A Community Philosophy
The success of web3 projects will be measured by the depth of their community; inside is our theory of community at Seed Club.
This piece was originally published on Club Press, the Seed Club media site. We recommend reading it there for the full felt experience of what it means to be embedded in the Seed Club community. Stay tuned as we launch more community-driven functionality to Club Press in the coming weeks. You won’t want to miss it.
Seed Club’s Community Philosophy
The success of web3 projects will be measured by the depth of their community – which is why robust community is a critical component of the Seed Club flywheel. Community is how we cultivate trust within a trustless system, and it’s how project teams persist through any market condition.
Building for Builders
Project builders, operators, and high-insight leaders comprise the Seed Club community. While they represent a range of industries and expertise, these individuals have a crucial commonality: the belief that the brightest version of our future includes more community-governed networks.
We design our community as a place for project teams, collaborators, and contributors to thrive as they build, with project teams as the bedrock of the Seed Club community. Everything we do revolves around these brilliant web3 builders and operators. Project teams enter the Seed Club community via the Studio or the Accelerator. These flagship programs provide discrete support to project teams at varying stages of maturity. While each of these programs is distinct, the end result is the same for both: projects transition into alumni, where they are sustained by the Cultivation Team.
Pathways for Project Teams
Our flagship program, the Accelerator is an eight-week immersive education cohort that establishes the foundation for launch. A few times a year, we gather the most promising community projects to learn from other top builders, operators, and thinkers within the ecosystem. Learning modules cover web3 building from end-to-end, including tokenomics, legal, media, and community.
Our second project-facing program, the Studio provides bespoke support to emerging community-governed networks. More incubator than accelerator, projects receive tailored attention as they prepare to launch.
Once projects launch, teams engage in the rigorous work of building their own enduring community networks – but they don’t go it alone. Cultivation is our emerging working group to sustain Studio and Accelerator projects once they “graduate,” so to say. Cultivation is where the magic of building community-governed networks truly takes off.
Collaborators as the Heartbeat of Collaboration
Collaborators are a crucial component of the Seed Club community. These high-signal, proven leaders are curated to support both Seed Club projects and the Seed Club team. Collaborators are selected based on their proven experience, expertise, support of Accelerator projects, and commitment to Seed Club.
Seed Club is where these groups – project teams, collaborators, and contributors – come to cross-pollinate. Proven operators and builders impart critical lessons to emerging project teams; these project teams in return provide novel imaginations to demonstrated leaders.
Creating containers for project teams to surface challenges and celebrate successes is nearly as important as the work of building. The Seed Club team – composed of contributors and Stewards – are constantly building the containers to hold the critical connections between all three of these community groups.
The Seed Club community flywheel unites multiple forms of capital, but our value proposition is principally knowledge and social capital: the Seed Club team, collaborators, and projects reciprocally employ and return resources to the community. This looks like a Seed Club collaborator providing leadership development to a Seed Club Steward, a seasoned alumni project bringing a current Accelerator project onto their podcast, a Seed Club contributor collaborating with a Cultivation project on their Hello World post – the possibilities are endless.
Community is Not a Function of the DAO
Community is the DAO. With that, all contributors and Stewards at Seed Club facilitate our overarching community philosophy. We’re witnesses of the ways that connection naturally wants to emerge, thoughtfully removing barriers to collaboration and holding space for dispersed digital intimacy. We consider ourselves the eyes and ears of this dynamic ecosystem – we watch, we learn, we listen. Together, we decide what to do, how to do it, and when it needs to be done.
As we navigate this new market reality, we find ourselves simultaneously ushering in a new chapter for Seed Club. We’re principally responsible for building, operating, and facilitating space for all members of the Seed Club community – from the project teams to collaborators to fellow contributors – to support one another. We will design, collaborate, build, collect feedback, iterate, and provide immense support along the way.
Return to Our Roots
Somewhere along our 300,000-year journey we became hyper-independent. Within our post-industrialized economies, geographic unity is a rarity; we hardly look to our neighbors for support or care. The pandemic exacerbated our individual and collective isolation.
Yet we’re not built for isolation. We’re built for interconnectedness — which web3 technology enables in an unprecedented way. At Seed Club, we hope to co-author this next chapter of human evolution as one that embraces the future of technology, and also brings us back to our roots – which is each other.
“Our individual success will be a symptom of our communities.”
- Stephen Jon Thompson
Words by Steph Alinsug and Pandy Marino, with support from Merna Makar.