In the Parsons era I have found the Community (and this Forum) to be a much better place. How ironic this is!? And during the Parsons mission we were brought together nicely, but not anymore.

Here is my speculation, version of the story of what´s happening with our Community.

The Community Management Team is struggling a lot, they are not able to fulfill their role to provide guidance, balance, healthy environment for the Community in an unbiased, fair & efficient way. You can´t really recognize their own voice and identity no matter they cost 4 FTE for the Foundation. This is one of the issues allowing for the toxicity & mud we sometimes end up in. The Community Management Team has no transparent plan & agenda to involve and unleash the intellectual power, vast capacity & diverse skillset of our Community, to utilize all the highly motivated talent we have out there and promote a decentralized Community, this should be done already in the design process and not only when something is rolled out in runtime Such kind of collaboration doesn´t exists. What rather exists is various levels (regular member, lounge VIP member, Slack Member, Inner Circle) of Community status and exposure to information and opportunity to influence. Their weakness might come from the fact that Parsons never really cared about Cardano or had the competence to do so, so he has recruited people for the job and just to provide the illusion, but didn´t hire the best talent by far (and I am being polite here). I find it even troubling that when clearly asked in social media by one of the members of the Community Management Team, whether he stands by Parsons side or the Community side, he didn´t even respond to that. In the Parsons-Era this CM Team got close with a few members of our Community (will refer to it as the Elite) as the Elite had the early-entry advantage to the Cardano Community and they were always eventually quite active. These relationships were quite clearly protected in the Parsons Mission, not to expose or damage anyone from the Community Management Team, who had personal relations to Parsons. What happened after Parsons resigned suddenly there was a vacuum of power, opportunity and available resources to invest The Elite tried to secure (and honestly succeeded) their position close to the Community Management Team and have everyone else (CF Board, maybe even Charles) see the happenings via their eyes CF Board & Charles just don´t have the time & effort to go into this depth we are in (it´s not their job at all), they mainly get their feedback, reports via the Elite & CM Team (there are a few exceptions luckily) The Community Management Team needed the Elite to balance off their aching weakness of experience & competence and by then the trust relationship was built. With every challenge to the Community Management Team, you can usually see the Elite coming out defending them and their bond just grows stronger and stronger. Having Parsons out of the picture, to start the engine of the Cardano Foundation, new programs were finally announced like the Cardano Ambassador Program, the Cardano Hubs Program, which will define the future of our Community Having explicitly asked for having all of us from the Community shape these programs together in an Open Community Consultation, instead the Elite is applying tactics of protectionism and have exclusive influence how these Programs should look like Any efforts (like the Cardano Social Council https://forum.cardano.org/t/cardano-social-council-introduction), which were tackling the centralization of Community Power and Influence are broken down by strategically pushing them into a personal, emotional, discrediting & destructive context (aka mud), where they eventually die off (or get moderated, topics closed, made private or even deleted without prior agreement & transparency). It will likely happen to this comment as well. You may have also experienced the misuse of anonymous users, who most of them have very little other contribution, but as part of tactics exclusively focusing on politics shaping public opinion or voting in Forum polls (such an anonymous profile was busted recently) In the meantime the Elite is expanding its network and influence, by making some other Community members and even people from other Cardano Ecosystem Entities “loyal” to them (sometimes with morally & ethically not acceptable tactics, sometimes with sharing special titles, etc.) What you experience is the clash of people in the Community who are not loyal to this Elite and challenge the very basic fundamentals (like whether having Cardano Ambassador´s on LinkedIn without ever empowering them with representation) & trends happening in the Community IMO we do not need a hidden and non-official hierarchical organization formed by the Community having totalitarian control (but maybe I am wrong and this is all a natural & healthy process?) IMO the members of the Elite are passionate about Cardano, some of them are sufficiently competent, they want to help the venture and also do their best, but they just want to keep this control so it can be done their way without Community wide openness and some sort of consensus (but maybe I am wrong and this is more efficient?) This is a very complex topic and unfortunately hard to grasp & recognize, which results in some members who have very good intention & character, but haven´t put the puzzle together will mainly see pointless arguments and pick sides without being aware of the entire deep context

For the record I am not conspiracy theorist, just good in observing things & putting the pieces together (which I mainly did for the Parsons Network Graph you might have seen).

Here is an earlier, overly simplified definition I had for decentralization:

“Decentralization is about emergence; an extended, diverse & large “non-hierarchical” network of (identical or function based) nodes, where all the independent nodes collaborate following a consensus protocol and each of them is contributing to the utility (consented agreements) the network itself provides.”

The larger the network, the stronger it is. The better the consensus protocol, the more efficient it is.

This is completely opposite to how our Community is organized at the moment (but maybe I am wrong and this is an idealism?).

Just replace nodes with members of the Community and ask yourself if this is how we function or not.

You will know when we are decentralized, when you will be able to join a collaboration platform that will allow you to bring your competence, insight & know how shaping projects together, which define our joint future.

Just one sign of this speculation is that there has been zero response by the Community Management Team for almost 2 months on Community Feedback for the Ambassador Program or any recent Change Requests proposed to it by members of our Community. Eventually there has been other feedback on this program from 6 months ago in the Lounge area of the Forum, which was never responded to.

https://forum.cardano.org/t/announcing-the-cardano-ambassador-program/

I expect a lot of attack on this comment (maybe even from the Elite), but I won´t have time to respond to them. I simply can´t invest so much time having a job & family I just can´t let down. I have also nothing more to say about this topic, but would like to focus on other initiatives of the Watchdogs.

I kindly ask the other Watchdogs if they like to help & follow up on this one.