Complete Overhaul of Shiden /Astar Community and Social Media Presence

[Royal]

Complete Overhaul of Shiden /Astar Community and Social Media Presence

Introduction:

As we have seen the late issues and problems that the community faced, and with the constant changes that are made with a new and upcoming blockchain such as Shiden as well as Astar a lot of complaints from the community occurred. A loss of trust, and eventually a loss of valuable people that would have contributed liquidity and grew network activity. A lot of mistakes happened and even more lessons were learned.

Community is what makes or breaks a project, it’s a fact and we have to acknowledge it. We need the best of the best and we need to utilize the benefits of having thousands of minds aspiring to reach a goal instead of a handful of people. The community, if productive & strong, can be the main force of innovation, marketing, and adoption. The biggest blockchain we know off today Bitcoin, became the giant trillion dollar asset because of a small strong community that never gave up.

How can we change, improve, and grow better?

The plan:

1- Grow the unofficial community, through the effort of unofficial people who care about the project ( I have already started that journey, and made the Shiden-Unofficial channel)

2- Make sure that this community is moderated automatically and focused on fighting maximalist and the success of Shiden as well as Astar and the long term growth. ( the channel I made is currently regulated automatically set up and by rose bot)

3- Increase community engagement on twitter and grow the account organically through constant updates and activities ( currently the official twitter, is handled poorly and lots of good information that should be posted is either not posted or posted late) and the level of activity is low. I routinely check github and speak with some members of the CoreTeam, and understand the development changes as I have a background in software engineering and a lot is happening behind the scenes that is not being presented to the community. ( I have experience on this front and I have built connections and communities as big as 2-3k strong supportive people with collaboration with +10k partners and the most important factor of growth is high activity.)

4- Make sure the complaints/suggestions/proposal are routinely gathered, combined and posted on the forum and GitHub as appropriate

5- Make sure every voice feels heard, even if it is negative and critical as long as it’s civil and the bot doesn’t automatically ban the person because of it, then he can be heard.

6- Encourage cooperation between all networks in Kusama/Polkadot instead of maximalism. Currently with our old state of the community without enforced rules the negativity and hate was putting the Shiden community against Astar which is laughable.

7- Fully utilize shiden, and bring it in the picture whenever is possible. This can be done by the team as they make their stance clear. Hopefully as well by applying some of what’s been highlighted in this proposal: Build & Test then Go Live - Ensuring Shiden Growth and Astar Stability

How can we measure the success/efforts of changes?

There are multiple ways, but let’s split this into two categories: direct social media presence such as twitter & indirect social media like telegram and the forum.

For twitter then that is easy, twitter analytics can provide us with exact percentages of growth and engagement. For starters the milestones would be:

• increase 28 day average Tweet Impressions, profile visits, mentions by 20%

• increase 28 day average Tweet Impressions, profile visits, mentions by 40%

• increase 28 day average Tweet Impressions, profile visits, mentions by 60%

• increase 28 day average Tweet Impressions, profile visits, mentions by 80%

• increase 28 day average Tweet Impressions, profile visits, mentions by 100%

Final goal: double follower count, and engagement level over the course of 5 months or less.

For telegram & the forum then we should set milestones as the following:

• 10 proposals/github issues/tutorials created (close to hitting this target currently)

• 20 proposals/github issues/tutorials created

• 30 proposals/github issues/tutorials created

• 40 proposals/github issues/tutorials created

basically by the number of proposals, github activity, and feedback. Notice that I did not mention members number here as that metric is not useful.

Final goal: initiate the process of acting as a DAO and moving responsibility completely from the coreTeam & ambassadors into the hands of a well run community that will vote, propose, and make changes autonomously.

I personally RoyalCT am in the process of the telegram & the forum proposal/github gathering and posting and have been doing that for a while now. I’ll happily take charge of twitter presence as well if given the ability to post using teams feature is twitter TweetDeck.

Funding: Utilize Shiden Network Growth & marketing allocations. Current projection of costs given the current value of shiden is 500 SDN per milestone achievement.

[moonme]

We want to build a troop of Shidenators. Shidenators cannot be stopped, not even by the biggest fud. Any fud, we annihilate them. If someone fuds on twitter, the whole troop will have to take action.

We believe that nobody should fud their own bag.

How about changing the milestones to:

1. Number of Shidenators on both TG and Twitter.
2. The number of tweets and engagement.

[Royal]

Thanks for you support

I though about it when writing the proposal, but I came to the conclusion that the number of followers can be misleading sometimes with bots and dead accounts. Measuring Engagements levels & outcomes directly is a better metric. in addition, with growth in engagement the number of Shidenators will increase as well.

[moonme]

@Maarten @shnshkw

Can you comment on this?

[shnshkw]

Thank you for the proposal!

I understand this proposal is considered well.
Some adjustment may be needed of the workflow of core team side how to get feedback, and how to measure the quality of “xx proposals/github issues/tutorials created”.

But I think we can adjust on the way.

[Maarten]

Thanks a lot for your proposal and do share your concerns.

Currently, in our Growth team, we are making huge changes. Workflows, communication, … everything is having a complete overhaul. Will this have an effect now? No, we just started working on this last week.

1. That’s a great idea to grow the unofficial community.
2. Thinking about this with the long-term vision is crucial
3. Last week we started with using more tools and increased the Tweets to 3x a day with all the latest information about Shiden. You can check Shiden’s Twitter and confirm. After fully analyzing the current workflow for Shiden we will also implement this on Astar Twitter.

About development work about Shiden and dApp’s deployed on Shiden, we are working on a bi-weekly dev newsletter. This newsletter will also be shared online and shared on Twitter. Major changes are also shared first on Twitter and Socials.

4. Can be added in the Growth daily sync meeting internally.
5. I think our Ambassadors are doing a great job on this?
6. Agree, this is something all parachains are facing at this moment. We really need to consider working on a strategy for this. Education is key!
7. I disagree with your statement made on your topic

I would propose that the team takes a clear stance and approach here. From my point of view, I think any project planning to be on the Astar network should be forced to test on Shiden first and upon success can deploy on Astar.

This is extremely impotent for many reasons, but I will highlight the most important two:
1- ensuring stability in Astar network
2- growing Shiden Network & utilizing its full potential as a canary network.

Tier 1 projects/apps that we are in talks with are waiting for Polkadot and not Kusama. Forcing them to use Shiden first will not work. If we do, they just go somewhere else. Our testnet is Shibuya that they will use for testing but we can’t force them to create 2 economic projects when they only want 1 in the Polkadot ecosystem. The cross-chain vision that projects set upfront, we need to embrace and support. There will be parachains on Polkadot that will never be on Kusama and vice versa. What I do want to add to this, maybe I repeat myself, is education. Education is key to explaining Astar <> Shiden and this needs to be well thought about.

Measure changes
Twitter: data will be collected on the changes we did with the Shiden Twitter after 14 days and analyzed on the Growth meeting to set milestones for Shiden & Astar for the next month.
Telegram: I have my doubts about setting milestones for official Telegram, I prefer setting those for Discord and not Telegram.
Forum: milestones will be set during the next Growth meeting.

@Royal please send me a DM on Telegram (@Fiexer) and book a slot in my Calendly to talk about further steps with your proposal. Funds can be used from ‘Community Rewards pool’.

[Royal]

3- great work, but I’m planning a lot more than increasing number of tweets.

4- i think nothing that isn’t confidential or very in depth should be discussed internally only, more clarity and participation in the conversation from the community is better. As eventually even crucial changes will be discussed publicly as we transition into a DAO.

5- most of the time yes, but improvements can be made.

7- if forcing is not possible, then encouragement and presenting the option with support might be another solution? Would you agree with that?

We can have both discord & telegram.

I sent you a DM on TG.

[Maarten]

Thanks for your comments

3. Would be great if we could discuss and you could present a proposal with milestones.
4. I agree, but first, we need to deploy and adjust working workflows in our documentation, CRM, and create guidelines before the implementation of community thoughts. Depending on how the DAO will be run, it’s always possible that the DAO gives approval to an agency to work on this.
5. nobody is perfect but I think the ambassadors are constantly improving their engagement.
6. Encourage them to use Shiden, yes! What do you mean by support? Please keep in mind that Shiden & Astar and permissionless smart contract platform, it’s not up to us to tell where a project should deploy. BUT when a project joins the builder’s program we can tell them to first go to Shiden.