:citycoins: CityCoins Mission, Strategy & Roadmap

šŸ” Community & Ecosystem
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[last updated August 29, 2022]

Hey all,

Our community recently started the process of defining the CityCoins Mission, Strategy and Roadmap. The goal is to give ourselves a common vision for success and a clear path to getting there.

Iā€™ll try to summarize everything in this forum post for any community members that havenā€™t been following closely and for future community members that want to get up to speed quickly.

I will keep updating this post and hopefully it can serve as the main place for community feedback.

First letā€™s quickly define what each part is:

  • Mission: a concise and memorable statement that inspires and aligns the CityCoins ecosystem

  • Strategy: a clear plan for how we will fulfill that mission over the course of years and decades

  • Roadmap: a timeline of initiatives to focus of efforts over the coming 12 months

Working together to define each of these in writing is absolutely crucial to our success as a decentralized community!

:star: Mission

status = complete

The first step is articulating our community mission statement. This needs to be a very potent statement that makes it easy for everyone in the community to remember what their work is driving towards ā€“ from builders to miners to local government officials.

There has been a lot of great community input on this; from an open feedback survey to multiple community calls workshopping potential mission statements.

And it feels like weā€™ve landed on something great:

Our mission is to empower people to take ownership in their cities.

Many of us agreed that there should also be a longer version of this mission statement that is more descriptive of how weā€™ll empower people to take ownership in their cities

Hereā€™s what weā€™ve come to:

Our mission is to empower people to take ownership in their city by transforming citizens into stakeholders with the ability to fund, build, and vote on meaningful upgrades to their communities.

Feedback so far is that weā€™ve landed on the best versions of our mission statement to date!

That said, if anyone has feedback or improvements, these are not set in stone ā€“ our mission statement should evolve with us.

:compass: Strategy

status = in progress

Now that weā€™ve narrowed down a compelling mission statement we need to outline how we will fulfill it.

At the highest-level our strategy is:

  1. Crowd-source crypto treasuries to fund city growth
  2. Use governance tokens to align community decision making
  3. Build an open-source application layer for anyone to develop city app and services

#1 has been validated by activating and growing treasuries for MIA and NYC over the last year.

#2 is being made possible by community members that are building the structure for a CityCoins DAO, which will allow token holders to have say in how treasury funds are deployed.

#3 will take time but weā€™re well on our way with dozens of teams building apps on CityCoins, supported by Stacks Accelerator and bootcamps and hackathons.

But how can we get more detailed about this strategy?

In upcoming community Town Halls we will continue to ideate on strategy that will inform our roadmap below.

:motorway: Roadmap

status = next up

Ending notes

A big thanks to everyone in the community that has been involved in shaping the direction for CityCoins.

Please share any feedback and thoughts in the comments and we will continue to update this post as we go!

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Thank you for sharing this, @dp! This seems like the start of a foundational document for our community. I think the ā€œCrawl, Walk, Runā€ approach will help focus our efforts and the initiatives you outlined feel well aligned with the overall mission and strategy.

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Well done on this document.

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Nice, clear mission statement. Maybe in growth phases chart, an area for expected users in the city to track user growth.

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Great work bringing input from so many threads and discussions together into one clear place DP. Seems like prioritizing the roadmap between work streams is going to be a very valuable next step.

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Great work, and +1 on @andreā€™s roadmap comments. Iā€™d avoid getting too specific with dates beyond prioritization, but what we have now is a perfect balance of forecasting and forward-thinking strategy.

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Greetings, I love the work being done here. One comment I have in the mission is the word ā€˜upgradesā€™. It strikes me as assuming the current reality is lacking. Are we really trying to ā€˜fixā€™ anything, or is it more like empowering? Just having a voice is a great start.

Iā€™m no copywriter, but here is a swipe as a peak of what I was thinking;

Our mission is to empower people to take ownership in their city by transforming citizens into stakeholders with the ability to fund, build, and vote. People now have a voice in real-time to impact their communities.

Impact/influence/guide/etc.

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I first want to say the mission statement is perfect so far to me. To help contribute to the road map ideas, I believe that the city coin board members should be required to attend city counsel meeting to secure the relationship with the local officials and assist the transparency of proposals, so the city can make more use of the platform and project itself.

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I would disagree with the meaning of the word ā€œupgradesā€. The definition of upgrade is to take to a higher standard or level of performance. The word makes no assumption of the current state of the subject to which it is being paired. The subject, in this case, the city, can be fantastic by all accounts or can be terrible by all accounts. In either scenario, upgrades are possible. The word upgrade, by definition, means to have a positive impact. Adding in, ā€œin real-timeā€ is arguably an acceptable addition.

The word upgrade is also relevant given that, as it relates to innovation, it is always possible. The CityCoins project itself is an innovation of the current paradigm. One may have varying opinions on whether or not the current paradigm is lacking, perfect and not lacking, or somewhere in between, but Iā€™m certain that in any scenario we could agree that we have the potential, with the CityCoins idea, to innovate and thus upgrade the relationship of citizens with their cities.

Less consequential, but relevant also, is the connotation of the word upgrade. Again, by definition, its meaning looks in the direction of enhancement, thus a positive connotation. Iā€™m assuming that the impact we vision citizens having on their cities is of a positive nature. If this is in fact true, then the word ā€œpositiveā€ is missing from the statement youā€™ve proposed. By adding ā€œpositiveā€ to your proposed statement it would then specifically describe the type of impact the mission hopes to drive. In this case, using the word ā€œupgradeā€ is preferable as it is one word that exactly describes the type of impact that the mission hopes to drive. If we for some reason want the mission to drive negative impact on the cities, then leaving ā€œimpactā€ by itself would allow for negative impact to be a part of the mission.

This is my contribution towards why I think the mission statement should continue to use the word ā€œupgradesā€ to describe the type of affect we want the mission to have on citizens and their cities. It points the needle in a specific directionā€¦ that of enhancement or positive impact. Pointing the needle in the right direction is important, as focus is what creates our reality.

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Appreciate all the feedback in the comments and direct messages!

Iā€™m planning to update this post again in the coming weeks following our upcoming community calls around future vision for the project and protocol sustainability.

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Thanks for all your work on this front, @dp! My biggest suggestion for now is to add a second focus in parallel with governance for the Crawl phase. Now seems like the right time to also start laying the ground work for the public-facing ecosystem. This would involve off-chain work like identifying new use cases, finding what use cases would be most widely adopted, building educational and informational materials, and forming relationships with community partners. It would also involve on-chain work like building out dApps for those use cases to have ready for the first adopter crowd and eventually a broader user base as well. These are all areas that weā€™ve been lacking on so far and frankly I feel like we have some catching up to do. Iā€™d love to hear what the rest of the community thinks about that.

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I am in the starting steps of starting a citycoin for my state.