A Brief Update on Foundation Community Roadmap

hi everybody charles hoskins here live from warm sunny colorado i just wanted to make an update on a current news item in the cardano ecosystem many of you were following last week rick made a video about two of the community managers being let go from the cardano foundation and he was a bit perplexed as no reason was really given and it got to a point where rick decided to create a telegram channel and invite the community along with a video to create a roadmap for the cardinal foundation because there really isn't a clear roadmap quite yet where the foundation wants to go and what it wants to do and rick and kyle had a live stream that they did and i joined the live stream about an hour into it we just kind of talked around it since that time true to form the cardano community has risen to the occasion 146 people have joined the telegram channel mostly made up of ambassadors state pool operators community leaders and other people and there is a very active and lively conversation in that telegram channel and actually several of the foundation council members tamar hassan nico and manmeet have already joined and expressed support and admiration for the progress the community is already making now of course we on the global side are facilitators and infrastructure providers and where and when we can provide support help to the community we try to do so so my recommendation in the podcast that i did with rick and kyle was to install some sort of structure and project management layer to it turns out that some of those 146 people have a lot of project management experience and i think what's going to end up happening is after the initial excitement fades a bit there's going to be a regular cadence of work that's done so probably weekly meetings in some form of a pms put on top of it and high level goals and high level discussion and mission values and particular projects will be underway and there's just an enormous amount of creativity right now and it's really important that that gets captured and documented so it can be discussed to rick's point rick is in favor of a short time horizon between the creation of the road map and some form of community vote for the road map i'm a little skeptical that that can be done in the weeks time frame but i do believe that in the coming weeks to months that significant progress can be made and community consent can be given it is important to remind those who aren't aware that no one in the foundation was given a democratic mandate yet their mission is to represent the will of the ada holders and act in their interests so part of this process is getting a mandate from the community to lead we all need that i try to be as transparent and open as possible to the community and the things that i am responsible for regardless of personal cost in terms of time and money i will deliver because that's my job and the foundation must do the same in their respect each dollar they have does not belong to them it belongs to the community and it's spent on behalf of the community so a community oriented roadmap is an important philosophical step in my view because what it does is it tells the foundation under no uncertain terms what the expectations of it are from the community and this gives the community an opportunity to weigh in about priorities and what's in scope what's not in scope these types of things so i'm incredibly glad to see that it went from a single community member rick to 146 people in less than a week with fervent activity and already now under the guidance of several council members and participation of them and if this is where we're at in a week in a few more weeks i will probably be ten times larger this is the cardinal community we are in essence one of the most decentralized cryptocurrencies because whenever someone doesn't do their job people show up with shovels and picks ready to do it and they get it done no matter what we all are held accountable to that my organization emergo and certainly the foundation and none of us are above the community in that respect it's our job to work for them and if we don't community is going to remind us that it is and it's really good to see that when perceived or real deficits are encountered that there is a peaceful productive remediation of these deficits as i mentioned my part is to help people along and there's certainly a lot of people on our side who have some great ideas that we love to contribute to the community roadmap but ultimately this roadmap belongs to the community and they have already put a lot of cool interesting things down on paper the reality is however that expectation management has to be maintained not everything we aspire for or hope for can be achieved in a year period and not everything we aspire for hope for can be done in a single entity under a single jurisdiction with a single group of leadership but the conversation alone gives us long-term requirements for where we need to go and the types of institutions and entities we need to embrace so i love to see these types of things and i love to see how decentralized cardano already is and what's really amazing is just the caliber and quality of conversations we tend to have just from brief time in a telegram channel and it leads me to believe that great things are here to come on our side we are doing everything in our power to accelerate voltaire so that democratic mandates can be given where and when it's necessary and prudent and we're doing everything in our power to provide support on the project management side in particular and the organization side in particular if the community wants to go in that particular direction i think they do that said a lot of people have independent resources and are already contributing to that as i recommended to rick i think it is prudent to at least have a weekly meeting with the community and it is prudent to start putting down on papers and mission values and goals that they feel the foundation should aspire to so they can use that as an inclusion exclusion test for items on a community-oriented roadmap after the community finishes a roadmap i will write an open letter to the cardonal foundation asking that they specifically address each item on that open roadmap and give an explanation of how they intend to achieve it or why it cannot be done either for regulatory reasons or resource reasons or that they feel it's philosophically against the organization that they lead but there cannot be silence this process must be embraced because it is in essence the will of the community as a whole as the people that we have entrusted to run cardano the stake pool operators are behind it as are many future and current people building projects and products on our system as are the leaders who every day inform us and thus when they speak we must listen because we work for them it's that simple and that's what it means to be decentralized to acknowledge that every day you can have confidence in your abilities but you always must have humility when dealing with the people who are really in charge and if the foundation and i believe it will rises to this occasion then i believe they have the right to have that mandate in that title and that term if they do not well then they'll be as relevant to cardano as the bitcoin foundation is to bitcoin remind me how that worked out in any event i'd like to thank the people in the community who were the first movers and the people who had the courage to stand up and ask for a little bit more transparency execution vision and clarity means a lot to all of us and i'm glad that we see independent leadership maturing and crystallizing as rick often says charles can't do everything nor should he and i am the first to agree in that respect because the reality is there are many of you are far far more capable than i am and many different domains and respects and when you have a voice it means we all have a voice and it inspires many more to rise up with you so pretty good week in that respect and i'm very happy in that respect and i think the outcome of this process will be a much stronger cardano foundation much more diverse cardano foundation and a foundation that operates with absolute clarity that it is completely aligned with the cardinal community and the community's direction furthermore i firmly believe that this will give us many new ideas and interface a lot more creativity than we could have had internally or otherwise and so i really applaud the effort and i'm excited to be part of it as a humble foot soldier in the background there when you need me but certainly not a leader in it the community's leading this one and that's a good thing for us all and it's a proof to the level of decentralization we have achieved as an ecosystem so thanks for your time i'll keep everybody in the loop and if you have weekly meetings i'm happy to show up yeah if you don't want me there don't need to be there you do i'll just lurk in the backdrop every now and then share an opinion but you guys are running the show now and it's pretty cool to see that happen it's very humbling i couldn't have wished for a better outcome in that respect thanks for this work and thanks for having the courage to be here with me cheers