The theme of this months roundtable largely revolved around marketing and community engagement with productive discussions being had on all fronts.

Marketing Discussion

After a month of observing the NavCoin project sundaybrunch has joined the roundtable to discuss how to move the project’s marketing strategy forward. For context she teaches digital marketing, was introduced to NavCoin by salmonskinroll and she has taken an interest in NavCoin’s philosophy and community vision.

Some initial observations being that we have some good talent in the community in terms of design capability but that the message needs to be more focused. For the most part her participation in the roundtable was more of an introduction to the rest of the community rather than a planning session and a specific marketing meeting has been set to further discuss the scope of the efforts, what our goals are and what resources we have available.

If you would like to sit in or participate in this discussion, please join the NavCoin discord this Wednesday 4 September @ 9PM GMT #marketing.

Proposed Symbols for NAV Denominations

Some discussion has been taken place in the community around finding a unique symbol to represent NAV in the way that $ represents a dollar.

There are several things to consider when trying to decide what symbol to use, primarily whether the symbol is already widely available as part of the unicode character set. If we were to try and create an entirely new symbol it would be nearly impossible to have it included in the unicode standard.

The list of contenders were narrowed down to;

1. Ꜻ
2. Ň
3. Ɲ
4. ₦
5. ℕ

With #1 being the favourite in the quick poll that took place during the meeting. The runner up was #4 however there is some consideration to be made that it is already the symbol of the Nigerian national currency which could become confusing.

It is planned to have a network vote on the topic when the DAO consultation voting system is deployed but for now it seems the front runner is Ꜻ.

Dis-incentivise Exchange Staking

Previously discussion has been made around how to protect the network as exchanges are starting to provide custodial staking services. The issue being that staking is how network consensus is achieved and the DAO makes decisions and centralising voting weight with third party providers goes against the NavCoin Core Manifesto to work towards decentralisation of the network as a primary goal.

So far the leading idea is to time lock coins into staking cycles which would exclude the exchanges from participating since their coins need to be accessible for withdrawal at all times. It could be possible to have unlocked coins still participate in securing the network but receive a smaller reward and not be counted as part of the voting weight of soft forks and DAO decisions.

Not all community members agreed that locking the funds is the correct way to resolve this issue so it seems there is still some exploration to be done.

At this time no other suggestions have been brought forward. If you have any ideas for how to solve this interesting puzzle then feel free to join the discussion on discord and brainstorm ideas with the community.

Utilising Reddit

While the NavCoin Discord community is often bustling with activity, it is a community which takes some effort to be a part of and take part in. It seems that a recurring sentiment within the community is to use reddit more as it is more public facing which makes it more accessible and shareable.

Community members agree to move some of the more important conversations to reddit instead of burying them inside discord.

It was suggested to handle support queries through reddit which is something we tried before but found it was not a great new user experience to have the front page of r/navcoin filled with technical issues. Most support queries can be handled by articles in the knowledge base or with realtime support on discord. Don’t forget there is an active bounty campaign to add more articles to the knowledge base and colvano has a DAO proposal being voted on to create additional tutorial content.

How to Attract More Developers

Currently there are two development bounty programs running, one for NavCoin Core and another for the NavCoin websites. They have attracted some new developers for sure and the existing development community is quite capable and varied. The community is grateful for everyone who spends time to work with us on this project but we still need more developer engagement to hit critical mass.

Hopefully some ideas come out of the marketing planning sessions with sundaybrunch and the rest of the community to further engage developers.

Aside from future marketing plans, metamizolmann had some good ideas to directly engage with software development companies informing them about NavCoin and making them aware they can participate in this open source project to help up-skill their developers on blockchain technology.

Another previous method was to approach local universities and find if they have any computer engineering students wanting to get involved with a blockchain project. If your local university has a blockchain or computer science club then reach out to them and us about how we can collaborate.

Donating Stakes to the Bounty Programs

One of the issues with attracting developers is that the rewards of the bounty programs are quite low. To help fund the development efforts salmonskinroll has redirected his staking rewards directly to the bounty fund addresses. This is now possible by setting the `stakingaddress` parameter in your config file to the bounty address you wish to contribute to. Or you can map individual addresses to particular staking addresses if you would like to split the amounts between the bounties and your own addresses as example.

This facility to nominate and tithe stakes to causes or charities is planned to be further refined in the future, but for now the coins need to be split to addresses to achieve this.

If you would like to donate some or all of your stakes to further fund development of NavCoin then please go ahead, every NAV counts. If you need assistance setting it up just jump on discord and a community member can assist you.

User Onboarding Process

Many users are joining the NavCoin community on a daily basis but many are going unnoticed or not engaging when they join. Jottum has suggested to send a survey and information pack to new users as they join the server and post it on other social channels as a sticky.

The idea behind the survey is to firstly find out some more information about where people are finding out about NavCoin so we can focus more marketing efforts on popular channels. Secondly it is to provide a starter kit for new users to more easily find out about all the awesome facets of the NavCoin project as it can be hard to see it all at a glance.

We look forward to seeing how the survey comes together and any insights which come from it.

Using the Community Trello Boards

At the last roundtable meeting it was requested to revive the community Trello boards to help organise community efforts and further expose the progress of said efforts.

Three boards have been setup;

Marketing: https://trello.com/b/HrXTM9fo/navcoin-marketingDevelopment: https://trello.com/b/y4yI6VdX/navcoin-development
Social Media: https://trello.com/b/r0TRNOWn/navcoin-social-posts

The social media board is actively being used to manage NavCoin’s twitter and facebook posts. Some help would be appreciated to come up with new content to post on the social channels.

If you want to add post ideas, join Trello and ask an admin to add you to the NavCoin Global team. Anyone who is part of the team on Trello can add new post ideas to the “planning” column for discussion, approval and scheduling.

The boards are setup in a Kanban style where cards generally move through the columns from left to right through planning to done. If you’re not sure how to use the boards, please read the notes which have been written as instructions on each column and feel free to direct any questions, requests or suggestions to proletesseract on discord.

We will post any ideas that come out of the marketing meeting to the trello board for public discussion.

The Next Community Roundtable

NavCoin’s monthly Community Roundtable takes place on the first Monday of every month at 8pm GMT. The next one is scheduled for Monday 7 October.

https://navhub.org/events

The Roundtable event is open for anyone to read or participate in the conversation. If you would like to be part of the future of NavCoin then all you have to do is get involved. And as always a special thanks to salmonskinroll for hosting the roundtables and taking the meeting minutes.

Don’t forget that you can receive this article by email. If you would like to be added to the mailing list, please sign up here.

Till next month!