Been doing a bit more research and also in response to other comments
Ref the above changes and proposals.
I appreciate this is only one channel/way of monitoring activity and input, there are so many other ways that people can ask question/support the Cardano eco-system (people will be adding value that is not visible here). as mentioned in other posts.
How much time spent on this Forum is the right amount for team members?
I ask this because the CForum seems to be, the preferred method for people to connect with the Cardano eco-system (it’s top of the list on the community link). It’s also the forum suggested here to connect with for updates/discussion.
CF will be closely managing all channels, hopefully going forward they will be closely checking involvement here as well as other channels, (offering choice) although currently the figures for time spent on this channel, are not great for team members.
We are all busy, although i feel we should be measuring involvement with this Forum in particular.
This ‘Forum’ is monitoring all community involvement and awarding ‘badges’. as it should, it rewards good ‘behaviours’.
This Forum channel can be used by both investors/pool operators and in particular CF/IOG/Emurgo employees and community support to engage as much as they can, in particular CF/Community support should be offering a good example to the general public, demonstrating a great eco system to connect with, keeping you up to date with what’s happening.
Pool operators appear to have put a lot of time input to this Forum, it makes a lot of sense as contributing/commenting etc. offers a great way to let people know about what they are doing to support the Cardano project and how people can connect with their Pool, they have plenty of ‘skin in the game’. I appreciate we (others) have also spent time in the community, we are all measured (system does this automatically) Let’s have some more CF/Community connecting here.
My post is essentially about performance, accountability and feedback, which are the main metrics i use when choosing my stake pool. Let’s use it to grow this community.
People will be looking at Cardano and measuring it against other projects, we can do this, let’s improve together.
An outstanding response, thorough and positive, that instills confidence in the responsiveness, competence and vision of the Foundation and in its abilty to collaborate effectively with its members and with the Community to realise the vision.
I feel like the Cardano foundation should have some form of democratic input for such decisions. I don’t know enough about the individuals who were fired or why the decisions were made but in principal, these decisions should be as transparent as possible, even if they can’t be democratic.
In light of the activity on the thread, I feel the original statement is disingenuous. It invites communication, points to 50 different places to give feedback, but when feedback is given in the thread itself, it’s silence.
In response to Gilianscheatday…Leadership and communication go hand in hand. You can’t have bad communication yet claim that there is nothing wrong with the leadership. Leaders are generally celebrated not just for their actions, but also their communication.
The internal leadership has nothing to do with transparency and communication towards the community. And just because there can be improvements that doesn’t mean leadership is bad.
Leaders are ‘celebrated’ because they inspire people not because of their actions or communication lol.
I’m happy that Nathan responded. I was very fed up with others not responding to my question via slack so I decided to reach out to Nathan directly.
I’m happy he actioned my message, but honestly speaking my question was very strait forward, so i don’t understand how someone cannot give a direct answer to my question, unless there is something to hide.
If my was too difficult I would have appreciate Nathan saying so. I would have been very happy to rephrase it.
Anyways, perhaps we all know the answer already to my question.
I will look forward to CF respond as was promised by Nathan
“ Second, we will shortly publish our current staking - where and how much. Transparency is a good thing!”
Especially the part, to where CF has delegated their stake. And for me it’s about: to which Ambassadors stake pool
You weren’t the only one to ask this question and of course the answer is highly interesting for all operators and the community.
Nathan probably (I am assuming here) made this statement in a broader way because it scales better than a 1:1 answer.
When the Cardano Foundation disclosed to whom it delegates, then it is automatically clear to which Ambassador pool, so the way I see it: this statement includes the answer to your question even it was a bit more specific.
Maybe I’m overlooking something but I don’t see how this includes an answer to my question.
This is a typical CF generic reply.
My concern, and so does many other ambassadors, has to do with CF seemingly favoring a particular ambassador stake pool.
It seems to me that if CF would disclose this information, it would place them in a difficult situation - making the claim of other ambassador pool ops correct. (That they are favoring a particular ambassador pool) So the best thing to do is keep everything in place and try to avoid giving A direct answer to such question.
Nevertheless I am looking forward to Nathan’s statement.
Hi all Thank you for the discussion in this thread and taking an interest in our community and the Cardano Foundation.
There are a few comments here about this communication being posted but not replied to, as you might notice this was published over the weekend, and even the Cardano Foundation team occasionally rest on Sundays! Additionally, we need time to collect questions.
I’ve answered some of the most pressing questions in this thread below. These answers come from both myself personally as a member of the Cardano community and ex-Ambassador, and also in my capacity at the Cardano Foundation.
The decision and process of hiring a CEO has been in the pipeline for many months, and indeed was part of the original outlook for the Foundation from the inception of the new Council. This is a great time for the Foundation. The leadership problems of the Foundation in the pre-Guardians era was directly a result of not having a CEO to keep the Council accountable and vice versa. Hiring a CEO has been a long process, and is in no way related to recent events.
In the original communique, the Foundation team stated that “we recognize that a change in the Community Management team may raise some questions” - but this doesn’t mean our communications channels have been hurt. As we laid out in detail, our existing Community Management team is strong, capable, and has a proven track record of delivering community facing channels. That said, we will also be exploring bringing new Community Managers onboard soon, which we also stated in the communique.
This section makes perfect sense if the entire original sentence is taken into context -
“As blockchain and distributed ledger technologies (DLT) become more mainstream, it is evident that the Foundation is on the right path with its plans to bring talented persons with diverse capabilities onboard, and to maximize the adoption of the Cardano protocol.”
We are confident in our plans to increase our team - which has already grown at an unprecedented rate in the last two years - ahead of the wider adoption of blockchain technology.
At the time of writing the Cardano Foundation maintains over 30 communication channels across multiple platforms. An exhaustive list of Foundation maintained channels is listed here should you wish to access it. These include channels for our Japanese, Korean, Chinese, Dutch, German, Spanish and Portuguese communities, in addition to our well-known English channels. The maintenance of these channels represents a significant investment of time on behalf of our Community Management team, and indeed the wider team at the Foundation.
This question is in regard to a plan for Community Management team hires. As with all staffing matters, this is confidential. It would be highly irregular to share details of a job posting publicly before we had begun hiring for the post, I’m sure you would agree. However, we are listening to community feedback and will use this to shape the requirements of new roles in the Community Management team.
For social media in general, I would refer back to my above response regarding Cardano Foundation owned and managed channels. We push out socials and posts on all of these channels regularly and have a dedicated team to do so.
However, we know that this is a critical time for the Foundation ahead of Goguen’s rollout, and as such our communications will increase. To this end, the Cardano Foundation has recently brought onboard Victor Algabe as a Copywriter for our Marketing team, Marlene Velasco as a Graphic Designer and Social Media specialist, Elliot Hill (that’s me) as a PR and Communications Copywriter, and we will soon announce the arrival of a Digital Marketing Manager. This is in the space of three months. We are taking social media incredibly seriously.
YouTube will continue to be an important channel for us. As you can see, we delivered the Davos Diaries at the beginning of this year. However, videos involving multiple parties have been impossible for the majority of this year as we are all forced to work remotely and in isolation. We will be exploring new content soon.
The Cardano Reddit channel is wholly managed by the Cardano Foundation, so these users are in effect part of our wider audience. You are right, this is one of our most popular channels. We have dedicated Community Managers who oversee our Reddit. However, we cannot steer which platform is more popular - Reddit is one of the largest sites of its kind in the world and we encourage our community to engage on whichever platform they enjoy best.
The circumstances of the Cardano Foundation’s staffing arrangements have explicitly not been communicated, nor will they, because it is absolutely unacceptable to all parties involved to do so.
Thank you @AdeptAardvark. Our Council members are very enthusiastic about the future of Cardano, as are all the Cardano Foundation team members. As we have discussed, and hopefully as mine and others continued discourse here is evidence of, the Cardano Foundation has brought in multiple new team members for this goal and we look forward to sharing more two-way communications with our community in the future.
Alongside various community-led initiatives, the Cardano Foundation is exploring a roadmap which will best suit the needs of both the Foundation, the Cardano blockchain, and our community. A roadmap for the Cardano Foundation also needs to be inclusive of other Cardano entities, and this is why it has been approached on a Phase basis so far, as set-in-stone KPI’s wouldn’t reflect the changeable nature of development milestones for the remainder of 2020.
However, this is in the works and the ball is rolling - the Cardano Foundation is waiting for the community to submit an inclusive roadmap for the entire Cardano and its ecosystem, which it will then action.
There are many Cardano Foundation team members monitoring and reading the comments here… not to sound too much like Big Brother! We have multiple other workstreams that take a great deal of our time, but communication has and will continue to increase.
Hi @Adam_Parish. The entirety of the Cardano Foundation read, added, and approved this statement before it was released, and it has been a passionate joint effort from the entire team - therefore it is from the whole of the Cardano Foundation as a single entity.
There are many areas we are looking to increase community input in, and discussions like this help drive that forward. However, when it comes to matters of staff, where livelihoods and reputational matters are involved, these must be dealt with by senior leadership and our Council as I’m sure you understand. In the future, we have expressed an interest in community-elected Council members, something @Nathan_Kaiser discussed with members of the Ambassador community who joined our Q&A session on Friday 4 September.
Hello again @AdeptAardvark! As I touched upon at the beginning of this mammoth post, the Cardano Foundation team members work around the clock Monday - Saturday across various timezones. This communique was posted on Saturday, and I started drafting this response on Sunday - but I was dragged outside into the sunshine by my better half!
We will be increasing conversation going forward, but please be mindful that we are human beings, not robots and we must take time to read, digest, and formulate an appropriate response. Thank you for your patience!
I hope this has gone some way to addressing some of these concerns. As I’ve stated I began this lengthy reply on Sunday outside of working hours to give my personal view as both a Cardano Foundation team member and a community member. Both I and all the other members of the Cardano Foundation team are highly passionate about the success of Cardano, and it’s our pleasure to be part of the wider community.
Thanks Elliot,
Appreciate the comprehensive reply,
The community can be your eyes and ears, be challenged and respond accordingly, moving forward with the community.
Yes, the amount of time that passed since the Davos diaries is part of the reason I mentioned this. If you analyze the reach of all your channels, Youtube probably has the widest reach. Correct me if I’m wrong. And the statement that some are an easy point of attack for bad actors…that is simply something that needs to be managed, not backed down from.
Well not necessarily about hires, it was having a “plan … for the Community Management team” and saying “yes … there is a plan” is being very very short about it in a communique like this. It goes on to say “highlight that we have multiple strong and capable Community Managers” strong and capable I would hope, but just saying that is the case does not mean anything. “You will know many of these Community Managers personally…” ok? How? I’m getting a picture now, but the paragraph is just not very informative.
My observation was that the whole public roadmap initiative happened in spite of the communication channels. This could be seen as a failing of communication. So I was curious how you arrived at the conclusion of the desire to “maintain the current (…) channels.” Just maintaining seems like an incomplete analysis.
Thanks ElliotHill for addressing some concerns yet my concerns have not been alleviated.
Can you elaborate a bit further regarding the CEO as you do have a point that the hire of a CEO that it was communicated now could be purely coincidental. My question is why it was identify there was a need for a CEO? “… steer the Cardano Foundation even closer towards is mission” is what I got so far from the comunique. Traditonally a CEO handles day to day operations and not all swiss fundations have one if I am not mistaken so it is interesting to know if the CEO is not being hired among other reasons to streamline decision making processes (aka leadership). This is to me an identified leadership problem that is being taken care of but only in november or when the CEO starts - I am not talking about removing leadership type of problems but streamlining decicion processes.
Also if this all where in the pipeline and 2 way communications are so great why was it only AFTER the community demanded answers, answers where given. Why was it that community members said this was a concern? 2 way communication is not a one way street where you can say communcation was great for both of us! The only way to move forward from such a situation is to aknowledge there is a problem.
I am all for moving forward and I think you guys are moving greatly in the right direction but every time I ready a PR from CF there is in my opinion a tendency to gloss over things. This in itself is a problem as it can cause needed change to happen slower than it should. Just my 2 cents. I still have a lot of love for CF <3 and you are in a much better position than after Parson.
CF has no leadership problem, never had since Parsons left.
Most likely Charles is leading the Foundation on a strategic level and Nathan on the day-to-day operations level since.
In my opinion they had to wait until Shelley, Gougen and Voltaire are close to their release. Without Smart Contracts, DAPPs, Community operated StakePools and Governance there was no reason to scale up on operations and burn resources. It was a smart decision to delay any massive investments and kind of stay on low profile.
I believe it’s the right time now for the CF to switch to a higher gear.
Charles might slowly step back as soon as he is comfortable cutting ties, Nathan might as well hand over the day-to-day operations to the CEO before the gear shift happens and you need a full time capacity to manage that. Nathan will perhaps stay to ensure integrity and have direct insight into operations and further reporting to Charles. Additionally there might still be some outstanding legal cases (such as lawsuit with Z/Yen he will have to support).
What I see many people might get wrong is the illusion that Nathan and Charles were not in very close communication, alignment and agreement on the Foundation matters. Just look at the council, that includes Tamara, Nicolas, Manmeet and Nathan, all super close to Charles.
Sure it has to be communicated that these are independent entities, but this is just a good fairytale story the Ecosystem needs.
For the record I think it was the very best decision for Charles to keep the CF under close control and now once the infrastructure, governance, the Community and Cardano is ready gradually decrease this control and hand over to a new Council and the Community.
Anytime you question the CF for leadership problem or any other issue which is not day to day related (such as Ambassador Program), would you question Charles? Stay calm, CF is in good hands.
All this fuzz around the leadership issue and public roadmap might be artificially triggered social experiment to spice up the Community, bring it together and measure it’s maturity and readiness in respect to taking a more significant role in the life of the Foundation. This timing doesn’t seem to me as a coincidence at all, rather like a well planted agenda.
As said pure speculation, but if you think about it, it all makes sense and fits together. The Community has one thing to prove now, that it has grown up to the challenge.
(1) “No, the Cardano Foundation does not have a leadership problem”
(2) “Staffing changes are a normal course of business—we have only had four changes over a two-year period—and we will continue to be very effective with our growing team.”
(1) “Yet they are hiring CEO and the community clearly called them out on having a leadership problem. True leaders would instead look at why the community thinks they have a leadership problem.”
(2) “Yet the changes are in the team members closest to the community and the critisism has been that both times it has been people in direct communication with the community that has been fired and that it has shut down effective communication lines…True leaders would state that while staff changes are part of normal course of buisness in this case they can see how it has hurt the community communication channels.”
I’d explain grammar to Dylan before wasting time defending Hansen’s responses, as they are unassailable in any context. As of this moment, unless we satisfy our very practical need to understand cause, we must accept and prepare for the existing condition to persist.
This statement is absolutely true, and paramount to deciphering the bewildering vector impacting many Cardano ‘branches’. The “illusion”, the misinterpretation, is the product of design, not a failure of our imagination.
From our perspective, Cardano has hemorrhaged liters of time, and time is critically low. A short while ago, Cardano was The PoS in town, it had the market by the throat.
I insinuate nothing on Charles or anyone personally, nor is this FUD. What is true however, is humans, all humans, are incapable of sustaining unbalanced power. As an excerise, consider your reactions if facts surfaced evidencing Cardano’s resources have been exploited, not exclusively for the benefit of Cardano, but exclusively for the benefit of Charles. If we are serious about Cardano, we should request a comprehensive, legally binding financial audit of Charles, IOHK and its financial interests eg. IOG, the CF, and Emurgo, prior to any vote or decision to extend ‘services’. As it stands now, we are a financially vested class without means for oversight, and if required, without means for recourse.
Are we stakeholders in Cardano, with full discretion vested in Charles? I’m ok with that, let’s clarify, and make it official. Is Charles the consultant? I’m ok with that also, let’s clarify, and make it official. What I’m not ok with is our current, clearly untenable state of unaccountability on behalf of those we place all our faith and trust.
For years I’ve aggressively defended Cardano by watching Charles’ 6, still do. My 1st priority has always been Cardano, nothing else.
Thank you for the discussion in this thread and taking an interest in our community and the Cardano Foundation.
We have multiple other workstreams that take a great deal of our time, but communication has and will continue to increase.
and we must take time to read, digest, and formulate an appropriate response. Thank you for your patience! 