# RadicleDAO Lost and Found

*Lost*

There are a few things that have been bothering me the last few months about how we do things here. This post is not meant to be a criticism of anyone in particular but a wake-up call for all of us. In fact I take my fair share of responsibility for how things work around here. Many of the problems I will outline below are the product of decisions that I led or supported. So instead, I want to start the conversation about how to help this community get back to its mission.

1. Engineering Culture?

I will start here: Radicle is an engineering project. Its audience is builders, its contributors are builders. Unfortunately, we haven't succeeded in developing our engineering culture. Some examples of that:

- Our community calls are 75% non-product & eng topics
- Our Discord is two channels with technical development and 30 with other topics
- A similar story on our forum
- We have few technical leaders

The language we use also reflects that. See how our Twitter presence evolved. Notice the style of lingo used and the topics discussed.

Somewhere between speculators, individuals selling their services to the DAO, spammers, and contributors, we have collectively lost the vibe of a community that lives and breathes code.

To not be misunderstood by any FUDers: our engineering output is still very high, but our culture is not centered around engineering.

2. DAO confused

At the core of it all is the DAO.

Quoting from the original post that introduced the DAO:

> In this reality, building Radicle within the traditional paradigm, as for example a SaaS or open-core company, would force users to remain in a customer/corporation relationship, leaving them vulnerable to eventual extraction. Additionally, if Radicle is to be resilient collaboration infrastructure that truly respects user freedoms, it needs to be developed with trust-minimization in mind, be accessible to anyone in the world, all while remaining adaptive and competitive in a market with well-funded mega-corporations. The only way out of this pattern is to build free and open source networks that are self-sustaining and community owned.
>
> Operating by these constraints, Radicle recognizes token-based sustainability models as the most promising path forward. More specifically, it's the emergence of governance primitives within crypto-networks that present a new design space for engineering community-owned open-source protocols & networks. These primitives provide a foundation for a truly "open" open-source world, not one bound by arbitrary walls.
>
> For these reasons, the Radicle project will be moving forward as an open-source, community-led, and self-sustaining network for software collaboration. This vision will be realized by Radicle's Ethereum integration — a set of open protocols that complement the Radicle peer-to-peer network. Its smart contract system enables unique global names, decentralized organizations, and experiences that help maintainers sustain their open-source work. The integration's smart contract system will be decentralized with the Radicle token — a governance token that will enable the collective governance and long-term sustainability of the Radicle network.

What started as the decentralized organization to govern the Radicle code collaboration stack is something quite different today. There are many good reasons for this:

1. The Radicle code collaboration protocol is completely decoupled from any blockchain
2. The Radicle code collaboration protocol doesn't have any on-chain component and doesn't need anything to be "governed", at least for now
3. The Drips protocol and product were born by this community to leverage the new sovereign financial infrastructure (Bitcoin, Ethereum, DeFi) to create new value flows for developers and grow the digital commons, independent of the Radicle code collaboration protocol.

I believe that we have collectively failed to internalize the above and adapt. As a result, the DAO today is in a weird place where it needs to re-define why it exists, its core audience, how it relates to the technologies this community develops, and how to grow its impact further.

The DAO's roles today are a) to be the main source of funding for the product teams, and b) to fund ecosystem growth initiatives for value-aligned projects and technologies relating to FOSS.

3. Three communities in one space?

Talking about the DAO, the Radicle code collaboration stack, and the Drips crowdfunding infrastructure, it's obvious to me that these three groups have certain things in common but even more differences. Most importantly I have started to believe that their core audiences are quite different from each other(at least today), and with little overlap - something that mostly manifests in confusion from users, partners and contributors.

How many times have you read a message on Discord about "on which chain does Radicle run?"? only for someone to answer "Radicle is an off-chain peer-to-peer protocol, not a blockchain one"...

4. Failing to grow contributors

Communities start with small groups of like-minded people who want to learn
from each other and build stuff together. Communities grow if there is some kind of shared goal, something community members can aspire towards, and
a place where they can meet and feel comfortable exchanging ideas. We've
failed to create that space, in my opinion, in most part because we've
failed to distinguish the target audiences enough and tailor to them.
We've tried to bundle three communities into one.

[... why else we failed ...]

TODO: Ele

*Found*

[talk about the foundations we have]

1. Sound technical foundations finally!
2. Tight definition of our target audience for Drips and Radicle
3. Really well funded
4. Running decentralized for a while
5. Operational capabilities

*What to do*

[talk about what concrete next steps we should take]

- Separate the "RAD" DAO brand from Radicle and Drips
- Split in 3 communities, meaning seperate Discord, Discourse, Twitter, community calls etc.
- Clearly define what relationship the DAO should have with Radicle and Drips
- Start an exercise at the DAO level about its mission, vision, core-audience and overall proposition
- 1 pager for each community (Drips/Radicle/etc.) with mission, core audience, core messaging and resources