dRep Book Club

Hey everyone, did you know that there is a dRep Book Club? There is! The dRep Book Club was funded in Fund 9: and will be kicking off with our first Zoom meeting at the end of January. The Leadership Academy Book Club will hold monthly book club meetings to discuss the books recommended by IOG for dReps:

"As we move into delegation, you will play a pivotal role in championing and safeguarding the future of Catalyst and Cardano. So, in the meantime, we would encourage you (if you haven’t done so already) to read a recent blockchain governance paper written by two senior IOHK researchers and additionally the initial treasury paper A Treasury System for Cryptocurrencies: Enabling Better Collaborative Intelligence.

More broadly, studies on collaboration and communication are always net-positive endeavors. Some recommendations; The Power of Experiments, Reinventing Organizations, and Reinventing Discovery."

One of these papers or books will be read each month. After the community has had a month to acquire and read the materials, the Leadership Academy will hold an in-person book club meeting open to dReps and the entire community. The book club will be facilitated by a host who has read and is knowledgeable about the material and will set up and use a shared Miro board to guide the conversation and record notes about the book. These sessions will also be recorded and uploaded to a YouTube channel where people can view and listen to the session if they cannot attend in person.

Keep up to date on the discussions on these papers and books and when we hold our face-to-face Zoom meetings on the Leadership Academy Discord: Leadership Academy

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@xeeban

Please provide links to these references.

Just some thoughts after checking out the Miro link contained in the Catalyst proposal.
These books have all been proposed by IOG. This is how academics think about systems, networks and development. It’s fairly high level, esoteric cogitation. Is this truly how people think, though?

dReps are the next step in the Catalyst experiment for funding on Cardano. If this is the direction IOG wants them to operate, we are bound for another failure. The process needs to be simplified so that we don’t develop an academic/professional oligarchy directing from on high.

One of the main issues I see is an inability to take academic developed guidance and convert it into every-man level procedures. This is evident with Catalyst, some wallets, websites and dApps. We need to focus on simplifying the user experience in blockchain, else it will remain niche.

If you are looking for something quick to read to help you to understand this process, may I suggest “Don’t Make Me Think” by Steve Krug, in which he discusses human–computer interaction and web usability. It’s one of the best introductory explainers of UI/UX I’ve read, and I still evaluate user experience of sites and apps by this simple philosophy.

Thanks for the feedback and recommendation. I have read that book, and it is an excellent introduction to user experience and design. The proposal for the dRep Book Club was voted in based on the IOG recommended list of books (and one paper), so the next four sessions of the book club will have to cover those books so I can fulfill the proposal that the community approved.

However, there is a more general section in the Leadership Academy discord where many different books are being discussed. I encourage you to join and contribute to the conversations there.

The first live Zoom dRep Book Club will happen in a Project Catalyst After Town Hall breakout room tomorrow on Feb. 1.

I hope to see you all there to discuss liquid democracy and the paper, A Treasury System for Crypto Currencies.

Hey Everyone, the next book in the dRep Book Club meeting is happening on March 8, 2023 in an After Town Hall breakout room:

We are currently reading: The Power of Experiments - Decision making in a data-driven world By Michael Luca and Max H. Bazerman

In this book, Michael Luca and Max Bazerman explain the importance of experiments for decision making in a data-driven world.

Luca and Bazerman describe the central role experiments play in the tech sector, drawing lessons and best practices from the experiences of such companies as StubHub, Alibaba, and Uber […] Moving beyond tech, Luca and Bazerman consider experimenting for the social good—different ways that govenments are using experiments to influence or “nudge” behavior ranging from voter apathy to school absenteeism. Experiments, they argue, are part of any leader’s toolkit. With this book, readers can become part of “the experimental revolution.”

Not enough time to read a whole book? A short 1 hour overview can be found here: 20210423 Power of Experiments - YouTube

Jump into the Discord server to discuss this and other books with the community: Leadership Academy

We will be holding an After Town Hall session to discuss this book on March 8, 2023. I’ll do a quick overview of the main points, so you don’t have to have read the book to participate.
Hope to see you all there!

The video of the dRep Book club meeting where we discussed The Power of Experiments is available here: Leadership Academy dRep Book Club - The Power of Experiments - YouTube

Book number 3 of the dRep Book Club is Reinventing Organizations by Frederic Laloux. https://www.reinventingorganizations.com/

Frederic Laloux’s Reinventing Organizations is considered by many to be the most influential management book of the last decade. It has inspired thousands of organizations throughout the world to take a radical leap and adopt a whole different set of management principles and practices.

This book was covered last year in the book club, and we’re revisiting it again as part of the dRep series as it is on the list of books recommended by IOG and dReps may also be interested in reading and discussing the idea of “Teal” organizations.

We will spend the next month reading the book and discuss it face to face in April. The book is available for free online in two versions (the illustrated. version is a shorter overview and the original book is a deeper dive with use cases and studies in more depth): Pay-What-Feels-Right - REINVENTING ORGANIZATIONS

Hey everyone! We will hold the next dRep Book Club on Wed (April 19) in an After Town Hall breakout room. We will discuss the book Reinventing Organizations by Frederic Laloux (see above) and how it might apply to Catalyst and the role of dReps. Hope to see you there!

The YouTube Video of the Book Club for Reinventing Organizations has been uploaded to YouTube here: Leadership Academy dRep Book Club - Reinventing Organizations - YouTube

The next (and final) book in the dRep Book Club series is Reinventing Discovery by Michael Nielsen: Reinventing Discovery | Princeton University Press

Reinventing Discovery tells the exciting story of an unprecedented new era of networked science, driven by powerful new cognitive tools enabled by the internet which are greatly accelerating scientific discovery and transforming our collective intelligence and how we understand the world.

As we read the book, we will discuss it over the next month on the Leadership Academy Discord server: Leadership Academy and meet in a Zoom After Town Hall session in about a month to discuss the book face to face.

The next (and final) book in the dRep Book Club series is Reinventing Discovery by Michael Nielsen: https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691160191/reinventing-discovery. We’ll be discussing Reinventing Discovery at an After Town Hall breakout on June 7!