Aligning Community with Vision - a Discord rebirth

The law of conservation of energy states that energy can neither be created nor destroyed - only converted from one form of energy to another. We are experiencing this energy shift at Harmony first-hand as we transition from a state of abundance and expansion (Grants, DAOs, Partnerships) to a state of scarcity and concentration (smaller agile team, qualified partnerships, owning sharded architecture).

The community that joined us during the period of abundance has wounds that will take time to heal. The community that finds us now are over-exposed to the scars of the past year, which is counter-productive to our build mindset. All members should have a space to voice their opinions and concerns, but the spaces available should skew toward productive and forward-thinking subject matter.

We must mirror our powerful community tools to reflect our current vision and foster communication that empowers the builders and dreamers. We can achieve this by re-crafting our public Discord.

Once our Discord is rebuilt we can invite developers and community with confidence, welcoming them into our digital home that is clean, organized and inspires creativity and optimism toward building solutions that will outlast us.

Why Discord?

Although Telegram is larger than Discord (550m monthly users vs Discord's 150m monthly users), Discord is the preferred platform for crypto communities with significantly higher quality engagement than Telegram.

Discord-based crypto projects have larger registered memberships

Discord is home of blue-chip projects with membership counts over 50,000, including Rarible, Uniswap, SuperRare, and SushiSwap. Discord was born from the online gaming community and decentralized games are not an exception with Illuvium boasting a Discord membership size of over 200,000. If Harmony plans on heavily engaging Web3 gaming communities, a strong Discord presence would be logical, if not all but necessary.

Discord-based DAOs have more active communities

Source

Discord smashes Telegram when comparing the activity of community members. This is likely due to the plethora of tools Discord offers to create engaging activities and channels for communities.

Data-driven targets

We will model the community Discords with highest net community scores.

We can be effective even with a low marketcap, as size doesn’t necessarily statistically correlate with quality of engagement.

Execution Plan

1. Communicate with current and past moderators (Globey, Soph, HarmonyDragon, etc) and write down a detailed outline of the current state of our Discord.
1. What are the current pain points? What is working well?
2. What tools should we keep? What tools would be nice to have?
3. What roles are active and inactive?
2. Investigate the Top 5 crypto servers based on size and engagement (Illuvium, Uniswap, PIVX, ENS, and Rarible).
1. Note each login experience and choose top 2 experiences to discuss with team.
1. link on the website to verification process
2. DMs sent upon invite and first interactions upon entering server.



2. Note channel organization and permissions and propose 2 channel and sub-channel structures to discuss with team
1. Welcome channels, community, international, feedback and ticketing, and micro-communities (Validators, Devs, Stakers, etc.)
3. Note bots and automations and choose top 5 bots that we should incorporate in new server

3. Begin archiving old server and implementing new structure. (We can begin archiving sooner if we feel it wont be detrimental)
1. Start with securing the login process and creating a clean welcoming experience.
2. Setup channel structures to foster a narrative around our vision (Technical, Project, Showcase, Integrations/Partners, Industry Leaders)
1. I think we can be especially powerful in facilitating conversation around building and industry leaders. If we highlight and incorporate Stephen’s aggregation of research and market analysis, our server can be stickier for academic discussion.
3. Implement relevant and powerful bots
1. facilitate security and anti-spam
2. data retrieval for FAQs (Intercom integration) and support ticketing to make engagement more efficient for mods
3. community engagement (games, memes, art, etc.)
4. Observe, iterate, observe, iterate…
1. The Discord should be a living, breathing reflection of our vision and objectives at Harmony.
2. Optimize efficiency for the moderators and plan ahead to make the process easier for promoting community to moderation roles and adding more team members to oversee the Discord.