Phase 2: The Valley

“Politeness is the poison of collaboration.” — Edwin Land

McMurdo Dry Valleys

Phase 2 is best defined as the dip. Your initial enthusiasm and energy have slowly worn off, and your motivations are tested by the day.

Sure, you are not stumbling in the dark — you know where you’re going, and you have a strong team of five or six members that have made tangible progress.

But things have suddenly become complex and have taken a different shape. You are now in the valley.

Setting the Stage

The meta of navigating the valley is addressing the newfound complexity in your community. This comes in two forms — the first is internal complexity. Your community has essentially doubled in size, which has increased coordination costs. Arriving at consensus takes longer, and you might see in-groups forming in your community.

The second is external complexity. All the context you set in the beginning — while essential to reach here — now stands questioned. For example, your narrative might not have had the expected impact or may have attracted those more interested in spectating rather than participating.

Here are some frameworks and concepts to remember as you navigate the valley.

Fostering your community

The first outside people to join your community are unique because they were solely attracted by your community’s potential. Joining a community at this stage implies high levels of intrinsic motivation since they are few to no external benefits or bragging rights of joining any community so early.

At this stage, speaking to the intrinsically motivated parts of your members (rather than their extrinsically motivated parts) is of utmost importance. This is best done by highlighting and appreciating each member individually and publicly for their contributions.

At the same time, you should put some effort into defining different ways people could get involved to reduce the distance from a new member to an active contributor. Such pathways provide templates to collect social capital, making people jump to action.

The open-source community is a wonderful example of this. Since practically all issues are open and all PRs are default visible, members visibly collect social capital by contributing to repositories. The ultimate validation comes in the form of a merged pull request.

Setting decision-making processes

As communities scale, attaining a perfect consensus gets exponentially more challenging. But most of the time, a perfect agreement isn’t even needed. The time spent arguing about the theoretical best decision is traded off for concretely slower execution. Therefore, a good enough decision-making process is often sufficient.

What does this look like, though? A decision-making process focussed on Schelling points is an excellent strategy for most communities. In reality, each individual has a different way of calculating the cost vs. benefit of specific decisions. So it is difficult to have everyone agree upon the “best” outcome to choose/vote for.

Instead, if everyone bases their decision on what they think everyone else will choose, we arrive at consensus faster. Having a consistent, clear North star, i.e., your community’s agreed-upon goal, also makes decision-making much more manageable.

Resolving conflicts

If you have been working hard, you have probably already seen an intense disagreement or two in your community. Depending on how agreeable your members are, this would have either ended in reluctant giving in, followed by both parties holding grudges, or a massive blow-up that created a rift in your community.

But conflict is not necessarily a bad thing! If anything, it is a sign that people care. This is the right stage to create a ritual, a process around conflict resolution. This should always focus on the reconciliation of the differing factions, and never an investigation or a judgment of who was at fault.

While an inclusive conflict resolution process is excellent for matters of the community, you need a slightly different approach to interpersonal conflicts that leave either party unable to express themselves fully. A good start is for the leaders, i.e., community founders or other senior members, to hold a safe space where members can come forth and share their concerns, trivial or grave. This is also the right time to set formal rules around interpersonal behavior in your community.

Time to Perform!

The exponential increase in the complexity of everything defines the valley. Things are more challenging than you expected them to be. This is normal. Finish the following activities to maintain your sanity when the going gets tough.

Activity 6: Where does your community reside?

ℹ️ Fostering community

Fostering your community is best seen from various perspectives.

The first order of business is creating a formal, shared space where your community can congregate.

• Clean up or create a new Discord server.
  • Have different channels for different purposes. Ideally, you should start with the least number of channels possible and only add more when existing channels are overflowing with activity. Too many channels with little to no activity make your server seem dead.
  • This means you should have a general channel where anyone can come and message. A gm channel where everyone sends daily gm’s, and an off-topic channel to share memes, music/TV show recs, discuss interests, etc. In addition to this, you should have two channels where only the admins can send messages. The first such channel should specify the server rules, linking members to your community’s social media, and answering FAQs. The second one should be a space for full-time contributors discuss work matters.
  • Chances are that the most active channel in your server will be the one where the core team discusses work-related matters. This channel will be the one new members will be most curious to see. Therefore, keep this visible to all, and be very intentional in how you communicate with each other.
  • Remember, you are always indirectly telling people what behaviors are expected, encouraged, and tolerated.

Activity 7: Define the paths of involvement.

At this stage, you should set clear paths with different levels of involvement for members. The paths should be exponential, i.e., each successive path should have much more work and reward than the previous one.

• What are some ways people can participate in your community?
  • What is the easiest way to participate in your community? This could be as simple as interacting with your posts or creating social media content. For example, members could translate articles, create TikToks or explainers, etc.
  • Ideally, you should have three paths. The first path should be something anyone can follow with just a few minutes of daily investment. The second path would ideally require a couple of hours a week. The third path would require an hour or more per day.
  • This is also a great way to spread the word about your community and discover your most enthusiastic members. When expanding your team, you should choose from this pool first.

Activity 8: Allow everyone to lead.

The best communities consist of leaders. Empowering everyone with an opportunity to lead does wonders for your community dynamic and makes you more resilient.

• Create a ritual where community members get to lead in turns.
  • You could, for example, choose a different member to host your weekly internal calls.
  • You could also involve your top contributors in critical meetings, and take their opinions in meta-admin matters.
• Decide and create a totem for your community.
  • Present the community with the task of creating a totem for itself. This could be an NFT, a physical object, an event, or anything else. The idea is to get the community to work out the details and execute the task together.
  • From choosing the format to the design to the actual creation and then its distribution (if so required) — these are all opportunities for people to hone and display their leadership skills.

Activity 9: How do you make decisions?

ℹ️ Making decisions

The faster your decision-making, the longer your community will survive. This is because making decisions inject energy into your community. They are a marker of movement and progress, and the best motivator for any community member.

• Figure out what quick decision-making means for your community.
  • Remember, you can only know the true efficacy of a decision in hindsight. Sometimes, we get lost in weighing the pros and cons, and in trying to find the theoretical best option, we indirectly choose concretely slower execution. This saps your community’s morale, which is a far more accurate predictor of your community’s death than making a wrong decision.
• Introduce the idea of Schelling points.
  • Promote a decision-making process that encourages members to think about what others are most likely to decide, and then choose that option or from that set of options (instead of thinking, evaluating the options first, and then selecting from them).
  • There is a high degree of divergence in what everyone considers the best option. However, there is low-to-moderate convergence in what everyone thinks others will find to be the best option.
  • Thinking in terms of Schelling points either makes the decision for you or narrows down your options and takes you closer to making a decision.
• Finally, document your process.
  • Create a separate document that summarises your decision-making processes. This should fit on a page and can be added to your manifesto.
  • This will benefit the new members in understanding how things are done in your community and will be a helpful reference point in times of confusion or disagreement.

Activity 10: Set up a governance process.

• Decide how to give governance power in your community.
  • This is best done through membership NFTs since these are easy to set up and manage as your community grows. rep3’s platform enables communities to set up membership badges and a Gnosis Safe in a few clicks, which saves you the trouble of figuring out and setting these up separately.
  • Membership NFT-based governance also doesn’t require much upfront setup like that needed to launch a token (deciding on supply, creating liquidity pools, fair distribution, etc.) and it also shields your community from governance attacks.
  • Lastly, this is also an excellent time to set up token-gated spaces for your community, starting with token-gated channels on Discord, and exploring token-gated collaboration tools such as Clarity or Charmverse in the future.
• Choose a platform where members can show up and vote.
  • We suggest using Snapshot since it is the default for all communities and is the easiest to set up. This is also the right time to set a formal proposal process that encourages members to share ideas, form comprehensive proposals, and present them to the community.

Activity 11: Elect an ombudsperson in your community.

ℹ️ Resolving conflicts

As mentioned above, conflicts are a natural part of working and living in groups. It is not the conflict but the community’s response to it that has path-altering effects on its trajectory. The idea of all conflict resolution is to reconcile by returning to a point where everyone is in harmony.

• The ideal fperson is the individual the community deems impartial enough to resolve conflicts.
  • Have your community vote upon and decide upon an ombudsperson. Work closely with this person to propose a conflict-resolution playbook documenting the process.
  • A sample process could look like this — the parties involved submit a description of the facts of the event and their interpretations of it. The ombudsperson then reviews these decisions and discusses them with the two parties, starting with getting them to agree on facts and then reconciling their differences.

Activity 12: Define your community’s code of conduct.

• Prevention is better than cure. It is much easier to define and nudge your members toward proper ways of conducting themselves in the community than addressing someone breaking the code of conduct.
  • A code of conduct is just a solidified, objective and thorough description of your values. In addition to that, it should also list the basics, i.e., complete intolerance of any discrimination (based on religion, gender of choice, perceived skill level, etc.) and behavior that may contribute to creating an unhealthy atmosphere (unwelcome sexual attention, harassment or trolling, bullying people or taking sides, etc.) *Be extremely clear about escalation practices. Having a code of conduct that is not enforced is worse than having one that is. For example, institute a warning system where each digression from the code of conduct is taken as one warning. Then, please make it so it is easy for everyone to track the warnings of members without knowing what they were warned for.
  • This could be done through badges conveying a warning without more details. You could also institute bans instead of or along with a warning system.
• As founding members of the community, it is imperative to hold safe spaces for anyone and everyone to come forth and share their concerns, no matter how trivial or grave. Ensure you and the ombudsperson are aligned, and communicate it frequently with the community.

Activity 13: Revisit activity 1.

In communities, the earliest members often set the tone of interactions for everyone that comes after. New members often look at the communication patterns of early members to see what is accepted and what isn’t. Here, your actions speak much, much louder than your words.

• Whatever precedent you set for your community, there is a high chance that someone takes it to its extremes. For example, if you have a culture of tolerating playful banter, then down the line, you will see someone or the other take it to its extreme and outright troll or bully someone. Or, if you have a culture of shipping fast and turning around things quickly, sometimes people will not even adhere to the bare minimum standard of quality.
• Take a step back and think hard about this. You ideally do not have to change yourself entirely for your community. You just need to be careful in upholding boundaries or standards.
• That’s why the most significant communities have zero tolerance for things common in small groups of people, simply because it broadens the “grey area,” where most transgressions of a community’s code of conduct lie.
• Remember, people are more concerned with not looking bad in front of their peers than getting praise. Often, not acknowledging and encouraging unwanted behavior by anyone is a powerful way to prevent transgressions of your code of conduct or address them swiftly if they ever happen.

Common Roadblocks

The Dip by Seth Godin

A community in the valley stage slowly exposes itself to reality for the first time. This can be an arduous process to navigate. Things might feel like they are not working or breaking down when in fact, they are.

When in doubt, always consider whether the reason can be attributed to internal or external complexity. Chances are, the roadblock you face is ideally a result of both internal and external complexity.

The aim, then, is to do what you can control. You always have control over how you work and approach problems. Focus on this. Set, revisit, or revise processes. Consciously steer your culture.

Getting right to “what matters” and moving on to the next thing may be tempting. But the importance of spending time on your culture in this stage cannot be overstated. This may just be the last time you have any control over it.

Conclusion

Contrary to the first stage, where things seem “up only,” a valley starts with a decline and eventually ends up with things looking better. You go from a small unit of five or six people to two small units of this size.

Your community going forth is now best seen as a collection of similar-sized units. If you have been careful, you have templatized this growth process. You would have also become comfortable putting yourself out there and learned the value of feedback gained from exposing your ideas to the world.

You have probably revisited some aspect of your narrative or values, and you have a space that your community calls home. You also have processes for collective decision-making and transparently managing your finance.

Your mission seems to have the potential to resonate with people — and not because you think so, but because you have signs that point in this direction. Things will soon pick up the pace, and how you look at your community will change. You wil soon enter the carnival.