Nomenclature Model

aliyajypsy

I have attempted to make sense of our nomenclature traditions here and to think about how the model can look in KB8, though I’m not sure it’s even right to call it KB8, but alas, how else to refer to it?

some notes:

how do we feel about foster or fostering fellow (as the noun instead of endorsing fellow), fostering (instead of buddying up)? admittedly it is inspired through the increase in reference to the foster writing program, i read Jess’ and Maxwell’s pieces. then i accidentally put ‘foster’ next to ‘fellow’ and it clicked for me!
i categorized by color, though the purple and red overlap a bit, we can still recategorize as it becomes clearer.
i know we wanted to have less labels, we wanted to create simpler language. however, i’ve arrived at these options through our conversations. we have been using endorsing fellow for a few days since moving on from ‘buddying up’ - the verb didn’t seem to be holistic enough to capture the meanings intended.
random but in this process i thought - wouldn’t it make morse sense to rename #kernel-conversations to #kernel-convos? matching the name of the application seems more self-explanatory and easier to grasp.

what are initial reactions? i’m a bit concerned about the new rituals that are pertinent in fellows track. a glossary could be very handy. we’ve never written one before, and i could imagine it being a strong resource if obvious words that already exist will not suffice.

saintsal

Thanks. Seeing it all in one place is helpful; it’s a lot for a new fellow to understand.

Congruent

My north star for naming is “fit.” Does understanding one part of Kernel help understand the rest? Are the names congruent with each other? Do they relate to each other?

Changing #kernel-conversations to #kernel-convos is a good example of that. Using “tracks” to denote access to groups of events also does that.

Explanatory

The next thing is simplicity, especially with a few to the progressive onboarding we’ll be doing now. So, looking at the terms in the order they’re revealed, and the groups that they reveal themselves in. Do the words describe the thing intuitively, or are they mystical or opaque?

Provisory

I’d also like us to be mindful of the downside of implied heirarchy in a p2p environment, especially in web3 with fomo and shadow heirarchies everywhere. These create anxiety which strongly limit learning (stressed people don’t recall well, and don’t integrate learning into their worldviews). Also these heirarchies signal that people need to get permission, which works against the goal of the mempool of initiating agency and self-direction.

So elevating titles like “mentor” ", and diminutive titles like “memper” are worth avoiding. In peer learning, everyone advises and helps others, not just mentors. And it’s encouraged for everyone to ask for help, not just “mempers.” As long as we use these terms ourselves, people pick up on this, self-categorise and limit their own behaviour.

If we need to name roles, I’d lean towards making them obviously emphemeral roles, or better yet actions. For example, “Defender” sounds like a knighthood, whereas #kernel-defence is just where we all defend. (And since status is still a motivator, it comes from showing up and doing the thing, maybe being on top of this month’s leaderboard, not from the title bestowed.)

User-focused decisions

To help us frame this from the fellows perspective, rather than our opinions alone, let’s do a User Journey Map. That way we can walk through the experience systematically, using all the key personas.

cryptowanderer

I began putting together a User Journey Map (without any idea how to do one) and it turned out that Sal’s framed timeline still does a much more succinct job than I managed:

https://cryptowhatever.com/post/660

However, there were some interesting outcomes of the exploration for me.

We don’t need any roles, other than “steward”, which is very specifically defined as the people (i) studying behavioural data with the express and sole purpose of amplifying the care we already offer to one another and (ii) communicating operational details (schedules and finances mostly).
There is a focus on the word “invitation” that came out of what I did. You are always being “invited” into something: whether that is another application next Monday, the Mempool Track, the Fellows Track etc. When thinking through this lens, it becomes clear that we can focus on ensuring anyone feels the agency to invite another into what they’re doing and design for that.
@saintsal I changed the “Learner Transformation” for the Fellows Track to Work and relationships that impact who and how you are, fundamentally as I think that better reflects what I intend for it, as opposed to the more diffuse lifelong support for your blockchain journey, which I felt was too close to the Learner Goal of focus on your passion with peer support. I wonder what you think of that and if we need to refine it further?

Here is where I got to (didn’t fill out the rest for Fellows Track, because Sal already kinda did a better job than where I was going, and I think we can do a proper User Journey together this week).

saintsal

@cryptowanderer Nice. Yes - the timeline is a very high-level user journey map, well spotted!

The idea of “User Transformation” at the end is to help keep us focused on the deeper goals of the user. Congruence to their incoming goal (how they frame why they started) helps makes sure the whole experience makes sense throughout, and your more specific wording “relationships that impact who and how you are” helps narrow that down. (Not to get too caught up in semantics, but it begs the question of how blockchain-specific we want to design the Kernel experience to be.)

User Journey Maps are more specific than our timelines because they always describe the journey for a specific persona, should ideally be empirically observed rather than best-guesses or targets, and have more detailed info. (@vivek @aliyajypsy now would be a good time to return to the personas we started in December, group 2-3 similar fellows into a persona, and aiming for a diverse 4-5 personas.)

They break things down into the steps a user steps or jobs, graphing emotional state, marking thoughts, and mapping each of those steps to specific actions and channels.

It’s this level of fidelity and specificity where we start to see where confusion or confidence sprouts.

saintsal

@cryptowanderer said in Nomenclature Model:

There is a focus on the word “invitation” that came out of what I did. You are always being “invited” into something:

Ooh, I like this as a repeatable mechnism, in the same way that 1/n gates can become familiar, invitations can do the same. I’d give it one more nudge from invitation into to invitation to to emphasise action over access or status. (Tracks already give us an access mechanism to a “place”.)

If you share this with me in excali (or just throw me an SVG on signal or slack) I can reshape this into a v1 user journey map for us.

cryptowanderer

@saintsal

Happy with invitation to for the reasons stated

Love the template.

Agree on the point about “blockchain”, and suggest Work and relationships in web3 that impact who and how you are. We can drop the fundamentalism and I know “web3” is not our favourite moniker any more. We could use DWeb too if we felt better about that, but I agree some specific context/focus is needed there.

saintsal

My thoughts on web3 vs blockchain (for the sake of clarity for the Nomenclature Model):

Web3 can be defined clearly: as the technologies enabling a web browser to interact with a turing-complete blockchain, and the technologies enabled by that capability.
Web3 tech is a subset of blockchain tech
There are plenty of non-web3 blockchain technologies that we’re interested in within Kernel context, from Bitcoin to native mobile apps, and the whole emergent category of use cases enabled by light clients which don’t rely on the Web (at most, http as a transport protocol).
Web3 is a scissor label, and a bit of a buzzword, whereas blockchain has a clearer and more univserally accepted definition.
I’ve met quite a few OGs who consider interchangeable use of ‘web3’ ‘crypto’ and ‘blockchain’ to be a sign of ignorance. Web3 is also a more recent term, which dates people as newbies.

So I lean towards using blockchain in macro contexts like Kernel , since I think it sets a good example and also frames things more constructivly for our education goals. (what does blockchain mean for humanity? vs what does web3 mean for humanity?)

It’s also inclusive people who are interested in blockchain tech but not necessarily web3.

Of course, I’m a newbie myself, so please correct me!

cryptowanderer

@saintsal ok.

How about Meaningfully integrate blockchains into my work and relationships?