Growing a decentralized community at Deep Work
Peter ‘pet3rpan’ wrote an article titled “How to grow decentralized communities” — This post is a quick answer, showing how Deep Work is fitting the model and funnel. The intention is to explain how Deep Work is scaling and the opportunities for growth and token rewards in our design studio collective.
It’s worth having a quick idea of what we do at Deep Work and reading pet3rpan’s article above.
The below goes into detail on key points, we have a lot more, such as bounties, but I haven’t gone into detail.
1. Attracting potential community participants
This is an area Deep Work is currently lacking. We’re actively looking for experts and members to join our collective and are currently investing in our brand/website to make this more attractive to potential team members. Explaining the benefits of our token system and the future of work as we see it.
Read more: https://deepwork.studio/about
How we work: https://docs.deepwork.studio/
2. Getting community members engaged
Learning in the Deep Work Skills System
By joining Deep Work you can upskill in workshop facilitation, product design and user research. We’ve built a system that is open to anyone, regardless of skill level, to join Deep Work and learn whilst being paid.
On a project this looks like a creative director leading a project, a lead in each skill domain responsible for tasks completion, and collaborators assisting the expert or completing tasks.
More Info: https://docs.deepwork.studio/how-we-work
Working on a project as an expert
Once a community member has moved through the skill system or proven themselves to a certain skill level, they can become an expert and lead a client project.
Job Description for a Product Designer Expert: https://docs.deepwork.studio/skills-and-levels/prototype-designer/deep-work-product-designer-job-offer
Community Sprints
We also run community sprints where anyone can join and solve a problem through our Hypersprint process on a monthly basis.
Join a community sprint: https://docs.deepwork.studio/community/community-hypersprints
3. Consolidating community ownership
Pet3rpan’s model summarises this as community governance, leadership positions and long term token incentives. This is all intrinsically linked in the following at Deep Work:
Creative Director
The highest position currently in Deep Work is that of a Creative Director. They have the overall responsibility of a project from sales call to final outcome. Their job is to make an exceptional client experience, and more importantly an exceptional team experience by allowing the team to focus only on their skills for four hours a day at their optimum.
Creative Director Job Description: https://docs.deepwork.studio/skills-and-levels/creative-director
Creating a new skill system or product
Currently a work in progress, however, we’re building Deep Work so anyone can come in and create a new product and skill tree(s). Currently products are Product Design Hypersprints made up of the skilltrees: facilitation, product design and user research. We’re currently creating a new skill tree for branding.
Andrej’s work on progress on creating skill trees:
Managing the Studio
We’re currently centralised with Andrej and myself running the show. As Deep Work transitions to a collective, this will move to community governance and leadership positions.
Linking this up to the DEEP token
Deep Work will* have a token enabling us to transition from a UK Limited company with founders to a DAO. The goal is to create a successful design studio as a collective, but rather than a traditional exit (e.g. selling the business or going public) we will ‘exit to the community’.
*This is all a temporary plan and likely to change as we develop, learn and adapt.
Decentralisation is hard (I wrote about the topic before), and to be successful, it is necessary to decentralise a minimal viable product and build with market and user feedback.
You can see more of our roadmap here: https://docs.deepwork.studio/deep-token-introduction
Linking this to ‘Consolidating community ownership’ through token distribution and long term incentives:
In the future, Deep Work DAO is made a collective with a series of products. Each product has its own skill tree so it can scale infinitely. There can be an infinite amount of skill trees.
This means, the collective can scale in two ways:
- More clients customers for each product (unlimited due to the skill tree)
- More skill trees (unlimited can be added to the organisation)
In order to do so, the future token mechanism will enable anyone who creates a skill tree (by sharing their skill) to earn a significant amount of tokens. They then earn more tokens each time the collective books a client for that product. This means they can a return on their investment and are encouraged to leverage Deep Work’s system and brand rather than build their own freelance gig or company.
The view is to create a protocol for highly skilled creative work, benefiting all the collective shareholders.
Anybody who works in Deep Work as an expert, collaborator or community member and Deep Work’s clients is helping to build this future. Therefore, we’ll use any mechanism to work out future tokens so we can ‘exit to the community’ that builds Deep Work.
If you’d like to join our community — you can start on our Discord. Go to our docs: https://docs.deepwork.studio/
Thank you to Pet3rpan for permission to re-use the infographic, his article and feedback, Andrej for starting Deep Work with me and the community for helping us build the future of work.
