Lines in the Snow
The full article was originally published by HelloIOTA. Read the full article here.
In our September piece titled Erupting onto the Scene, the subject was broached: how should we, as a community, be thinking about IOTA. How should we present it to newcomers and potential interested parties?
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 too 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.
The piece was meant to be a starting point for the community. It was suggested that it might be prudent to begin thinking about the terminology and concepts that IOTA might need to use after Coordicide has been completed, and a new influx of IOTA-interested participants arrives. It’s a conversation starter, and the first attempt at drawing some lines in the snow, if you will. We’re only here to get the lines started, though, and the hope was that the community would engage to create some dialogue around the ideas therein.
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”.