NEM Community AMA - 09 April 2020

Announcements
#1

Purpose

This post is a follow up to the recent announcement about the NEM Ecosystem future plans to give some further information on how to take part in the Ask Me Anything (AMA) sessions.

These sessions will be the first of regular ones, so if you are unable to make these at the times, there will be other chances, you are also able to leave your questions in advance.

The intention is for them to be a fully open, constructive forum in which the community can ask any questions of the teams and we will do our best to answer as many as we can in the session times.

Asking Questions

A new Twitter account has been created called @NemberAMA you can tweet your question to this account either before the session or during by either including @NemberAMA in the text or using #NemberAMA (using # is preferable as it is easier to find but both will work)

In future sessions, we will look to incorporate alternative platforms and naturally refine the approach over time to make it as effective as possible. For the first round we will stick to Twitter for simplicity and ease of management.

Depending on the quantity of questions received, we may or may not manage to answer them all in the allotted sessions, we will endeavour to follow up where possible on subsequent ones or in a forum post.

Times

As a reminder the first round of AMAs will occur on 9th of April at the following times:

  • UTC 6am in English - covering the Asia Pac + Australasia time zone
    • Attendees: David Shaw, David Mansell, Iain Wilson, Dave Hodgson
  • UTC 11am in Japanese & English - covering Japanese time zone and language
    • Attendees: Jaguar, David Shaw, David Mansell, Iain Wilson, Dave Hodgson, Kevin Newman, Etsuko Kanetaka, Minoru Orui
  • UTC 3pm in English (optionally Spanish) - covering Europe, USA and Latam time zone
    • Attendees: Jaguar, David Shaw, David Mansell, Iain Wilson, Dave Hodgson, Samy Mendiburo

At the start of each session, attendees will be confirmed and where possible answers will be attributed to one of the attendees (character count allowing)

We encourage the entire community to get involved, this is an opportunity to ask any questions you have wanted to ask but didn’t know where, have asked but didn’t get answered or anything else you want to know.

The intent is to be as open and clear as possible, even with difficult/uncomfortable questions and is part of the way we see community engagement picking up again. So please, bring your friends, ask as many questions as you can and get involved.

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NEM Ecosystem - Future Governance and Plans
NEM Ecosystem - Symbol Launch Plan
NEM Ecosystem - Future Governance and Plans
#2

Am I doing anything wrong? It’s 6.20am UTC 9/APR and I can’t see any messages or tweets at @NemberAma in Twitter :grimacing:
https://twitter.com/NemberAma

#3

Seems like it started a bit late. Some messages are showing up.
Anyhow - may I propose to use NEM Forum or Telegram next time. I don’t like Twitter and the similar social media monsters :relaxed:

1 Like
#4

Posting my questions here.

  1. Is the “NEM Group” approach (with a CEO and proper corporate structure) inspired by / following Matt’s (wallfacer) proposal from 2017? If not, how does it improve on it.

  2. Can a Symbol-Light launch soonish and updates come as development will go? So the damage from the ever-postponed Catapult launch can be kept to a minimum.

  3. Who is “NEM Core”? The “Core Devs”? Will they be de-anonymized? If not - what’s the rationale.

Thank you

#5

Thanks @r3n3 no worries, happy to pick up the questions off Twitter as well, either here, in the main forum post or if needed on Telegram (better on here or Twitter tho so they are easy to reference and search for others)

Answers below:

  1. It is not inspired by/following that proposal it is an independently agreed approach across all the entities and core team. I can’t find the link now either, can you remember where it was? Search function is not bringing it up and I’d need to reread the detail to answer the second bit.

  2. “Symbol-Light” this is something that will be included in the plan that is published on 18th April. In relation to “ever-postponed” launch, bear in mind that to date there has never been an agreed date that is based on a detailed plan and agreement with the core devs, as per Jaguar’s forum post.

  3. NEM Core is the group of people who manage the core funds as per the whitepaper etc. Made up of old time members, many of who were around since before NIS1 launch, easiest to think of them as a founding team although not quite fully accurate. It includes the Core Devs and others. I can’t reveal names/identities as it is up to that group how the subject is managed and what is known or not. In terms of de-anonmyzation (is that even a word?) the NEM Group will not present any information without those individuals wishing it to be presented. @jabo38 is obviously publicly known already, part of the governance board, alongside other responsibilities and is confirmed in the announcement. There is tentative agreement from others Core Team members to join and this will be communicated when/if it becomes concrete as soon as it can be. Whether that is as known people or under their pseudonyms will be left to the individuals to decide based on personal circumstances/philosophies/legal considerations/security assessment etc.

Hope that helps, definitely ask for clarification on any points or other questions where needed.

3 Likes
#6

Telegram ??

Everybody who didnt say “alex is the best, alex the goddess” has been banned there, even the stakeholders lol.

So we use a plateform where many are banned ?

2 solutions:

  • Use NEM Forum
  • Allow the one who got banned by NF2.0 to come back to telegram
#7

Sounds like changes for the better.
I’m still digesting the content of the messages and trying to figure out how it has evolved towards this announcement, what it all means and what the impact of the changes might be. As the AMA is the first opportunity to react, I would like to do so.

Can community members or token holders have opinions about what might be good, interesting or even valuable for the evolution of the project and its ecosystem? More importantly, should the community be taken into account?
Are the POI and POS+ mechanisms really valuable to engage the community? If yes, why not prove it by using it for important changes such as these?
If NEM is shifting towards an open source blockchain system, then why is the PMC not part of these changes? And if it does, then why is it not explicitely mentioned?
Does the shift towards an open source blockchain system mean that the source code of all components have to be publicly available, or are a few components enough?
Should this open source shift also result in a DAO with a publicly verifiable corporate governance structure and decisions supported by its community of token holders?

Why would a potential investor choose to put money into NEM, XEM or SYM, besides the pure speculation on the evolution of price changes? Why was this question not part of the big Marketing study?

So, allow me to attempt to turn most of the above reactions or questions into a suggestion:
Confirm the community is taken seriously and explain and present the announced changes in more detail as a proposal to the community and allow them to vote on it with a POI vote.

Looking forward to answers and feedback.

#8

The PMC exclusively manages the open source code, its development and some developer outreach. It does not manage the broader project, exchange outreach, enterprise sales, etc. Therefore, the organization of NEM entities has no impact on the PMC aside from the fact that some employees of those entities contribute to one or more of its codebases.

Everything that the PMC has purview over is open source already. The only Symbol projects I can think of that are not open source are a handful managed by the Foundation. I cannot give you a good reason why those are closed source. If you want my opinion, I think it is confusing and counterproductive to have three GitHub organizations for essentially the same project:

  1. https://github.com/nemtech
  2. https://github.com/nemfoundation
  3. https://github.com/NEMStudios
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#9

Thanks @garp, definitely will take a bit of time for full digestion and we expect questions to continue for a few sessions, we can hold as many as needed. I’ve tried to put the main questions out, let me know if I miss any.

Community Involvement
Absolutely, community members and token holders can and should have opinions on the direction of the project and ecosystem. This is specifically why the community engagement piece is part of the work. For some time most of the PoI votes etc have been spread out and generally limited to elections, budget approval etc. We want to increase that engagement to have the community, this can include both PoI/Token Balances but also combined with people’s positive activity on media platforms, content creation, open source contributions, etc, etc etc. There are numerous ways to build that reputation in addition to straight PoI. The suggested plan for community engagement will be released within a month and provide a lot more detail on this area.

Open Source
I see Jag has responded on while I was typing, he is infinitely more qualified than I to talk on that point.

DAO
This is part of the community engagement plan - basically it is very hard to create any form of DAO until there is an engaged community, the first step towards that is getting things rebooted and re-engaged. Then yes having a DAO or DAO-like (to avoid the usual semantics and discussions in that area) is what is intended to be moved toward for the project direction decisions/governance. There is a lot more conversation needed in this area and we will be trying to get as many people in the community involved in this as possible as it is the only way it works in my view.

Investment rationale
With the normal caveat of this not being financial advice! This is personal to each person, right now, primarily because they believe in the project and that adoption will increase. In terms of the Symbol tokenomics there is obviously a strong economic support in the block rewards for hosting nodes and staking. As I know you are aware but for the benefit others, the rewards basically follow Bitcoin’s supply inflation economic model without the halving drops every four years, adjusts every 4 months.

It would be wrong (potentially illegal here as I’m unlicensed) for me to encourage investment for financial gain so I can’t comment much further here, but if there is a specific question/idea please let me know.

Summary
The community is absolutely taken seriously, from the experience thus far, the primary pain points we have seen over past couple of years are when will Symbol launch and why can we know the detail, coupled with how can we be more involved. This route has been taken specifically to target those issues and being done with support from all of the entities and core team as we genuinely believe it is what is needed to get there.

Hope that helps, as I say, please do highlight things I have missed, follow ups etc. The entire thought process here is to be as open and communicative as possible.

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#10

We are deliberately using multiple platforms to try and ensure the views of everyone can be expressed. In terms of banning etc I am not an admin on the community channels so I can’t talk to that. I would however as part of the community re-engagement like to start moving things forward to try and heal old rifts and have people on the same platform(s)…personal view.

No one has been banned by the NemberAma twitter account, and forums are clearly open for contributions as well. Happy to use the forum and catching up on various posts today/tomorrow

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