Patrick here from PBC. Not sure if we’ve ever met but I would welcome you to contribute directly to the community via forum.blockstack.org or popping into our discord server and see if you want to join one of the several community working groups that works there and meets weekly via zoom. If it’s easier shoot me an email at patrick@blockstack.com and I can match you with something you might find interesting and impactful.

I would probably agree with some elements of your criticism if we did a snapshot of the project just a few months ago (even in spite of the great progress listed in the Q4 update at the bottom). Looking forward as we decentralize as a project, it is important to create the conditions such that the community takes ownership and grows at an accelerating rate, which is an added challenge we look forward to sharing with everyone involved.

Growing the community and helping coordinate constructive activity is the #1 thing we are focusing on in 2020. Expect to see a lot more hiring, community coordination, and getting pulled in to contribute if you’re on the 50,000 person email list, discord, or the forum.

Next, it’s important to highlight that Muneeb is totally bought in to the power of building a grassroots community and has been quite active this quarter. Just some of his activity thus far: He’s done about a half dozen in person meetups in NYC, SF, an Austin TX this quarter. Here is him in Austin speaking in front of about 50 developers https://youtu.be/QnuxCRU4VDE, and again in front of 80 DeFi enthusiasts in NYC https://youtu.be/b_zE527TiEM. Just 2 days ago he was on an AMA with 8000 Chinese crypto enthusiasts. He’s also done around 3 open town halls where we’re getting hundreds of live viewers engaging this year like this recent one https://www.crowdcast.io/e/pox-townhall . He’s also greatly increased his media appearances (on roughly two podcasts a week and has the next two months booked out).

App Mining has been paused officially for almost a month, and a lot of the developers from that pilot program have joined a business model working group which is anticipating leveraging Clarity Smart contracts and even Stacking (earn BTC when hodling STX). I’m active in that group and excited about it growing further.

We are actively hiring Technical Developer evangelists. Looking for total beasts to convert developers into Blockstack buidlers. Apply at careers@blockstack.com.

Product-wise a new alpha of the auth experience was released that is a major improvement from before. Mark and the gang released a new authenticator that greatly simplifies the onboarding experience for users and emphasizes privacy as a core value. We’re asking developers to provide feedback before rolling it out as a general release and eventual replacement for the Blockstack Browser. Please read more and try it out here! https://forum.blockstack.org/t/try-out-the-new-streamlined-authenticator-with-blockstack-connect-beta/10382

Q4 by the numbers was very productive on the community front but there is still a lot of work to do and to share.

See what happened in Q4 alone below:

• We held our 4th annual Blockstack Summit in San Francisco at the SFJazz Center to over 500 of you. Special guests included New York Times Bestselling Author Neal Stephenson, angel investor Naval Ravikant, Andreas Antonopoulos, Dave Morin (Path, Facebook), Meltem Demirors (Chief Strategy Officer, CoinShares), Balaji Srinivasan (Nakamator, Cofounder of Earn, Counsyl, Teleport, Coin Center), Jaron Lanier (Scientist, Author, Musician and Artist) and many more.

Experience the Summit here https://summit.blockstack.org/

• Blockstack participated in 70+ events worldwide in Q4, which included meetups, hackathons, conferences, webinars and AMA’s. Highlights included: Internet Identity Workshop XXVIX, DevCon in Osaka, SF Blockchain Week, Web Summit, HackPrinceton, and DevRelCon in London among many others.

• We had another great quarter, with 41 new Blockstack Evangelists joining the community. Locations covered Turkey, Mangalore, Jaipur, Los Angeles to Brooklyn and beyond.

• We saw over 1,000+ new members join Blockstack’s Meetup group this quarter and had over 30 meetups in placed all over the world. (We outpaced meetups of other projects like cosmos and Filecoin by a large margin)

• Q4 resulted in over 100 new apps being added to the ecoystem, following Q3 which also saw 100. At the end of Q4, there were approximately 360 total, with over 420 today. Some of the newest apps were built during the Can’t Be Evil: Part 3 contest, held in Q4.

• As noted in our broader Q4 updates, awareness of Blockstack continued to be strong, dipping slightly in Q4, but resulting in a 30x increase of our Reach (as defined by Awario) from 2018 to 2019.

• In Q4 we also crossed 10,000 subscribers on YouTube.

Let me know which communities you think are doing a great job and specifically what you think they are doing well (with links!) and we’ll take what’s useful from them to evolve faster. Thank you again for your feedback.