion topics:

  1. Templates and tools for community growth
  2. The Peercoin protocol: utxo optimization, “declared stake”, documentation, etc.
  3. Mobile client and efficient multisig
  4. Community growth activities or initiatives
  5. Semi-automation of leadership
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FutureMinds_StrategySession_1 (1)
FutureMinds_StrategySession_1 (1)1313×752 172 KB

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Below is a brief bullet-point write-up of some points about event hosting and publicizing it.
EventsAndPublicising.txt (2.1 KB)

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For the next forum, i was talking with indiamikezulu and they came up with a really cool next topic idea: use of AI in our community. This can be the october discussion topic, and we can detail it as we get closer. Indiamikezulu does not wish to facilitate discussion directly on the forum, but I am happy to continue filling that role for now. If anyone else would like to take over facilitation for October, please say something. Your role would be posting the question on the forum (I or indiamikezulu can explain it to you in depth) and writing a summary after discussion happens. You can also feel free to go above and beyond, e.g. hosting events or discord discussions on the theme of AI in the community, but at minimum it is just posting a discourse thread and an ending summary.

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