The Cardano Foundation’s communiqué on recent organizational changes and community feedback

[ElliotHill]

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.

@Eystein_Hansen

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.

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.

@Eystein_Hansen

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.

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.

@AdeptAardvark

That blockchain is becoming more mainstream doesnt make it evident that the foundation is on the right path. Those things have nothing to do with one another.

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.

@AdeptAardvark

What kind of communication has there been in a bit more detail, and how do you identify that there is a desire to maintain the current channels?

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.

@AdeptAardvark

Where is it?

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.

@AdeptAardvark

Youtube is a primary public facing forum. If you are not on Youtube, are you doing your job? And worse, if you consider Youtube comments an “easy point of attack for bad actors”, what is your perception of social media in general?

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.

@Eystein_Hansen

Notice how reddit is much more active than the Cardano Forum. There is a reason and that is that communcation lines are not as clear here and there is simply better discussions then.
There are 88K users on reddit and 11.5K all time users on the forums accoring to the about pages of both platforms. I dont know about you but I like hard facts and the hard facts are there are way more communication happening on other platforms.

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.

@Eystein_Hansen

The hires have been good but it is still questionable to fire the communitys direct communcation lines and not once but twice.

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.

@AdeptAardvark

On a highly related note, the Cardano council members joining the recent video call about the public roadmap were highly encouraging! I think the problem is mainly related to the lack of communication that has been going out.

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.

@Eystein_Hansen

making a transparent roadmap with KPIs that can be measured.

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.

@MachTwo

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.

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.

@Adam_Parish

I feel like this post should have been signed by someone or group of people.

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.

@Casparus

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.

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.

@AdeptAardvark

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.

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!

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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.

Thank you all and have a great week!