What is our Pocket DNA?

Following from this post here, it is worth remembering that Pocket’s strong sense of mission and shared values have made the project unique and attracted so many of the employees, DAO contributors, investors, node runners and builders that have joined the community over the years. The Pocket DAO seeks to represent all of these stakeholders through its governance and the allocation of resources within its treasury.

As we enter 2023, Pocket is not the same as it once was. Until very recently, Pocket was a small community consisting of the founders, a small core team, some investors and advisers, and a group of early followers passionate about Pocket’s mission to decentralise the blockchain infrastructure stack. The community mostly inherited its values and customs from this early group.

Today Pocket is a community with 20,000+ nodes on the network, 100+ investors, 100s of apps, c.50 full-time staff across PNI and PNF and many more builders in the community, 55 voters in the DAO, and 1000s of community members on discord and telegram. Consequently, the strong sense of mission that bound the early community together is no longer so prominent. As a result, it is becoming increasingly more work to reach alignment on the key priorities for the ecosystem.

As stewards of the project, we at the Pocket Network Foundation have asked ourselves the following question:

How can we create better alignment amongst all of Pocket’s stakeholders?


We believe the answer is to co-create Pocket’s mission, vision and values for the next phase of our journey.

Human motivation is inherently connected to a sense of purpose, meaning and belonging. Individually and collectively, we bring our values into the world by how we behave and the guiding principles we share and use as a framework for making decisions. This leads us to the conclusion that:

  • PNF has the opportunity to facilitate an open, inclusive and participatory project to refresh and redefine Pocket’s mission, vision and values, to create a better-shared understanding of what binds this community together and, ultimately, what it is that we value

  • With a well-defined mission, vision and set of values, aligning priorities for the coming quarters and years ahead will be much more intuitive. It is deeply important that our community can align on these key areas of focus, so that our energy and resources are directed for maximum impact and ROI

  • By facilitating this workstream in an open, participatory manner, we hope to create a more profound sense of ownership and legitimacy over the end result for the entire community, which ultimately increases the likelihood of its success

By doing this, we believe we can align the community behind a mission that resonates and a set of priorities they want to support.

Pocket DNA project:

To that end, today, we are launching the Pocket DNA project. The DNA project will seek to refresh and define for Pocket our shared:

  • Mission and Vision

  • Values and Culture

And with these in place DNA will transition into activation by moving us to align on:

  • Goals, Priority programs and key metrics

This project will take place in the open and welcomes participation from anyone within the network. This project will introduce each of you further to members of PNF and our own operations for working in the open.

Call to Action:

Starting today, there are two ways in which you can start participating:

  1. We are sharing this initial survey to understand more about your individual beliefs and values, and how you see Pocket today. We will use this information to share back the different perspectives and customise a set of open forums and workshops to further elaborate on our Pocket DNA together. We welcome any and all members of the Pocket community to complete this survey here: https://forms.gle/bKN3JeZxQFqeCLxA9

  2. Signal your interest to participate in future working sessions such as the workshops. We want to curate a wide and representative group to help explore these questions, so please leave your intent to participate here or reach out to @b3n or @Dermot directly if you want to be involved

We welcome further comments or questions below and hope that this project can be a valuable contribution to bringing this community to greater alignment and inspiring even more pride in your contributions to the Pocket Network.

Many thanks,

The Pocket Network Foundation

@b3n @Dermot @JackALaing @nelson @Ming

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Hello Ben and the PNF team,

Almost a month ago, I posted this need (Pocket needs a shared mission and shared values, and recurring annual quantitative and qualitative goals supporting that mission and values, which represent ALL entities Pocket, namely PNI and PNF at this moment) and we had a few interesting exchanges. I have to say that back then my understanding of the upcoming structure was little sketchy and that reflects in my thoughts in the thread. But the overarching “need” doesn’t change.

I have a better understanding of the structure now. I am very impressed to see that PNF is jumping into action to have “the fundamentals” in place just a few days after the formalisation of the new structure. This certainly gives me and I am sure other community members, who supported this need, the confidence that Pocket is on an evolved and better path.

Thank your for initiating this at the right time, and I hope that you get tons of inputs from the community.

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Aight…that took a min.

Thanks for putting that together b3n and crew.

For the rest of the community, don’t come on these forums, telegram chats, and discord chats and complain if you’re not gonna do this type of shit.

Fill out the fuckin form! And not by March 3, y’all should have it done by the 10th of Feb.

I bet @Caesar will give you guys some really good answers. :saluting_face:

:peace_symbol:

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Fill out the fuckin form! And not by March 3, y’all should have it done by the 10th of Feb.

Not sure why the form says March 3 - should be Feb 3!! Will correct :sweat_smile:

Love the sentiment though… fill it out now!

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DNA - Sprint 1 - Update

Hey, we wanted to provide a first progress update for Project DNA. We’ve completed Sprint 1 and will provide similar updates at the end of each project sprint. We think it’s important that we go through this project collaboratively and that regardless of an individual’s level of participation they can see the evolution of our shared story, particularly so they can contribute to it when needed.

The path of Project DNA is:

  • Sprint 1 - Understand current state and understand what needs to be done
  • Sprint 2 - Iterate to consent on a refreshed set of mission, vision and values statements for Pocket
  • Sprint’s 3 & 4 - Use the increased clarity of these statements to align on strategy and priorities for resource allocation in the DAO

Sprint 1

The objective of Sprint 1 was to understand the current state of purpose, values, culture and general sentiment within Pocket. This involved the following activities which have now been completed:

  • Consolidation and review of existing materials relating to mission/vision, values, culture and strategy
  • Creation of the DNA survey and completion by the community
  • Analysis and summary of survey results (shared below)

The survey itself was designed to gather input in a safe, anonymous and methodical way and to help us understand:

  • How each of us individually perceives and frames Pocket’s mission, value, culture and strategy
  • The synergy between this personally and whether we are aligned as a collective
  • Areas of consistency and divergence regarding what we see as priorities and success

Survey Results

We received a total of 21 responses from a broad cross-section of the community and some very impressive answers. Here is both a written and visual summary:

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1iHkuAXa4cE8Qw7po_um8nkWIuFnAKsHHFBOM5_-VsPA/edit?usp=sharing

  • Pocket’s purpose and ethos inspire pride in the community, but we can use more consistent language and descriptions to tell our story more powerfully
  • Pocket’s vision is ambitious and inspiring, but we are not aligned on exactly where we are going or what success looks like
  • Pocket’s values are strong and consistently “Open Source Software” values, but we are not always living these consistently

This is a solid foundation for us to reinvigorate with clearly defined statements, and with this increased clarity use to drive the project forward on our strategic priorities. You have comment access in the linked slides so feel free to leave comments or questions there too.

Sprint 2

In the next 2-3 weeks, we will conduct workshops to drive towards our refreshed statements. We will reach out via various channels seeking targeted participation, and there will be an open workshop session for the community in which any member can attend and participate. At the end of Sprint 2 we will report back on a final set of draft statements seeking the community’s consent to start using not only in communications but in helping us further define our operations and especially in Sprint’s 3 and 4 to define strategic priorities.

It is very cool and inspiring to see the passion and ambition for Pocket, and we’re excited to keep aligning on it together with you.

Many thanks, PNF

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DNA Update and Community Call next week

Following from the note above, we have completed DNA workshops with PNI, PNF and the community members who reached out to us directly and asked to be involved.

On Thursday 30th of March we will run an interactive community call to further capture the inspiration of our community around the emerging DNA themes. You can access the event link in Discord or by simply clicking here

Thanks, we hope to see you all there!

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