Our New Approach to Communications with the Community

Keeping a balance between communication with the community and working hard on delivering is difficult. We know we could have done better in the past, and we are committed to doing better in the future, starting right now.

Fast growth finally tamed

One year ago, the Dash Core Team was a small group of around 15–20 working with different levels of involvement. Then the price exploded and we could finally afford to hire people and pay proper salaries so people could put their heart and soul into the project. We’ve now grown to around 60 people working full time.

Such rapid growth puts a lot of tension in an organization and both internal and external communication suffer as a result. However, we are finally at a point when things are starting to stabilize. We keep growing, but now we have the structures in place to be able to act in a more deliberate way, and that also means improving external communication. We want to thank everyone in the community for their support through this process, it would have not been possible to get where we are without it.

It’s been suggested that we hire someone to be a link between the Dash community and our team, but most of us believe that community updates should involve the team members at an individual level, and that it be a regular part of our routines.

We’ve rebooted this blog as the result of a suggestion from one of our developers. It is intended as a grass-roots effort to interact directly with the community, as an alternative to having a single designated spokesperson who collects and presents updates.

Several team members have already committed to write regularly, or help others write, about what they do and other things that can be interesting for the community. We were actually astonished how fast this got rolling and how many ideas came in! It turns out that our team is itching to speak to the community.

Some posts will be highly technical and others will be business related. Some will be long and detailed, while others will be a couple of quick thoughts. Make sure you subscribe! We still need to find our rhythm, but you can probably expect at least a few posts per month.

The idea is to give everyone a first-hand view on what is going on inside the team, so please understand that the styles will be different, that sometimes things will change after we write about them, and that not everyone in team agrees with everything someone else says. We believe that direct and frequent communication is better than highly polished and infrequent. This effort will show you what and who Dash Core Team actually is. By getting to know more of the individuals that make up our team, we hope you can understand us better.

On top of this effort, our Strategy team is also working hard on improving internal communication. One such effort is collecting unanswered questions from the different discussion outlets and taking us through the exercise of answering them together. In addition to improving internal collaboration, this should also lead to everyone in the team being more informed and better equipped to communicate externally. This will be done monthly and the first report is about to be published in this blog shortly.

Of course, our quarterly update calls will still be happening.

Evolution is coming to life

Saving the best for the end. We all know that nothing else matters. One update on Evolution is worth a hundred updates on any other topic.

After months of work in the shadows, Evolution is finally starting to come together and we can finally talk about it. A few days ago we filed our patent, and a press release has been issued today announcing this, so you may see a few articles about it. The process is long and the filing won’t be public for 18 months, but we are now protected.

As stated before, we are still an open source project and that is what we believe in. We chose to file the patent in order to defend the technology and the ecosystem from others trying to profit from it and/or block usage.

Our plan is to start publishing more information about Evolution in the coming weeks and months. This will lead us all to the public launch of the MVP. And no, I won’t be giving any date that is not the already published H2 2018. Evolution is not a cake you can bake with some ingredients from a recipe found on the internet that has pre-established times. It is a very complex project that deals with money, so it will be out when things are ready and developers are comfortable with it.

Some of those releases of information about Evolution will happen here. Several technical articles are in the works already. Others will happen in more appropriate channels. Like the first publicly available demo video of Dashpay, the first Dash DAP, that was released today in our Youtube channel.

And I’ll end here because I know everyone has followed that link and are not reading anyway.