Response to I wanted to talk a little bit about onboarding

A response to Hive account@acidyo's post I wanted to talk a little bit about on-boarding.

The post talks about two interesting examples: the decentralised and highly customised Hive account@ocd model, and an 'adoption ready' approach through reddit communities model, and then there was the 'dev market niche' model put forward by Hive account@taskmaster yesterday. Leofinance's approach seems to be an extension of that model by offering/marketing a 'frontend' as part of a bigger campaign they've been running over several months now.

I've had two ideas about onboarding:
one when I was involved with a Hive writing community, which was about developing a writers and readers community (manifesto - some changes have been made by the current team since I wrote the original). I thought there was potential there because of:

• the huge value of the creative and cultural industries to GDP.
• the very low incomes that most writers (pretty much everyone outside the top 2%) earn.
• the country-wide network we have through the Arts Council and universities with creative writing courses.

I was looking for external funding for this, which we have in England, although the Hive community would have the potential to be global. The big barrier I had was someone with the cluster of skills and knowledge to be the (part-time) co-ordinator/facilitator for the funded project. Just in the past week or so, someone who might be interested has become available and I'm re-visiting this idea. Also, having read acidyo's post, I'm thinking about adding some gamification, similar to the approach acidyo used with the reddit community model.

The other idea is around Saturday Savers Club which is built on ideas from outside Hive and which has a very low bar: all you need to do is comment each week. Some people have always written posts with their progress, and there is some incentive to do that now with the topauthors initiative, but it isn't necessary in order to join in with the community around the weekly post. We're in our third year now and there are some ripples which is great.

Part of my reason for building the Club was to provide an easy route into Hive and a framework that supports new users. Over the same time period that the Club has been maturing, there have been external changes: more awareness of and readiness for crypto (although not necessarily awareness about blockchain) and now I've got an easy route in through Saturday Savers Club.

This approach is not dependent on creating and posting content, other than comments. Part of the incentive is about the opportunity to learn about blockchain, crypto and the Hive ecosystem - for free, other than your time and maybe the price of a coffee each week. Interestingly, I was asked about how this would work the other day - a big sea change from when I used to mention Hive and people would get antsy. We've also got renewed interest in alternative economies with groups we are working with and Hive fits right into that.

I guess this latter idea fits into the Hive account@ocd decentralised model, where I'm working with customised approaches.

I was also thinking this morning about some work I did pre-pandemic with one of the local universities which had a department of alternative economies and social value. The university has an enterprise week in October/November and I was thinking about offering a round table event as part of it, creating a potential recruiting ground.

There is also a UK Hive meetup on 23 September 2023, hosted by Hive account@c0ff33a, in his coffee shed, timed to coincide with HiveFest in Mexico. We are looking at streaming HiveFest and also running a virtual event: ideally we'd like to twin with a similar event in Berlin as Hive account@slobberchops will be there and not here. Please get in touch if you can help.

What I was going to say is that England is only a short journey from Europe and we would love to see some of you on 23 September.