🪴Creating the right environment

Potential factors to consider that can help create the right type of environment for a learning based approach to work more effectively

Impact based alignment

Contributors working under a shared learning approach will operate more effectively if they are strongly aligned to create the most impact possible. Incentives will be one area that is important in achieving this by ensuring the incentive is sufficient for the skill sets needed and that the responsibilities of those contributors is directly associated with producing the right outcomes that generate the most impact. A shared learning approach will thrive more effectively with a more collaborative environment. Due to this, part of periodically reflecting on impact based alignment will be determining whether the incentives used are encouraging more collaboration to create impactful outcomes or more competition? Another approach for consideration to help with increasing the amount of impact based alignment could be the introduction of a bonus incentives model to reward contributors who make highly impactful work. The intention here would be to even further incentivise people to identify and contribute towards high value areas of work. Contributors that most effectively help with increasing the rate of learning, collaboration between ecosystems and amount of knowledge and resources made available should be sufficiently compensated and rewarded for doing so. Ongoing consideration will also need to be placed on what financial and non financial incentives are effective in helping promote more impactful outcomes under a shared learning approach. Factors that influence how much impact is generated will have a direct influence on the return on investment for ecosystems supporting a shared learning approach so ongoing iteration and focus on this area will be needed.

Flexible collaborative approach

A collaborative working environment will be a foundational part of effectively executing a shared learning approach that supports and improves multiple solutions across Web3 ecosystems. Considerations will be needed on how contributors communicate, make decisions, conduct governance, allocate tasks and record and share information under this approach. Lessons can be taken from how project management tools are used in existing companies and make any needed adaptations to better fit the differences in working environment. Ongoing reflection will be needed on how to best communicate and collaborate with existing teams based on their own processes. Each team could have different time availability and processes that influence how they want to interact with external contributors and any resources made. It will be the responsibility of the contributors working under a shared learning approach to identify and accommodate for these different working approaches and find ways to most effectively collaborate with these projects to provide as much value as possible in helping them improve and iterate their own solutions.

Iterating the contribution process

The knowledge, source code and standards that actually get created and improved by contributors working under a shared learning approach will determine what impact is generated and whether those outcomes yielded a positive return on investment. Defining and iterating on a process to help to generate these outcomes and make that process more repeatable will be valuable in establishing how a shared learning approach could be adopted for other areas of importance in Web3 ecosystems. The more systematic and efficient the process becomes to support these focus areas the more it will become obvious on how easy it will be for this process to be replicated for another purpose. To achieve this a contribution process has been defined which can be improved over time to articulate the steps being taken to create each defined outcome. The value of any outcomes can be verified and justified through seeing how they help existing projects. Value could come in the form of any gains in efficiency or quality to their solutions that were derived from the resources or from support in generating their own impactful outcomes. More experience in contributing to these different areas along with feedback from projects will help with identifying any blind spots and any weaknesses in the existing contribution process so that it can then be improved over time.

Diversity of participation

Another factor that will help with creating a more effective environment for a shared learning approach to thrive is one that is effective at increasing the diversity of participation involved in the contribution process. Creating higher quality outcomes which are well informed can be more easily achieved through the inclusion of a diversity of data, knowledge and opinions. Increasing the diversity of participation involved in a contribution process can help with creating these outcomes by bringing in a diversity of backgrounds, skills and opinions that influence the work being performed. Creating this type of environment can be achieved by collaborating with as many projects as possible to increase the amount of idea generation and feedback given to improve any knowledge base and resources created. Another area of ongoing focus will be to increase the diversity of participation of the contributors working under the shared learning approach.

Ongoing maintenance & support

Creating research, analysis, suggestions, reference implementations and solutions for important problems in Web3 will require ongoing maintenance and support to keep those resources up to date and relevant. Continuous effort will be needed to identify where existing areas of work need to be further updated and improved so that those resources can continue to be effective for the new and existing projects that use them. Considerations will be needed towards how regularly existing solutions should be reviewed to identify changes in approach taken or other technological advances that could provide further data and insights that improve the existing knowledge or resources available. As the capacity of contributors working under a shared learning approach will be limited a balancing act will emerge of determining when existing work should be revisited for further improvement or reflection. Doing this too early risks limiting the impact that any contributions here will provide compared to other more important areas of focus. Doing it too late increases the risk of the existing knowledge and resources becoming out of date and being less effective at supporting any existing projects. Creating an effective environment for a shared learning approach will be one that can effectively prioritise which new or existing areas of contribution represent the bigger opportunity to generate impact for helping existing projects.