Support for Community Gatherings & Neighborhoods [old version]

[Matai]

This post summarizes my feedback to recent comments, appreciate everyone’s engagement!

1. Community is more important than profit

By increasing community engagement through in-person events, we are increasing the perceived and actual value that Cabin is delivering as an organization, giving us more capacity to find sustainable financial models in collaboration with our community down the road.

@Ktando to further address your and @Zakk’s questions around ROI, Cabin is an unincorporated non-profit association, and I believe that its ok for certain initiatives to not have direct financial drivers. I’ll add a statement to the proposal to clarify the high level goal, and have already articulated the goals around increasing Cabin’s community engagement metrics to a greater extent that proposed in the Cabin Labs Spring 24 roadmap.

I think its a fair point to request more info on how we’ll improve the community gatherings process from what Supper Clubs started. Had a great conversation with @camlindsay about the topic and will update the proposal with more details soon.

Update, added this to the proposal:

@Matai

To help introduce people to the opportunity, we will create recorded video onboardings along with more comprehensive written guides to streamline the process (shout out to @camlindsay for the idea and effort to draft early improvements)

2. Gathering community is the goal of this proposal

This proposal aims to establish a clear goal of supporting many community gatherings to offer value to our community. The diversity of opportunities for meaningful and frequent gatherings is the most valuable part of the Cabin ecosystem, and I think the DAO should continue to support a broad set of gatherings while Cabin Labs - Spring 2024 explores what it means for the new proposed bets around the Neighborhood Stewards Cohort program.

To respond to @jon’s comment below,

@jon

I mostly agree with your concern about the ROI of gatherings that aren’t clearly tied to bigger goals.

If I understand, the “bigger goals” mentioned are Cabin Labs - Spring 2024’s objectives (screenshot accurate as of Apr 4. 2024):

expanding on the original Cabin Labs proposal to run experiments:

From my perspective, Supper Clubs was the only proposed bet that showed success so far, with:

• 500+ people attending Cabin Supper Clubs
• and newsletter subscriptions rising by 30% (+1000 people)

… having the most direct impact on manifesting opportunities for Cabin’s Guiding Principles and Obvious Truths to be experienced in-person by community members from any other active contributor initiatives.

I think that its a good thing for this proposal to stand independent of the Cabin Labs Spring 24 roadmap. Affirming Cabin DAO’s support for community gatherings of all sorts being up for discussion. I hold this perspective given the lack of a clearly articulated roadmap for how the Spring 2024 goals will contribute towards Cabin achieving a sustainable financial model, with very little progress shown around the cohort program’s ability to effectively introduce our offer value to new community members through Citizenship.

In lieu of all this, I plan to remove language from the proposal that suggests gatherings should only be funded if they are a part of the cohort pipeline, keeping a wider aperture to allow for other types of community building gatherings to be supported by this proposal.

Update, reworded what is defined as an appropriate gathering to this:

@Matai

Increasing the scope of events Cabin offers reimbursement for beyond community meals (Supper Clubs) to include any “appropriate” gathering. “Appropriate” in the sense that:
– the gathering relates to our Guiding Principles and Obvious Truths
– that it has the potential to create opportunity for community connection, without having any negative intentions
– attendees of the event are introduced in some fashion to Cabin, and aware that Cabin sponsored the event

3. More gatherings will help more people be interested in Citizenship

Thinking about the potential for Cabin DAO to act as a public goods organization… as someone with the means, I would be happy to pay for Citizenship if I knew it would support others gathering around the world in the name of building community, and I think that many other community focused builders would agree.

By Cabin taking an honest stand to support community gatherings, we can help create an integral community support structure that our community can build on as a foundation while it explores pathways towards financial sustainability, with some form of Citizenship being the target that seems to makes the most sense.

Through this proposal we can also continue to support gatherings for nomads, a core part of the Cabin community that are being deprioritized by the Cabin Labs Spring 2024 objectives. It is my hope that all nomads find where they want to call home, but this process is a journey, and Cabin has the potential to continue to serve its initial goals with the launch of the Network City by helping people connect to awesome community gatherings around the globe.

As any successful community project will attest, patience is a virtue, but the time to act is now.