Giveth Galaxy vs Giveth

Thanks for this proposal Satya. I don't really think there is a tension right now, to me these were resolved before Devcon and I'm happy that the Dapp Team is finding their own way. To me Giveth has always been about the Future of Giving and building a community of Givers and Makers. Giving is a wide term. The DApp is indeed a crucial part of is, but not the only thing, the logic of transparency and accountability built in the DApp has been expressed in all of our initiatives.

Especially when you look at how the outside world perceives us: we are mainly known right now (and rightfully so) in the Ethereum space. The Ethereum community (our current audience, the people we talked most to in the past 2 years) knows us as Giveth, and our homebase as Giveth.io. Many people in Berlin & Prague told me personally they got into the Ethereum space through us, and many people are interested to join our social coding project and learn more about our governance initiatives.

The Giveth DApp will always be a core part of the Giveth project (when it depends on me) and our future is becoming clearer and clearer to me. The Giveth brand has been built by the great presentations that mainly Vojtech & Griff have given on the DApp (to the Ethereum community) but this branding has been seriously reinforced and has taken a way higher flight through the ScalingNOW, OpenblockExplorerNOW, DECENTRAL at Burning Man (!), and most recently the DecentralizeNOW initiative at Web3Summit, another beautiful example of community building.

Giveth is a super strong name right now, almost everyone I ran into knows us, and most often, the entry point was not the DApp. This is our audience, and yes, because the DApp team disagrees that these are the people we should be focusing on right now, you are choosing your own path, which makes sense ofc!
Taking the Giveth brand with you, especially when you guys have been talking about a white-labeled version, makes less sense to me.
When you look at our medium account, our twitter account, and our website (and all the time & efforts we put in this over the past time), you will see that there is a clear line in our communication: We are a Community of Makers and are Building the Future of Giving: through (Giveth) DApp Development, but just as much (or more) Governance & Social Coding experiments.

I do agree the Giveth Galaxy is the 'bigger picture', the entirety of projects, but we have mostly used this as a concept, it's not a brand, and it shouldn't be per se, it's a mindset. Out of the above I understand you'd like to take the name 'Giveth' with your fork of the DApp, but to me that would be highly confusing to the people who currently know us very, very well: the Ethereum community.

So, if you want to keep on using the name Giveth, we cannot stop you ofc, Giveth is open-source, but this could indeed get confusing if you want to get away from the community (not our intention the other way around). In that case it is probably better to indeed claim another name.

We are not taking anything anywhere and we are not forking the dapp, there's only 1 codebase that we will be working on but we'll be working with different entities / teams. The discussion here is whether that will be named Giveth.io or something else.

If the team wants to keep Giveth.io as its main entry, then we will have no choice then to adapt a new name and build a brand around that.

And that's where the tention is - from our side.

It saddens me to hear you're fine with diffusing what we have now. I had hoped for a more strategic approach.

So perhaps I should rephrase the question for you:
How would you suggest positioning the dapp branding and its communication within the current setup?

How would you fit into the current giveth.io website things like feature pages, a page that explains what exactly you can accomplish with the dapp, a helpdesk, a knowledge base, a blog that talks about the mission of the dapp, etc. - basically anything that a proper product has?

The Giveth DApp (so not the on which different teams and entities will work on, around which you want to build new branding - no idea how to call this version at this point, tbd) currently does not need a whole lot of extra pages. Knowledge base and blog posts etc can continue to go where they currently exist: our wiki, our github repos and our medium blog, and everyone is free to build this out with us.

For the Ethereum community this will suffice and this is where they will look, as they are Builders, like we are; they are probably even the ones who will build out a knowledge base with us - they don't need a lot of support, they'll probably support us more than vice versa.

The Giveth ecosystem, of which the 'Giveth Dapp' is a part - at this point in time - is not targeting the masses, a larger -non tech- audience would indeed not see this as a proper product, but we're not targeting them, so this strategy makes the most sense to me.

I don't think things need to get diffused, as a team will continue to work on the Giveth branded DApp. It is the DApp team that decided to work with other teams, so that strategic decision is not a decision the Giveth team as a whole made. So this falls outside of any Giveth DAC strategy, comms or otherwise.

I really like both aspects of giveth, the liquid pledging side and the incubator side. Brightid used social coding as an incubator and it was great. We now use the dapp to manage our grants and donations. I think it's just fine for the higher level project to include several of its own initiatives including incubators. I would like the high level site to show campaigns and to explain liquid pledging and prominently feature giveth's own initiatives. I like the new site, but it buries the liquid pledging aspect of giveth. It would be nice to show that the other initiatives we have built are using liquid pledging to make them even better.

If anyone is allowed to chime in on this, I'd like to:
If I understand correctly, the DApp team wants to be able to have giveth.io as the portal for the actual dapp and dapp information, links to Github, documentation, support KB etc. At the moment, the broadening horizons of the rest of the Giveth organization, under the moniker of "giveth galaxy" is more representative of the greater work beyond the technology behind it.
Is the struggle here to find a balance on how Giveth portrays itself that the DApp team is comfortable using giveth.io as it's portal? Is the Giveth Galaxy not a good entry point to click through to the Dapp resources, or is there a deeper question here?
I for one believe that we're all the same family and have similar enough goals to coexist under this same blanket, and would like some clarification on exactly what the tension is around the name? is it just the domain name entry point? can't this problem be solved by some direction in the presentation that happens when one lands at giveth.io? I am all for adding galaxy.giveth.io or some other thing to show the expanding universe, would that be enough?

Anyone is allowed to chime in!
The problem is indeed that we want/need to focus communication on adoption of the dApp, and the current Galaxy site serves a wider purpose. Focus is all we're after.

galaxy.giveth.io would definitely work as the site for the galaxy, good suggestion.

The Giveth ecosystem, of which the 'Giveth Dapp' is a part - at this point in time - is not targeting the masses, a larger -non tech- audience would indeed not see this as a proper product, but we're not targeting them, so this strategy makes the most sense to me.

If it makes more sense as a strategy to focus on the tech and less on marketing the use of campaigns for the masses, I understand.

To me it seems sensible to use the galaxy.giveth.io domain for projects and giveth.io to drive the primary apps name, adoption and ethos for launch - you only get one chance at that initial launch publicity traffic. In a few months the driver could be reassessed and domains re-juggled? Alternatively, moving the dapp cards to under "join our chat" would help highlight them on the current web site

Definitely possible to move the dapp card higher up (site is still work in progress).
From there we can refer to the Giveth DApp (which we'll continue to build out and will target ethereum-focused nonprofit initiatives) and from where we can also refer to the website for the whitelabeled (?) version the DApp team is planning to build, when this comes into existence (which will focus on charities only, not on the ethereum community, as I understand it) 'The Dapp' in its current or future form is however not the only project Giveth focuses on, so moving the majority of what Giveth does under a subdomain would be confusing to the audience we have currently been talking to. Reassessing this in a few months is definitely a good idea!

I will start by thanking everyone who has engaged so far by stating a tension felt, asking clarifying questions, expressing thoughts and sensibilities. This is an awesome and important conversation, and also a great opportunity to practice our tools and improve our communications which is something I've heard requested from all the elements that comprise the galaxy!
Here's my reaction/response on items that stood out to me:

1.) Satya states a tension: "The initial mission of Giveth was to build the future of charitable giving by building and growing the Giveth platform (dapp). Since then Giveth has become a collection of different initiatives, many of those not directly related anymore to the initial mission. We now refer to Giveth as a Galaxy of ideas, concepts and initiatives that mainly seek to help to move the Ethereum space forward. It has become an Ethereum incubator."
My thoughts: I don't actually know if the last part of the first sentence "..by building and growing the Giveth platform (dapp)" is true for everyone with Giveth, it is clearly true for the DApp team. I think that building the future of giving is a lot more than JUST the tool to be used for accountability purposes, and yet that is quite CENTRAL to it all.

2.) Kris presents a counterpoint: "The Giveth ecosystem, of which the 'Giveth Dapp' is a part - at this point in time - is not targeting the masses, a larger -non tech- audience would indeed not see this as a proper product, but we're not targeting them, so this strategy makes the most sense to me."

My thoughts: True! We are not targeting the masses at this point in time, AND. It does not appear defined yet who we ARE targeting or how we'll reach them in a way that engages funding. Right now we are mostly engaging development.. the DApp's development is more essential than ever with the necessary bug fixes and requested feature bounties being highlighted, as planned, through our use.

So a more-defined strategy for Funding (and testing) these improvements to the DApp are vital to the galaxy's continuity and indeed need a bright spotlight, no matter who holds the roles involved or for how long.

3.) Re the further exchange, it feels like there are emotions and tensions around how the previous decision by the DApp team to meet with other collaborators and explore other funding opportunities was not made openly and inclusively that are clouding this subsequent effort to engage in the collective process.
With Kris' statement here: "It is the DApp team that decided to work with other teams, so that strategic decision is not a decision the Giveth team as a whole made. So this falls outside of any Giveth DAC strategy, comms or otherwise."

My thoughts are different here, I believe that this is a very important strategic and communications issue for all of Giveth. It will become part of the origin story, complete with hero's journey, how we (nearly?) cracked apart in the process of expansion and learned from our missteps by sticking it out together even as we also grow apart. This is open-source, it's community, it's human.... it gets messy at times. Like throwing a party, lol!

4.) Bowen does summarize the request clearly and expresses a position I do share: "I for one believe that we're all the same family and have similar enough goals to coexist under this same blanket, and would like some clarification on exactly what the tension is around the name? is it just the domain name entry point? can't this problem be solved by some direction in the presentation that happens when one lands at giveth.io? I am all for adding galaxy.giveth.io or some other thing to show the expanding universe, would that be enough?"
My thoughts, yeah, I think adding galaxy.giveth.io is a great alternative. And that we need to provide great directional options at the landing page.

5.) The feedback from Adam resonates strongly for me, and with BrightID positioned as it is - a Giveth incubated social coding project that is now a campaign being transparently funded through the DApp - I encourage everyone to hear it again: " I would like the high level site to show campaigns and to explain liquid pledging and prominently feature giveth's own initiatives. I like the new site, but it buries the liquid pledging aspect of giveth. It would be nice to show that the other initiatives we have built are using liquid pledging to make them even better."

FINALLY, hahaha! After reading the proposal carefully as it stands, I don't think a shift to "givethgalaxy.xx" would be a good move. I do feel strongly that giveth.io needs to offer a clear path to the DApp, slowed initially by an extra click (an acceptance to proceed to Beta), and then potentially with choices to proceed on different platforms if and when that becomes viable.

Josh makes the killer point. "you only get one chance at that initial launch publicity traffic". We don't know when we will launch publicly - but we are already live in Beta and planning fundraising activities to bootstrap us into that Launch. There will be those who want to fund the urgent technical challenges before us in Ethereum. There will be those who want to fund collaborative endeavors on other chains. And too, there are clearly those who want to support social impact initiatives regardless of platform.

The Giveth DAC, and the forthcoming Unicorn DAC, have seed funding but longevity with regenerativity is surely a goal. If our campaigns and milestones are not front and center, even those who would LOVE to support us, can't easily find out how to do so.
YES AND!