Review of external communications

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Review of external communications

As commented in Slack, I have started to distance myself from the day-to-day internal communications to see if I can figure out what is going on with the project as an outsider.

Here is my review to date. Will continue to add to this as discoveries are made and then will do a final round before the end of Feb.

General

• What is the projects mission statement?
• Might be a good idea for someone, a developer evangelist, to have a list of developers building on Blockstack who can touch base with each one on the regular. (Do things that don't scale until it's just not possible anymore).
• Core team members should be "required" to bring up topics to the team that have been voiced by community members. If a community member feels as though their voice is not being heard, they could lose interest in the project. It could also, turn that possible evangelist into someone that speak negatively about the project.

  • Happy customers can promote your business in ways that feel more honest and authentic than traditional marketing efforts. https://relate.zendesk.com/education/turn-customers-brand-evangelists/

Meetings

Since Blockstack is an open source project, the need for note taking in meetings is quite important for close followers, contributors and evangelists. I just found this on the forum.. https://forum.blockstack.org/c/meetings. Which is great. But the thing about the forum is organization. there isn't 1 place to go to link to everything you need. GitHub Readme files are perfect for this. If content is edited correctly they can be short, direct and make it easy to navigate to where ever you need to go for the entire project. Whether it be engineering, forum, meetings, mobile, design, or growth. There's a simple 1-stop solution in pointing all developers and the like to one readme or repository.

Instant Messaging Comms Tool (Slack)

• How does a first time developer know which channel to go to for what?
  • Possible solutions, add channel topics? Slack unfortunately does not make these very clear for newbies entering Blockstack Slack.
• A few channels feel quite active. Conversations in channels that are active seem to move quickly
• There seems to be some channels not used at all #security-web-danial, #ranom, #integration-tests
• One thing that I am discovering is that there is less chatter on Slack than there used to be and that the quality of content is also going down, minus #engineering. Maybe trying slowly fade out Slack might be a good idea and move over to a more traditional system with a focus on exxtermal communications.
  • Exercise: When doing "documentation" sprint, have an entire day where the core team is not allowed to use Slack. A lot of discoveries will be made I believe in doing that.
• When in Slack, if someone has a general question, when I read through the list of channels, I feel drawn to comment in the #engineering channel as it feels as though I might get a faster response than posting in any other channel.

Public Slack channel list

Customer Loyalty

Today and for many many days to come the only real users are developers. Customer loyalty goes a long long way. Engaging and making the users (developers) extremely happy will bring them back time and time again.

In the words of Warren Buffett, "you don't have to invent AI to build a great business. If you make people happy they will remember you and come back over time."

Growth

As an entrepreneur/developer, I do not know where to go to see what is happening in the growth process for the project.

• Where are things headed?
• Will this project survive?
• How are they going to grow this network and more importantly
• How do they intend on doing this?
• What is the rally cry to get developers so excited about Blockstack that they want to devote a large amount of time contributing to the project? ie. IPFS API bindings ipfs/ipfs#83

Engineering

So far with engineering it seems to be very well executed. Lots of communication, note taking, etc.

Roadmap

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