PROPOSAL #90 [REJECTED] Community Health research, analytics and benchmarking

Hub Proposals Community Spend
21

Hey, thanks for raising these points. Really important to clarify!

Defining Community Health is itself a lot of work (we know that number of members in discord or the number of messages are just vanity metrics. But what are good metrics?!). We’ve already been at it for some time, and you can read about our progress so far here. This article is a work in progress so part of the grant is to validate that this is a good framework, in practice. So the question you’re asking is part of the deliverables.

Also, I’d invite a difference between surveillance tooling and community analytics. One thing is mapping the behavior of a specific person (e.g. like Karma does for reputation). Different from that is getting aggregate insights (not disclosing the behavior of any specific individual but overall patterns and trends) so that the community can know what to focus on. The difference is the same between disclosing that an individual voted in favor of proposal X vs disclosing that 55% of the population voted in favor.

If you see our framework in the article, we’ve identified a series of key areas that determine a community’s resilience, sense of ownership and participation, well-being, etc. The insights we aim to provide are about helping the community to discover the biggest levers they can work on.

Finally, for the pulse survey, I’ll offer the following framing:
What motivates you or any other member to discuss here? I’d hope it’s about making this community better
Answering pulse surveys can be another way to do that. Popsups are annoying because they usual take value away rather than adding it. And along the same lines, surveys are often disengaging because they’re long, it’s not clear what impact answering has, and it takes months to analyze the data and take some initiative. Our proposal addresses those shortfalls with short surveys and fast feedback loops so the community can quickly respond and take action, and in doing so, show to others that having a voice has an impact, so more and more are motivated to answer every time. If used well, it creates a positive feedback loop of questions, insights, initiatives, and improvement.
Importantly, answering questions is not only useful for the person asking. Coaching is mostly based on asking useful questions to offer reflection and for the individual to generate their own insights (more powerful than having some stranger tell you what to do). In the same way, the pulse surveys can offer a moment of reflection, a prompt to stop the busy work for a moment and check in with ourselves about how we’re doing and how things are going, and then share that with the community. This will take some work, but it’s the route we want to work towards.

Hope that makes sense @common_spelling?

22

Hey @saint.Ericus, please see my answer above and let me know if you still have any doubts or concerns. Happy to answer if so!

23

For me this remains a very interesting test to do and see what comes out. The amount of funding is not enormous imo and worth a gamble.

If it proves successful then it will be a very powerful tool for the complete ecosystem and people to analyze a project based on community engagement. This can be converted into opportunities to make projects more successful.

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24

Interesting, I post because, things being as they are, i have command of no force that could precede the causal links preventing me from doing otherwise. are you asking me how i behaviorally justify why i posted?
my participation in pulse surveys would be motivated by a contempt for the unsolicited inconvenience.
why would this be funded during a bear market?
the composition and disposition of the community could change in the time it takes you to make up a definition for community health.

oops, did i just guess a bullet point in the follow up proposal after you make no meaningful contribution to the definition of community health?

25

Hello everyone!

We have an initial call with @danielo today, December 7th about this proposal. If you would like to join that call, the information is as follows:

Time:
December 7,
7PM GMT (11 AM PST)
you can use this website to easily convert to your own timezone.

Place: https://meet.google.com/cpk-tgek-dob

Purpose:

  • understand the value proposition of the community health tool
  • plan the proposal process and timeline particularly in regards to:
    getting more eyes on the proposal via twitter and a live event; determining a last-call date for the proposal (when the proposal will be put on-chain)

cc: @common_spelling @saint.Ericus

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26

oh, if that’s your interpretation I probably miss-explained.
For clarity, I’m not challenging your motivation to post. I actually appreciate your feedback (albeit contrarian to the proposal it raises great points for discussion).
What I was trying to suggest is that in the same way the forum can be an avenue to express an opinion, so can be a survey. Different methods work for different people.
You’re making me think that the feature to opt-out from receiving future survey prompts is something we should prioritize and make sure we have before launching, so we’re not repeatedly messaging those who don’t like it.

27

Hello everyone, this proposal has moved to the last call status, and will be put on-chain on the 12th of December.

Important
If you are interested in joining a twitter space event that discusses this proposal, please fill in your availability here.

Here are the meeting notes from our initial open call on December 12th.

[December 7] Open Call Notes

Attendees: @danielo (RnDAO), @Youssef (Cosmos Contributor), Katerina (RnDAO), Worker Bee (Osmosis Support Lab), @lexa (Hypha Worker Co-operative), @LeonoorsCryptoman (Validator), @ala.tusz.am (Community member), Akshay N (Community member)

TLDR

  • This call served as an opportunity for the community to ask questions about the proposal and for @danielo to work with the Cosmos community to understand proposal next steps.
  • It was decided to put the proposal on-chain on December 12th.
  • FAQs have been appended to the original post in accordance with community feedback.
Full meeting notes

Overview

  • About RnDAO: RnDAO is a DAO platform that focuses on DAO and organizational projects. There are currently two projects relevant to Cosmos related to RnDAO:
    • Community Health
    • Deliberation Process
      This call is particularly about the Community Health Initiative

Community Questions

  • Youssef: How can we address accountability concerns in regards to the proposal process? How can we judge the value that is created? I am concerned because I’ve seen many proposals on the forum that deal with governance, and I’m worried that there is going to be overlap because different teams request funding from the Hub. A different approach is to create a community council which has all governance flowing through it, this solves the oversight and accountability issue. How can we address this concern?
    • Daniel:
      • These concerns are general governance concerns for Cosmos. Accountability is a problem across DAO ecosystems. Two ways we can frame this:
        1. Let’s stop everything and deal with this concern.
        2. Let’s take parallel tracks to address these concerns while still getting things done.
      • Accountability concerns are a risk, but not certain failure. As such, the recommendation is to mitigate the concern w/ low-hanging fruit while still moving forward. The discussion around the community council is a large discussion, and probably requires a different call to address.
    • Youssef: Yes, I understand what you’re saying. The biggest advantage of the community council is that it enables planning and coordination.
    • Daniel: Suggestions for solving for accountability as a proposal group:
      1. Dox proposers to avoid sybil’s and help build a natural reputation system.
      2. Emphasize milestone to fund release of funds
    • Abra: A multi-sig could be used to solve for milestone release.
      • Daniel: Requirements for a multi-sig release process:
        • Verification that milestones are met
        • A trusted and neutral party operating the multi-sig
      • Worker Bee: The deciding factor of accessibility to funding on Osmosis seems to be engagement with the community.
  • Leonoors: Are you intending to do the research with other chains? Maybe it would be good to share the progress already so that people have a rough idea of what they can expect.

Proposal Timeline

Two key points moving forward:

  1. Getting more eyes on the proposal by sharing in the appropriate places.
  2. Last-call date for the proposal: December 12th
    • Youssef: Ensure that the deliverables are clear and that there is sufficient oversight.
    • Lexa: The oversight that we usually get for spend proposals is the release of the deliverable. These can be transparency reports. The multi-sigs usually arise when the money is going to go to multiple parties and the use-case isn’t yet disclosed.

Next Steps

  • Add a last-call date to the proposal title
  • Organize a synchronous, open meeting to provide more information and answer questions about the proposal. (As a community member: use this link to schedule a time that works for you!)
  • Share the proposal’s last-call announcement on twitter and telegram.
  • Put the proposal on-chain

Note: I have no vested interest in the outcome of this proposal, and I am not part of any RnDAO teams, though I do personally support the initiative because I trust the quality of RnDAO’s work, I think it will be beneficial to the Hub and the Ecosystem, and I believe that methodical improvements to community health is a valuable workstream to pursue.

2 Likes
28

I won’t make it today, but interested in the outcome! Can you post the summary again?

29

Interesting, have you been looking with technologies like Desmos to create an “on chain” one that could interact in any ecosystem?

I would rather prefer a real on chain solution using tools of the ecosystem that just changing to something at the end the same…

30

why would this be funded during a bear market?

the composition and disposition of the community could change in the time it takes you to survey people (who might be answering just to fuck with your survey) and make up a definition for community health.

31

Actually, I don’t see much of a reason why building an on-chain community health tool would make sense. For example, in my analysis on Proposal 82, I found that there were over 36,000 telegram messages sent about the proposal, much of the discussion took place on twitter, and on the forum.

That’s all to say, most of our governance activity takes place off-chain. Additionally, what is currently a $30,000 spend for a pilot of a community health framework would become much more expensive if built on-chain, and work has already begun on the project.

If the pilot goes well, perhaps we would like to see the workstream continue, or eventually move to on-chain solutions, but imo it is totally unnecessary for a pilot.

Community exists and interacts regardless of market conditions. Perhaps with a methodical approach to improving community health, when more people start joining the community in a bull market, we will be more equipped to on-board them into a healthy and vibrant community.

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33

additionally to what @ala.tusz.am mentioned, a really important thing to understand a community’s health is benchmarking. And benchmarking against the same community (i.e. historical data) is often the one that provides the most insights.

It will take time to develop the framework and technology, then to implement it and have the insights. So if we want to have the ability to understand what’s happening during the bull market, we’ll have to start before that.

34

what benefit would improving community health and its vibez do? community health is a meaningless concept, this proposal is funding to make up a definition for community health.

community health could be how many wallets are in profit vs loss or subjective feelings of wellbeing held by community members & self reported on a survey. imo its not worth the continuous funding requested in either case.

35

It seems like they already have a pretty good idea of what community health is, beyond just “subjective feelings of wellbeing.” Have you seen the work they’ve done on the framework?

I would say that community health is certainly not a “meaningless concept” given that poor community health can lead to contributor attrition, groupthink, lack of ability to attract new contributors, and ossification (an inability to change or innovate).

Arguing that community health is meaningless is like arguing that organizational health is irrelevant. In fact organizational health has implications on every aspect of an organization’s function, in the same way that health effects our biological functions. Healthy organizations are more productive, and more innovative and this feeds into the bottom-line. To quote McKinsey on the subject:

Working on health works. It’s good for your people and for your bottom line.

Additionally, in the original post, we can see some of the applications of the approach toward community health:

This is untrue, this proposal is funding the creation of a research-backed, open-source tool that can be used to methodically analyze and improve community health, the importance of which I’ve outlined above.

Again, I have no vested interest in the outcome of this proposal, but I strongly believe that if we want the Hub to reach its potential, we should be focusing on these softer areas of community and culture alongside the tech. At the end of the day it’s the humans that use the technology, not the other way around (yet).

36

by meaningless i mean undefined. no objective metrics define it. i get that words have meaning that suggest that “community health” seems intuitive and important, but that expectation also makes it easy to pair meaningful words with irrelevant or loosely correlated data based on the small sample size of a bear market.

how would the tool analyze and improve community health?

does google being able to advertise to you based on eavesdropping improve consumer health?

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37

Check out Q4 of that framework I linked above, it outlines which metrics can be used to define community health and how they can be used.

Screenshot 2022-12-11 at 17.45.21
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Benchmarking and baseline analysis are crucial to assess the impact that inputs have on complex systems. The google analogy is not relevant because they are not trying to improve consumer health and they also don’t anonymize the data they collect about your profile, though from your example you could deduce that having sufficient amounts of data about inputs in a system enable targeted action which drives some end-goal… So, maybe if google really did want to put their data to good use to improve societal health instead of act as a parasitic layer driving a consumerist society, they could. But I digress…

38

looked at framework, it is just vague generalities surrounding the typical connotation of the words “community health”

most of it sounds exactly like what map of zones already does.

the proposal is a an open question asking if community health can be objectively constrained to yield useful information that will correspond strongly enough with “community health” that action can be taken and requests ongoing funding to check.

given the huge number of variables that could effect this underdetermined “community health” metric, the proposal incentivizes continued vague generalities over deliverables. the proposal repeatedly mentions that is its intent.

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39

The deliverable is a community health assessment. To get there we need to finish translating the conceptual framework into practice, which can’t be done well without data. And for that we need the data collection tool and basically the rest of the work of the proposal.

This is research precisely because the exact shape and feel of the output can not be known in advance (unless we use some vanity metrics like the number of users, but that’s pointless). We have to try multiple avenues, iterate, etc. And only then we can deliver the exact metrics.

That being said, our research so far leads us to “sense of community” (this is a construct that has extensive research done, both in terms of its impact and how to assess it), and a few network analysis metrics like small world index (also with extensive backing). Both are referenced in our paper. Then again, we believe in doing this properly and not jumping to easy conclusions, so first, we need to run this project.

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40

I thought you need indexing for that. AFAIK, the indexing on Desmos was planned to be done by Bostrom. Unsure what happened of that story

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41

Twitter space for the proposal tomorrow:

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