Holochain’s Community of Practice
A community of practice is a group of people who “share a concern or a passion for something they do and learn how to do it better as they interact regularly”.
I was introduced to Holochain around December 2017, by a Climate Vegan Activist friend Dr. Sailesh Rao, who recommended that we use Holochain as the backbone for The AhimsaCoin Economy. At that time Holochain was running an Indiegogo campaign — Holo: Take Back the Internet — Shared P2P Hosting.
It was not in my best interest to doubt Dr. Rao’s suggestion, since he was a Stanford graduate, who use to work at Bell Labs and was one of the Engineers behind the Gigabit Internet — Engineering Taskforce. Thus I took the plunge and supported the campaign — in return for some HoloPort.
Fast forwarding few years in December 2019, my HoloPorts arrived as promised. This infused a new breath of life and excitement into my pursuit of AhimsaCoin project as well as my interest in Holochain in general, which remained on back burner until then.
Next logical step for me, was to find people sharing similar interest and if lucky find a community. In order to do that, I started with fielding for Holochain events. Most of them were happening online and were organized by local meetup groups, guided by holochain community manager.
During one of those meetups I landed across Developer’s Forum, which at that time was the only asynchronous community space that existed. Since I had plans of working towards realizing Dr. Rao’s vision, since I had skills which did not qualify me as a developer, but as a translator for business team who dint speak code.
To my surprise, what emerged when lurking on developers forum, that this space attracted a lot of well intended people, with visions to build a new Humane world. Myself being one of them, I could resonate with those visionaries, the only problem we all shared in common, was that we all couldn’t code.
Though due to generosity of few pioneering community members, who created and held a space for developers to meet and hangout on a weekly basis, made it possible for folks like myself to meet other like minded individuals, thereby learning their stories and their visions outside of Code!
Apart from that there was one passionate hardcore believer and HOT investor with humble savings, who not only poured all his faith and trust in HOT token. Which on a later date made him commit even more community building effort and love to lead “Holochain Welcoming Map” initiative, which opened up a whole new space apart from Weekly Hackalongs, engaging serious members in a deeper philosophical conversation.
There is yet another example of how, community members voluntarily lead and organized “Holochain DevCamps” to train others to pickup a difficult coding language that even hardcore developers are afraid to code in. Energy brought by those community member, helped further nurtured genuine caring relationships, one can feel in Holochain ecosystem.
But not everything was rosy for me personally, as I would end up having endless philosophical conversation on Developers Forum and in those weekly Developers Hackalong, until one day — my posts started getting recategorized, followed by posts getting flagged, and one time I was even sent to a looney bin (metaphorically speaking).
That experience culminated, with a great 1:1 discussion with the Holochain community manager, who explained to me, firstly where the community was and he tried to learn where I was coming from. That discussion ended in one of the best piece of advice — “Less is More”.
This experience and heartfelt conversation, helped redirect my energy, without ever feeling offended when my posts got flagged in the future— only for me to learn my lesson, of respecting the purpose of Developers Forum and stop misdirecting focus of developers trying to resolve a Bug!
That little innuendo, helped me find an entire world of Holochain enthusiasts outside of that forum, who were self-organizing around individual projects, supporting each other, emotionally, financially and informationally. For we all organizing over telegram and zoom, kept each other motivated and informed, aiming for interweaved outcomes.
Such deep connections were being formed with such great people, that I was happy to have had that enriching experience, which only opened up possibilities for me personally to meet others and attend events outside of developers weekly hackalongs.
One year into my journey with holochain ecosystem, following opportunities I have started seeing emerge:
- Engage the periphery in a meaningful way, yet not overwhelm the developer focus of the core community, who are busy solving bugs and knocking out those kinks.
- Push hard with Future Currency workshops and courses, to churn out Currency Designers, who can then plug into Currency Circles to support real world holochain projects.
- Interweave projects and teams, by creating mimetic bridges aided by Currency Designers, manually capturing reputation of agents involved as well as the project space in which they exist.
- Support and encourage experimentation in general of Currency ideas with Holochain community involved in the mix to ensure some of those experiments may eventually aid in design of holochain applications.
- Nurture upward spiral of value flows, that will build on initial enthusiasm of holochain to attract well intended people to contribute in developing the humanized practice that will help transition our society.
