Over the past year the Aragon Network DAO has been focused on creating a community of contributors. As we’ve seen this hasn’t worked out the way we wanted to. Partially due to the timing in the market causing an influx of retail investors and inexperienced contributors and partially to a change in leadership without a clear mission. With the shift to the Aragon DAO we are also shifting to a focus on Devs, DAO Builders, and ANT holders. The people who are using our product and holding our token. We are deciding to split this shift in to three areas. Community Research, Community Outreach, and Creation, Implementation, and Retainment.

First off, we will be going to other communities to research what they are doing to be successful. This will include a range of communities including Defi, Social, Service, Infrastructure, Gaming, Investment, and our competitors. Some of the data points we will be looking at are the mission, popular topics within the community, types of events, participation at those events, do they have ambassador programs or something similar, cultural attributes, the definition of contributor within this community, Discord structure, among others. We are working with the data squad to collate this information into reports which we can use to inform our decisions moving forward within Community Guild. Making educated decisions based on what is working or not working within other communities.

Next, we will begin outreach. This will be in our own community and in other communities as well. We will be doing outreach in these two areas for different reasons. In our own community to understand our community. Why are they here? What will benefit them? What do they want to learn? How can we help them be successful? By doing this we hope to create systems within our community that are engaging and beneficial to the people who are using our product. Creating personal positive relationships that can encourage these people to engage in our mission, tell others about the products we offer, and help others than enter the community.

Secondly, we will be doing outreach in other communities. This will be to start building relationships with the community members in these communities. Its important to note that we will not be reaching out to these communities as representatives of Aragon but as community members who are interested in the project. Although we will take opportunities to shill Aragon whenever possible to begin driving traffic to our product, our community, and the services we offer. The timing of this step should align with the release of the new Aragon App on testnet to ensure that we are driving traffic to that product to help gain feedback.

Lastly, we have Creation, Implementation, and Retainment. The timeframe for this process will be the end of Q4 beginning of Q1 2023 to ensure it aligns with the release of the new product and to give us time to process the data that we have acquired from the last two steps. This will be where we take the information that we have gained and use it in to create events, programs, and initiatives that we will provide for the community to engage them meaningfully, build relationships, and most importantly help them be successful. A few of the ideas we have are based around things such as networking, personal development, and education. However, this may change over the coming months as we gain data from research and outreach.

Most importantly, we want to use this process to help improve some of the programs we already have such as DAO Experts and the Ambassador Program. By understanding our community better, we can use this information to help our partners in the DAO Experts program. Giving them up to date information on the needs of people who are creating DAOs. Allowing them to use this information to iterate their services to stay on the forefront of the constantly changing ecosystem. We would also like to turn the Ambassador program into an invite only incubator program that will identify top notch talent in the space including content creators, DAO builders, scholars, and more. Providing them a chance to submit the work they are doing (in lieu of an application) and leverage our existing community to gain visibility, awareness, and spread word of their ideas and projects. Creating a network of these individuals to help them reach an audience they may not have been able to otherwise while also creating spotlight events to help those who are just starting their journey in web3.

To summarize, we want to support our community in every way possible. We understand that Aragon is a product centric organization. However, in todays landscape a product alone isn’t enough to create and retain a community. We also recognize that we aren’t always the best people to give advice or guidance to the people using our product. Therefore, we want to research what makes communities successful and our own communities want and needs, then use that information to form engaging and beneficial programs and events to help them be successful. With the outcome of this creating a better relationship with the people using our products, those who are working to move the space forward, and those who are just starting their web3 journey. Putting Aragon in the forefront of their mind as the “town square of web3”, the place they can go to meet others, get help and direction, and most importantly be successful.