Steem Facilitators - A proposal for organic community growth

Structure plays a key role in the development of any community. There are a variety of approaches when dealing with this, depending on the desired end result. Top-down structures are used to create systems of control in which the architecture starts from the top towards the bottom like a pyramid. But control is not sustainable because a lot of resources need to be used in order to maintain it, plus the fact that this type of structure gives way very easy to abuse and that's not nice.

To my mind, the only question worth asking when dealing with structure, is how to create a self-sustaining, grassroots, common-sense, decentralized, organic, participatory by choice, free and open structure designed towards fulfilling individual and collective potential? This question had me paralyzed for the last couple of weeks since I started being involved in the @steemromanian community building attempt. Never before in my life was I so confused as I was in this period, because of the need for us to build a worthwhile structure that is not dependant on any one person and is able to empower a version of the massive transformative purpose that was proposed in this post.

And after a couple of weeks of doubting every though combines with an avalanche of ideas and possibilities researched and thought of, I think there is a combination of methods that would work in conjunction with the steem blockchain and ecosystem.

A concentric circle approach to developing @steemromania.

---

The foundation for the community and the center of the circles needs to be the Massive Transformative Purpose (MTP) agreed upon. This will give a direction and would act as a guiding star when building the community, the steps and goals would need to be in conjunction with the MTP

The first circle around the MTP is the steem ecosystem. Because we are a steem community, the first thing we need to do is take advantage of the opportunities provided here and develop our skills and talents as much as possible, while learning how to get better rewards.

The second circle is the entrepreneurial domain. The skills some of us have or develop in the steem ecosystem can be used outside of it, furthermore, users can collaborate in forming multi-skilled teams that would act as businesses in the real world.

The third circle would be the prosocial approach towards building positive change in the world around us. Some of the money generated from the business and individual accounts can be donated to a structure involved in a social change. This structure would emerge from within the steem community and would carry out work in the outside world.

These three concentric circles can also be viewed as an inverse pyramid, in which the architecture starts from the base-down. This can act as a roadmap toward developing any community and can have a high degree of success because each step is being built on the strengths of the previous.

The need for a culture of hospitality

---

I would like to start with two quotes:

”When we do change to people they experience as violence; when people do change for themselves they experience it as liberation.” - Rosebeth Moss-Kanter

”The future of every community lies in capturing the passion, energy and imagination of its own people.” Ernesto Sirolli

The first quote underlines the difference between change that is inflicted by an outside agent and change that happens by one's own will. The first, however well intended it may be, will never be able to take into consideration each individual's true nature and dreams because it will need a form of standardization that would kill the unique manifestation of people. The second is a more conscious type of change because it was initiated by the individual. In this way it will take into account the feelings, hopes and dreams of that person, thus it will have a unique result that can be felt like liberation.

The second quote emphasizes the key ingredients in the development of a healthy productive community, passion, energy and imagination. This cannot be done by telling people what to do, you can give a person the best idea in the world, but if she does not have the passion to put into building that idea, it would be for nothing. The things for which people have the most passion are their dreams. This means that if you can help a person start working towards manifesting their dreams, they will most likely, find the passion, energy and imagination to fulfill them.

And because nothing should be imposed, not even help, a culture of hospitality should build a safe space in which people would feel comfortable seeking the help of a Steem Facilitator. Knowing all the help provide would be in congruence with their own dreams, values and aspirations. But please keep in mind that this refers to people that want to grow even a little and need the help, not abusers of the system.

The inspiration for the approach

---

The following post is an interpretation of two approaches to community building, the first is called Enterprise Facilitation, developed by Ernesto Sirolli and the second is called Asset Based Community Development, conceived by Cormac Russell. Both creators have TED Talks regarding their particular structures and approaches. Viewing these talks is highly recommended before going deeper into the subject, but if you lack the time or disposition, I will try to sum them up in a couple of words.

Enterprise facilitation is based on the principle, ”shut up and listen”. It involves facilitators that go into communities and provide intensive one on one assistance to people that want to develop a business. These facilitators do not come with any ideas but concentrate on capturing the passion, intelligence, imagination, and resources of the people.

Asset-Based Community Development is founded on the principle of ”focusing on what is strong in a community, not on what is wrong”. This approach wants to create communities of hospitality, in which what matters is a person's gifts used in conjunction with the gifts of other people. The success of this method is measured by the capacity of welcoming people from the edge to the center.

Both these approaches come from the desire of working with human nature and try to maximize the potential of each person. Although they have different names, to my sense they seem to be like the two faces of one coin and for the remainder of this post, I will not differentiate between them, while also adding specific steem community elements to the argumentation.

The concept of Steem Facilitators

---

I believe the best way you can have a strong decentralized structure is by having strong nodes which actually are communities in the steem ecosystem. And in order to have a strong community, you need to have strong individual users that make up that community. This means the primary focus and most of the resources should go towards supporting individual users and their development.

This can be done with a team of Steem Facilitators that work one on one with users that reach out, this would help retention and maximize success in the steem ecosystem. These facilitators should be highly capable communicators that have access to a vast information network and are up to date with all the different platforms and content types, plus they should be very good at helping users discover and develop skills and talents.

Building the team of facilitators

---

This step has two sides to it, one is the human element of finding and forming people that have a natural tendency of playing this role, and the other is developing the framework and information base with which the facilitators would work.

The framework

---

Steem Facilitating should be a service free of charge for the individual users that seek help in developing their skills and increasing their revenue. Ideally, the larger community structure would be able to financially reward the work of facilitators, but not all communities are able to afford this from the beginning. Thus a combination between volunteering and tips from users that start earning high rewards would be a good compromise in the beginning.

Facilitators should also actively search and share new methods of maximizing the payouts, and we are not talking about bidbots, but projects like minnowsupport, qurator, thesteemengine, or steemsteem. Basically, they should contribute and have access to a large database of information on the existing projects and opportunities to monetize different types of content with these structures.

There should also be at least a member of the community core team in contact with the facilitators. This would also permit the facilitators to act as a communication conduit, making sure the active community is aware of the plans and know what needs to be done to move forward.

Choosing and preparing the team

---

This process will need to be quite extensive once there is a working version of the Steem Facilitator program, but for the beginning, we will need to work with what we have. With time, this process would get better and better, both at choosing the facilitators and helping them develop the skills necessary to maximize their success.

The safest bet is to seek out people in the community that already proved their fairness while exhibiting a helping nature and ask them to be involved in this process. Once you have a team of passionate people that are really interested in helping others and supporting the development of the community, I think we would need to let swarm intelligence do its job. Each facilitator should be encouraged to share what they think is good and how to proceed and with time, they would be able to share ideas that bring real results. So, at least at the beginning, the fastest way of organizing would be self-organizing with some principles in mind.

I will try to list some ideas to keep in mind during this process:

• the focus should be on inclusion, just in cases of abuse and bad behaviors towards others, should there be exclusion
• every member of the community has a gift and passion that can be built upon
• sessions should be one on one and a relationship between the facilitator and community member is encouraged
• some members do not know their gifts and need guidance in finding them
• facilitators should try to focus on the uniqueness of each person
• facilitators should not give ideas but should help users realize their own ideas
• people that have skills which complete each other should be encouraged to work together
• help should only be provided when asked for
• communication with any facilitator should be in confidentiality

Benefits of this approach

---

The Steem Facilitators would be the first line in sustainable community building, aiming to support organic community growth based on the passion and skills of its members. A culture of hospitality and confidentiality would create a context in which users feel comfortable seeking and receiving help.

This effort would also result in a decentralized skill mapping and the facilitation of creating multi-skill complementary teams. These would work conjunction with the concentric circles roadmap and would permit us to naturally scale as a community to the entrepreneurial activity and social implication with time.

This would also be one of the safest ways to build a decentralizes, bottom-down structure that would support community success by empowering individual success. Thus having a strong foundation for future projects.

Join @steemromania discord server here