Iām feeling increasingly bad for the timing of my post as it seems everyone is on vacation or its their birthday. Though I think these conversations would be hard (but important) no matter what the timing actually is.
Thank you for bringing this up because I donāt think that has been communicated broadly about how this has happened, and how Aragon Black has worked as a partner with Aragon for a long time, reacting to feedback, changing directions, and ultimately working closely with the projectāeven dropping previous identity and taking on the Aragon name.
I recall at one point in one of the Nest conversations about Ryhope how we had discussed how the project could fit into the Aragon ecosystem, and how their were plans to raise external funds in an ICO, that didnāt align with the projects goals and was dropped, in favor of working more closely with Aragon long term and helping to build out a shared vision.
I think Yalda and some of the Autark members who were working on Space Decentral had a similar experience of giving up some of their vision to join the flock and align more closely with the ecosystem. And while I think its important to continuously balance and course correct the direction of Aragon as a whole, I also think that is important to recognize that where Aragon is today is not just because of A1 and its founders, but also to the broader ecosystem of people that have shown extreme dedication the cause, made significant sacrifices, and taken on specific risks.
One thing that I value about Aragon is that we are a community of missionaries and not simply mercenaries, and while I think it is important that we continue to improve our process and create structures that align incentives effective and create more accountability to the project as wholeā¦ we need to be careful to maintain that balance and continue to attract missionaries and enable them to thrive in this community.
I want to second and emphasize that I think that we should be trying to improve cross-team coordination and collaboration. We should be celebrating the ability for teams to identify issues and work together to ensure that the project as a whole is as successful as it can be, these instances should be celebrated first and foremost and not characterized as failureāeven if some aspect can and should improve.
In case the collaboration, particularly around the added scope of the pre-sale was more of a last minute rather than planned thing to help ensure the launch is both successful (includes necessary features functionality based on user feedback), and not delayed significantly. I think it was critical for this to happen, and I also think that its critical in general for the projects and teams to be less concerned with ālaunch what we have ready at this timeā or ālaunch what is on our checklistā but plan to allow for testing, documentation, and user feedback cycles within the scope of launches and deliverables.
My main frustration with the fundraising development so far is that the plan hasnāt really accounted for that timing (and I donāt blame anyone specifically for that, I think its an artifact of the process and pressures the process imposes rather than anyone specifically doing anything wrong).
That being said I really donāt like the framing/characterization of this collaboration on either side in this thread. I donāt think we want to be posturing here, or pointing blame. If we want to improve collaboration moving forward we need to identify issues, suggest improvements, and move forward in a collaborative spirit that builds trust between everyone involved (including ANT holders).