CENTER STAGE - DAY 2 - Sofia Kachula, Vasilya Rafikova: Decentralized Leadership

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   our next speakers are the uh managing partners of the openweb sandbox uh sophia cachula and vasilia rafakova and they are going to talk about uh how to enable decentralized leadership in a communal ecosystem like the near ecosystem so sophia and vasilia welcome to the stage hi good morning everyone every community requires leadership even if it's a highly dedicated group of people if they are not working full time on the shared course they are probably too busy to be active all the time and

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   participate in every discussion or decision communities usually have dedicated members who are in charge of coordination possibly moderation this is a quote of ilya from his article on sputnik dao a piece of technology that was created to facilitate the decentralized governance of empowered communities of web 3.

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   yesterday and today both of us had a chance to listen to excellent speeches on technology and talk to people project representatives which will undoubtedly lead us to the web 3 world of the future however today me vasilia and sophia from the open web sandbox would like to talk to you about another driver of that change communities and leaders that stand behind those changes those necessary decisions on the way to the world of the web 3.

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   the reason why we would like to talk about this today is because we personally believe that decentralized leadership is an essential element of empowering community members of those communities that actually each and every one of you are building already today so before we dive into the future let's take a look at the current situation right now the community of nir consists out of very diverse subgroups projects and guilds they're all centered around different

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   ideas and beliefs different technology which that's the beauty of it right but there's one thing that unites all of them all these groups are governed in a fairly centralized manner usually there is a leader a manager a person who is in charge of the most important processes who is taking the most important decisions there are also active community members who can take part in those processes as well but let's be honest there is a clear vertical hierarchy present

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   of course it goes without saying that this hierarchy is not formal the communication is transparent and the feedback of all members is highly welcomed at all times on the other hand it does not mean that the accountability is shared or that all of those members participate equally in a strategic planning or decision making processes what's interesting here is that in fact all those remaining members of the communities are given the option of

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   participating in those processes but for one on another reason they've decided or sometimes decide not to do so also because this re this degree of freedom can be sometimes freezing it's a paradox of choice you know having this many options without the necessary guidance leaves people confused and yeah they just don't know how to act on those opportunities and they choose to not do anything imagine

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   if every member of our communities would feel entitled and powerful and act on his plans deploy his talents right away and therefore will feel value as a valuable member of the community right away imagine how much more powerful would the near ecosystem be nice right as mentioned previously the web3 technology can provide the opportunity for people to act like that however technology is just a tool

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   people must be empowered by external factors to take initiative to be active and to deploy these opportunities one of such factors one effect one sorry one of such factors is actually the presence of the of the guidance and creating the safe space where people will feel welcomed and leaded to the right spot where they can actually get their goals well let's talk about this matter in

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    terms of the open web sandbox to enable collaboration between projects and individual contributors the initial plan for the openweb sandbox was to be a playground a free space where everyone can learn about near protocol attempt creating something valuable and get rewarded for this contribution after launch in april it became pretty clear to us that that initial plan was rather utopic for the time being

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    without necessary guidance people felt lost they were confused about the purpose of the platform they didn't know exactly what they're supposed to be would quickly get demotivated lose interest and leave at the same point it was quickly clear to us that the necessary the sustainable the the sustained efficiency of the platform was impossible without the steady coordination of all elements because there were a lot of projects a lot of

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    members there was a lot happening it's just impossible to be efficient without controlling all the processes at that time our team started growing we became three and now we are a team of seven moderators each with their own responsibilities but yet keeping each other in constant check in june we decided to shift our payout system to sputnik dow to ensure efficiency and transparency of the payout process at this moment we have four dow council members who vote through the payout proposals and our roadmap reads even

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    more members in the future sorry raise even more members in the future meanwhile openweb sandbox keeps growing our internal processes became more complicated and so did our contribution to the development of near protocol it is we are reminded every day that every member of our community can be activated and is extremely valuable for the near ecosystem the only thing that's necessary is a couple of conditions to be satisfied one of those

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    conditions are is a present of timely guidance provided by the appropriate leader and the right time and the right space now the question is how are we planning to satisfy this condition right so imagine that all the groups on near are owned and driven entirely by the community members that absolutely everybody contributes to the collective decision-making process how does that sound to you

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    i think this is all why we're here we're trying to make the shift towards decentralized shared leadership decentralized shared leadership any ideas one that might entail any associations anything more or less a little bit not really okay compared to the traditional hierarchical companies online communities are heavily influenced by the emergent bottom-up leadership processes what that means it means that everybody can and actually should be a leader

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    by raising active global community members we will be able to grow self-sustained community of people who would be able to use veterinary technology to take control of our money of our data on a large scale it is those people that we need today that was a little too early well we're all trying to experiment here with how to build such a community let's see what the research has to offer and the first one right here which is also the most obvious one probably is formal leadership position

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    occupying a formal leadership position we kind of knew that already before boring but necessary at first it is up to the former leaders to facilitate a cascade of leadership and provide simple positive concise messages to people this is also what we do in open web sandbox communication theory from 50s has already discovered that top-down one-way communication does not diffuse innovation on its own

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    what it does it affects opinion leaders and opinion leaders in fact affect broader audience there we go consistent communication as social human beings we're always looking help and advice from other people which is also true in online communities getting a warm response from your moderator solely based on your membership can be very strong catalyst for a future engagement this is also what we're trying to do in open web sandbox

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    we're using multiple channels to address people wherever they're joining us for the same reason we opened language hubs to ensure that people can ask questions and learn about near ecosystem in their native language network position leaders also tend to be somehow influential we saw in open web sandbox that individuals who are considered inspirational important they get more likes more reactions

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    their actions are considered as having a bigger impact network position researchers see that as a proxy of leadership in fact opinions power and influence is coming from the network of supporting of supporting users but also contributors and people who are interested personal connection it is a great way to feel value with an online community it is at this moment when we start talking to friends

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    to family about how much engaged you are in your community this is advocacy this is also what we're striving for in open web sandbox and we hope that everybody can take our lessons from this formal leadership consistent communication and network position we aim to construct such a network where centralized governance would not be needed anymore where people would be supported and they could motivate each other

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    in a decentralized manner as our new roadmap and together with the educational unit of nier we're going to implement such a mentorship system new people are supported by experienced sandboxers this is one of our goals we continue building our network and we're trying to help others people to do so as well today one of our greatest achievement is that in less than six months sandbox has become living concept that means that if our team had to be

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    removed the idea of people communicating to each other engaging with projects that are already building a top of near in one digital platform in a consistent manner that idea will stay with us the factors that we just mentioned which is formal leadership consistent communication and network positions those are things that have been discovered already in science in psychology communication theory a long time ago so we should definitely use them

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    as open web sandbox colleagues but also early development developers developers our developers community developers one of our goals is to enable near-mass adoption but we're also trying to do is to empower other people to be able and to be willing to do so we're here to facilitate early adoption but one of our mission and vision is to share our passion about the open webinar with everybody who is as passionate

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    about it thank you