With the proposal for microgrants towards the formation of baby WGs passing, thought I would take the opportunity to share a few of my thoughts/learnings from the past couple of months leading the Catdets WG and also from working with various DAOs and communities.
Hopefully this would be helpful to those who are trying to form their baby WGs and work with the community.
Actually, most of the times I have no idea what I am doing. 
But I think it’s a combination of:
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having a vision of what I want to create/achieve
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knowing certain rules of thumb and principles very well, and operating closely based on them
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listening closely to the community, not just read or hear, but really listen; I try, sometimes it’s painful, and I’m still learning how to do it better, but I try
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making decisions based on all of the above within certain operating constraints
Let me talk more about one of my recent fuck-ups.
In the month of July, I was extremely swamped by my commitments across all my projects and other IRL stuff - this led to a loss of focus on certain aspects of community work. To some extent I could feel the vibes deteriorating in the Jupiter Discord in real time, there were a few issues we were confronted with:
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lack of a strong purpose for the CoC core, people didn’t really know what they were doing as CoC and wanted to contribute more, but there was no clear way to do so
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internal miscommunication and conflict among some members of the core community. This was especially tough because often it’s not like one side is “obviously” wrong, and sometimes things just need time to be worked out
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the CAWG was not active enough in both the core and wider community. I wasn’t clear enough in activating and leading the team
So there were a few key decisions that we made that I think was important.
Instead of trying to tackle everything at once, we got back down to basics. At its core, a big part of community work is showing up, so we started showing up more in the community, both in Discord and in Twitter.
We listened to the community’s feedback, which was really helpful and clear (even though sometimes it can be painful), and we took time to digest.
One of the principles I believe in is that a good community is one that is productive, not just in quantity of “output”, but in quality. Culture is hard to measure and define, but I think one way to define a strong culture is one that leads to productive outcomes – creates great value for the organisation.
Something that meow said to me has stuck with me a lot and that is we should focus on “having fun”.
On the surface this may seem contradictory to being productive, but if you read some of the literature on this topic, work as “play” actually activates the highest level of creativity and productivity. So truly, if we bring back the vibes, culture will improve and productivity will soar.
The other principle that I leaned heavily into, is that it’s much better to encourage positive behaviour than to police bad behaviour. One of the things the Catdets WG talked about at the start before we even got elected as a trial WG was about how do we stop ourselves from becoming the ‘Culture police’. That is the last thing we want. A free environment, where everyone is free to express themselves is very important. But at the same time, the community does need to have certain guidelines and ethos to remain as a healthy collective.
Armed with these principles, we doubled our efforts to communicate more, show up more, and accelerated efforts to co-create the guidelines, ethos and rules with the community. There were several iterations to this, many sessions in public where we worked together to ensure everyone, both in Discord and in the wider community had a voice in expressing their thoughts on it. Even now as I type this, we will be having another session towards the end of August to once again engage the wider community on these and clarify the process of becoming a Catdet and also the opportunities that come with being one.
To get everyone aligned and really activate the entire community in supporting and growing together with these shared ethos, we also developed some tools to aid us, one of which is Discord bot that allows community members to appreciate each other easily. The idea behind it was simple, but people do really feel seen and appreciated, and sometimes like I mentioned, encouraging positive behaviours and highlighting the good stuff, is just a lot more effective than trying to prevent bad behaviour. Fast-forward a couple of weeks, it has seen extensive usage. It is the first iteration, and we will be doing a retrospective on that soon and shipping some improvements/changes in the upcoming weeks.
During this process, we also got the opportunity to collaborate and work with many amazing community members. It was during this time that we started up the Mindfulness sessions with Sambino; it was also during this time that we supported and worked with Wake and Sax on booting up their podcast, which has now become Jup & Juice.
Our vision as the Catdet WG has always been to find a way to develop Jupiter’s community culture into one that is the most productive, and by that I really mean that we have the most fun while collaborating with each other to move Jupiter forward.
I can’t speak for any other person or WGs, but I believe that working closely with the community and in public while challenging is extremely rewarding. It starts simply from just showing up and spending time caring about others and caring about Jupiter.
To end off, I think it’s extremely fortunate for the whole of crypto and web3 that Jupiter has the resources and most importantly the leadership vision to support this new way of working as a DAO. It’s really a grand experiment that has the potential to show the world a different side of crypto. I urge everyone to appreciate and respect this opportunity, instead of abusing the trust, resources and opportunities made available.
LFGrow. 
we’re all so grateful 
