The Sundae School Reformation: Penance for the Community

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Sundae School

This is a proposal on addressing community issues that have been observed since the early days of Manifold. Taking these last few weeks to reflect and more importantly address this in a meaningful way took great care. Simply hiring a ‘Community Manager’ or ‘Marketing Director’ to have oversight would not have addressed the problems we have faced and, more importantly, will face in the future. I will detail a few retrospective points, then provide how this will be implemented, and finally define the outcomes we expect from going forward with the plan.

Restructuring the Community

  • MEV ETH issues with maintaining ‘separate but equal’ communities
  • Maintaining distinct forums, chats, etc. requires at least double the effort
  • Moderation is the primary overhead for community management.
  • Does not address how to facilitate cross project involvement, promotion, etc.
  • Taxidermy Crisis of 2024

The central premise to the motivation behind this plan is that we need to be able to facilitate cross-project promotion and involvement with the genuine appearance of sincere involvement and interest. Having a communal area (at first) to support the existing Manifold Community and the growing XGA and projects using Manifold/XGA brings a more coherent voice and space to both advocate and promote

Community not dumb

The community we have is not dumb. This goes beyond just ‘MEV’: there is a rich space of discussion possible and very few projects have touched everything in the Ethereum stack. We feel that this opportunity represents a better way of engaging with the Ethereum community as a whole.

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Reformation Plan

  • Sublimate the community into a new entity with its own distinct name, ‘Sundae School’ (unless someone comes up with a better name).
  • Create a discord for this: Telegram chat will continue to operate as is, however we will be promoting the Discord server going forward.
  • Migrate the forums to this new entity branding.
  • Recruit community members into a compensated position for moderation, for finding potential speakers, etc.
  • Biweekly 2 hour slot on Saturday’s for Office Hours and Community Discussion/Presentations. Someone from XGA or Manifold will always be leading this.
  • Utilize members for MultiSig signing duties if desired
  • Utilize MolochDAO like setup for managing (e.g. OP superchain rewards directed to the DAO)

Benefits and Desired Outcomes

  • Discord will facilitate community calls, office hours, support, etc.
  • To become an ‘Area of Principled Discussion’ - think EthereumMagicians but more shill friendly and less oblique.
  • ‘Sundae School’ can provide the communal space for XGA, Manifold Finance, and hopefully other projects.
  • Can more easily facilitate promotion of other projects that are using XGA and Manifold
  • Broader appeal to the larger Ethereum community as a learning resource and space for discussion.
  • Appeal for developers/projects to make presentations regarding their work or area of study.
  • Taxidermy regulated on Telegram usage only.
  • Construct and revise analytic methods for projects.

Timeline

  • Organize a community call date to discuss the plan and hear objections, questions, etc.
  • From there, create and secure the Discord server and onboard an initial set of community members whom will help.
  • Publish a quarterly calendar with the bi-weekly Saturday event and schedule speakers/topics accordingly.
  • 14 days after the conclusion of the community call and any voting/polling that has been posted.
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honestly, just having a commitment to come in once a week to telegram and give the top 3 updates for the week would be all it takes. let us know about how the top 3 from last week went/are going, what are the top 3 things being worked on this week. that’s it. you don’t even have to answer questions.

then post whatever else you want. but just some consistency would go a long way for people here, the team, and yourself. there is freedom in commitment.

What is proposed is a valiant effort but very late and not sure there is much belief in the commitment to it.

“Do as you say, say as you do.”

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There isn’t any demand for what you’re currently suggesting Sam. Why do you think any of this is necessary?

It’s a contrived and complicated solution to a problem that currently does not exist: we don’t have distinct communities across any medium, at present there is barely one. Support and nourish that one community, start small and then we can have these sorts of discussions much later down the line.

Feels like this is again complexity for complexities sake and will avoid the underlying problem which is while we actually have very strong foundations for a community (with many active, smart, funny and knowledgeable members) there has always been a lack of any reliable communication from the team to these members.

Until you acknowledge that you are going to fix that one central problem then it’s difficult to see a world where any other changes will have a positive effect.

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Completely agree with this. We just need a commitment and follow through on communication.

Even if a plan changes, something gets delayed, something came up, a new feature had to get built first, etc. it doesn’t matter what it is as long as the communication is consistent from you and the team.

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I think if you can answer these main questions everyone would really appreciate it.

  • Whats being done about the liquidity issue?
  • When will staking be available?
  • When will V2 (or is it V3 now?) go live?
  • Are Frax still on board?
  • What happened to the Lido proposal?
  • Are all the audit activities complete and signed off?
  • Are you really the briefcase man?

Thanks!

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All this sounds nice.

But why not start simple:

Do a weekly update in the existing community at the same time every week.

And a monthly community call with Q&A.

It doesn’t need to be a lot more complicated than that.

Start there. Build on that.

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When is the community call taking place for this?

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It seems like no one wants to discuss Sundae school