Upcoming initiatives in Community Management (+extras)

[Pepperoni_Joe]

Hi owls,

Out of passing interest, on 29 April, I attended my first Index Coop Weekly planning call. Falling totally for the vision of Index Coop, and the strength of this community, 37 days later, on May 5th, I handed in my resignation at PwC.

Whilst I struggled to explain the transition to earning magic internet money to mum - I am delighted to now be able to devote 100% of my time (after a 1 month notice period) to support this community to become the BlackRock of crypto indexes.

This also provides the opportunity to progress initiatives above and beyond those responsibilities initially laid out in the Community Manager Post.

As such, have made this post to

• Outline key initiatives and approaches we are taking within Community Management.
• Identify activities I’m looking to progress which sit partially or fully outside of community management. Thus (hopefully) ensuring alignment and minimizing duplication of effort in these areas.
• Confirm activities that new members of the community are taking ownership of on a longer term basis.

My ask…

• Below each main chunk of activity, there is a vote to indicate your support for the prioritisation of each activity. Let your thoughts be known!
• If you, or someone you know, are completing similar or overlapping work, please let me know so we can align.

Here is a summary of this activity, which I will explore in more detail through this post. I apologize in advance if this post is a touch meandering (and pretty long!).

edit, this image is too wide to be legible, you can view the source file here

1. Background to webinars & virtual events

Virtual events and training is one of my core passions and areas of main expertise as a consultant.

We are not DogeCoin, Index Coop investors are informed, intelligent and knowledgeable. As such, providing high quality Webinars & virtual events will allow us to:

• Engage investors and community members with high quality informative content which establishes us as the “go to” experts in this space.
• Build momentum and hype around the “best in class” sessions we run.
• Provide an opportunity to pitch our products, and the experience of our team, to the broader market
• Feeder for high quality recording of virtual session for our youtube channel (BigSky7)

This has some overlap with what is currently being done in Clubhouse, though the webinars are likely to be less personable and more on the “structured” side.

This work leverages the AMAZING collateral developed by the Business Development team (Metfanmike, fallow8, DOC) and spans community and BD, covering the webinar activity mentioned in the Business Development WG2 post.

1.1 New Investor & Contributor Call - Pepperoni Joe

We have now run three new joiner call with 30+ people and are developing and iterating on the session week by week . Any feedback on our sessions slides would be hugely appreciated.

The 1 hours call splits into two parts:

• New Investor - our pitch on who we are, what we do and what products we have, using an expanded version of the standard pitch deck - credit DOC et al.
• New contributors - a detailed look at how to practically engage with the community and running through the essential “need to know” of contributing to the Coop.

In a few more weeks this session will be polished enough that we can spin out the first 30 minutes as a “Why invest with Index Coop’’ standalone presentation which can be delivered via multiple channels (pitching Index Coop again and again to the world!).

There are some practicalities to running these calls, (slides, polls, attendees, followup) which will be handled by our two technical facilitators.

• @ElliottWatts - Technical Facilitator & coordinator
• @DefiJesus - Technical Facilitator & coordinator

The call is open to all current community members, so we would encourage you to attend as there are various opportunities you can take to contribute in the session - and it represents a great way to meet new joiners. . You can join this via invite in the Index Coop shared calendar.

1.1.1 Bronze Owl Quest - Pepperoni Joe

Linked to the new investor and contributor call, we are launching a NEW Bronze Owl quest to leverage the muscle and enthusiasm of new joiners in a more structured way.

Whilst still a WIP, the Bronze Owl Quest hub is an experiment I am trialing to see if we can provide a more structured and focused guide on how new joiners can contribute. This approach is likely to evolve further in coming weeks as I continue run trial and error to see what works.

For example, I’m considering shifting to a more “hands off” model where new joiners are tasked with entering various competitions (“content writing” or “design competitions”) as a means of identifying top talent in key areas. More on this to follow in coming weeks.

1.2 Index market analysis and main players - @patb / @4aquatic / Pepperoni Joe

To begin the launch of a broader webinar series, new community members @patb , supported by @4aquatic is working on a research to inform a webinar and blog post focused on the crypto index market generally, and exploring the key players in this space.

This will look at their comparative strengths and weaknesses and will feed into a longer term approach to competitor analysis (with each competitor “owned” by one individual as a go to point of contact for Index Coop). This can be seen as the “other side of the coin” to the project ambassador programme cedrick is launching.

I’m keen to run the session with the community first, before opening this up to a wider audience and getting the recording on youtube. This can be a presentation we run periodically, providing the world a regular update on the state of the crypto index market.

It will leverage and expand upon the following existing collateral:

• Crypto Market Index Products - Mr Madila
• Market Barometer - MetFanMike

We are in need of some more support here if anyone is interested? @overanalyser it would also be great to connect in a few weeks as I believe you have done some interested research into BasketDAO which is still an area we have some questions about…

1.3 Channels Analysis - TheYoungCrews & @ElliottWatts

@ElliottWatts has also raised a great idea RE how we can live stream webinar events across different channels - and he will be leading some further investigation on this.

With Elliott focusing on the “how” TheYoungCrews will to do some further digging on “where”. Or, to put it a different way, what options are there for us to present our webinars / live sessions as wide an audience as possible. This would be for both our “New Investor” presentation, and webinar content more generally).

To what extent do you support this approach to webinars and virtual events (including new joiners events)

• Strongly Agree
• Agree
• Slightly Agree
• Neutral
• Slightly Disagree
• Disagree
• Strongly Disagree

2 - Community Analysis & Memberlist - Pepperoni Joe & @ElliottWatts

We are collating a great deal of data on the community, which are invaluable in making data informed decisions and supporting improved efficiency.

2.1 New joiner funneling - Elliott Watts & Pepperoni Joe

We now collected detailed information on every new joiner who attends to call. Becoming better as using this data is something I will be prioritizing increasingly over the coming month (as I get more time free) which will allow us to.

• Funnel suitable new joiners towards specific working group and tasks
• Identify what engagement channels are working (i.e. are people coming to us from twitter, or word of mouth)
• Reduce the pressure on the wider community to have multiple 1:1s, introductions, sets tasks etc.
• Identify and recruit key talent and capability that the coop needs at any given time.

In support of this, @Elliott watts and I will be providing monthly analytics reports highlighting key insights we are drawing from our new joiner data.

Long term I will be looking to engage more deeply with each Working Groups to understand specifically what their resourcing needs are (i.e. if treasury needing a quant risk person, my job is to go out and find them) and develop a more targeted approach to recruitment to fill these gaps (teaser: Coop member referral programme) .

2.2 Community Memberlist - @ElliottWatts & Pepperoni Joe

The most frequent thing I say now, outside of “Coop” is, “what’s your email address”. Having to constantly request contanct information represents a real point of friction for many in the community. Enter the community member list.

This document will provide a variety of contact information on community members. This is entirely voluntary (we don’t need your LinkedIn, but if you would like to share it, why not?) and can be used to easily identify people’s emails and time zones. Saving you the constant effort of having to ask for this information.

Access to this list will be limited to Bronze Owl+ and those who have attended the onboarding call.

This interacts with the New Joiners list because, as new joiners complete the “Bronze Owl Quest” they will be moved from the “new joiner list” to the community member list.

@ElliottWatts will be managing updating the community members list, thanks @DefiJesus for the great start made here. Once we have 85% of the community on the members list, we will release it to the community for us (we are currently on about 65%).

To what extent do you support this Community Analysis and the Member List approach

• Strongly Agree
• Agree
• Slightly Agree
• Neutral
• Slightly Disagree
• Disagree
• Strongly Disagree

3. Moderation - @mrvls_brkfst & @DefiJesus

Moderation is a key part of the Community Manager role, and will be something @mrvls_brkfst will be leading on.

Main areas

• Discord
• Forum
• Youtube

3.1. Discord Automation advancements. @DefiJesus

DeFi Jesus brings some great experience with the moderation of Discord, and he will be inputting heavily to strip away manual effort from this process and improve how we use discord to engage (i.e role game).

In the short term, I see him support Gav directly with this, with a view that eventually Defi Jesus takes on a more formal community moderation role. More details to follow soon

To what extent do you support this approach to Moderation

• Strongly Agree
• Agree
• Slightly Agree
• Neutral
• Slightly Disagree
• Disagree
• Strongly Disagree

4. LinkedIn Campaign Pepperoni_Joe, James Thomas
We know what our target audience is, because they form such a large part of this community. TradFi people just get index product

LinkedIn provides an effective mechanism for us to push targeted ads by role / industry. I’m keen to test my hypothesis that role / industry targeted ads could yield greater engagement than general crypto ads (i.e. coingecko).

For this reason, I’ve brought in James Thomas who I’ve worked closely with IRL to take products to market using LinkedIn campaigns. His expertise, coupled with mine and @mrvls_brkfst experience could make a winning formula. Conscious lanks has also been working on Linkedin so, Lanks it would also be great to get you involved.

Broadly I see this more fitting within Growth than community management, so we will be reporting into @LemonadeAlpha on this.

@0x_Dev, I’m also keen to coordinate this effort with your Dowls as I’m sure you have many invaluable lessons from the ad campaigns you have already run. It is also worth noting the designs we use for a “index savvy, new to crypto audience” will be very different from our current “crypo savvy, new to index product ads” so some Dowl support with the campaign design may be beneficial!

4.1 Key dependencies

We have a major dependency here on the website. At the moment, if I follow an Index Coop ad it takes me straight to the “buy” section of the website.

I struggle to imagine many users journey play out as follows:
* click ad, “are you missing out on Defi”,

• “connect wallet”,
• “buy dpi based on the graph / info provided on the page”

@0x_Dev , I’m certain the new website redesign will address this, and have an absolutely kick ass landing page in mind, but my preference for the landing page is the “Introduction to Index” video, which has the script written, but am waiting on Earth Maze to return from AL (19.05) push forward development.

Whilst this all happens I will focus on getting James up to speed on our products and prepare for the LinkedIn launch. We will run an open session with the community over the coming weeks to showcase the marketing and outreach capabilities LinkedIn can provide, and to crowdsource ideas for how we could practically use this functionality.

To what extent do you support the prioritisation of LinkedIn marketing and growth campaign?

• Strongly Agree
• Agree
• Slightly Agree
• Neutral
• Slightly Disagree
• Disagree
• Strongly Disagree

5. Organization @MrMadila & Pepperoni Joe

Coming from a firm that works entirely using the google suite, I know there are some low hanging organizational fruits that will help the coop become more efficient.

5.1 Drives - @MrMadila

Mr Madila is looking to set up a more robust drive system, where public drives are nested within the main Index Coop shared drives. DevonOnDefi, I know this is something you are keen to put into practise ASAP. @MrMadila let me know if there is anythigng I can do to help move this foward, as we feel to be stalling on this slightly?

5.2 Shared Calendar - Pepperoni Joe

I’ve spoken a bit about this, but using a shared Index Coop calendar will have massive benefits in comparison to launching invites through personal calendars.

With ongoing data collection happening around the Community Members List, this has allowed us to create an Index Coop mailing list (with all members on this list added to the shared calendar). All public meeting have now been moved over to the shared calendar, and everyone who has completed this form has been added to the mailing list. A more detailed explanation of this process can be found on this post.

If you haven’t completed this form already, I would encourage you to do so as it will stop you from missing out and an increasing number of public sessions and events we will be launching over the coming months.

To what extent do you support these organizational initiatives

• Strongly Agree
• Agree
• Slightly Agree
• Neutral
• Slightly Disagree
• Disagree
• Strongly Disagree

6. Close

Pheww, had I known this post was going wrack up 2000+ words, I might have reconsidered writing it . its not so long I’m the only one to read it.

Hopefully this helped shed some clarity around the various activities we are looking to move forward over
coming months.

Questions, comment and feedback welcome! If you would like to support any of this activity, let me know.

[mrvls_brkfst]

Well done @Pepperoni_Joe ! You’re doing a fantastic job with new joiner activities and really helping organise/formalise a lot of processes and resources that will help a lot now that the Coop is much larger than just a short time ago.

I fully encourage people to get involved wherever they can. As a Coop, we move forward together and @Pepperoni_Joe and I will help everyone do the best they can as best we can. This post is a great springboard to moving the Coop along and keeping the way it works as smooth as can be.

[overanalyser]

Wow, just Wow,

So many new names, so many new ideas, so much talent coming onboard.

Thank you @Pepperoni_Joe

[LemonadeAlpha]

Hey Joe,

As always I appreciate your thoroughness and passion.

A couple big things are coming up for me in the context of helping our community run as a well oiled machine.

One, it seems like there is a big push to onboard large volumes of new members into the community. I’m curious where this ideal is coming from and why we think this is the best path forward. Although getting as many people as possible excited about Index Coop is a worthy objective, I’m a bit weary of the pressure this puts on the current group driving outcomes. In the past few weeks there’s been a noticeable uptick in low context proposals coming from people who have never attended a growth call.

Imo, we should be funneling people into more and more informative sessions before attempting to give them tasks.

I’d also caution to not stretch the responsibilities too broadly in the early going as focus will be the key to success. LinkedIn paid campaigns are not even a possibility for crypto products (likewise with the occult ).

I’d be keen to understand - what are the goals of the community team? The prioritization should be simple to back out from those.

[Pepperoni_Joe]

Thanks for the insightful comments and helpful challenge @LemonadeAlpha

Hopefully this discussion can also help expand on some of the points mentioned above

@LemonadeAlpha

I’d be keen to understand - what are the goals of the community team?

Ultimately I see the role of Community Manager being to act as a funnel, preventing a tide of new contributors crashing on the different working groups, creating more pressure on value driving groups through requests for 1:1s, duplication of effort and poor proposals.

An essential part of this funnel is installing a mechanism to allow the early identification of top talent, who have the time and experienced needed to make valued contributions to the Coop in areas that need support.

We seem to share the same goal for community management and so the question is fundamentally on the practicalities of achieving them.

@LemonadeAlpha

One, it seems like there is a big push to onboard large volumes of new members into the community.

I would challenge the assessment that it is the Community teams aim to onboard large number of new communities members. We don’t promote the new joiner calls anywhere outside of “introductions” in Discord and I would hypothesize the uptick in activity is reflective of the growing interest in crypto, and success of Index Coop.

Interestingly, the data we collect shows new community members find their way to us in a variety of ways:

• Twitter: 32%
• Online research: 28%
• Word of mouth: 29%
• Other: 11%

Therefore, I want to emphasis that onboarding increasing numbers of new joiners in itself is not our goal. Its about the quality of the new contributors we bring in.

@LemonadeAlpha

In the past few weeks there’s been a noticeable uptick in low context proposals coming from people who have never attended a growth call.

Having just had a scan through and identified four proposal I would consider “low quality” I then cross referenced the authors, to see if they attended the New Investor and Contractor calls either. None had.

Maybe to reframe the question, “how do we better guide people towards this session so as reduce the volume of low quality posts?” This is an excellent questions, and one I will take away and consider.

@LemonadeAlpha

Imo, we should be funneling people into more and more informative sessions before attempting to give them tasks.

Agreed, and our New Investor and Contributor call should really hammer home key messaging around what effective contribution looks like. I did a refresh of our slides this weekend to emphasize that learning is a priority and impact takes times (and research!). I will be especially strong on this point going forward.

However, the challenge may be making sure all contributors are funneled through this initial call - so we can impress this point on them.

Some example slides we are using to help land this point:

I think part of your concern @LemonadeAlpha is that you are worried we are directing people towards tasks and content that they are not suitable equipped to complete (or require extensive input).

I’d encourage you to look at the specifics of the Bronze Owl Quest as I am using these tasks primely to:

1. Allow new joiners to pick up self contained tasks which I would otherwise have to do myself
2. Give me an idea of new joiner capability and commitment. This assessment extends to “content writing ideas”, as my new editorial responsibilities should give me a good sense of who have the writing skills really needed by the IC.

For example:

• Create a new joiners FAQ and review it with Joe
• Data & Analytics cleanse data on New Joiner collection form and draw out basic data insights.

@LemonadeAlpha

LinkedIn paid campaigns are not even a possibility for crypto products (likewise with the occult ).

Thank you for flagging this, a bit gutted @BigSky7, but happy we have identified this blocker early. Also nice to be associated with the occult - your observation reinforces my belief technical analysis is little more than tea-leaf reading.

@LemonadeAlpha

I’d also caution to not stretch the responsibilities too broadly in the early going as focus will be the key to success

I think this is Sage advise, as much of what is mentioned here spans outside the remit of Community Management. Whist usually I would mindful to not spread myself too thing (quality over quantity), as of June 1st I will have an additional 50+ hours a week to devote to the Index Coop.

This should give me more than enough capacity to nail the part time community manager role (which I’m sharing with @mrvls_brkfst) as well as explore some others areas of interest and passion within Business Development with @BigSky7, @fallow8, @Metfanmike and others.

Thanks for the great feedback and challenge, and hopefully we can continue to develop the Community Manager role, and my involvement more generally, in a way that drives value for the Coop.

[puniaviision]

Talk about a forum post! Very impressive @Pepperoni_Joe

Something that I think is likely to happen as well is you and the Product Working Group [led by @overanalyser and me] will be working closely together.

The PWG is laser focused on understanding and building products for investors as well as the community. Of all the people in the Coop, you probably will have the exposure to the most new joiners, their journey, and their feedback. All data that would be invaluable to the product team.

[verto0912]

I would echo a lot of @LemonadeAlpha’s points.

One question for you @Pepperoni_Joe - what is the goal of this post? If you are trying to get a consensus on something, 2000 words is a bit much. It’s hard to see the majority of the community reading the entire post and forming an opinion on all of these matters.

Furthermore, I don’t quite understand why these polls are needed. All of the things you proposing are reasonable and you should be able to execute on them. Some might need input from different WGs and you can engage with them directly. We should aim for minimised governance, not maximised one.

I would argue that it takes more than 5 hours a week to keep up with the forum alone in any meaningful way.

With all of these activities, what are the outcomes you are looking for? Why are these pressing issues? How do they contribute to hitting our KPIs or any business outcomes for the Coop?

In my mind, our 3 key short-term priorities at the Coop level, are (in no particular order):

• Distribution

• Product

• Treasury management

How are things in this post contributing to the above? My worry is that we are funneling people into less impactful activities while taking time and focus away from the more impactful ones.

[Pepperoni_Joe]

Thanks for the feedback @verto0912 - did any of the response I provided to @LemonadeAlpha address any of these concerns?

To pick up some of the specifics points you raised.

@verto0912

One question for you @Pepperoni_Joe - what is the goal of this post? If you are trying to get a consensus on something, 2000 words is a bit much. It’s hard to see the majority of the community reading the entire post and forming an opinion on all of these matters.

To distill the aim of this post into one sentence:
“To show what we are doing, how we are doing it, who is doing it - if you have any challenge or see duplication in other areas, let us know”.

@verto0912

Furthermore, I don’t quite understand why these polls are needed. All of the things you proposing are reasonable and you should be able to execute on them. Some might need input from different WGs and you can engage with them directly. We should aim for minimised governance, not maximised one.

I saw the polls as providing a temperature check on the activity we are proposing to do. Whilst not formal “governance”, if one of the suggestions received apathy or pushback (ie. majority of responses were neutral or below), I would consider canning it. I take onboard the feedback though that the polls are of little value.

@verto0912

With all of these activities, what are the outcomes you are looking for? Why are these pressing issues? How do they contribute to hitting our KPIs or any business outcomes for the Coop?

Without wanting to repeat the detail in original post, fundamentally these initiatives each do one or more of the following:

• Drive Coop wide efficiency - and so all business outcomes [headings: 2,3,5]
• Enable us to identify and funnel top talent - again driving all business outcomes [headings: 1,2]
• Increase awareness of, and engagement with, our products - this is mainly related to “1. Webinars” and has parallels with the business objectives that underpin the existence of the IC, impression mining and other Growth and BD initiatives. [heading: 1]

@verto0912

My worry is that we are funneling people into less impactful activities while taking time and focus away from the more impactful ones.

Who’s time and what focus? Treasury Management and Distribution are closed groups, not open to new joiners. New joiners have little opportunity to immediately contribute to high impact activities. Thus, there is a need to still direct then towards activities which provide values for the Coop (writing content, completing basic tasks, sharing post of twitter etc) and which present an opportunity for them to prove their capability and value to the Coop.

We are still less than two weeks into the role, so I would ask for some patience whilst we look to address some fundamental challenges with community management. For example, better funneling of new members to reduce extra work on the wider team.

However, I’m struggling here to understand what practically you are suggesting we should be doing differently, or prioritising instead, to achieve this aim.

[verto0912]

Thanks Joe.

I’m not suggesting anything specific to this post. I understand that you wanted to provide an update. Personally, I think most of the topics could’ve been presented in the weekly meeting as it seems like you/others are already executing on a lot of them.

Okay, let me see if I can better phrase my concerns.

@Pepperoni_Joe

I would challenge the assessment that it is the Community teams aim to onboard large number of new communities members.

This seems a bit misleading to me. There are a lot of new people joining the community on Discord, right? And we are trying to actively onboard everyone into the community with the end goal being that they effectively contribute to what we are doing. Am I getting something wrong?

And if, say, we onboard 30-40 people into the community within 1-2 months does it make Index Coop as a whole more or less efficient? Just thinking from a perspective of a start up, you wouldn’t hire 40 people unless there’s a business need for it, unless you were ready to do so. Going through that effort would take time and focus away from other areas of the business. And, if the business isn’t ready, you’d have to come up with tasks for everyone.

What I’d love your thoughts on is this - is there a difference between a community member and a contributor? Should all community members be contributors? Is there a limit on how many contributors the Coop can accommodate before reaching the point of diminishing returns? What are the costs of reaching a point of diminishing returns in terms of business efficiency and performance?

I by no means have the answers to these questions. But I do feel that they need to be considered.

[BigSky7]

This is extremely comprehensive and well thought out - if Index Coop is able to inspire this level of passion in community members we are winning.

We are talking about a few different things here and blurring definitions - maybe this breakdown is helpful.

Community Member: Owns $Index, participates on Discord and the Forums, helps brings Index Coop products to larger audiences, attends some calls, etc.

Contributor: Active member of a working group, attends all meetings, doing meaningful non-trivial work for the Coop, has spent a significant amount of time in the community etc.

This separation is relatively fluid. Generally everyone starts as a community member and then progresses to greater and greater levels of involvement until they are making meaningful contribution to an established working group. This process takes time and is hard work.

Being able to contribute legitimate high-level work for a DAO requires sophistication and context. There is a reason many of our strongest community members come from very successful careers in other industries . It takes more than a few weeks to fully understand what is going on at IC, and even longer to start successful contributions.

@LemonadeAlpha

Although getting as many people as possible excited about Index Coop is a worthy objective, I’m a bit weary of the pressure this puts on the current group driving outcomes.

@LemonadeAlpha makes a good point here and raises valid concerns. Some of our working groups are starting to operate at a very high level. This is only possible if they are tight and cohesive teams. The LA Lakers don’t add large numbers of new players during the playoffs.

I feel like @verto0912 does a good job of summing up these concerns and open questions below.

@verto0912

What I’d love your thoughts on is this - is there a difference between a community member and a contributor? Should all community members be contributors? Is there a limit on how many contributors the Coop can accommodate before reaching the point of diminishing returns? What are the costs of reaching a point of diminishing returns in terms of business efficiency and performance?

In my eyes all these questions come down to context and oversight. Work done by community members by design requires low-context and low-oversight. Systems like Impression Mining enable individuals to contribute while taking comparatively little time away from the core WGs and Coop leaders.

On the other hand, work done by contributors requires high context and high - oversight. For example our Business Development Working Group runs best when made up of a small team of contributors working closely together. Because these are complex enterprise level initiatives they do not scale linearly based on man-power. This has been a big learning experience for me.

We should strive to decentralize as much of the community work as possible. In an ideal future the majority of our community work will happen through programs like Impression Mining that set out clear metric based parameters.

On the other hand, the work of contributors will always require a high-degree of context and nuance. We should not strive to maximize the number of contributors. Just like any highly skilled professionals the work does not scale linearly.

I view the role of Community Manager and many of the functions laid out by @Pepperoni_Joe as screening and context building. We need these functions to help people join our community and start participating in some of our initiatives like Impression Mining. The vast majority of people who join as community members will not become contributors and that is ok. Alongside this mission of educating new community members, the community manager should also be screening people over time and helping to place high impact high level community members with the appropriate working groups only when they are ready.

Much of the current frustration comes from community members with little context or time in the Coop immediately attempting to make high impact contributions. This is not a bad thing, but we need to do a better job of setting expectations and ensuring that new energy does not get in the way of existing operations or initiatives.

[blurb]

When I came into the Coop there fewer people and posts and I managed to get a grasp of what was going on fairly quickly. I imagine that I would struggle a lot more if I was a new joiner today so I really believe that especially a good calendar system, new joiner meetings and connecting people with matching talents can accelerate onboarding and make it distinct and meaningful. I believe that this can help us capture networking value and odd talents that otherwise could be lost while cutting through to reach core KPI:s.
Structuring the funnel to this extent seems a bit strict and like @verto0912 says;

Just thinking from a perspective of a start up, you wouldn’t hire 40 people unless there’s a business need for it, unless you were ready to do so.

This is a bit of an orobourus in that a cross-section of the talents of a bunch of engaged people can show us unidentified opportunities that might be very costly to acquire if otherwise sought out. In line with our current model, we don’t need to commit in the same sense as hiring everyone, instead we can offer WG/project based bounties that can be completed by new joiners. That would mitigate the Coop’s long-term externalities and give us something tangible to build trust upon.
I don’t really think of new joiners as externalities since we are disseminating INDEX tokens to people that are showing engagement and (hopefully) are more likely to vote, stay and become ambassadors. It’s up to trusted IC owls to identify and communicate the needs of the Coop properly. This is why I think that the funnel might be a bit strict and could create expectations of rewards without communicating with the working groups first.