Erupting onto the Scene
If all goes well, IOTA will be erupting onto the tech scene within the next few years. It has been an experimental research project to this point in time, like all DLTs. Now, the esteemed staff of researchers seems to have the protocol on track to achieve Coordicide at some time in the medium term future – something that was never a certainty before, and remains to be seen.
However, if this works, IOTA will quickly enter the wider public stage as a legitimate 10x technology, and it’s never to early to contemplate what something like that means or how it might be handled by the community.
How the community reacts to upcoming developments will play a vital role in sparking interest, luring more talented developers, and ultimately resonating with people across the globe. The stakes are high when introducing novel technology, but it’s hard to even know where to begin! This piece will be an amalgamation of thoughts on how the IOTA community might approach thinking about gaining broader traction after the technology proves itself to be functional. Most ideas herein probably won’t be relevant, but the hope is that they can start a conversation now. Better to have collectively thought about these things in advance than be faced with them all at once in a moment of truth.
You can go the route of many failed endeavors – dryly explaining the name of your new thing, tossing out some buzzwords hoping one sticks, and inviting people to come learn about your thing on forums, chat rooms, or websites. But in the end, all you’ve done is made them briefly aware of yet another new distraction that they don’t have time to research, or reason to care about. And why should they? Competition for their limited time and energy is fierce, and you haven’t sparked any emotion, curiosity, or passion. You’ll have a potentially revolutionary technology on your hands. It’s about figuring out how to get it out into the world.
The alternative is to engage people. Start by identifying a similar thing that they already understand, we’ll call it a pre-existing conceptual framework, and teach them by superimposing your new thing onto this pre-existing conceptual framework. “Teach” is the operative word here, and doing so is easy because the work has already been started for you. You can just piggy back on an extant neural structure that was established by technologies of old. And now the most important part of the process: By dictating exactly how and where we decide to teach, we can promote emotional engagement, intellectual curiosity, and passion that spurs spontaneous action. This is the quintessence of evangelism.
If someone were to invent the greatest technology in human history, it would still fail to achieve its potential if the inventor and their community wasn’t able to engage people enough to care about it. Whether that be by touting its attributes or connecting with individual emotions, spreading the word is essential for the success of any undertaking. Until people feel visceral engagement, curiosity, and passion for IOTA, it remains “just another thing”.
Living in the digital age means that the tools at your disposal to lead an extremely inexpensive, authentic, engaging campaign that showcases this project to the world. Such a grass roots campaign can be totally decentralized among ourselves. We must be meticulous in our path to clear messaging. After all, the brand is the interface between IOTA and the world. IOTA has ostensibly done a wonderful job with B2B interactions and corporate collaborations, and it’ll soon be up to the community to take interactions to the wider public.
