NEM Ecosystem - Community Reinvigoration Strategy

Announcements
#1

NEM Community Reinvigoration Strategy

Translations:

This is an announcement from NEM Group about the Community Reinvigoration and Marketing approached. In the initial announcement we committed to publishing this approach within 1 month (10th of May), and it being into implementation within 3 months (10th July 2020).

This post is a summary of longer document, which should also be read and is available here:

Summary

NEM has a good community base, however it has in the past had a better one. There is room for improvement. XEM is still one of the largest cap digital assets in the world (top 30 of ~2200), top 10 for Q1 2020 in market cap growth. The community that supports it should reflect that and be part of working to improve the above, and more importantly adoption in general.

There is work to do to heal past rifts and to attract new members to NEM. The time leading up to Symbol launch in late 2020 is a perfect time to spend time as a community resolving these issues to ensure the launch goes well and the project is well supported beyond launch.

This is a suggestion for how we can approach the challenge and is intended to generate healthy discussion on how to move forward. The paper deliberately maintains a forward focus, we cannot change the past and will not attempt to, we can only focus on what is to come.

Problem Statement / Opportunity

The NEM community has gone from a very motivated, engaged and supportive group. To one that is only partially engaged and numbers of active members feels to have fallen over the past 2-3 years. The reasons for this are varied but likely include:

  • Perceived delay in Symbol launch due poor expectation setting and limited visibility of public progress
  • Frustration/Arguments/disagreements in response to the above resulting members being banned from some channels
  • Members wanting to engage and contribute to the community, beyond just being holders but being unable to find a way to do so and becoming disenfranchised.
  • The Crypto market has fallen and people are losing value in all tokens they hold

An open source, public chain project generally succeeds or fails based on the community that supports it, promotes and speaks about it in public, builds projects and engages with it. We have an opportunity to put various things in place to help reinvigorate a supportive community around the project. These are outlined below.

Marketing Commitments (Short term):

The following items have been identified as immediate requirements, and things the community has been asking for, for some time. We are targeting release of the below by 31st May 2020:

  • A fuller marketing plan and roadmap published
  • Refreshed NEM.Website complete and released
  • Version 1 of Symbol product website complete and released
  • Version 1 of NEM Platform (NIS1) product website complete and released
  • Publication of NEM ecosystem partners and projects on the website

Community Reinvigoration Recommendations

A summary of the recommendations is below, we encourage everyone to read the complete document (link at the start of this post) for detail on each:

Short Term (1-3 months):

What can we do right now, to build a base from which to grow?

  • Create a community code of conduct
  • An amnesty period and process for all those banned over the past few years
  • Focus groups with community to understand different demographics better
  • NEM Group to publish incorporation documents (articles, by laws, trust deeds, legal structure etc)

Mid Term (1-6 months):

Where do we want to develop as the awareness of the project builds?

  • Japanese Advisory group (a more formal version of focus group above)
  • Implementation of a community platform and DAO, with the aim of handing this over to the community as it becomes self sustaining
  • Creation of a Planned Voting Roadmap/Plan

Long Term:

Once we have that bigger, more engaged community cranking, where do we think we might want to go next.Involvement of the community in more input/roles over time as the engagement matures and the community is functioning well, likely to come out of the DAO platform above. This area will evolve over time.

Conclusion

Having taken stock of where the various activities are right now, we summarise that the community has good foundations but various problems to solve. By working together (all of us), there are opportunities to revive the community and our recommended plan is outlined above.

We are committed to, and have a plan for, delivering to the dates above and encourage all community members to get involved, ask questions, make suggestions, add ideas etc so that this becomes a more welcoming and supportive environment in which to launch Symbol and support the wider project going forward.

Further posts will be made in the coming days/weeks with details, but we hope the community is ready start the discussions today on what kind of place we want to be going forward so we can all work together towards that.

16 Likes
#2

Some problem with permissions on the translation files, should be fixed now @thilon

1 Like
#3

If the price of XEM is higher, then more and better things can be done. I look forward to it. I want to pierce the XYM logo on the back of the fuselage.

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#4

OK, Thanks.I see a lot of positive things happening.

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#5

what by who and until when

what and until when u did line out well

but who does this all who is in lead who is in the team

are their paid people by nem group are there on top volunteers

i think a true community movement need also community itself be involved

as much as possible

foundation did suck at allow more people to join and get involved

group doesnt even have a “membership” programm

as its build as a corporation

so even if i agree nem group will be stronger to make things happen

regarding get non employees involved i miss a organisation that replace foundation

2 Likes
#6

what by who and until when but who does this all who is in lead who is in the team

A post will be made early this week with the people, roles and details of how we move to next steps.

are their paid people by nem group are there on top volunteers

Yes, at least initially, to help provide the effort needed to get it started, the end objective is to be able to not need that, but we will have to see how successful it is. We suspect it will be a few months at least, that it needs support.

i think a true community movement need also community itself be involved as much as possible

We agree - this is the Community Activity Platform and DAO, if well implemented and taken up, it should be an entirely community owned and directed organisation/group

group doesnt even have a “membership” program as its build as a corporation so even if i agree nem group will be stronger to make things happen regarding get non employees involved i miss a organisation that replace foundation

The idea with the platform/dao is try and aid this type of gathering of community members into groups/teams depending on interests, so that the community can indicate what should/shouldn’t be important, help identify community representatives based on merit. There is a note in the document about a Japanese Advisory group, it will be the first one because we know it is needed, but as the organisation takes shape there will be others as well I’m sure. The focus groups will also help work these out.

foundation did suck at allow more people to join and get involved

I don’t want to get into past side of the comment but can confirm this proposal is one way for how we can get people involved, the basic summary of the idea is:

  • Try and fix some of the arguments/rifts/sides that have developed over the past couple of years as a base from which to move forward with the rest
  • Try and harness the community energy by encouraging it and developing a better understanding of different perspectives within the community.
  • In parallel build out a community activity platform and Dao so that the community can decide to reward other members for their contributions, suggest which contributions would be most valuable, work together and generally be a community - without guidance/rules/influence from NEM Group, beyond us being a catalyst to try and start a movement.
1 Like
#7

DAO is a strong word which not really fit in NEM ecosystem

beside a really strong multisig engine we dont have the tools to build a 100% blockchain DAO on NEM now and even later on symbol

for me a DAO is only true if its 100% blockchain based and allow many anonymous people to colloborate and work together and also make decisions based on a blockchain framnework and ruleset

i know how difficult this is im involved in 2 projects that try to become true DAO governance driven

i see no way without programable smart contract able blockchain involved

1 Like
#8

Regarding the detailed document that you have provided. After careful examination, I came to the conclusion that it may well trigger a discussion, but did not outline any real approaches or solutions. Especially the short term section of the initiative is very vague in its statement and feasibility. In addition, it is not clear exactly what is happening now and why this is necessary.

I also see a strong focus on returning lost members. These plans take up several pages and appear several times. I am not quite sure that it is wanted from both sides. The amnesty phase and various measures are also rather unsettling. Clearly everyone is welcome to come back. And everyone can say what they want in my opinion, only if possible not across all channels if there is something internal.
Thrown out should only be based on violations such as, fraud, pornography, racism, etc. Not based on an unpopular opinion. Also give people enough time and they disqualify themselves;)

Community code of conduct, okay! But is a normal process that arises over time. Otherwise you can find good copy n paste templates for community rules.

Focus groups are in themselves a good idea, I just don’t see an approach how community can be brought to a higher level and populate them.

Marketing is marketing.

Mid Term is a little better formulated and I believe that the only tangible part of this document is the creation of the Japan Advisory and the creation of a DAO platform.

That’s all I have to say about it so far, I encourage all of you to come up with alternative plans in parallel and release them for discussion.
Also i started checking on xrp army. Not so sure i want to go the same path.

7 Likes
#9

Also i started checking on xrp army. Not so sure i want to go the same path.

dito, on that one.

4 Likes
#10

I want also to mark the DAO name. That would need to be well thought and it is unlikely that it will raise out of one document and that that would cheer community engagement just because it’s a DAO and it’s cool. We need more than a promise of a DAO for our community to engage back.

I think overall very similar to @Stinghe_Dorian ; People that were excluded because of their opinion are mostly welcome back but spreading misinformation, scamming people and defamation is more hurtful to the community than it helps in building a strong community so I vouch for a rigorous code of conduct. It is totally fine to not agree on “blockchain” and not agree on ideas, but it should not be considered fine to do one of the above in my opinion ; Hopefully this will be reflected in the community code of conduct.

I believe in mediating more than I believe in trolling, thankfully so - and therefor I believe the NEM community will come together stronger out of this.

I appreciate the effort put on trying to engage the community and let the community spearhead some change. I am seeing many positive changes overall the last weeks and hope this will be the start of something great for the community!

7 Likes
#11

The Nember Program,

All can register for the Nember program free of charge and are registered on the blockchain and receive a nember mosaic. (Mediates belonging to a group and gives an overview of the number of the community).
To ensure lively participation, you should only be allowed to participate in elections with the nember mosaic. If that goes too far you can think about giving out a small reward of 10 “xem”. Interesting maybe for the new ones.

NEM / SYMBOL for Noobs Program,

101 with our blockchain. Create simple copy n paste tutorials that everyone can do. It is clear to me that not everything can be broken down to the most essential. But you don’t always have to understand everything at the beginning. But the feeling of being part of something. Maybe in the course of this process, one or the other will be more enthusiastic about the technology.

Nem101Meetup Program,

Bring back NemMeetups. Installs NEM ambassadors who can coordinate and, if necessary, also monitor larger events. Otherwise, the reward rate shouldn’t be high. It is more important that there is reasonable material with sufficient substance.

NEM Ambassador Program,

For many good reasons. If appropriate, have the potential to bring a community forward. Also in number. Ideally, he has the position of the trainer and the talent scout at the same time. Otherwise, it acts as a presence in the respective area.

And finally, the question also arises, why should someone become part of NEM? What motivates a person to join this thing? The current state shows that no suitable answer has been given so far. The thing 2017 is not representative. I basically ask myself whether there is enough of this type of community that NemGroup or CoreDevs wants, out there.

p.s. Hold free webinars and advertises them through the ambassadors at universities. Give a workshop every 3-6 months.

10 Likes
#12

I read the NEM Community Reinvigoration Strategy (JP).

It says that the Japan Advisory Group is an elected volunteer member. However, the current NEM Japan team is an unelected, paid member.
Perhaps these two teams need to work together, but I feel unfair.

If the purpose of the management team is to gain insight into the Japanese community, it would be good to have a group of professionals hired by NGL to collect and analyze what the Japanese community has to say.

It is questionable whether a direct dialogue with management is necessary. I’m not good at English, and I tried something similar through an interpreter with a former NF president before, but in the end I couldn’t communicate well.

Or you can create your own Japanese subsidiary within NGL. In order to make Japan better through NEM, I think it is very important for Japanese people to have discussions in Japanese. Although Japan is a global country, there is a closed-minded side to it.

If you were to do marketing in Japan, you would have to adapt to the Japanese market instead of doing the same thing as their parent company. There are many expressions that are difficult for Japanese people to understand just by translating the text created by the parent company.

And the subsidiary should report the situation in Japan to the parent company on a regular basis. I think this is the best way, but I think it’s hard to find people who can fulfill the mission.

What do you think led to the acceptance of NEM in Japan? That’s because there were Japanese people on the initial core team, and also because TechBureau Japan was involved. It’s simple.

6 Likes
#13

to place japan in a special position leave a strange taste

i want NEM to be a global project

and if there is a aim to push for local regional communities on top

then it should start first continent size units with europe america asia

and later if demand exist u can break it down to smaller units

and that based on language and not nationality

english
german
french
spanisch
portugise
chinese
japanese
korean

and so on

to be honest as myself a close to 50 year old and non native english speaker
i think u can expect 98% of blockchain/crypto early adopters to be able to read and understand english
and constant improve because each time a word written they dont know they google in their favorite online dictonary

refuse to learn and improve is not the mindset of early adopters

we are pioneer who reach out for new frontiers

we are the best of mankind we adapt and improve to whatever is needed to prosper well in this new enviroment

learn a common language is one of the less demanding tasks on our voyage

and between master a language and be able to read and communicate is a big difference

no one demands we able write perfect harvard english

7 Likes
#14

we are the best of mankind we adapt and improve to whatever is needed to prosper well in this new enviroment

Now, this is a good Slogan for the community! :stuck_out_tongue:

1 Like
#15

I don’t think English is appropriate as a common language.
of course we can understand if you speak perfect harvard English.
but if you speak “Tell me about it.” , we will try to tell you more about it.
Even “Google” is telling we to do so.

And when the debate becomes incandescent, you use like those words a lot.

3 Likes
#16

Hi all, thanks for all the discussion so far, its good to see it has people thinking. I will try and round up several replies in one.

@cryptonit @gevs

DAO is a strong word…etc

That is fair. It doesn’t need to be called a DAO, we just need another word for it and Dorian has several in a later post that look goo. The activity platform also use the term Social Mining, but its a bit unclear. Ultimately NEM community can call it whatever we like to refer to a pool of tokens that the community can choose to allocate to community members for supportive tasks, contributions etc. We can work on this name over the next few weeks, it may even be a good first task/vote!

@Stinghe_Dorian

Regarding the detailed document that you have provided…etc

Thanks for consideration of it and your reply(ies) raise several useful points. Regarding solid/concrete plans it was written that way on purpose. NEM Group is not trying to tell the rest of community what to do and impose that, we are trying to start a conversation as a community member that we think there are some things which should be considered.

The amnesty concept is one of those, we aren’t sure if its wanted or not either, but it has caused a lot of bad feeling on both sides. So we wanted to ask if people think it is wanted or not. If people think it has broken part of the community or not etc. If it is wanted, we are happy to help co-ordinate it, if its not then the community have decided that rather than an entity, we would like it be a conscious community choice though. We are trying to think of ideas for everyone to move forward from that means every positive news story and post doesn’t turn into a 100 reply thread most of which is X person did this, Y person did that and isn’t focused on the progress. It happens to often on the forum and on twitter, which ultimately hurts progress and forward momentum.

I encourage all of you to come up with alternative plans in parallel and release them for discussion

100% agree with this, we want the community to be engaged and decide the direction, we are just trying to help move past frustration/apathy. Its been great to see initiatives (like discord) over the past few weeks. No one pretends to have all the answers here, if there are better suggestions, we definitely want them out in public and to be implemented.

@Stinghe_Dorian @gevs

XRP army

Yep, I agree, some of their techniques are not naturally how NEM community members tend to act and they can even be quite hostile sometimes. We don’t need to be them, it was more a quick and easy reference to saying NEM would probably benefit from a public and vocally supportive, organised group. As a community we can work out how best to do that for NEM.

@tresto @TakaNobu
Thank you for the input, particularly with the language challenges (I have seen some chat on NEM Japan I will try and reply via translation soon). I am concerned that some of the messages have not survived well from English to Japanese. The main points I want to make sure are clear across languages:

  1. NGL are not telling the community how to behave, or trying and enforce that.
  2. The code of conduct would not be written by NGL, it would be written by the community and agreed by the community - the behaviour in NEM Japan for example appears to be a good level or respect and questions. Hard questions are not a problem.
  3. NGL is saying we think there have been problems, mainly in the English speaking community, and we think it would be healthy to try and fix them. Rude and disrespectful behaviour we think has been a problem and want to help heal that problem.
  4. NEM group are not and do not want to be admin on any community channels. Any community channels, they should be controlled by the community.
  5. The input here is valuable and being listened to, it is also similar to the focus group/advisory concept to ensure we are able to hear the feedback and understand it.

@tresto on some specific items:

Japan Advisory …

The current NEM Foundation team in Japan are paid by the NEM Foundation, you are right. Mikun as Community Lead, Etsuko as Communications/PR lead and Kevin Newman as Business Development. The Advisory Group is different to this team. A team of paid people will continue to exist in Japan via NEM Group we need to work with that team to work out how to structure this most effectively. The same is true for other regions. We are working to move the tech and sales teams first. That is being worked through just now and conversations will start very soon on this approach as well.

The advisory group, needs to be defined with the community, if it is useful and wanted. If it is not we can have a different approach. That will be done via conversations, survey(s) and focus groups.

The goal to make sure the community voice/questions/ideas are understood well. In both directions. We plan to work with the community to see how that should be achieved and more detail will be published in the next 2-3 weeks. All of the community, both in Japan and outside Japan. There are members of the community who speak both languages and may be willing to be more involved. The Activity Platform part we think could help with this, but we want to speak to everyone about this over the coming weeks to make sure it can.

I also agree. Direct dialogue will be difficult (my Japanese is very very bad!), it will probably be via local teams and bilingual community representatives who can help be a bridge. This hasn’t worked well so far and we want to work together to see how best to achieve this, because it is important for everyone. We can, for example, also help Japanese projects and companies expand to other regions if we understand what is being done and how best to help.

If you were to do marketing in Japan…

We agree and understand this, some of the team have experience in Japan and other non European language countries/cultures. This is one of the reasons that an in country Communications and PR lead exists already. It is very important to ensure marketing is tailored correctly for several regions, Japan is one of those.

Japanese subsidiary within NGL…

Whether it is a legal subsidiary, or a team employed by the parent company, we agree and know there is a requirement to ensure the approach is localised and information passed well in both directions. We are looking at this as part of the re-organisation of global teams and expect to have more news on this in the next few weeks. The job of this team is likely to be a combination of promoting the project/technology and assisting the local community to do the same, capturing feedback and ensuring responses and messaging are understood.

but I think it’s hard to find people who can fulfill the mission

It is a very difficult mission, but we think it is worth the effort and want to work together to find the best way to do this - whether paid, volunteer, combined, focus group, advisory group etc. If the community has any ideas do please send them to be in public or private, we will also begin these conversations very soon to try and help.

What do you think led to the acceptance of NEM in Japan? That’s because there were Japanese people on the initial core team, and also because TechBureau Japan was involved. It’s simple.

100% agree

I hope the above is understandable. I have tried to write it so it has short sentences and hope translation is simpler. Let me know if anything is unclear please.

8 Likes
#17

Love these ideas @Stinghe_Dorian please keep throwing them up as you have them, also the rest of the community. This is the type of energy, ideas and motivation we need to get the community back active.

Most of these are possible within the community activity platform/approach. I have made sure this comment is captured internally and Dorian I have a funny feeling I know who will be part of some of the focus groups.

Let’s try and keep this type of movement going, it is very motivating to see and will be a key part of what wakes up NEM as a sleeping giant (or doesn’t) in terms of noise and activity through this year

4 Likes
#18

A little more time will pass and nem will leave the top 30.
Why was the new wallet created NBKXLNQ2GKTLQBTXNFOHULNJDA7T2Q57CZGQ2TFP - 394,151,003.85 xem (NEM Group (NGL))?
We need very good marketing, what is happening now is horror.

1 Like
#19

Not sure if this is the place, but I’d really like to see a place where crossover between different languages is as easy as one click away. I’m a big proponent of our own official Discord server, were I could be in e.g. the Japanese and the English channel at the same time. An experimental server was discussed here. It would really help if the different communities are on the same server, and if people from NEM or representatives would hang out there from time to time.

#20

@Stinghe_Dorian the Discord link is expired. Is the experiment over?