‘Technology is not enough’: George Siosi Samuels highlights importance of community on The Bitcoin Bridge

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When you take blockchain and community building together, what you end up with is something called a “meta-community.” And with years of industry experience under its belt, community tech consultancy Faiā knows what it takes to create a successful—and meaningful—meta-community. 

Faiā Managing Director George Siosi Samuels joined The Bitcoin Bridge to talk about the real meaning of community building and why cutting edge technology alone is not a guarantee of success.

“A meta-community is an ecological term used to describe communities within an ecological setting, different diverse species, et cetera, and sort of the interactions and behaviours between all of those different groups,” Samuels explained. And among the behaviours that are now prevalent within these meta-communities are the desire for more decentralization and ownership of data, just to name a few. 

Notably, Mark Zuckerberg recently elicited some groans and raised eyebrows with his move to rebrand the Facebook company into Meta. While Samuels admits he had a similar reaction, he points out that the move has done a good job at raising attention. 

“By doing this now, a lot more people are asking things like ‘What is the metaverse?,’ ‘What is blockchain?,” Samuels explained. “Because they realize that in this space, blockchain actually becomes a part of the trust layer for this emerging space.” 

So how exactly does Faiā differ from other tech consultancies? 

Samuels explained that Faiā purposely leads with community culture, in contrast with most companies who lead with and implement their own tech solutions. But he says that if there’s anything he learned from working with large organization, it’s that technology is usually just 10 to 20% of the problem.

“It was all of the people stuff thereafter that was the biggest hurdle, what required the most coordination and management, because you’re dealing with the psyche of a group of people, you’re dealing with belief systems, you’re dealing with all of these internal things that will either make the adoption easier or quicker.” 

Samuels goes on to say that a lot of this could be said about the BSV ecosystem as well. He said that this ecosystem has a lot of people who come from a traditional background, people who put most, if not all, of their faith in the technology aspect of things.

“I come from a background where I know that technology is not enough,” Samuels declared. 

Of course, the first step in building a successful community is knowing what kind of dynamic or profile to aim for. And for this, Faiā uses inspiration from the popular show “Avatar: The Last Airbender” by using the four basic elements to characterize communities.

Samuels explained that air cultures, for example, focus on ideas and seeing the big picture, while fire cultures are very people oriented. Then, there are the earth cultures, which are more grounded and centered around customer support. And finally, Samuels said that water cultures are more concerned with transactional relationships or the so-called “masses.” 

By simplifying and classifying communities into these four elements, Faiā has a clearer picture of how they can successfully come together into a successfully meta-community. 

“We take them through a process that we’ve seen with many others before, but in a very sort of symbolic way, with very simple elements that people know and understand, and just attach more relevant definitions to it based on them wanting to build communities in this space.”

Find out more about Faiā’s community micro-accelerator program on The Bitcoin Bridge with Jon Southurst. Watch his full interview on the CoinGeek YouTube channel.