Edgeware: blockchain community development and baking.
As a community technical coordinator and developer for the Edgeware community (which is my self-assigned role) my role is to build, inspire and cultivate: I’m building with our parachain integration; I’m inspiring through getting people interested in directions we could go; And I’m cultivating by scouting people and projects with the correct ingredients and approach to build the next great project.
What does it take to build a community?
The thing about building communities is that it’s not all about the smartest people who can build the best tech. Yes it’s a major factor, but it’s not all the ingredients. To provide the simple analogy, it’s like baking bread. Engineers, designers and architects are the flour, but the community spirit is the yeast. You need the right balance of flour and yeast in order to have a good loaf. Too much flour and you might have a dense project of smart people stagnating in a contracted channel prone to ego hierarchies, forks, and semantics. Too much yeast and you have a holey loaf, getting too big for its infrastructure and prone to ripping. But lest us not forget water, which is the lubrication required to allow this process to take place, i.e. the token. At this stage I’m probably belabouring this analogy. And so I shall move on...
But before we move on, let me continue this bread analogy. We’ve touched upon what the ingredients are, and the balance required. But what’s also important is the quality of the ingredients and the subtlety of the baker. And this I where very importantly where values come in.
The most important thing I look for in a project is what are their values? And because we’re writing a bread post I must kneed (mwaha) crypto into how to make bread. Community values is of course the baker and the quality of their ingredients. Why does the baker do what they do? What drives them? Look at the bakers, are they organically minded? do they throw preservatives into their bread? Where did they source their grain? Did the grain have a fun life? What was the bakers intention when making the bread: to make a sweet shilling or to create a better world? or both? Does the baker share their recipe and process with others?
New Futures
Work less, create more. meaningful shit.
Ok enough, enough. The reason why bread is on the mind is because I went to visit Beej, who recently co-founded New-Futures (I shan’t forget that it’s hyphenated ;)), getting funding through an Edgeware treasury proposal, and whom is an extremely talented creator, designer and producer of both motion, graphics and sound. He is an easy-going perfectionist. He showed me a project he was working on along with James from Lemonade Money (another funded Edgeware entity), It was a very short documentary, for a regenerative farming project, about Bread <add link when available>. I can only describe it being like a Warburton’s (British bread brand) advert on acid.
As I sit with him in his office, just a stones throw from Stone Henge, we talk about life, he shares me his ethos as he inhales his tobacco pipe “work less, create more…” – exhales – “… meaningful shit”. An unintended slogan of New-Futures.
Now he’s designing New-Futures, and part of that is designing metaverses, including stuff for Kabocha (Edgeware’s prospective parachain). They’re also seeking to inspire real world projects such as NFT permissioned cultural events, and other interesting explorative things.
TShiba: learning from the youth
As I scout for young and promising projects for Edgeware’s Web 3.0 incubator I find a shiny.
I speak to @sascha_1337#![no_std]. From his username he’s making it quite clear that he’s not interested in standard libraries in Rust, (no ser). His razor sharp GenZ typing speed and ability to talk about 5 subjects at the same time indicates his multi-threaded “gigamindedness”, for better or worse. Humble and enthusiastic, both his interest in the consensus level and his qualms with Iota governance intrigues me. Ask for a baker and you shall receive I thought in my bread-ridden mind.
Rich, who you can find in Edgeware and on the council, re-introduced me to Sascha only last week in a small Discord group. Sascha shows me this experimental community project he started with his technical group called “Gigafactory”. It started quite spontaneously. They wanted to make a truly decentralised organic community blockchain project, with just the right amount of flour and yeast. He says “we’re building a Giga brain”. A specifically no-ego project, open and dynamic development with no fixed old world roadmaps and real time feedback to the community. “Interesting: What is it called I asked?” He shared me the group. “It’s name is Terra Shiba”, Aka TShiba. Launched by a collection of Germans and pseudonymous devs he likes to call the “Giga minds”… “But disguised as a meme-shit coin”, which his German compadre told me in a voice call. I enjoyed the contrast between the quality of the people behind it and the unoriginality of the project name, which was intentional and part of the experiment. I personally would like them to change it Chiuhaha, which is a small dog with large brain; or perhaps just Yeast. Organically funded by the community and only 5 days old a modest $2m market capitalisation. I was very intrigued so I joined the channel. And I learned what it’s like to be in a youthful project with good bakers and quality ingredients. Let’s see how this Giga mind of devs and hopeful shillers actualises.
We’re exploring how Edgeware can incubate these “Giga minds” projects. Me and Sascha also talk about Substrate chains, bridging Edgware to IBC, XBC, and other possibilities for incubation and collabaration between Edgeware and Terra.
Ok thats all for now. Until next time… keep buidling!
All the best,
Ramsey(Decentration)
