Nicodemus Rodriguez

Interim CC candidate - Nicodemus Rodriguez

Country of Residence United states Are you an individual or representing an organisation or a consortium of individuals or organisations? Individual Are you an Intersect member? Yes If you are an Intersect member, are you currently contributing to any working groups or committees? If so which? I am currently active in Intersect's Marketing Working Group and the Government Transparency Working Group. I also joined the DRep Working Group as I have recently registered as a Drep via GOVTools.

Please summarise your contributions to the Cardano blockchain, ecosystem, and community to date. My initial excursion into the Cardano ecosystem began in 2021, when Josh Jones, Co-Founder of the Cornucopias Metaverse gaming project, invited me to join the project’s creative and marketing teams. As the lead copy-writer and content developer for Cornucopias, I served as the liaison between the project’s team, and our base of users, NFT holders, and gamers — all communities within the Cardano ecosystem. During this time I developed a series of communication strategies based on the community’s concerns, pain points, and emerging cultural memetics. I spent equal time interacting with community members on Twitter/X, Discord & Telegram, and working closely with the Cornucopias team to develop marketing strategies for the project’s first 5 NFT mints, which collectively raised over 14 million in $ADA. Due to personal circumstances, I had to leave the project. It was a painful but necessary decision. Flashforward to the end of 2023 and Logan Panchot, Co-founder of the Clarity Protocol project, reached out to me via Twitter/X and invited me to work with Clarity as an intern. Over the last 7 months I have immersed myself in the world of decentralized governance in an effort to understand and communicate the particulars of Decentralized Autonomous Organizations—the governance parameters of which are not too dissimilar from those which constitute the Cardano blockchain’s proposed governance parameters. I am now working closely with the Clarity Protocol team as the project’s Social Media Manager, content developer, and community coordinator. I engage with the Clarity community daily via Twitter/X and Discord, and regularly contribute to community building efforts focused on governance, leadership, and a variety of entrepreneurial topics with representatives from our member DAOs. I am working closely with core team members to help streamline our communication strategies, and encourage community engagement in governance actions for Clarity DAO agora proposals, as well as on-chain Cardano governance initiatives, and participation in Intersect. As I explore my role at Clarity Protocol, it is only natural that I want to participate more fully in governance at the blockchain level and encourage others to do so. As of May, 2024 I have been working with the ADA GOATs as a member of the ScapeGoat Media team. My primary responsibilities are community engagement via Twitter/X and content development. I am working closely with the project’s founders to develop a social media communications strategy that stresses the importance of governance and community involvement in Intersect. Core team members have recently co-hosted IRL governance workshops along with Adam Dean, and our team’s artist participates in Intersect funded gatherings in the UK. Additionally, we are working on acquiring Intersect funding to host more IRL events. Our community has a wide global foot-print and my goal is to help the team make use of our base to promote participation in governance/Intersect and real world initiatives to promote the Cardano community’s IRL cohesion. As of May, 2024, Founder and CMO of Cardano Curation, Caleb Montiel, onboarded me as the agency’s Director of Messaging. In this role I support and direct Cardano Curation’s content development / messaging strategies. Our agency’s goal is to provide affordable, effective, and thoughtful content marketing media solutions for project founders within the Cardano ecosystem who may not have access to a large marketing budget. I look forward to contributing my expertise to Mr. Montiel’s agency so we can elevate & promote worth-while Cardano projects from across all verticals. We are both active members of Intersect and Mr. Montiel/Cardano Curation has recently been awarded Intersect’s Inclusion & Accessibility Grant. I have recently become a DRep via GOVTools, but I am learning how to deploy a SanchoNet node so I can contribute to the deployment of Cardano’s governance systems at a technical level. I am a “Founding Member of Intersect,” and regularly contribute to the Marketing Working Group. I am also a member of the Government Transparency Working Group & the DREP Working Group and look forward to contributing value in any way I can. Given that I currently work full time in the Cardano ecosystem as a “web3 content marketer,” I am in a privileged position to eat, breath, and swim through Cardano 24/7. I am confident that I would be able to leverage my level of community engagement into practical contributions to the constitutional deliberation process that will also help to ensure maximum representation for the various communities across Cardano that need it most.

With regards to the 5 measures of competency, and with regards to your contributions summarised in the previous question, please describe why people should vote for you. 1.) Robust operating model: As a social media coordinator and content marketing strategist, I have implemented a variety of operating models for social media marketing campaigns which have resulted in extremely successful sales: 14 Million in $ADA (Cornucopias NFT sales) + $10 Million USD (Clarity DAO Treasury / token launch). I prioritize assessing a system’s needs, and then sourcing solutions to increase overall operational efficiency, whether that’s by helping devs identify UI issues, or encouraging project founders to implement certain social media marketing best practices / procedures. If any given operating model within my competencies (and even some outside of them) can be made more efficient by tinkering with X,Y, or Z, I will keep complaining about it until it gets fixed and overall operational productivity increases by a (probably) considerable margin. 2.) Credential Management & Security: As a social media manager for various projects, I understand how important basic security measures like 2FA and proper credential management (password structure / storage) are to reduce instances of scammers and fraud. At a blockchain level, I understand that security is crucial to Cardano, and maintaining the chain’s integrity is of the utmost importance, however I lack the technical sophistication to realistically contribute to on-chain security efforts as of now. I will learn about whatever technical security / credential management systems I need to know about in order to operate as a functional member of this committee & contribute as much value as possible. Thankfully, I have recently become active in the Able Pool Discord so I can learn all the governance & security secrets directly from the living legends of the SanchoNet crew, like Johnny Kelly and Mike Hornan. 3.) Constitutional Review and Deliberation: I am no constitutional law expert or anything, but! I have a background in secondary education and have on more than several occasions taught social studies / history / civics students about the United States Constitution, the history surrounding its framing, and of course its founders. Part of my lesson plans have included dividing up the class into opposing factions of founders and helping students lead mock constitutional debates. So, I figure if I was able to help keep an orderly decorum among highschool and middle school students, I should be able to contribute value to this committee’s efforts. Perhaps more on point, I am also experienced in hosting creative writing workshops, during which the merits of any given piece can be vigorously debated for hours without ever reaching a consensus among poets. I think there is obvious overlap here and I’m not afraid to workshop, deliberate, peer-review, and refine any piece of constitutional content that comes my way. 4.) Knowledge of how to vote with respect to existing tooling and cip-1694: I am developing technical competency as a Drep so that I can fully commit to the governance process. While I am still developing my knowledge base, I have dedicated study time to, not only thoroughly understanding CIP-1694, but developing a streamlined series of visuals that will integrate and improve upon the visuals developed by the SanchoNet community. We need to make governance as easy to understand as possible, so when I get to the point that I understand CIP-1694 and all of Cardano's governance infrastructure from a story-teller's perspective—which is one of the things we really need to synonymize with Cardano governance: LORE—I will help lead the efforts to make sure EVERY MOOK ON CARDANO knows what the heck governance is, and what’s really at stake. 5.) You have expertise in communicating with the community: Yes. I love talking to people and I’m an empath so it’s easy to relate to folks. I love listening to others, and I’m not afraid to let them vent, speak their truths, or tell their long, meandering narratives. As a writer I encourage people to tell me what they really think, but also do my best to foster positive and productive conversations with individuals at a very personal, up-till-3am-CST level. I’ve recently become more active in community spaces on Discord and Twitter/X as a representative of Intersect and encourage community members to get involved in governance to whatever extent possible. I am also a copywriter by trade, so people do pay me for my expertise as a communicator. That’s how I earn a living!

Why is decentralized governance important to you? Decentralized governance is the counter-revolutionary force that has emerged as the collective consciousness’ last-minute immune response to ensure planet Earth’s probabilistic worldline steers away from global tyranny and toward maximized personal freedom. I believe in a fair, sustainable, and widely prosperous SolarPunk future, and I believe the decentralized governance made possible through Cardano is KEY to making it happen.

What perspective would you bring to the committee if successful? am a storyteller and educator. I’m a listener, and an empathic thinker. I’m a humanist, I believe in the better angels of human nature, but know that we must be ever ready to counter our demons. I have focused my entire intellectual/professional life on figuring how to properly communicate with others, as a teacher, writer, and marketer. However, now I would like to know how to communicate as a representative of the many communities spread across the Cardano Universe I’ve come to love. I will bring an influx of perspectives from these communities and fight like hell to make sure we develop into a fair, communicative, and transparent governance structure that doesn’t turn into a digital oligarchy. To wit, the perspective I will bring to the committee is: ⧝⧝⧝Centralized, oligarchical power—bad⧝⧝⧝ ⧝⧝⧝Decentralized, community-held power—good⧝⧝⧝ Balance is crucial. Old world solutions will not fix new world problems.

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