(Meta) AMA call retrospective. What was good, what to improve moving forward

General
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Last week, we had the first Anchor team + community AMA call. First, here’s a recap: Debrief and recap: Anchor community call 28/29 Oct

I’m interested to hear from everyone about how this went, what can be improved moving forward and more generally what else can be done to maximize productive community participation.

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Some thoughts from my side to start with.

What I think went well:

  • First, a big thank you to Anchor team members for joining; it’s awesome that the community could interact with you in such a way.
  • We covered many important topics, and I think community members that are not deeply involved with Anchor got a good overview of what’s going on and what the challenges are.
  • The format where community members could submit and debate questions ahead of the call IMO allowed us to discuss overall more important things than a typical live Q&A panel with randomly selected questions. I did my best to objectively raise the points that received the most interest from the community.
  • I aimed for the discussion to be understandable even to people with only the most basic knowledge about Anchor - I think we did well here.

What could be improved:

  • There wasn’t enough time to give many topics the full attention they deserve. I would have loved to go deeper on many of the ideas that were mentioned, but was conscious of time and that if we didn’t move on, some other important thing would be ignored.
  • With one hour total, each team member might only get 15 - 20 minutes of speaking time; that’s not nearly enough. Each team member has a ton of wisdom to share and they did not get a fully adequate opportunity here.
  • Moderating something like this was new for me, particularly as it was after midnight here in Europe :slightly_smiling_face: . Wasn’t on my A game.

My proposed action items:

  1. The scope of future calls should be more narrow: either discussing on a high level, or going deep but focusing only on a specific part of Anchor (depositing/borrowing/tokenomics/marketing/engineering).
  2. I’m thinking a good format would be a quarterly high level review call, with more narrowly-focused chats organized in between.

A final note: this call happened largely because I volunteered, did a lot of prep work, coordinating, scheduling, moderating and the debrief now. It was really fun, but objectively speaking it’s hard to promise that I’ll be able to keep doing that regularly - day to day I run a business on top of Anchor but on these governance calls I’m just a fan.

We should figure out a sustainable way of organizing this. Most of it is essentially a job, so I wonder if one way would be to designate a few community members to be in charge, perhaps with a 6 to 12 month term and some compensation from the community fund. Alternatively, maybe the Anchor team would prefer to organize this internally. Not sure, would be great to hear ideas from others.

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I agree. I think this one was so long because there was a lot that needed to be covered as it was the first one we have ever done.

Again. I agree. I would propose something similar:

  1. Monthly/bi-monthly calls similar to this one with a higher level that explores what TFL is working on with time for questions and input from the community.
  2. Twitter spaces on topic-centric forum posts, ideally less formal tone and more exploratory nature once every 2-3 weeks.

You did a wonderful job and certainly set a high standard for community work. Could not thank you enough :raised_hands: :pray: :pray: :anchor:

Going forward, my thought is to turn this work over to a future Anchor Gov board that starts taking control of this. Community remembers elected to the board would get paid in ANC from the community fund to help organize and be involved under this model. Ideally to keep things balanced and synchronistic there would be TFL members on the board as well. There is a separate post about this - Community dev contribution - #7 by bitn8

Thanks again for all your hard work and time!

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Wanted to give everybody an update here. Sorry it’s taking a little longer to organize everything. This was our first time doing this so hopefully it goes much smoother and quicker the next time. I expect to have an update on all of this next week. Thanks for your patience :anchor:

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Firstly, a huge thanks to you, the team and all who contributed to making this call a reality. I wasn’t able to attend because of timezone issues but I’ve gone through the debriefs and I think it allowed interesting discussions to emerge.

@Kamil
A final note: this call happened largely because I volunteered, did a lot of prep work, coordinating, scheduling, moderating and the debrief now. It was really fun, but objectively speaking it’s hard to promise that I’ll be able to keep doing that regularly - day to day I run a business on top of Anchor but on these governance calls I’m just a fan.

I’d be willing to organize some of these calls. I have a background in journalism so organizing questions and conversations are something I’m familiar with. That being said, should I be in charge of an AMA, I think it’d be beneficial if we could hop onto a call beforehand so that you can walk me through the preparations you made. Two reasons for this:

  1. to learn from your success and mistakes in order to provide the best service to the community
  2. so that we can maybe start to create an organisational template that could be shared with community members and/or a future Anchor Board to standardize the process and make it as smooth and efficient as possible.
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I totally agree, the call was very informational from a top down perspective. However, all that are listening are most likely there for the meat and potatoes, which is information and updates that are not disclosed at all. The roadmap or what’s being worked on currently was barely touched upon as we ran up against a time crunch, limiting Ryan’s ability to dive in and drop some alpha.

So narrowing down the discussion topics is definitely something that should be incorporated moving forward. Maybe instead of an umbrella approach to discussing all things Anchor, dial in the key points of what the community wants to hear with a few polls prior to the call.

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@Spaydh Would love to chat about this. I’ll try to set up a time with you next week.

Exactly. This one was the first one of its kind, so it was kind of a dump of a lot of data at once due to the fact we had not done it before. I foresee:

  1. monthly-bi-monthly top-down calls where TFL outlines all it is working on so it doesn’t build up to be too much for one call, leaving sufficient time for lots of community questions and ideas.
  2. 2-3 week less formal spaces or discord events where we as a community with TFL talk have more in a more exploratory way based on forum posts etc. It would be more of a back and forth and free-flowing call.

Looking forward to looping more people in and getting back to you sometime soon. Going forward responses will be faster than this.

Also please check out the post about my idea from a community board that part of it would be organizing these things - Community dev contribution - #7 by bitn8. I’d love to hear your thoughts, pros, cons etc.

:anchor: :pray:

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Improvements:
=> shorter or more focused agenda would be better - or you could give general overview followed with focused areas. Maybe some areas have more priority (for instance yield reserve status vs tokenomics vs new Bassets)
=> sum up with focus on managing expectations of stakeholders (for instance - so many ideas, lets talk which ones are coming first)
=> after call a to do list?
=> maybe also good to have summary of chosen metrics

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Maybe we could have a pinned post on the forum with a detailed recap of all that was said during the meeting, so that people who missed it can see how topics/issues have evolved through time and what was touched upon in the last meetings. That’s a lot of extra up-front work for the host but I think it’s worth it to have a centralized info dump on the initiative we can direct everyone who missed the call to.
Ideally, we’d also have a link to recording on YT, soundcloud or wherever so that people from all timezones can listen to each and every call without having to skip to many hours of sleep ^^

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