Hi folks!
Anna here and along with @olarte I am the Planning Steward for the Community Development working group. As part of Season 11 Planning, we would like to share details about our plans for the upcoming season. If you are unfamiliar with the Season Planning process at the Celo Foundation, you can find more information in this forum post introducing the Season Planning Process.
The goal of this post is to introduce more transparency into the work we’re doing at the Celo Foundation as well as ask for your feedback on the plan and activities listed below.
Working Group Purpose
The mandate of the Community Development working group is to help grow the Celo Ecosystem by focusing on incubating and nurturing the most engaged mission aligned members of our community. The way we accomplish incubating and nurturing is through a number of internal programs that our team runs that we will expand on below, and through grants that we give as part of the Foundation Grants program.
The Community Development team at the Celo Foundation consists of Daniel, Anna, TC (@olarte, @annaalexa, @tc_dong) and is the interface with many community members that contribute to the Celo Ecosystem. The long term vision of Community Development is to enable groups and individuals to participate in, own, and grow the ecosystem. We seek to create pathways that make it easy for anyone to plug in and get involved in the Celo ecosystem and establish grassroots autonomous communities.
The key programs we run are University Guilds, Meet Up, and Ambassador Program and their goal is to enable community members to establish the human nodes in the network to grow the community. Our goal is to facilitate the connections and drive resources in the form of budget, education, and personal support to help those nodes grow. In addition, key pillars of our work include:
- Recognition of contributions: sending swag, POAPs, invitations to special events like Celo Connect, opportunities to receive travel scholarships
- Bootstrapping resources: grants to help run meetups and other activities in regions
- Connection: creating an interface for all Celo championsadvocates with profiles and highlighting their work and contribution
A view of the the last season
Key Achievements
- This past year we had the opportunity to collaborate with amazing partners like Dacade, DreamDAO, LearnWeb3DAO, OdysseyDAO, Cryptohunt, Eggheads, Blockchain eX, Defi en Español, Bits Pilan, BAF, HerDAO, Blockchain Academy Chile, The DAOist, 101.xyz, Platzi, iamyourcryptonite, AlysiaTech, Groove with Gaia, Master Z, Y School, Mining Devs, among others.
- We launched our Ambassador Program that reached ## ambassadors in ## countries
- We launched our University Guild Program and had the pleasure of working with the University of California, Berkeley, University of Michigan, California Polytechnic State University, Kryposphere, HEC Paris, Columbia, UPenn and Princeton
Missed Opportunities
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A few partners were unaware of the grants process requirements or had misaligned expectations of it, resulting in lengthy and unsuccessful grant applications. We hope we can continue streamlining our processes and offer better support for new grantees.
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We began plans for a DAO incubator with Deepskills. However, coordinating the different teams that will be part of the incubator took longer than expected. We hope to kick off this program in October. More details about this program are below.
Looking outward
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One trend that we are aware of in the wider Web 3 community and ecosystem is the trend towards decentralizing community building and ecosystem growth activities. We are beginning to see this in our own community with various regional DAO’s proposals (India and Africa). We would like to consider this as we design new programs like the Meetups programs and as we offer support to independent entities interested in supporting the Celo ecosystem.
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With the current market conditions, we see lots of communities struggling to find funding for their initiatives and mission aligned projects. Our own process of reviewing and awarding grants has slowed and become more demanding. We would like to focus on funding way sthat perhaps have a longer incubation period by higher sustainability in the long term.
Goals for the upcoming Season 11
- Identify, develop and grow Celo’s most active community members.
- Incubate and nurture the most engaged members in our community through our Programs
- Grow University Program to 15 schools
- Grow our ambassador program to 20 active grantees and 100 Advocates
- Launch Meet Up program and hold first 25 meetups
- Continue to support education grantees
- Host the first Kuneco 2.0 call in November
- Onboard 5 communities/DAOs to the Celo ecosystem
- Send swag to our top 100 contributors
- Connect with Celo Community at Devcon, host a Celo Connect Salon Oct 11-14th
Key Milestones and Dates
Community Development grows community through a number of internal programs, these are the programs we will be focusing on for Season 11.
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University Guild Program
- Steward: TC
- Celo University Guild drives Celo presence in Universities around the world through student-led events and partnerships with institutions themselves. Participants are empowered to independently host various activities such as conferences, Hackathons, DAOs, validators, research and projects. The Guild encompasses universities from across the world and seeks to encourage collaboration and development of long term, recurring events.
- The University Guild program page is here.
- 15 Institutions receiving active support under the Guild program and 10 events with Celo presence.
- Help support at least 1 DAO and 1 Validator on Celo.
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Ambassador Program
- Steward: Anna
- Celo Ambassadors is a community-driven initiative helping grow and support the Celo Ecosystem around the world. Ambassadors play an important role in Celo’s mission of bringing open financial tools for prosperity for all by introducing and onboarding communities by hosting events, creating content, and managing community online and in person. This program is supported through small grants to bootstrap establishing local community nodes and have high autonomy over the grassroots community development.
- Encourage applicants to become an ambassador here
- The goal is to maintain 20 active ambassadors and build a network of 100 ambassadors around the world who are highly engaged and interested in participating.
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Meet Up Program
- Steward: Anna
- In addition to the Ambassador program, we are launching a Global Meet Up Program. The goal of this program is to rapidly disperse micro grants to passionate members in the community for hosting a meet up to educate their community about Celo. These meetups would act as the sparks that catalyze educating and attracting potential users, active community members, and contributors while also giving passionate individuals a budget to help with costs. The grants are >$500 paid in cUSD to the meetup organizer.
- Our goal is to host 100 meet ups with at least 20 unique organizers in the first year of operation. In Season 11 we plan to launch the program, begin accepting applications, and host at least 20 events.
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DAO Incubator Program with Deep Work
- Steward: Daniel
- The decentralized design and innovation studio Deep Work is launching an incubator program for emerging DAOs in the Celo Ecosystem in October 2022. The initial round of communities includes Impact Market, CalPoly, and AfricaDAO. The incubator aims to support communities as they align themselves on purpose and values, define goals as a team, formalize their value proposition and business model and learn tools, norms, and practices to scale as a decentralized organization.
- We hope to learn as much as possible from this initial cohort to design a DAO incubation program open to everyone by EOY.
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Kuneco 2.0
- Stewards: Anna, Daniel
- Evolve our monthly Kuneco call into a community-run town hall prioritizing interaction, governance, and community stewardship.
- We have created a forum post that describes the idea in detail. You are welcome to offer your thoughts on the post.
- To gather feedback during September, publish the new model and process in early October, and host the first call in November.
Your feedback
We would love your feedback on this post. Please share your thoughts on the areas that we at the Celo Foundation are working on, what you think the Foundation should be doing more or less of, and how we can improve to help the Celo ecosystem. We truly believe that we can get better with the inputs from you all in the community and we look forward to it.
Thanks,
Anna & Daniel