Unlock Ambassador Program Proposal

I was wondering if unlock team has considered having another layer above the team as community ambassadors to further the promotion and adoption of Unlock Protocol moving forward to 2023 and beyond.

Though the platform rewards monthly contributors, yet I think to have dedicated long-term community leaders and supporters for the protocol community, an Ambassadorship may be considered.

A tip on the process effectively as seen and used by superfluid protocol recently to select the superfluid community ambassador is outlined below because I seem to resonate well with their process (though that will be up for debate in our Unlock Protocol community here):

What Are Our Ambassadors Doing

Here are a few examples of how ambassadors can support and contribute to Unlock Protocol and community development moving forward:

Awareness: Unlock evangelists within and outside the web3 space

Growth: Introducing Unlock to new projects and individual creators.

Mentorship/Community: Offering mentorship and support for teams who are building with or integrating Unlock into their projects.

Technical Support: Organizing technical workshops and participating in technical discussions within Unlock community while supporting those who need help.

Open Initiatives: Ambassadors are skilled, adaptive builders/content creators that are open to supporting new ideas or initiatives within the community.
If you’re building a project with Unlock Protocol (across different platforms, they will be able to help or point you to the right resources!)

How Do You Become an Unlock Protocol Ambassador?

For the launch of the program, the superfluid protocol team carefully handpicked select individuals to become their inaugural ambassadors. Some of their main criteria for selecting ambassadors include the following which I still find worthy of consideration for Unlock community as well:

  • Long-term, consistent and proactive commitment to our community
  • A deep understanding of how Unlock Protocol works
  • Have built (or are building) working products with the protocol (or created educational content promoting/helping the community solve issues relating to the Unlock Protocol)
  • Naturally empathetic and supportive towards new Web3 developers
  • Motivated to represent Unlock Protocol across the broader crypto space and beyond
  • Natural leaders that want to take ownership and help us achieve our long-term mission (this is so essential considering Unlock is a DAO)

Considering the above, I suggest:

(1) Invite-only ambassador program where anyone that wants to become an ambassador needs to voluntarily be doing all or most of the above-listed features to qualify, get noticed and be invited by the Unlock Protocol team

(2) The first set of ambassadors could be between 5 to 10 people max (to pilot test the program and observe the benefits of the project in the first half of 2023) by then, there would have been other community members that may be due for an invite into the ambassador program by the team to grow the ambassadors’ number to like 10(if previously 5) or 15(if previously 10)

(3) The first ambassadors could be hand-picked by the team by now considering its already 10 months in 2022 and they can unbiasedly identify those who have been contributing, promoting and supporting others in the Unlock community throughout this year.

(4) New ambassadors may be added to existing ones every 6 months (that’s twice per year) to give enough room to prove themselves and avoid hit-and-run (just here for the reward) type of people as ambassadors.

(5) When the program is well established, then it can become vote base by the entire community in addition to the team suggestions before final selection decisions are made

Rewards

I don’t have much to say on this but the community can decide how the ambassadors will be rewarded on a monthly bases to keep them active in the community.

A token reward of around 50-100UDT per month may be a consideration (this can also be adjusted to align with market value every 3 months or so)

This, also make it possible to penalise any ambassador that is not delivering on their duties to the community over time

If there is no reward, then the community can not expect much nor penalise any ambassador for not delivering on duties the community entrusted them with in the first place as leaders.

Training

Even though anyone that would qualify should on their own has tried enough to know the protocol well, yet it is essential they are given in-depth personal training directly from the team.

The notion is that the more solid the ambassadors are knowledgeable able the protocol, the more effective they would be in helping other community members

Other Tasks

(1) Unlock Protocol is currently not having enough participants in the voting process. It becomes a must for ambassadors to participate in voting which will increase the participation rate compared to what we have now (adding 5 to 10 new consistent voters every 6 months in voting-based governance decision-making is cool)

They also encourage the community to do the same and community members can also dedicate voting power to them.

(2) Represent Unlock Protocol at events/join the Unlock team at events when near to them

(3) Monitor Unlock Protocol social media platforms to ensure official content and announcements are given more voice and pushed further with retweeting, sharing and answering questions for prospective members there.
For example, I did one recently when someone asked a question under one of Unlock youtube videos and pointed them to the right place to get help in the community.

Exemptions

Ambassadors should be automatically exempted from some other community rewards to ensure they become the voice to encourage the members to participate over competing with them.

One of such is the monthly retroactive funding, just like I won’t expect @julien to compete for retroactive funding even though his the most active community support reps in the community month over month (so are ambassadors - that’s while it is essential to reward them monthly too),

Thus, new members can be allowed to compete fairly in doing good for the community with less competition during reward time by established members like the ambassadors.

Other exemptions can come to play as the community grows and new rewards are introduced o incentivise different community-building activities

Now Over To The Community

Yeah, it’s time for the team and the community to discuss.

I just initiated this, the final ambassador program may look slightly or entirely different than the above suggestion as the team and the community deem fit.

PLEASE DON’T PASS THIS POST OVER WITHOUT MAKING YOUR VOICE HEARD VIA THE COMMENT AND SHARING YOUR OPINION TO MAKE THIS BETTER FOR THE COMMUNITY’S PROGRESS MOVING FORWARD

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REGARDS!
SOLOMON FOSKAAY

5 Likes

I think this is a great suggestion and has a lot of potential to move the community further in the right direction. I also appreciate the thought and effort you put into this proposal. Unlock Protocol is amazing, feature-packed and I think its massively underrated mainly because not enough people know about it and all the cool things they can do with it, so having more hands on deck with the sole purpose of representing the DAO and getting the word further out there would definitely be a win for the community in my opinion.

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Definetly that’s a really cool concept @Foskaay i support 100% that we need to create an ambasssador program so people can understand/discover how powerful can be unlock in their developments/projects!
I think nowadays the guides that the protocol had and all the features are amazing and it’s time to make everyone know about them! :smiley:

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I like this idea of creating Ambassadorship program. But creating an elite group in a DAO which is invite only, could be seen as somewhat subjective.
referring to ( Invite-only ambassador program )

I have been in ambassador program in few different DAOs and in my opinion If the community does go ahead and approve this proposal, At least it should be open for everyone, based on individuals merits, who are actively contributing or have contributed.

Anyone can raise their hand and nominate themselves to be an ambassador, And the community can vote on it. An ambassador candidate should lay out all of their skills and contribution in public in order for them to apply.

Ambassadorship must be voluntary role because they believe in the project or their visions are aligned with Unlock Community.

DAO must have De-Centralized Leadership. By the people for the people !!

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Thanks for the great proposal @Foskaay! I think it’s a great idea overall!

Couple of questions:

  • What’s stopping me becoming an ambassador and then not doing anything? Can ambassadors set targets as part of their campaign, and then rewards based on deliverables?
  • It would be cool to incentivise geographical distribution somehow. Having ambassadors in accelerators on every continent for example.
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Yeah, there would be tasks and expectations set by the community.
As I mentioned earlier if the ambassadors are not placed on consistent reward, then nothing stops you from becoming one and then doing nothing.

Though, if you would be rewarded on monthly basis, for example, nothing also stops the community from slashing your reward as a warning for the first month that such attitude is observed.
Repeat the same do-nothing attitude the following month and get nothing as payment plus be removed/replaced totally (what’s the essence of an ambassador that can’t serve the progressive interest of the community)

That’s a cool idea.
Though it might not be easy to implement in the early stage. I believe as the community expands with more dedicated minds to the protocol’s growth. It is worth adding to the ambassador program.

This is an excellent proposal, Foskaay! If this had been in place when I was community manager, it would have been pretty amazing. It allows the team to focus more targeted efforts on big picture stuff and gives more support to the mods and alleviates some of the daily, 24/7 stress of community management. I do like the suggestion on having the community nominate and vote on the ambassadors too.

I attended a meetup in Denver this week and Opolis was speaking. They had a brand ambassador there who gave a 20 min talk and did QA afterwards and it was a similar system as what you’re proposing here. Was super effective and ads a real human element to the outreach aspect of community building.

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Yeah, cool suggestion.
As I said in the proposal, the final ambassador program may be slightly or totally different from this proposal

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Indeed, it would be a relief to the team in so many ways as well.

Additionally, been a DAO. It’s can be a way to observe how community representatives like ambassadors can take up responsibilities within the DAO as the team gradually handover non-core development aspect to the DAO

That’s cool experience indeed.
Yeah, there are lots of web3 events the core team can’t always be in person but can be represented by the community ambassadors nearest to it.

First I just want to say thank you so much for this! When I started several months ago this is exactly the kind of thing I would hope for coming FROM the community :heart: It’s well thought out and clearly has the best interest of the community in mind.

Love this part especially. It becomes clear here what we are accomplishing by having an ambassador program.

Ambassadors is a great way to show people to whom they should delegate voting power.

While I appreciate that as part of the Unlock core team I likely have the greatest insights into who would make a good first cohort of Ambassadors, I think that it would be best if we let the community decide. I propose to start that the Unlock team nominates existing active community members with associated reasoning and puts those to a community vote. Along with that we can include the matrix for evaluations and going forward there should be a list of criteria to meet that is specific, once met a person can make an application to become an ambassador.

Then we have two options for going forward from there;

  1. applications go straight to a community vote.
  2. We can put the criteria to a vote and say that the existing Ambassador team has the power to review applications and accept them without a community vote (delegated power but only through a community vote).

Either option decentralizes power. The first does so with a little more friction so I would favor the 2nd especially since at any point a community member could simply propose a change to delegated authority or the ambassador applicant criteria.

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Yeah, that’s a solid idea.
Considering it’s a DAO, the community voting is indeed essential in an important thing that affects the protocol and the whole community.

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I want to prioritize moving this forward by taking all the suggestions here, doing a new outline, one more round of suggestions, and then moving the outline of the program to an official community vote.

One more thing I’ve been thinking about that I would like community feedback on is this;

What we’ve seen happening
We have several “guilds,” “pods,” and “committees” (whatever you want to call them) that have come up recently. Examples: edu-guidl, grants committee, game-vault, and recently some talk about one for events and media.

My question to you all
Do we make it so that there are ambassadors that are leaders inside these specialized focus areas?

The reason I thought this might be good

  • This might be most beneficial to help narrow down precisely what ambassadors might do.
  • This would also be helpful because new ambassadors will sort of self-identify by taking the initiative when they see a focus area they are suited to contribute to.
  • It is much easier to give out and revoke scoped control. It also means that if a bad actor emerges the damage they cause will also be scoped. I’m happy to say we haven’t seen this happen (our community rocks) but I believe planning for this helps protect everyone. I’ve seen stable, decent, and trusted people have complete breakdowns, it happens. Growth will also attract more people with not having the best intentions.

Although I still think there should be an expectation of ambassador involvement in general areas like governance votes.

4 Likes