Bringing together and building niche communities within a decentralized environment.

Curation markets, the term which first arose in the blockchain space as recently as May 2017 and first publicly presented as a concept as early as 2016, is most simply defined by Simon de la Rouviere as, “a model that allows groups to more effectively coordinate & earn from value they co-create around shared goals”. They are a Crypto-Economic Primitive that can be divided into a number of subset categories such as; token curated registries, curved bonding and a few others still being explored.

Since the first proposal of the idea of curation markets, a niche concept in itself, there has only been a handful of people within the space who have been able to fully immerse themselves into exploring what the technology is, its core functionality and its future potential. Although recently with the further release of more detailed articles by these individuals, anything curation market related has become a topic of intense interest among researchers, token engineers, and developers within the community, who are now exploring the practical implementations and use cases that these crypto-economic models could solve.

Photo by Rosie Kerr on Unsplash

One of the best community channels currently available online for curation markets is the ever-expanding Curation Markets Gitter, started by Simon de la Rouviere, as the go-to space for individuals seeking advice, resources and wanting to connect with other people and projects interested in the same topic. Although this provides us with an open source online platform in which to connect, chat rooms often tend to become disengaging and it’s often more beneficial to connect in a live environment. This allows for greater idea sharing, banter and fast-paced discussions that only arise from in-person communication. With Curation Markets being at this stage of relatively new growth, it is important that the community is able to realize and develop this understanding further.

At present there are 4 active meetup.com groups across the globe dedicated to the topic:

As well as 11 Token Engineering Meetup groups globally, where a large portion of discussions centre around bonding curves. These groups are incredibly beneficial for connecting the community on a local level, however, there is currently no medium that connects the broader global community. This is the issue that we aim to address with a community-driven workshop call.

On the 14th of November, we’ll be running the first of a series of monthly Curation Markets workshops to provide a platform for anyone with an interest in the topic to participate and take a deeper dive into the topic. This is a community-initiated online medium, aiming to bring together the somewhat fragmented market to share ideas and discuss topics in an approachable and geographically independent setting.

We’ve often seen with new and emerging concepts, that there is fragmentation within the community. People who are interested in curation markets are unclear on where to connect with like-minded individuals to build on the concept together. What I mean here is that, although there appears to be a large number of people interested in the topic, many of them are not connected to one another or do not specifically know others who are interested, making it extremely difficult to fast-track further growth of the concept in a constructive and collaborative manner. It appears that instead of nurturing collaboration amongst projects and people working on similar ideas, it results in an overlap and misalignment, slowing down the progress of the community as a whole.

These workshops are intended to be a more personal form of communication, rather than an open online forum chat, in an attempt to get as close to being a “face to face” roundtable discussion, whilst dialing in from multiple locations across the world. Each call will be moderated by highly knowledgeable individuals, who will direct these intensive and constructive discussions around curation markets with other experts in the field to further transpire positive development within the technology. Presentations will focus predominantly on technology exploration and in-depth workshop oriented open table discussions.

If you would like to participate in an upcoming Curation Markets workshop either by suggesting topics, asking questions or presenting concepts to the rest of the community, you can sign up via the Google form here and we’ll send you an invite to the event.

Photo by Rosie Kerr on Unsplash

Please note that while we would like to make these calls as inclusive as possible it would be most beneficial for you to have done some basic research prior to the call. Having a solid foundational understanding of the topic before joining would maximize your output from the discussions and presentations. For a list of resources to get you started, see the below:

Resources to get started:

A few of the people to follow in the space:

If you have any comments or suggestions on running these curation market calls or you would like to get involved with organizing them, then feel free to reach out to me directly.