Should we have an internal comms guild?

D_D has people with immense talent and drive, but the biggest issue I’m having is with the lack of organization and clarity of our communication. Some things are on discord, others on discourse, a few errant things are on google docs and of course there are things on github.

In my opinion, there should be a short-lived internal comms team, whose job is to streamline our current modes of communication, consolidate our past discussions, and create systems to facilitate future communication.

By systems, I mean guidelines, rules, templates, etc, which should all be simple to follow and easy to find.

Should we try to nail down where and how communication happens?

As someone with ADHD, it’s a heavy mental load to be sent from link to link and site to site as I’m trying to catch up with convos I’ve missed.

Rather than saying, “All discussion must be on discord and discourse!” it may be better to limit where official discussions of certain topics live.

If the dev teams want to discuss certain things, and github is a better place for them, then make that the official source of all things dev.

If issues of governance are better hashed out on discourse, then make discourse the official source of that info.

Conversations, documents and other communications can happen off these official platforms, but anything of substance relevant to meaningful decision making–anything you might need to know if you’ve been gone for 2 weeks, for example (cough cough) :joy:–could be either written or copied over to those platforms.

Should it be clear who’s doing what, when, why and how?

It’s not as if this info doesn’t exist, but if the goal of a Dao is to facilitate action and move fast, we can’t intentionally or unintentionally get into a “figure it out” mindset for information.

People don’t know how to contribute if they don’t know what’s going on.

I personally am not entirely clear on whether Season 0 has officially started yet, or when it will end. That’s not me being annoyed, I’m just genuinely a little lost.

I also saw a list of guild leaders, but it didn’t seem to have their contact info (no discord name or email, etc). Not sure how to coordinate with them to see how I can help.

Should it be quick and easy to see changes made to the structure/layout of discussion boards?

Seems like there’s a bit of chatter about changes being made to how the discord will be organized, and in the future the same may be said for the discourse or other platforms we may use.

It’d be nice if there was a person or group who could see these needs and asynchronously make the changes when informally requested if it’s something minor, or after a vote from the affected groups if it’s more major.

If you answered yes to all those questions, you may want someone to handle communication!

These are just thoughts I’ve had. There are probably tools already in place to handle most of this that I don’t know about, in which case my apologies. There are also cultural changes that could fix many of these things. But I do think there’s a blindspot here that isn’t covered by the current guilds, which is vital to our success.

Do you think there should be a team for this?

5 Likes

In my opinion, there should be a short-lived internal comms team, whose job is to streamline our current modes of communication, consolidate our past discussions, and create systems to facilitate future communication.

I like that you defined this as “short-lived”. I love the idea of spinning up teams with a narrowly-defined problem to work through together.

As someone with ADHD, it’s a heavy mental load to be sent from link to link and site to site as I’m trying to catch up with convos I’ve missed.

:wave: ADHD here as well!

You’re right. The workload just to keep up with a few topics is immense and it’s infinitely worse for those of us that struggle to focus/deal with information overload on a regular basis. I appreciate you being open about that here and think it’s important for us to consider.

If the dev teams want to discuss certain things, and github is a better place for them, then make that the official source of all things dev.

I agree that flexibility for teams/guilds is important.

As an open source maintainer, it’s extremely important to me that we funnel as much of our discussion and planning into GitHub issues/discussions/PRs as possible. That solution isn’t the solution for every team and guild, but for open source projects within the DAO, I think it is.

It’d be nice to have clear definitions around this for each guild and for DAO-wide discussions, so that we can narrow down the scope of where people need to look to keep track of what’s important to them.

I know that the governance guild currently has on-going discussions around how to track and document things at a high level, so that might end up being the best place to document these more guild- and team-specific solutions.

High-level documentation funnels you into the lower-level documentation for the specific areas you care about.

Conversations, documents and other communications can happen off these official platforms, but anything of substance relevant to meaningful decision making–anything you might need to know if you’ve been gone for 2 weeks, for example (cough cough) :joy:–could be either written or copied over to those platforms.

:+1: Important knowledge should always be funneled from ephemeral sources into concrete spaces.

Do you think there should be a team for this?

YES

5 Likes

I would seriously contribute a monthly stipend to someone (maybe $20?) to be an embedded reporter within the DAO and do quick hit daily/weekly/monthly summaries.

Obviously that’s not enough to compensate someone for their time, but maybe there are other people like me? If we pool resources maybe there’s someone who would want to jump on this ASAP?

I can’t be the champion for this because I’m pulled in so many other directions right now, but that’s kind of the point? Hoping to make D_D a majority of my time commitment once it gains focus so it would be great to not be jumping in cold later on.

3 Likes

do quick hit daily/weekly/monthly summaries.

This has been our goal with the weekly newsletter (“Probably Nothing”). Idk about daily but we are also working on getting writer “beats” assigned for each D_D project and ecosystem topics. I think some of them will be weekly and others monthly depending on the pace of the beat. We’re also evaluating blog platforms for content that will be published as it’s ready. Any feedback you have on what we’re getting started in Writers guild is very welcome!

2 Likes

The newsletter is great! Really exciting to see this coming together. Since we’re such a large org, do you think we’ll need internal comms dedicated within each Guild? Like a newsletter for each Guild to get more detailed for those who are interested? Something more targeted towards DAO members rather than viewing the audience as a casual external observer?

These questions probably don’t have answers, and I’m not sure this is the place to discuss, but I just wanted to throw that out there. We might be so big already that we should be thinking of a multi-tiered comms strategy that gets pretty granular for smaller, niche audiences.

1 Like

Based on what I’ve seen for the last few weeks there’s just not enough activity yet to justify a newsletter for each guild. Momentum is definitely picking up but even though we have >5000 members its only a small number of them that are putting in more than an hour a day. I do see a need for a historian role because - even now - it’s a lot to ask of guild leadership to report out every week to the newsletter team on top of directing traffic in the guild. And that’s to say nothing of managing the wiki pages and other guild-specific on-boarding tasks. I did see Will Blackburn soliciting help for the newsletter piece in Governance. I think other guild leaders should do the same, and I imagine that same person could take point on the other guild comms needs for now.

3 Likes

Yeah, I’m honestly already struggling to keep up with providing a weekly update for the DAO newsletter. I don’t know that I could manage to produce anything extra beyond that to justify a guild newsletter at this point.

3 Likes