Updates from Salim's Kitchen
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Just using this thread to share convergence stuff as I work on it, like a micoblog. Please feel free to ask anything.
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Some notes from this paper on SBCE at Toyota:
For the upcoming 2-week sprint:
- daily namawashi time in the calendar, where we’re available to getting/requesting feedback without needing to set meetings
Stage gates
As a foundation for each module, try to make explicit:
- capabilties, tolerances & trade-offs
- internal checklists
- variations and modules
Our final stage get should be to dry run 2-3 complete options
Artifacts to communicate options (increasing in fidelity as we progress and get feedback):
- timelines
- content plans
- user interfaces
- rituals
- decks
Fellow needs that we’re all designing towards:
- navigate blockchain by the stars
- hear from luminaries to be inspired and know what matters
- get (weekly) feedback on their project
- get (weekly) feedback on their topic exploration
- confidence in knowing the terrain / zeitfgeist
- feel connected and supported (tribe)
- anything else?
Option Examples:
1- last working version (what we did in KB5/7)
2 - improvement X (pick one: need, flexibility/modularity, performance measure)
3 - improvement Y (pick another)
4 - hybrids -
Sketching out some goals and options for reviews
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Some easy wins coming up at the intersection of convo, guilds, and juntos.
Convo + Unconference =
A weekly unconference serves the use case of easy-to-host conversations, with scheduling, even faciliatating, taken care of by us.
So that leaves the more serious event hosts using a separate event scheduler, which makes them more likely to want to choose their own registration/management tools.
Destructured guilds
A lot of the great guild sessions would be better attendended if they were stand-alone events, like firesides or juntos. (GVM, Timshel, Eva Beylin etc.) Promoting them as Gaming Guild #3 prevents fellows from noticing them and partipating, and also counters the guilds’ goals of helping other fellows see the value in their subjects. So ‘destructuring’ or elevating the individual conversation topics and guests above the banner of the guild, is useful.
A simple way to think of this is that we take all the guild sessions, and just put them in Convo as stand-alone events. No more ‘guilds’ but all the same content.
(This is a more general pattern I think of as ‘atomic federation.’ Remove the artbitrary groupings, and reveal the ‘atomic unit’, in this case a single event, and federate them with a single group, allowing the end user to select according to their needs.)This relaxes the guild leaders, who now can focus on individual, great sessions, and not all the admin and obligation of creating some kind of syllabus and coordinating repeat schedules (as domain experts, neither creating edu content or cat herding are their strengths, so let’s take that off their hands)
It also then lets us separate introductory topics from deeper explorations of practice, which we can do with different structures (arguably also stand-alone events that just get listed in our events listing)
All together now
I’ll have to write this up properly for the convegence process, but just wanted to share a link between juntos, event listings and guilds. Simpler versions of each, combined, can end up plugging togther more meaninfully and being more powerful.
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Does this link show you the latest?
@saintsal It does! Great updates overall, reading and digesting.
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Thinking through some guiderails on how to help make the current juntos better, particularly the weaker ones.
This fits in the “last known good” option for juntos for me, just a small iteration to the current way we do things. Though, it could apply to several of the options.
One issue I see is that most juntos are set up where the host is the teacher, or where the host has a horse in the race on a topic. (The behaviour quickly changes when Andy or Vivek drop in, largely because they get the floor and naturally reset the tone.)
I read our junto guide (didn’t even know it existed
) and also the Franklin Circles toolkit, and simmered them down to a Figma template. (Not sure if we want to make Figma a default for this type of thing, but just wanted to prototype)
This a kind of fill-in-the-blanks guide that’s also participatory, the idea being:
- it’s more likely for people who don’t read the junto guide to still have something that guides them into the type of convo we’re aiming for
- participants see this, so can also help steer the convo towards the Franklinian model.
I can imagine a set of formats for the host to select from, each with a starter kit like this that gets them running quickly, and in the right direction without too much prep.
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@cryptowanderer here’s a first sketch of the A-Team timeline for the more practical side of Token Engineering.
There’s a version of this from The Africa Prize, where the Challenger delegates to the A-Team up front, and can’t speak for the whole session except for having 2 “yellow cards” they can play, allowing them to interject for a 90 seconds each time. That prompts them to plan in advance, to make sure their team has the background info they need (with the help of a Delegation Canvas ) It also makes it feel a bit more like a sport, and funner to watch.
This version is on a monthly loop, where the A-Team members pick 2 challenges for the coming month. Though we could change this to have a bunch of challenges come in before the start of a block, and schedule them through the block from there.
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Current thinking on convergence gates for the next 2 weeks. Not final, just a first draft at something clearer.
Still need to think about it, but if anyone has questions, thoughts, or head-scratchers, I’d love to hear them.
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@saintsal said in Updates from Salim’s Kitchen:
the more serious event hosts using a separate event scheduler, which makes them more likely to want to choose their own registration/management tools.
I disagree with this. Convo already allows people to put whatever link they like into the
Locationfield, so in a sense already supports this. What I take you to mean is that we don’t focus at all on showing attendees or anything - simply an open and decentralised stream of community events, a la RSS.- I think we should have the open community events stream,
- I think we still allow people to RSVP through convo, and give organisers the option of seeing who is attending events directly through there.
- I think we ensure this can be done in Google, or via .ics files
- I think this is made even more powerful with web3 auth.
This is largely because of the activation energy required to get people just to use convo + organise an event, rather than requiring that they also go an learn another tool just to put a link into convo…
Incidentally, I think we should also speak to Stephen Reid about https://dandelion.earth/ even if only for ‘market research’ with a sympathetic Fellow who has been doing a lot of this already.
I am fully in agreement with the destructured guilds idea: I love that.
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@cryptowanderer said in Updates from Salim’s Kitchen:
Convo already allows people to put whatever link they like into the Location field, so in a sense already supports this.
Cool. I wasn’t aware. I like those 4 points you made. We agree on your reframing, and you understand me.
@cryptowanderer said in Updates from Salim's Kitchen:
This is largely because of the activation energy required to get people just to use convo + organise an event,
I see this kind of “convenience” axis as quite important. The easier we make it on people to propose conversations, the more we’ll have. Arguably, we’ll also have a wider range too, both in terms of topic and quality, but also adding more diversity from interests and motivations that ‘comortable hosts and organisers’ tend to share.
So from this POV, all I was getting at was that Weekly Open Space actually extend into the more convenient end of that spectrum, where the open space session’s host doesn’t even need to think about scheduling or promoting (even facilitation). The Open Space structure provides for that. If that’s an option for fellows, then Convo doesn’t need to cater to those use cases, and can focus on catering the “more serious” hosts.
This is something we should copy to the Convo or Unconference thread, once we get there.
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Putting some structure to the various options within Topic Tracks. (The Topic Tracks module is quite a can of worms )
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@saintsal said in Updates from Salim’s Kitchen:
Destructured guilds
I really love this idea, and it has me thinking quite a bit. For example, how nice would it be to have your Kernel syllabus include 1-2 of Antonio’s movement sessions, as a part of your destructured guild.
The persona I’m most curious about here, though, is the Fellow, not the Guild Leader.
Given Convo today, it would take a lot of clicks to make your own syllabus. I am thinking about how, when you go to university, you have an advisor who does all the clicking for you to pick your classes. That doesn’t really work for us (although, I guess, ‘Peers’ could help there), just sharing the idea.
The benefit of Guilds, early on, is that it allows fellows in orientation to fill up their schedule with something with just a few clicks. We might be able to suggest 2-3 ‘Destructured Guilds’, instead, for example something like:
- A Smattering: 2 DeFi Sessions, 1 Token Session, 1 Movement Session, 1 Research Jam, 1 WIP Wednesday
Or we can have them click through and pick for themselves (which I think is the current suggestion), but just note that it gets a bit tiring, quickly, to sign up for a variety of sessions yourself. Some balance here, no strong opinions yet. A healthy learning environment is the goal.
Related enough: I am still grokking how “Topic Tracks” & “Destructured Guilds” will converge, as they feel related. Letting them sit for now. Thanks for this thread.
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@aliyajypsy Just a heads-up on those Review options in the kitchen:
@saintsal said in Updates from Salim’s Kitchen:
Sketching out some goals and options for reviews
We’ve talked about Friends Of Kernel and Guest Passes before, and a rough outline is described at the bottom of Magma. (the 3 blue arrows that cross the big ring diagram)
The Levered Pipeline will be based on this design for Polygon but designed for the levers also described at the bottom of Magma:
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what type of project-support do our fellows need more of now? which skills and attitudes?
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what % do we want to allocate between in-bound vs referal?
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what types of adventures do we want to see more of?
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who do we want to attract who’ll intrinscially be role models and shape kernel culture block-on-block?
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Moved from Options by
saintsal
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Started thinking of a “program set” or shape, based on an outlying starting point.
I didn’t want to start with the 4-month learn track, saving that to do together with whoever wants to join.
And then I thought 'What if Learn Track and the Firesides weren’t the driver? What would we do?"
I was thinking about progressive layering and calmness, both of us and the fellows.
I started down the middle, with the fellow’s view of the experience. The rest of the structure was added after, and a few things moved around. I’ll walk you through.
So, without Firesides and Learn track as the main drum, that leaves Guilds, Guides and Juntos (using KB7 terms to just group the resources, though I think of them more as parts to be reassembled.)
I started with this idea that fellows could ask questions to Guild Leaders, and they’d respond with pointers, like ‘to learn that, go check this and that out.’ Then realised that guild leaders have questions too, and we’d need something like guides, but more a dedicated group of mavens like one of the Peers options.
So, we can help each fellow turn their questions into guided explorations that turn into a short reading list. Those reading lists can then be opened as event tracks in convo. We can add guardrails to that with the paper party format. Now we have convo filled with fellow-led convos based on a literal ‘paper trail’ co-created with maven assistance. Cool.
This didn’t feel technical enough in a few ways. Firstly, non-techies shy away from looking at the technical, and get stuck in a layered maze of hype and metaphor, when actually just looking at the technical would be easier and clearer in the end. Most of the big defi mechanisms are explained in just a few pages of a long paper, and most solidity contracts are really short. Seeing a coder walk you through one or two, and they don’t feel like unreachable magic. Plus coders themselves learn from looking at other people’s code. So Contract Safari does that – just an idea to look at a contract together, and cruise around the on-chain data to see what it does in practice.
Now I came back to Learn + Firesides, and saw that the convo events listing was a way for @cryptowanderer and @vivek to orient around the topics and directions of exploration that are of interest to the active fellows. I think they’d be able to see where they’re headed, and anticipate topics of interest. With that, choose a relevant cross … to be continued
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This is the last week I had in mind to get us to final designs. Still lots to do.
A few more shapes to explore:
- Fractalise everything: mini-accelerators, weaving learn track explorations, etc.
- and it’s opposite, to lean into centralization where it’s happening and take advantage of its possible efficiencies
- A shape without any special roles (other than Stewards) which effectively means turning Guiding and Guild Leadership into a learning track or topic
- A shape with no applications, just guest passes and headhunting requests
Then circling back with all the learning to: - Progressive improvements on the 8-week block
There are a few deeper prototypes I expect to open up more useful configurations: sponsor-guided research, Guest Passes, Mentor Impact (ask-orient-respond), getting into specific versions of mini-hackathons…
Going to try to keep my head down to designing for the next 2-3 days. So if we have calls, I’ll try to keep them short and shipping something specific. Crunch time!
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