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title: What is Cross-Pollination?

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# What is Cross-Pollination?

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## Establishing Cross-Pollination as a Practice

From our experience as part of SCRF's Community Cross-Pollination summer experiement, we have identified the work of cross-pollination as consisting of two main aspects:

### Active Cross-Pollination

**Navigation Support**:

Xpols know where things are, what is happening and how to guide people to them. They have a good grasp of various areas of the web3 space and know what both the virtues and the vices of certain communities, approaches, cultures and groups.

In the same way customer support are technical experts who can provide troubleshooting, xpols are community experts that can provide navigation. But as in customer support, the service is provided in a synchronous and active way 

The role of navigation support also draws from consulting and board advisory practices, where xpols can also construct plans of action for community builing, network building, knowledge facilitation and governance and help interested parties follow through them.

**Community Permaculture**:

Xpols are in the position to hold space, either temporary or hub-like, in order to accelerate the making of connections and the incubation of visions and work according to inter-organizational goals.

This can take the form of event organization and facilitation but xpols also are in the unique position to engage in a more novel form of participation **event infiltration**. 

Moreover, xpols are in the position to experiemnt with various tools and practices in order to catalyze the creation of space between platforms and organizations. Guild creation, or trans-organizational group creation is a great cross-pollination practice that leverages the power of serendipity that emerges in a focused environment with the right kind of people.

An xpols is able to see connections between individuals beyond organizational kinship and try to bring people that fit together in a common space. This practice can be called trans-organizational match-making.

### Productive Cross-Pollination

**Journaling**

In practice, cross-pollination can look very similar to ethnographic or journalist reasearch. One specific branch of such research that seems to be very close to the practice of cross-pollination is **Participatory Action Research (PAR)**. PAR stands in a stark difference to any other kinds of research involving a site of field work in that it requires the researcher to partake in the culture, and commitments of community under investigation. It is also important for the researcher to both understand and immerse themselves in the language, vernacular and norms of a certain culture. The resarcher then is called to report on the whole period of participation rather than merely gather data and interpret them. Interpretation and coding becomes a more seemless process through the thought maturation that participation affords.

This is in a lot of ways what a cross-pollinator is called to do. To succeed they must be very adept at this specific skill of agile cultural comprehension and the ability to "blend in". The next part is to report through an exposition of their participation, build a framework for understanding the community through this and provide references to any important fidnings they come across.

As is the case with PAR, subjectivity can be a hurdle to rigour but in the case of the cross-pollinator the requirements are not that strict. This is because the purpose of participation is not merely to investigate and report but also to actively open communication channels for cross-pollination which is an active role. The cross-pollinator then must follow the ethnographic researcher/investigative journalist in their scientific spirit but without having the quality report in mind. The bridge-building aspect comes first.

Clear methods of documentation/reporting and the curation and sharing of the documentation is paramount. In the case of SCRF, the publication and amplification medium is already provided as the forum. But the publication is the last step. The first step is efficient methods of note-taking or fast post-encounter reporting.


**Generating sense-making tools**

The effect and impact of cross-pollination is hard to quantify, measure and directly perceive. There are elements of care work and constant agility that make the role unfit for traditional performance metrics. However despite the aspect of intangibility that characterized the quotidiant active side of cross-pollination work, there is also an element of risk and future investment but in a social sense, which makes cross-pollination.

### Valuing the Work

Essentially the value of cross-pollination follows a logic of convexity and can compound as times progresses. There are emergent and non-linear positive effects that cannot be fully captured by conventional means and thus traditional ways of reporting and tracking work don't apply. SourceCred is a characteristic example of an attempt to track and reward cross-pollination effects because past contributions compound and the number of connections that can be traced back to an address assign more weight to that node and thus reward it more. But SourceCred has a very limited scope constrained to interactions inside a certain app. Until more refined ways of tokenization and translation of value are devised and implemented, the richness of cross-pollination effects will remain mostly invisible. The alternative is to use proxies.


### Good Practice

Because of the nature of cross-pollination, very formal means of social approach (e.g. structured 1-1 inteviews) are not very effective. The reason is two-fold: a) the creation of space required for the free flow of associations is severly limited by very finely imposed constraints, b) the most fruitful moments of cross-pollination happen when people feel more comfort and teh job of the xpol is to be there in order to capture or guide conversations.


### Requirements

- Experience in contributing to a variety of web3 communities.
- Good grasp of web3 cultures and community organization.
- Ability to sythesize knowledge and make connections between disparate fields and practices.

### Taxonomy of Cross-Pollination Strands

#### DAOgrapher (Community Researcher)

- Ethnographic Research
- Documentation and Journaling
- Diagramming

#### Weaver (Bridge-builder)

- Public Relations
- Inter-DAO project organizations
- Partnerships
- Guerilla Marketing

#### Catalyzer (Facilitator)

- Event Organization
- Community Space Creation
- Facilitation Practices (Liberating Structures, DAOism etc.)
- Bottom-up Organizaing (Sociocratic Practices, Agile etc.)



## SCRF's Community Cross Pollination Project

### Historical Report

#### Exploration Summer 

We started out as cross-pollinators with no guidelines, no clear direction, nor any precedent. We where floating without any ground below our feet. The mission was to create that ground and to establish cross-pollination as we practice it. Needless to say this has been a very experimental endeavour involving a lot of chaos, agility, backtracking and constant re-iteration.

Another challenge was our relationship to the different projects we where involved with and most of all with SCRF. The initial concept was to start of from SCRF until we gain some form of independence in order to later on help with the DAO Research Hub, a cross-organizational collective of various DeSci-adjacent organization inclusing with DRC, MetaGov and SCRF as its core. The thought was that our cross-organizational perspective and experience would help in establishing the hub. But for the time being, the hub was not in place and SCRF was the current host of this experimental role.

The intitial focus was on governance and coordnation and the rerritory was mostly reserach DAOs. The first thing we where tasked to do is make a detailed role description which could later on function as a job advertisment for the recruiting of further cross-pollinators. This made clear how transient our job was. But this transience was a source of both frustration and a great deal of learning.

#### Definting the Role
![](https://i.imgur.com/4etBY9v.jpg)

![](https://i.imgur.com/MtQkncs.jpg)

#### Exploring Communities

The first thing that we embarked on was to identify a list of communities it made sense to intearct with, immerse ourselves in them, consume resources, make connections and report back. It quickly became obvious that this was an extemely daunting task and that we would spread too thin to provide any valuable contribution.

### Major Challenges of Cross-Pollination

#### Reporting and Compensation

- Hours may not be the most accurate measure.
- What counts as work and what doesn't is yet not clear.

#### Coordination

- Difficulty synchronizing for the catch-up calls
- Work feels very slow
- Insufficient tooling

#### Expectations

- SCRF Verticals expect different things from cross-pollinators
- No clear expectation setting
- No independence from SCRF

#### Efficiency

Difficulties:

- Lack of clear norms on which to judge the success of the project or efficiency of active work. This was quite resonable because it is hard to have a performance indication for a completely novel kind of role since what works and what doesn't is not yet known.
    - However, during the end of the cross-pollination experiment, it had been far more clear what didn't work and for what reasons.
        - Examples: the project of conducting interviews so as to do a temperature check on current governance related problems and approaches to solutions didn't work because we decided to conduct inteviews with high-caliber DAO leaders who had been extremely busy and thus sheduling proved to very difficult. What is more, the presence of constant blockchain-related events around late summer (Dweb Camp, CCG, Stanford DAO conference, ETH Berlin) made it even more difficult.
        - Another hurdle was the framing itself. The way in which we structured the interviews had a formal character that we later realized was not the most succesfull strategy for the purposes of cross-pollination. Participation in events or more informal conversations inspired by either a certain talk or happening proved to be a much better medium for people to sincerely and honestly share their true stance on the problems they see in the space or have faced themselves.
                - The challenge in this however is that documenting what people said in a non anonymous way would land ourselves in all sort of contentious situations and even legal trouble. Such kind of journaling mst thus have an internal and an external component in which the identities of people are not shared in the external side.

- What counted as work and what

### Interviews

**Difficulties**

Hazel:
- Scheduling was intimidating (more accoutnability and organization).
    - Deadlines end up falling through
- No-previous relationship with people + hard to reach
- Don't do it as UX: can it be more knowledge and connection oriented?

Fotis:
- Feedback mechanism to know when is not working correctly.
    - Meta level: self monitor more and be more aware
    - Set some clear expectations and norms
- Is interviews the best way to it, what is the best method? 
- Suggestions: 
    - Go with surveys
    - Keep on doing the intreview projects, but when we actually find time - so it's not a deliverable or expectation of the project. the expectation and deliverables of the project then would be very different.

Define cross-pollination better: what has been value-adding in  SCRF?
* Gathering perspectives from the different     verticals and bringing them together
* Journalling 
* Book Clubs and discussions
* Event collaboration
* Community events and faciliating 

> documentation of these things worked, these things didn't. move on that way 
> Interview done as surveys, "Pretending to be research, but not actually reseacrh"


