An organizational psychology perspective on Cosmos (with a few initial recommendations)

Hi, I’m Rob, I’m a work psychologist, and a few weeks ago I attended Cosmoverse in Istanbul and met a bunch of you, and I wanted to take this opportunity to share some of my observations and thoughts. Just FYI, I’m not much of a crypto expert, and I’m not technical at all, but I’m a friend of Sebastien’s, and I’ve had a positive opinion of the Cosmos ecosystem after having attended the past two Nebular Summits. I knew a little bit about the history of Cosmos and some of the related dramas – and, in my line of work, drama and conflict are things I gravitate to, so I’ve been intrigued to learn more for a while. Cosmoverse did not disappoint. Let me start by saying that I love (and seek out) working with people who have two key traits: a passion for building a better world, and a humility that building a better world is really, really hard. I felt that authenticity and curiosity from almost everyone I talked to – that’s not something I see in every organization I meet, so it’s worth acknowledging and applauding. As a whole, Cosmos exhibits very strong shared values, some of which are: kindness, curiosity, fairness, intelligence, industriousness, humility, autonomy, and democracy.…

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Thanks for writing this Rob. Having met in Istanbul I was waiting to see what insight you gathered.

I don’t have much to add other than a broad agreement with your assessment and recommending that people interested in culture as much to tokenomics reach out to you and see if they find value there.

Let’s be real. A lot of the current drama is a remnant from AIB blowing up in 2020. The ecosystem we’ve seen cobbled together is a miracle achieved by people who care a lot about what Cosmos is trying to do, frankly. Most of the leadership and core developers splintered off in to their own projects and interests, or left the ecosystem altogether. However, a lot of the wounds never healed, and the largest institutions with the most capital (AiB and the ICF) have never recovered, either. They’re both a mess in their own way, and the community/builders are demanding better from both. So, essentially, what we’re left with is an ecosystem of loose collaboration of brillant/passionate builders with no top-down leadership to help guide toward a common vision and allocate resources to do so. This isn’t necessarily a problem in itself, and in the crypto spirit it’s relatively decentralized, but also chaotic. I think many have low hopes of a shared vision at this juncture. Some seem so stubborn and entrenched in their mindsets and patterns that they just find it easier to point the finger and hope someone else can take care of it. I see a lot more bitching and virtue signaling than…

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Excellent initiative that I would vote for if it came to a solid proposal.

We are working onlong similar lines with our Cosmonauts hackathon series at the Commons Hub in Austria in Summer 2024 to create a literal common ground for the various teams in the Cosmos Ecosystem. After hackathons for many individual chains, we’ll be hosting an Interchain edition where not only tech can be built, but relationships healed and strengthened.

Maybe you’d like to be involved?

Thanks Rob. Enjoyed meeting you at Cosmosverse and so nice to see your discussions culminating in this write up! So many terrific observations! With respect to the recommendation re formulation of “vision”, a few thoughts; • the design of Cosmos gov precludes a single centralized team from taking over the process of setting vision, • the ultimate arbiter of which modules of the vision are ultimately built & bolted on at the hub or which chains are invited to join AEZ is the $ATOM community itself • we need to get comfortable with these new decentralized ways of working, and unlearn the old centralized ways that we learned since childhood, ie the corp, nation state, church, military, university, basically everything we know is top down, hierarchical, and it is very hard to unlearn and forget the assumption that everything must be centralized • nodes of centralization, yes, but the entire project having a single centralized vision, why? • so, the added point I would make to your excellent article is that there can be a plurality of teams that get together to crystallize a vision for a module, and, the community will decide ultimately what is “in” and “out” of…

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Thank you very much Robert for this thoughtful and informative perspective for us all to reflect upon. I fully support your call for enhanced leadership training within the Cosmos ecosystem. The transition of many adept individuals into leadership roles underscores the need for such development. Investing in leadership coaching can significantly impact both individual and collective growth. I was fortunate enough to go through leadership coaching with an organizational psychologist, and it’s given me skills and perspective that have served me very well in my career and in my personal life. I have seen the wonders it can work for organizations, and I’ve seen the need for this first hand in the ecosystem. Your dream recommendation is also very possible, especially as we are hearing calls for a breakaway from the ICF and looking for somewhat of a new start. I think there is already a group trying to lead the way, but additional leaders are needed to step up to broaden the perspective and help guide the ecosystem down a path that allows for an abundance of success. The community also needs to give their full support to these leaders and build strong levels of trust to get through…

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My initial reaction is that the diagnosis is spot on.

Generally the investment in coaches, training, peer groups, wellness etc have produced nothing. I have my reasons for why this is but you would probably be suprised at how much money has been spent on these efforts in the last years.

But institutional failure is a reality of working in Cosmos.

Rob, I think you nail this on many cords. What used to be an abundant ecosystem has been hijacked by a few bad names or personas. Personally, ive been pretty critical of cosmos especially when it comes to marketing to newcomers on participating in high APYs and creative economics which only led them to leave eventually when they lost most of their original investment. I do not know the path forward, but I think youve outlaid some significant groundwork on the steps that can be taken forward. I would also state that Cosmos, especially Atom is becoming the system that we so sought to replace. I think Zaki had a tweet earlier about the ICF which held majority true. Most of the community wants transparency in whats going on between the ICF, AiB, Chorus one, Informal which all seem to be the same people making decisions instead of gauging the community. This problem seems to be the deepest of my concerns because investors lose confidence when community pool spends by the same people seem to keep popping up. People are tired, misled, and have just flat given up, while ecosystems like Solana flourish we have props like 839, 103, 79 and many others where it seems the ROI hasn’t been…

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Agree with many here. This was spot on and I’m incredibly grateful to @robertkelleya for the thought and attention he gave to this analysis.

Clearly there is still some soreness as expressed in the comments here. That said, I’m actually more optimistic on the future of Cosmos than I’ve been in a while. I interact with unbelievably talented and visionary Cosmos teams every day and I feel like some of the organizational debt (while not going away) is finally becoming less relevant. The feeling I got at Cosmoverse was the community was eager to find creative ways to solve the real problems together: users, liquidity, narrative, as well as many mentioned above.

While I don’t know that all of the suggestions here are viable, I’d definitely be interested in figuring out ways to level up the collective intelligence and empathy in the ecosystem.

2013 I start AIB, initially created FtNox an exchange. I maybe wrote the first exchange that also could prove its reserves. I never launched because just about when I was going to, I discovered the 1988 BFT paper. 2015/2016 there is CryptoEconomicon in the south bay in california. I meet Chris Harborne and Ethan. 2016 I work with Ethan as a loan employee since I wanted to build the EVM on top of Tendermint, and Eris wanted a permissioned EVM. I teach everything I know about Tendermint to Ethan, and he asks his professor if he can write his thesis on it. Around this time Ethan was still employed with Eris Industries. Eris Industries it was said that there were five cofounders, but the two public facing cofounders are Casey and Preston Byrne. The LICENSE at this time was not well defined. I said that it will be published “at least as copyleft” but it’s pretty fucking clear that I am also interested in more liberal licenses, since I mentioned that I’m a Kopimist by heart. Look at the repo. I spend 3 months to no avail to convince Preston and Casey to allow me to publish Tendermint as Apache2. Preston for being a lawyer is a complete clown and keeps pretending that dual…

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To this day I have yet to hear a single apology. To be fair Zaki once did internally to AIB, but not for what I wrote above. After I resigned from AIB by popular demand (though nobody sane would have agreed if they were in my shoes), and finally from ICF because it was already clear that the ICF was completely subverted (though I still regret the decision), I have since been working on the best smart contracting system the world has yet even seen. It’s still crazy to me that after Ethan and I decided that in order for us to make progress we needed to create our own isolated budgets, so I finally agreed on the creation of Informal, while the Virgo budget was equally carved out for my direction; and just because I chose to keep the funds in the ICF (obviously for accountability) since I have resigned from the FC they decided to completely ignore this and pretend like that arrangement never happened. Meanwhile I have learned since that the “coop” Ethan created with Informal is not a coop at all and Ethan has an outsized financial stake in it; so HE is the one who has a conflict of interest, and he created it AFTER he pressured me to leave the ICF on the same grounds, that I have…

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If you all just want to support the status quo despite these revelations, well fuck me, maybe it is simply too late. Don’t be surprised if everyone decent starts to exodus to a new hub. I cannot in good conscience support what has been and now is worse. The fucking buck stops here. Trust me, it is better to sell and leave now if you don’t agree with me. Don’t say I didn’t warn you. Doing any kind of psychoanalysis of Cosmos without understanding the chicaneers and their works, and what REALLY led to what they called gore2020, is complete folly, and only serves to sustain the status quo. Admitting the failures of the ICF and failing to act against the ICF, or suggesting that we simply ignore it, when the hub SHOULD be taking action, is again being an apologist to evil. I have given them AMPLE WARNING. Despite knowing that the above is true they have continued to play their playbook of mass brainwashing Cosmonauts and continuing their attacks against the integrity of the hub, and turning the ICF into their slush fund, and then daring to ask for more with ATOM2. Judgement day is here. UPDATE: created a new thread here: The Origin of Cosmos Drama Here is the plan.…

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Anybody interested in ATOM doing due diligence comes here, reads all this… Everybody seems eager to be collaborative, looks bullish.

And then an avalanche of rocks comes raining down.

People have asked “why a unified vision”.
Because it’s anti-rocks.
At a high enough level like “Share oxygen and water. Don’t die.” a shared vision keeps the village alive.

“Don’t throw rocks. Only constructive professional criticism. The Hub is for security.
Accountability required.”

That’s probably enough to start with. Especially in a village full of glass houses.

If that basic minimum can’t even be agreed upon then what can be?

If you tolerate evil, you are evil.
The unified vision is what funded cosmos in the first place.
What has happened since is overtly evil to destroy the Cosmos unified vision.
If what I wrote above doesn’t convince you, nothing will.
It is simply time to split.

Anti-rocks? Get a fucking helmet.
Also I forgot to mention that Chjango is a cofounder of Cosmos.
She was there since before the launch and knows of the shenanigans.
She now has a hotline for you to report cosmos crypto crime to.

chjango cosmos gardener🦇🔊

I beg you to get back on your meds. You are seriously not well.

Why do you say that, besides the obvious (you’re part of the problem)?
Everyone who tells you to “take your meds” is part of the spiritual problem we face today.
But we already know this, and they are merely outing themselves.

Here’s another article describing how the WEF has been circling Cosmos.

Do the Tentacles of Corruption & Power Extend into The Cosmos?

As capable individuals who power through the day, we tend to believe we completely understand our environment and our world. But every now…

Reading time: 16 min read

So we have George Soros affiliates subverting Cosmos, even since the early days of Tendermint, again with Antoine Vergne and Rebecca Liao now we have some WEF folks hovering around. Not to mention BlackRock funded Circle working with Noble+Strangelove. Another sleuth discovered likely ties between SBF/FTX and the Luna crash.

I’m pretty fucking sure Cosmos is being gangstalked by the deep state, and that is the source of our drama. If you can’t see the elephant from the parts, well, please, get vaxxed.

Since I am over my edit limit, here is an update:

RE Jessy Irwin:

• I tell this to Zaki and he insists that we need Jessy to complete the job. Her job was basically interfacing with HackerOne. I make an exception for Zaki, but refuse to give Jessy full superadmin privileges for Tendermint’s google apps, since with that you can do a lot more than her job entails. She was also responsible for maintaining Google Apps for onboarding and offboarding but I already gave her ALL THE PERMISSIONS save for superadmin (root). I asked her to clarify what else she needs and she doesn’t answer.

Dear Robert, I hope this message finds you well. I wanted to reflect on the time we spent together at the closing day of the conference. I sat to your left on the restaurant terrace, with Youssef from the AADAO on your right. The fact that all three of us were French made it easy to bridge the language gap. I vividly remember your enthusiastic sharing of early conclusions about your incredible research project at our table. Your excitement was palpable, and it left me eagerly anticipating your eventual public post, once the initial fervor had subsided, and you had time to reflect. It’s interesting to note that much of what you shared with us on that day seems to align with the diagnosis you’ve presented here. Our conversation during our leisurely walk from the restaurant to the last night’s party still lingers in my memory. We delved deeply into the concept of the collective intelligence that Cosmos fosters and its magnetic pull for intelligent individuals. We also pondered the idea that Cosmos operates like a machine, mercilessly dismantling anyone who attempts to control it. We discussed how most individuals with influence in this ecosystem ultimately find themselves…

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jaekwon:

Message to the Church in Ephesus (Acts 19:8-12 )

1Unto the angel of the church of Ephesus write; These things saith he that holdeth the seven stars in his right hand, who walketh in the midst of the seven golden candlesticks;
2I know thy works, and thy labour, and thy patience, and how thou canst not bear them which are evil: and thou hast tried them which say they are apostles, and are not, and hast found them liars: 3And hast borne, and hast patience, and for my name’s sake hast laboured, and hast not fainted. 4Nevertheless I have somewhat against thee, because thou hast left thy first love. 5Remember therefore from whence thou art fallen, and repent, and do the first works; or else I will come unto thee quickly, and will remove thy candlestick out of his place, except thou repent. 6But this thou hast, that thou hatest the deeds of the Nicolaitans, which I also hate. 7He that hath an ear, let him hear what the Spirit saith unto the churches; To him that overcometh will I give to eat of the tree of life, which is in the midst of the paradise of God.

Jesus is King of Kings.

Bruh, this took a turn I wasn’t expecting

@robertkelleya very interesting thesis and agree with most. Appreciate that someone spent his personal time to highlight how important unity is.

wtf u guys (Jae, Zaki, Ethan and remaining “gang”) cannot sit on a table and discuss all these issues.
If u cannot find a solution to bring unity back to cosmos then find someone to sell your part and leave the cosmos ecosystem alone. Last 2 years we (buyers/stakers) had enough drama.
Damn even 5 year old kids don’t shit post non stop on twitter to each other, or try to undermine others with ambiguous proposals such as those we had in the past.

Irrelevant to specific issue, but if any genuine soul is still in cosmos: put an annual cap to funding, bored to a see a new idea/group being funded, as usual the validators friends of the devs of that idea voting YES, so next time they will return the favor. I own a business and every year I see my reserve and say ok I have $20 how much can I spend, what profit my investment will bring etc

I want nothing more than to split away from the likes of you.
You’re literally no better than somebody who tells you that you need to marry your rapist.
As if I haven’t tried to make that work already.

If you want to keep supporting rapists and liars and thieves so be it.
We will split from you, it’s as simple as that. And good riddance.

Thanks Rob for your contributions your professionalism on how to make cosmo a better place.

Dear Rob, welcome to the Cøsmos forum floor. Every now and then there appears an expert here who suggests to the eco community to let him try his hand at changing matters in some aspect from the outside. I’ll give you my personal assessment of your implicit proposal in a to-the-point fashion in which you’ll hopefully won’t find too much offense. • Your CV comes accros as very jumpy, is mainly anchored in business and has only relatively recently moved towards the field of psychology • Your mission as stated in your Linkedin namely “to help mission-driven leaders wield power with good intentions” is not only somewhat of a ‘contradictio in terminis’ but also does not match that well with a decentralized culture as ought to be the case here • Your introduction above contains a lot of assumptions for a self-admitted ‘non-crypto expert’ regarding certain elements in Cøsmos such as “Cøsmos not being a cult”, “A shared long-range vision with the substance of the Atom2 paper” and “Cøsmos has a vision that goes decades into the future” • Your vision which is supposed to be about the organizational challenge is larded with (crypto)-finance centered terms and slogans like…

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Thanks Rob for writing this. Enjoyed talking to you at Nebular and Cosmoverse and feel like you’ve aptly summarized both the potential and the pain of this ecosystem. Appreciate it. There’s a lot we could talk about amongst your recommendations, and I hope we’re able to keep the conversation going so we can actually work through this and emerge stronger as an ecosystem. I’ve been trying for the last few years to rebuild the org structure since the Big Bang, but it’s felt very lonely at times, and has certainly pushed me to the limits of my competencies and emotional bandwidth. It’s been very difficult trying to do it across org boundaries, especially given my various roles as cofounder, ICF council member, and CEO of Informal. People seem to want to put it in the past (we all do), but what we experienced takes years to recover from, and there’s been many setbacks along the way. I’m not sure if this is the kind of rhetoric you refer to as catastrophization - if so, would appreciate feedback on how to talk about it more constructively I think one of the most important points you made is around the lack of management skills and experience. There’s a lot of smart, motivated and…

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Rob, I’m delighted to see the (mostly) constructive responses and feedback to your post. As a relatively recent observer, I’ve been impressed with your level of interest in Cosmos and your ability to accurately assess its challenges given its tumultuous past. To echo @hxrts ’s sentiment, I see many positive developments in the last year. There’s a lot of positive collaboration happening at the moment, best exemplified by the incredibly thoughtful conversations taking place in the AEZ room at Comsoverse. I believe we need to create more opportunities for stakeholders, developers and token holders to meet, debate and share ideas in a physical setting, as well as online. Nebular aims to be one of those venues. I’m on board with your recommendations with the exception of #1 . As you know, the idea of creating an ad-hoc group of representatives goes against the decentralized ethos of Cosmos. While I agree that we need a better way of coordinating around things like vision, roadmap, funding priorities, etc, this goes counter to the values of the community. A valuable exercise would be to study successful decentralized organizations or software projects to learn from how they…

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“Decentralized” means a flatter heirarchy, no kings. It doesn’t mean no cooperation, no organization, no shared goals, and no shared agreements over finite resources.

You sound here like one of those wild west types that wants it to always stay wild. If that’s what you want then you need to keep moving your wagon to the next frontier. Otherwise you eventually end up being forced to pay for municipal plumbing & water. If sovereignty to you means that you’re always the emperor of your camp, well that’s not sovereignty. That’s isolationism.

Pretty much everybody else prefers plumbing, roads, courts, and a fire department. Those things can be decentralized, but they still require consensus on map drawing & such. Maps require planning, collaboration, team building, and a shared vision for success.

Without those things you don’t get to bathe very often.

The Wild West is only fun in movies.

I have also written my complaints down but in the board meeting minutes of the ICF.
can you please publish all the board meeting minutes where I was involved?

Burt you won’t. You’ve shut me out of my own email address at interchain, and you won’t let me back in so I can’t find any ICF records. How about you give me my email address back and all of my old files?

"He once articulated that he thought our on-boarding process should be akin to dropping some- one off into the ocean and seeing if they could swim to shore. He certainly played his part there." I was the one telling you that A players hire A players, B players hire C. You were the one who cited Google “studies” that tried to demonstrate the exact opposite of this (which I disagreed with for us), and then you cited the example of some band where the lead composer hires non-muscians to play some orchestra by making them play an instrument they never knew how to play. This disparity in our ideology was the ROOT difference between us, and here you’re completely negating yourself. “Jae was quite difficult to reach and highly unreliable.” I always thought this was strange too. You never called. I have said so many times to everyone to call me if they need me. At this point it just seems like a strategy to fuck with my mind, to be so blatantly opposed between what you claim and what actually is. It really fucks one up, and combined with statements from Zaki such as “my favourite book is the traitorous eight” it starts to paint a picture of “revelation of the method” MKUltra…

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Wow!! This response has been beyond my wildest expectations. Thanks so much to everyone who has replied or commented on Twitter or directly to me. I’d like to start by extending a special thank you to @jaekwon for sharing so much on here. Jae, this must not have been easy to write. When I wrote in my original post that there’s a lot of pain in the ecosystem, I hadn’t even considered how much of that you’re still living with. We all owe you a great deal of gratitude for everything you created and worked on that made Cosmos what it is today. I also admire your commitment to your values as well as your openness regarding your religious faith. I don’t have the context to understand everything you wrote, but when I read through your posts, I observe a pattern where you’ve been disappointed by people over and over, to the point where you wrote, “I don’t trust anyone.” It’s a horrible feeling to have people let you down, especially when they let you down with their ethical behavior. And it’s gutting not to be able to trust anyone, when trust is the bedrock of all human relationships. All human interactions involve some expectations of how other people will behave. When their…

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Moving on works when I know it won’t happen again.
And turning the other cheek does work wonders to expose a pattern.
Do we not have enough of a pattern established yet?

What about just before Ethan you called me about ATOM2, when it was still being drafted in private, that “all it is about is removing the lower inflation bound to allow ATOM to become deflationary”? That wasn’t true at all, that was textbook definition misleading… it’s a whole lot more than removing the lower inflation bound, and it’s about creating an excessively large treasury so the ICF doesn’t have to spend its principle. Just admit it.

If you can admit that I have mostly valid points, and you own up to it, then I can of course forgive you. Isn’t this the story that the world so desperately wants to hear? I am open old friend.

robertkelleya:

People are actually way more complex than these simple judgments, and to improve your expectations about them, you need to 1) approach people with compassion and curiosity and a recognition of their infinite complexity, and 2) foster a tolerance for the discomfort that happens when you’re in confusion, because it’s a very natural state of being.

You are neglecting the same option that I neglected for too long, about the intent behind the source behind my confusion. What if I am right? What if my worse fears are true? I used to wonder. I don’t anymore.

robertkelleya:

when you’re in confusion

Actually it is you who are confused.
It is plain to see for those with eyes to see.
This isn’t the right way to solve this kind of problem.
This is not your hill, inducing stockholm syndrome.
My head is a hardened rock but my heart is not.
May I ask about your background, Mr psychologist?

Random off topic question,
how do you feel about the application of psychology
to manipulate targetted individuals via coordinated group response?
you’d have people acting like Agent Smiths reading off a GPTprompts.

Hey Seb, thanks again for everything. I’d agree that there’s a lot of positive collaboration happening in the Cosmos ecosystem right now, and if my post came across as too negative, that wasn’t my intention.

Based on what I’ve heard so far, I think it would be best to start small (and fast). The most ambitious proposal I would make at this point would be to team-coach either the Hub or the ICF, under the hypothesis that these organizations could acquire and then role-model more-effective communication and collaboration methods. If there’s interest in some research on improving coordination in decentralized organizations, I would be happy to at least coordinate that. At the very least, some individuals and organizations have already reached out to inquire about coaching – if any of these become clients, I’ll invite them to share their experiences publicly, if they’d like to.

To be totally honest, I expected to have a better idea of what to propose now than I actually do. I’m all ears if anyone has any more concrete ideas. Personally, I’m open to experimenting to find out how I could best help out and contribute.

Hi @Soverin , thanks so much for your welcome. Let me correct one thing first, though: I’m not an expert on much of anything. I’m a proud generalist • Your CV comes accros as very jumpy, is mainly anchored in business and has only relatively recently moved towards the field of psychology “Jumpy” is a great word to describe my CV! Yes, part of me regrets that it took me until six years ago to find my dream profession. And I didn’t even include my (barely) successful jazz festival and failed record label! I spent far too long in jobs I didn’t believe in and wasn’t good at. But grant me this: it’s a pretty impressive CV for someone who felt acutely out of place in every place he ever worked! And for my current job, it was an extraordinary education in working with a ton of absolutely brilliant leaders with many very successful organizations. • Your mission as stated in your Linkedin namely “to help mission-driven leaders wield power with good intentions” is not only somewhat of a ‘contradictio in terminis’ but also does not match that well with a decentralized culture as ought to be the case here Yes, the line is somewhat oxymoronic – but that’s intentional.…

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Hi Jae,

If my post to you made you feel manipulated or targeted (or that I was manipulating others), I’m very sorry. Happy to edit or delete.

Feel free to ask anything about my background. I shared a bit more in my immediately preceding post, if that’s at all interesting to you. I’m always happy to schedule a call or take the conversation offline.

The conditional bothers me, I wish you would just own up to it a bit. But I’m just Yak Shaving ™.

Please tell me about your early life, what it was like growing up when you were young. Have you ever been desperate or poor? What is your biggest failure? What is your greatest wish?

OK. Manipulation. I guess I could say that I was being manipulative in that I decided to approach you by signaling my respect for you and trying to demonstrate that I heard you in order to ask you to hear something I had to say. I think you could also call that “good communication practices,” but I will take into consideration your comments. To your questions: I was born in Colombia to a Colombian mother and American father, and I moved with them to the US before I had even turned three months old. My mom had a degree in economics from the National University of Colombia, but she had hit the proverbial glass ceiling and, unmarried and on the wrong side of 30, moved to Miami to learn English. There, she met my dad, who was a college dropout from working class Philadelphia with some really hard-right views on race and genetics. For some reason I’ll never really understand, they got married. Still, they both loved me tremendously. There was a lot of fighting at home, but aside from that, I had a very nice childhood along with my brilliant younger brother. My dad was a salesman for a company that sold equipment to small banks (think coin and bill counters). My mom didn’t work…

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Thank you for your answer, and welcome to the community Robert!
I will answer in kind by tomorrow.

I’d love to learn more. Let me know if you don’t know how to reach me directly.

There’s a lot of personal laundry airing going on here. Do these personal grievances need to be made public? I get that people are hurt but I don’t think it’s respectful to those who are not directly involved.

Hello Spacemonster, in my contribution I mainly address the issue of Mr Robert Kelley Ayala being utterly unqualified for the task he suddenly here seems to bestow upon himself.

This is amongst others done with the help of the an overview of his remarkably jumpy carreer path as featuring on several Linkedin profiles that suddenly have all been taken offline.

You do not get into any of my critical remarks in there which leads me to believe that you can’t refute them meanwhile demonstrating for me your conflated stance regarding decentralized decision making vs its execution.

Might be best to let some healing punch get shared around without spiking it or making it about us if it isn’t.

Welcome to decentralized community contributions?

I’m afraid I don’t see the immediate relevance of your replies so far towards my entries here. It would help to stay on-topic and address brought up arguments. You’ll otherwise run the risk to mainly come across as noise.

Hello Bendy, I’ll ask you directly: was this implicit proposal by the for the community (untill very recently) largely unknown Mr Kelley Ayala who has seemed to have gone literally to great length flying around the world to visit Cøsmos-related events in any way, shape or fashion sollicited via AADAO and/or you personally?

Hi Soverin,

Happy to answer.

Rob is not connected to AADAO.
I met him at Cosmoverse because I did some work there with Seb and we went for a curry afterwards and Rob (as Seb’s friend) was sat opposite me. We discussed his impressions of Cosmoverse compared to other crypto conferences he had been to. He struck me as an observant person and someone more interested in the culture of crypto than the financial side of it.

Fwiw most of the conversation probably was actually about music and the arts in general.

Neither I nor AADAO solicited Rob to get involved however I am delighted to see his post gain some traction. I always think that the more people wishing to contribute the better.

It’s just mind-boggling what’s going on here. I highly appreciate everyone’s contribution to this conversation.

I haven’t had such a good time reading through forum posts ever. Hope that wounds will heal and we, the Cosmos community, can get out of these sometimes tedious, destructive, and never-ending-seeming accusations and arguing, stronger and more aligned than ever.

Hi again Soverin,

One more clarification: the only Cosmos event I flew to was Cosmoverse. I live in Paris, and so the Nebular Summits were both accessible by foot.

Thank you.

Lol can’t a MFer post on the forum about how he went to cosmoverse without getting personally attacked?

Oh, and another clarification: my jumpy career is listed on only one LinkedIn profile. If anyone has been creating and/or deleting profiles with my name on them, well, it ain’t me. Also keep in mind that Robert Kelley is a very common name, which is why I added my second last name professionally.

Decentralization is based on communication of totally different people. And this is main difference with the Dictatorship: many different people with different opinion and different vision try to understand each other and find the best solution, that will be accepted by many different people with different opinions - we call it Consensus! And even if sometimes it’s hard to reach the Consensus, as Decentralists, we need to try to reach it! If everyone has the same opinion, and everyone should share the same point of view, and everyone who disagrees should be fired - this is not decentralization. This is more like the Hare Krishna sect, or the Stalinist party. Decentralized Governance brings us Decentralized Politics. Decentralized Politics implies the participation of completely different actors, each of which can influence the situation, as well as enter into alliances with each other. The main difference from Classical Politics is that we enter into alliances not for the sake of pursuing our own interests, but for the sake of the interests of the Network and the Community! If someone begins to pursue personal interests to the detriment of the interests of the Network and…

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Hi Robert,

Glad to see you made it onto the forum! I really enjoyed our chat at Cosmoverse, and I think you’re making some great points here.

Personally, i think the lack of a “shared long-range vision” as you put it is central to the issue; although I would say there is a shared general vision of sovereign app-chains etc, and rather the issue is more of a lack of unity in the organisation around getting there. For someone looking in or trying to understand the sum of all the parts i believe things can be perceived as quite scattered; work is being done a bit here and there but how it all fits together is not necessarily so clear.

While I do think it’s about time a clearer path is outlined, I don’t think a small central unit is the best for reasons stated by many others here. Could you perhaps approach it as a tender, and the community could elect a body to review submitted proposals and select, say, 2-3 final options for the community to vote on?

Either way, great to have you involved and thank you for this very thoughtful contribution

omg sometimes coming back here is truly amazing

Thanks for this. Good effort btw.

robertkelleya:

First, there’s a lot of raw pain and even trauma in the community.

Perspectives. Here is an analogue word to change it - competition and communication

• Burnout: very subjective
• The great goal is to get away from central management

Most of your suggestions are very subjective to a specific corporate culture and very outdated ethics values. What you see today is communication. Just like anything in psychology - perspective and understanding of all sides of the medal is the key.

Hi @Better_Future , and thank you for this incredibly thoughtful response. I took a few days to let this post stew in my head – sorry I haven’t replied sooner. One thing your post helped me to see is that I can be quite sloppy with the term “shared vision.” At some high level, I do think there needs to be a set of beliefs and values and goals that is shared by everyone. This is culture, and I would be curious to know how people react to @ebuchman 's portrayal of it: So what’s the vision? I’ve framed the ICF’s vision as nurturing a Cosmos Hub that nurtures an interchain ecosystem that nurtures the transformation of money and finance. Which leaves us to define a vision for those. For the Hub, there does seem to be an emerging shared vision as a provider of interchain security and interchain money (or is it[ interchain capital ][…]? frankly I don’t think any of us really understand money). On the interchain, I think we all generally agree on a vision for an open communications network for arbitrary blockchains and devices to enable sovereign and interoperable communities. And for the Cosmos stack, to be the leading enabler of community computers in the interchain. As for the…

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Hi @Tricky , thanks so much for your support. I would love to hear about your experience with coaching, if you’d ever like to discuss. Thanks!

Hi @zaki_iqlusion , thanks so much for the reply. We haven’t met yet, but I’ve seen you on stage a few times, so it’s an honor.

I don’t have any context on the use of coaching in the ecosystem (@ebuchman mentioned something similar in his post), so if you’d be open to sharing with me, I’d love to hear more, especially your reasons for why it hasn’t worked.

Thank you.

Hi @govmos , This is an extraordinarily astute response! Here’s what I take as your key question: Both of us expressed the notion that Cosmos might only truly thrive once we collectively reduce the remaining influence of the original founders, all of them. I’m curious to understand why this idea didn’t make its way into your final assessment. Was it deemed irrelevant when weighed against other factors after days of contemplation, or did further analysis reveal it to be inaccurate from the start? I did choose to leave this out because I wondered how clear or useful a message it would be. The way I understand the vision of Cosmos, I believe the original founders would all like to reduce their influence, as well. This is, to paraphrase @Better_Future , part of learning how to work in a decentralized context, and unlearning how to work in the centralized contexts we’ve spent our whole lives in is much easier said than done. I’m (perhaps over-)sensitive to defensiveness, and I think saying to people, “you need to reduce your influence” could be taken as threatening. Acceptance is they key to change, and my suggestion to get some of the most powerful/influential people in…

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I have only love and respect for sebastian. sorry about involving you indirectly.
I don’t know, unless you were also an employee at Eris Industries.
The crazy revelations keep happening, so I’m just trying to be complete here.

If my last act is to take everyone who committed chicanery against me, other Cosmonautrs like Taariq and Shane, and countless others, down to an influence of zero for Cosmos, that’s perfectly fine with me. The real crime is to not speak out. Tolerance of evil is in itself evil. It’s easy to look at many people commenting in one direction, and to conclude that because of social traction, their opinion must be true. If we all regularly affirmed the truth when this was happening, instead of calling them “crazy” or “deranged” (I see no problem using these pejoratives when appropriate against the perpetrators, but to the person alerting the public to crime, is itself “crazy” and “deranged”.) But you also need to ask yourself, “are they misleading the public on purpose”? And it is completely rational and sane (not deranged, or crazy) to consider that the answer may very well be “Yes, they are misleading you and everyone on purpose”. • we are in the middle of WW3, not “about to enter it”. • the vaccine mainstream narrative is being rolled back and people are waking up. • the same organizations that have had their feelers around Cosmos (such as the WEF) have as its primary…

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And as an aside, to hell with everyone who dares tell others to not talk about their grievous experiences. What boot licking cowards.

Hi @ebuchman , Thanks so much for this. First of all, when you talk about feeling lonely and being pushed to the limits of your competencies and emotional bandwidth, that sounds really hard. And thank you for sharing your writings from 2018. I hope you have a good support structure, and obviously, if you ever want to chat, I’d be happy to. Once again, I’d be curious to hear about experiences with coaches and what’s worked and what hasn’t. So much of this job comes down to some sort of ineffable chemistry. I have some clients who think I’ve changed their life, and others who didn’t seem to get anything out of our time together. It’s a humbling job in that way, I’ll tell you that. Can I just make one observation about the vision you described? (which I found inspiring, btw – I’m compelled by the metamodern philosopher Hanzi Freinacht’s idea of a future that moves so quickly that it becomes “chaos”, and that it’s up to us, right now, to set the “sensitive initial condition” so that it’s a “good” chaos; this is how I see (at least the potential of) Cosmos. You say that ICF is “nurturing” the Hub, which “nurtures” the ecosystem, which “nurtures” the transformation of money and…

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I can’t say I disagree.
“when you’re in confusion” he says to me, making assumptions.
then he goes on to ignore what is seemingly criminal racketeering.
then I make it clear that I’m expecting an apology but he just pretends like he doesn’t understand.

You’re literally always calling me out for conspiracy theories.
You’ve consistently mocked me for ever displaying paranoia about anything.
Take Pizzagate for example. Or that I consider David Hog to be some crisis actor.
Where were you when I was yelling about the vaccine, or the WEF?

WEF Antoine comes in scheming on how to create a new governance system for Cosmos. Instead of the hub as indicator of signal the first thing he proposes is to create a limited sample of 100 people. Fucking LOL. Still gets funding from the accelerator fund, is that right?

And now we have a psychologist who is going to help us resolve our issues, and people chiming in that our cultural values should be about not throwing rocks?

L O FUCKING L.

I am thoroughly disgusted. Everyone who isn’t disgusted can inherit the hub. We are taking a spaceship and saving ourselves.

Fucking rapture party is what it is. I can’t stand you people.

jaekwon:

I am thoroughly disgusted. Everyone who isn’t disgusted can inherit the hub. We are taking a spaceship and saving ourselves.

When? Sooner the better imo.

Let’s agree to split.

🎺 JLAMBO 🎺

jaekwon:

Let’s agree to split.

ok but only if i get some GNO

jaekwon: And it was Pasternak who previously agreed with the “crazy stuff”. Just like when I shared my alarming discoveries with Jacob he was the one eager to tell me that he actually believes every single thing, only to use our conversations against me two years later by lying by omission. And even you accused me anti-semitism. It’s so tiring. I did. Armenia was being bombed with Israeli weapons in fall, 2020. I’m Armenian. These things can do funny things to perspective. And we’re aligned on likely the majority of insane conspiracy stuff, it’s mainly that you spend a great deal of time pondering Jews. I don’t. Ya sued grace man, in a federal court, and printed inaccurate information about myself all over it. And I’m game to let all that slide. robertkelleya: Oh, and another clarification: my jumpy career is listed on only one LinkedIn profile. This is honestly getting interesting thank you for doing what you felt should be done and for your contribution here. The open conversation is refreshing. jaekwon: If my last act is to take everyone who committed chicanery against me, other Cosmonautrs like Taariq and Shane, and countless…

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jaekwon:

grievous

Chiming in again just to say, right or wrong, it’s not about cowardice, it’s about usefulness of actions toward intended goals.

The question here in this venue isn’t if the message is warranted or morally wrong or understandable or smart or justified or any of that.

Is it useful? Is it being heard? Does it actually accomplish its intended goal?

There was a pretty hilarious video out recently. It made some harsh points. It “threw big giant rocks” but the hilarity made them foam rocks. Huge. But they land. It communicates as it intends to.

Anything harder bounces off, triggers heavy defenses, causes unintended tertiary harm, etc.

I have no place here judging your messages or goals. Only that they might not align with each other.
People don’t listen to nice diatribes (like this one). They REALLY don’t listen to angry rants. (Whether they should or shouldn’t, merited or not.)

This is true everywhere. All the time.

So if you are getting what you want, if your goals are being accomplished as expected, a good success rate & all, then please nevermind the interruption.

We don’t have enough parents in Cosmos is what I’m saying.

I have been tracking/commenting on this COSMOS experiment now since 2019 officially on Publish0x as Thunderboltkid Kudos to jaekwon, I had to deal with similar skullf’kry when I founded Platespin, ultimately I got tossed by the guys I hired, then they got tossed 6 months later by the VCs who had promised them more interest, then screwed them anyway. JK stay true… tk over and out

Holy sh*t. Absolutely priceless stuff here. Cosmos even got a shrink!

Who would think 20% inflation can produce so much existential angst? Oh, wait. I do.

Technology and adoption wise Cosmos is light years ahead of everybody else because of Jae and Ethan amazing contributions (and of course everybody else) and this ecosystem is absolutely rocking. Big drama always goes with big personalities. If they weren’t big, they’d be no drama. This is Paypal mafia action here. It’s great.

Cheers!

(we’re this || close to the big bucks coming down. We just have to tweak the inflation picture)

Some much needed reflection, its time for cosmos to move past trauma, developing new tech and launching consumer chains will quickly put the past behind.