Summer 2017 Residencies

San Francisco CA ~ Ashland OR ~ Albuquerque NM

At Ceptr we’re building a platform for distributed applications that will power new forms of human collaboration and help the world successfully navigate the daunting challenges we face. Designed using the organizational patterns found in nature, we’re opening new possibilities for more more equitable and regenerative forms of governance and wealth creation.

You don’t program? Cool! Because the project needs all sorts of skills; storytellers, marketeers, organizers, community developers and more.

Click here to apply

We are looking for summer residents to join our team as we build and launch initial applications, share discoveries, and grow a movement that will change the planet.

As a Resident of the Ceptr team you will help awaken people’s minds to possibilities that they’ve never imagined and create the tools that will make that future a reality.

As an Open Source project, Ceptr is not a profit-driven organization and has no short-term revenue. Most people participate as volunteers. We operate as a “do-acracy,” empowering people to participate in whatever ways they see fit within self-directed teams.

We are implementing new ways of recognizing the contributions of our community members and supporting them and their growth.

Residencies include room and board. There will be domain-specific teams located in San Francisco (CA), Albuquerque (NM), and Ashland (OR).

More important than specific job skills or experience is communication, competence and commitment. We can provide training and development on particular skills, although it is also great if you’re already bringing some good ones.

If selected, this could easily become a career path as most will advance toward positions of leadership or take their training out into the world to start their own entrepreneurial ventures.

If you know of people that are good candidates for a residency, please let them know about the opportunity.

Types of Residencies ~ Ways to Participate

There are many ways to participate and contribute. Below are some that our teams have identified, maybe you can bring some of the skills, talents, and interests we need.

Software Development: Skills/Interests in Go, JavaScript, protocols, blockchain, or distributed computing.

Writing, Blogging, Editing: Good writing skills. Actually enjoy writing and editing. Research, develop, and write engaging blog posts, website content, video scripts, crowdfunding copy. Edit new and previously written documents and prepare them for public distribution. Find supporting images and/or work with photographer to capture useful visual content.

Executive Assistant, Admin & Organization: Competent, detail oriented, and excited to learn. Support founders and team leaders on a wide range of tasks including training, calendar management, travel logistics, email communication, editing, and report writing.

Marketing, Social Media & PR: Good communication skills, facility with many social media tools. Support for the social media strategy. Listen to conversations, analyze data, engage with audience, track questions, monitor influencers and hashtags, identify opportunities. Help design strategic vision and lay groundwork for broadcasting that vision.

Crowdfunding, Communications & Outreach: Experience running a crowdfunding campaign. Coherency holder for one or two of our crowdfunding campaigns. Ability to communicate effectively with a team of broadly skilled individuals including writers, videographers, and marketing strategists to engineer a brilliant campaign in a short amount of time.

Graphic Design: Skills in visual communication and graphic design software such as Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop, etc. Work with our UX, Web, and Marketing teams to create style guides, branding, and online experiences that are compelling, yet intuitive. Your work will be critical for both our products and community relations.

Web Site Development: HTML, JavaScript, Jekyll, and basic layout & design. Create websites for Ceptr and for specific projects and applications that are engaging and delightful. We are building new ways of computing, but many of these need to interface with or be marketed on the world wide web. Work with our graphic design and backend software development teams to drive engagement and adoption.

UX Design: Design and iterate on user-centered experiences. Expertise in UX software such as InVision, UXPin, Balsamiq, Framer.js, Quartz Composer, and the like is a must. Basic HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript skills are a plus. Design and deliver wireframes, user stories, user journeys, and mockups that lead to intuitive user experiences. Make strategic design and user-experience decisions related to core, and new, functions and features. Collaborate with Graphic Designers, User Interface Designers, Web Developers and Software Engineers.

Infrastructure and Deployment Engineering: Automating cloud and metal infrastructures with tools like Docker, Kubernetes, Linux, Storage, Networking, Security.

Test Engineering: Creating test suites for automated distributed app test-driven development processes. Holochain application development includes a testing-harness to automate tests across many automatically instantiated instances of the application. This work includes developing and enhancing that testing-harness and it’s Docker integration. Expertise in Test-driven/Behavior-driven development, Docker, go, unix system scripting all helpful.

Videographer, Video Editor: Natural storyteller with video filming and editing experience. Experience editing with Adobe Premier (preferred), Final Cut Pro or similar software. Create videos for social media, online education and community onboarding to help build understanding of – and nurture participation in – our work to re-design internet communication, collaboration, and work itself.

Animation; Illustration: Natural storyteller with experience in graphic illustration and/or digital animation. Experience creating 2d animations or motion graphics with After Effects or similar software. Illustration chops and experience with Illustrator/Photoshop/InDesign a plus. Create video and web animations that help communicate world changing ideas and engage audiences..

Community Development, Event Organizing: Good communication skills, eagerness to learn and create value. Contribute to event organizing and production online and offline. Learn to produce e-learning materials in Learning Management Systems (LMS), be in service to the needs of people in the community. If proficient in the content, then contribute to forum moderation. Contribute to activities related to community development like potlucks, be-ops and others.

Apply now to our Summer 2017 Residency Program

The post This Summer, Build the Next Internet! appeared first on P2P Foundation.

This creates an awkward situation for marketing. Tasked with growing revenue for apps and platforms, marketing adds a community layer without sharing ownership or control with users. But for co-ops — and really, any democratic endeavor — shared power is fundamental.

How can co-ops engage users without losing their democratic backbone?

I propose a set of metrics for online platforms to cultivate community power from within, not as a thin layer on top.

Peter Thiel, the Silicon Valley investor-activist, gives instructions on how to “run your startup like a cult.” History may be on his side. As neighborly behaviour goes the way of the bowling league, a layer of social interaction on apps and platforms gives them a competitive edge.

Consider the sharing economy platforms that promise a sense of community. They’re among the most profitable, fastest-growing companies. Countless companies are hiring community managers, a new managerial class that even hosts meetups to exchange best practices. Airbnb genuinely believes their home-sharing hosts cultivate a sense of belonging. They’ve recently begun hiring political organizers to grow their community into a movement.

Beneath their community layer, however, these platforms are made up of users, investors, and engineers. Users have no ownership or control to make the platform work for them. But wherever marketing reaches cult-like levels of engagement, users cheerily overlook their lack of power.

As the digital economy grows, the future for users is virtual feudalism. At the same time, I am optimistic about “platform cooperatives” emerging where users can become members and owners.

Cooperatives that organize their membership can buck the trend of powerlessness.

Cooperatives are associations that organize to serve collective needs, especially when markets fail to do so. During wicked recessions, co-ops persevere and prosper.

Grain silos in ancient Mesopotamia and grain elevators in the Midwest are classic co-op examples, insuring members against market volatility and stabilizing commodity prices. Member-owners are the main investors in the co-op, so they make smart, democratic decisions. To continue creating value, they take collective pay cuts before making layoffs. For greater economic gains, they pool resources and form federations.

Although co-ops emerge from market failures, they tend to lose when markets bounce back or new players reach their niche. The most infamous case took place in Austin, TX, where Whole Foods Market took after beloved Wheatsville Food Co-op and grew into a nation-wide behemoth. Wheatsville still exists, however, thanks to its local and loyal members.

Co-op membership is so much more than a customer loyalty card or a paid app subscription.

On the Internet, I certainly believe co-ops need marketing to survive. Like any enterprise, co-ops have to communicate the unique value they offer in the marketplace. Users looking for music or freelancers looking for gigs have little tolerance for crappy apps and platforms. This holds true even for die-hard co-op enthusiasts.

Organizing matters more than marketing, however, because even if co-ops are competitive, they need to achieve their potential as democratic communities.

* * *

Let’s use Pirate Metrics for marketing, and Mutiny Metrics for member organizing

Marketing professionals familiar with Pirate Metrics use them to grow a user base like its their job. To be fair, that is their job. They add a community layer to make users happy, but the objective is the same: growth. Cooperatives are different than startups. Their promise of community ownership and control goes beyond marketing.

By showing the limits of Pirate Metrics, and drawing a lesson from pirate history, I propose a new set of metrics for organizing community.

Pirate Metrics

Back in 2007, Dave McClure introduced Pirate Metrics as a way for startup marketers (AKA “growth hackers”) to get traction with users and keep them engaged. He proposed the acronym AARRR(!):

• Acquisition — users sign up for some product, subscription, etc.
• Activation — they get started on the app or platform
• Retention — they come back
• Referral — they bring others
• Revenue — they generate value for the platform

These metrics are strictly business.

To see how they work, consider Loomio, a New Zealand worker cooperative that built a decision-making platform. They raised over $100k via crowdfunding in 2012, and have grown their user base by applying Pirate Metrics to create a positive user experience, welcome emails to thank-you notes. People love Loomio. I love Loomio. But in terms of marketing, Loomio operates much like any startup.

For startups and co-ops, success depends mainly on operations.

Some of the most democratic operations in history were, in fact, pirate ships — despite their criminal ambitions. In fact, I recently became friends with a lawyer who swears by pirates. He recommended The Invisible Hook: The Law and Economics of Pirate Tolerance. Here’s what I took away from it:

The ever-present “mutiny” element helped pirate ships become both competitive and democratic. On pirate ships, captains only earned 2x the rest of the crew, and could be replaced whenever they displayed cowardice or failed to go after a bounty. Occasionally, pirate ships would form a fleet for collective action against really big bounty. They also had many black crew members who were free men and participated at all levels, from crew to captain. The merchant marine, on the other hand, operated as a slave ship with 6x differences in income and a punitive approach to handling nearly everything. Mercantilism helped build empires, but even good commerce is hardly democracy.

As a metaphor and a moral tale, pirates have a lot more to offer.

Mutiny Metrics

I propose “Mutiny Metrics” as a starting point to build better community with cooperatives, guilds, and commons of all kinds. While marketing is about revenue, a basic necessity for any enterprise, organizing is about community power, a moral high-road.

The MORAL acronym stands for:

• Membership — users become members and get a vote
• Ownership — they contribute equity/investment
• Reciprocity — they practice mutual aid
• Association — they create a structure of belonging
• Leveling — they maintain equality and fairness throughout the platform

These metrics are far from precise or linear, and their application for community engagement is open-ended.

For example, whenever Loomio’s team sees groups use the platform in innovative ways, the team invites them to share insights with others and play it forward with new users. Growing this community of practice can produce beautiful results for meaningful association, full of participation. And as Loomio grows their business in the US, they might get creative sharing ownership through community investment through a Direct Public Offering or better yet, through non-extractive finance. A quick review of Mutiny Metrics can generate many more ideas for better community.

* * *

A few reasons to consider Mutiny Metrics:

First, they focus attention on intention. For getting users and growing revenue, we have Pirate Metrics. Cultivating community power requires a different approach. And instead of prescribing actions, Mutiny Metrics are flexible and adaptive, a natural fit for what MobLab calls open campaigns.

Second, they invite pleasant surprises from community participation.Campaigners at SumOfUs hacked Pirate Metrics for community engagement, but their framework is still a one-to-many model. Mutiny Metrics go beyond user experience design to what we might call member experience co-design.

Finally, these metrics are a work in progress. Try them and see if they help make community participation easier or democracy more possible.

* * *

Danny Spitzberg believes that membership in community is vital for a democratic society — from bowling leagues to, well, whatever voluntary associations work for you.

For more thoughts & resources on this topic, sign up for the Peak Agency email letter or tweet @daspitzberg

The post The Thin Community We Get From Marketing appeared first on P2P Foundation.