Crypto communities are everywhere. Literally. For years, these communities have been uniting people with similar interests and giving them a forum to discuss ideas, share opportunities and improve their understanding of the space.

Communities are critical for a business / technology initiative in building trust with its users, contributors and investors. It’s a measure of the depth of appreciation people have for it and their desire to ensure it continues to grow so others can benefit from it the same way they have.

Different communities have different goals. Some to provide members a forum for discussion, some to engage different industry stakeholders such as corporates and investors, and some to build awareness and public perception about the business / technology they are representing through workshops and brand building activities.

Communities are also very dependent on their community leaders — especially the first batch of leaders who kickstart everything. These leaders set the tone, the expectations and the standard for whats to come. They also have the responsibility of ensuring the first group of community members are aligned and are committed to participating.

They make sure to bring others along the journey and mold new leaders who are empowered to contribute and lead. It’s a perpetual cycle. If this is achieved, the community survives indefinitely as long as the business / technology initiative is around. Experienced community leaders do this well.

By now, I think you get a clear picture of how we operate and what we subscribe to.

In this piece, we are going to share with everyone an update on how we have built out an awesome and engaged Decred community in Australia.

So let’s get into it, what have we achieve to date?

Partnerships

Why are they important?

We believe partnerships yield incredible outcomes as it allows us to reach audiences who have strong interest in the space and are willing to participate in our community. Below is a list of partners we actively work with to run meetups, workshops and larger events.

· Apollo Capital — Australia’s premier cryptocurrency fund.

· Stone & Chalk — Australia’s premier innovation hub.

· Fintech Australia — Governing body for Financial Technologies.

· Blockchain Melbourne — Community of blockchain enthusiasts.

· Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology — Leading Australian university.

· Loki .Network— Australian based cryptocurrency project.

· Hall & Wilcox — Established and progressive law firm.

· Coinstop.io— Wallet provider.

· Flex Dapps — Blockchain application developers and consultants.

· CTRL Group — Australia’s progressive cybersecurity experts.

· Blockchain Australia — Main cryptocurrency association.

They’ve all been instrumental in lending their support, inviting their respective communities along to our events, crafting content with us and collaborating on developing an engagement strategy for the broader crypto ecosystem here in Australia. We absolutely love working with them.

Something interesting thats come out of the wonderful collaboration between Decred Australia and all these partners is the unintentional mega forum we have created where all our communities come together to discuss overlapping topics — such as governance and standards!

It feels like we are each sharing a portion of each others community and it is fascinating how the dynamics work, and how the simple fact of shared interest unites everyone under one umbrella.

Events

To date, we have delivered a diverse set of events from community workshops, corporate presentations, crypto networking events, debates and panel discussions.

Below is a list of some of our favorite events we’ve held since we started work early 2018!

Crypto governance — it is a matter of survival.

Panel discussion deep diving into the meaning of governance in blockchain, and applied frameworks and principles for developing governance systems.

How to keep your crypto secure.

Presentation by cybersecurity firm CTRL Group and wallet provider Coinstop on best practices and simple measure you can take to secure your cryptocurrency.

Investment Analysis of Decred, by Apollo Capital

Deep dive investment analysis into Decred and why it fits into Apollo Capital’s investment criteria.

An introduction to Decred

A technical workshop into how Decred works with an open Q&A session with the audience.

Blockchain APAC 2018

Sponsored Blockchain APAC conference and participated in a panel which discussed blockchain technology standards to corporate representatives and institutional investors.

To our surprise, Australians actually have a very decent base understanding of blockchain and as an extension — cryptocurrency. The populous that is attracted to the scene is generally well versed in the basics, enough to grasp the topics discussed in both abstract and non-abstract formats.

Due to this blessing, we swiftly moved away from delivering frequent Decred 101 events, and instead expanding our areas of discussion to more sophisticated layers of blockchain technology.

In doing so, it’s allowed us to engage with corporates like banks, funds and law firms and corporates looking to better understand what blockchain and cryptocurrency means to them and how they can best utilize it. We’ve built a very special network of people from all corners of industry and we are in frequent contact with them to set up more engagements and experiences for their stakeholders.

Currently, one of our priorities is to deliver workshops for institutional investors who are updating their investment portfolio and would like exposure to cryptocurrencies. We believe this will catalyze a domino effect in gaining the attention of fund managers in the retail tier — potentially exposing millions more to Decred.

Community

Measuring how good a community is can be tough. We pride ourselves on quality over quantity. We are very strict about excluding speculation discussions, trading schemes and other nonsensical crypto meme discussions. It adds no value and it instantly directs the conversation to sweet nothings.

To date, we’ve attracted 1,350 people to our events in 1.5 years.

Our members and community participants come from all walks of life. Developers, investment fund managers, consultants, management consultants, doctors, and property developers to name a few. Its epic! The viewpoints everyone injects into conversations are insanely cool and it has helped us appreciate the vast beauty of blockchain and cryptocurrency.

For the community, our goals for the remainder of the year are to deliver more high-end forums of discussions with high-caliber speakers. Its important we display a high standard for our events and ensure that we are attracting genuine, engaged and educated people. As a secondary goal, we are always on the look out for developers who are masters of their craft and love contributing to open-source projects. This to date has been challenging and we are looking at ways we can improve our hit rate.

Conclusion

Decred is a well respected project and we are working off a very strong foundation to reach our goals down under.

We’ve received fantastic support from key people such as Josh B, Dustin and JY-P, and we are super thankful for their guidance on how to best go about delivering our objectives and most importantly, aligning to Decred’s principles.

Stay tuned for more updates and hopefully more good news with how we are progressing in Australia!