The Whitepaper Reading Club

A year in Web3 feels like ten outside.

New narratives emerge seemingly out of nowhere each week and die out just as quickly. The "fear of missing out" hits hard, so we do everything we can to try and keep up, sometimes at the expense of our sanity. To make the problem worse, the noise-to-signal ratio is at least 10x for every next shiny thing we chase after.

A group of us started to reject this idea. Instead of speeding up to superficially keep pace with ever-expanding narratives, we wanted to slow down and appreciate how things work under the hood.

Hence, the Whitepaper Reading Club (WPRC) was formed one year ago.

Who are we?

Once every three weeks, I get together with a bunch of "nerds" to discuss and debate specific topics in Web3 after reading up on said topics.

Think of it like a Web3 book club, but the "books" here are whitepapers, protocol documents, and even proposals for decentralised autonomous organisation (DAO). We come from all walks of life—founders, engineers, product developers, community builders, regulators, economists, merchandisers, content creators, VCs, etc. You name it.

Our session last week marked the first anniversary of the Whitepaper Reading Club and saw the largest turnout, with 36 participants out of 41 sign-ups.

The best part?

It was all organic! There were no incentives or shills; everyone from all walks of life was just here to have a good time geeking out!

Looking back

We started out as a group of 10 with an open roundtable discussion format to encourage active participation and discourse by all members.

Anyone can step up to guide the discussion, provide context, illustrate their points, etc.

We did not think many people would be keen on this format given the effort required to participate, but today, we have 160 members who joined organically after hearing about the fulfilling experiences and fun of other participants.

To date, 16 sessions have been conducted, and we are grateful that the community opened up their office spaces, volunteered their time to create summarised reading materials, and helped guide the discussion for every session.

The experience of the WPRC would surely have been less enjoyable without the highly engaged participants in our community.

Scaling the experience

As our community grew, we started thinking about how to scale while retaining the essence of small-sized roundtable discussion formats.

There were several pain points we wanted to solve.

• Given that roundtable discussion formats work best for group sizes of ~10, how do we address the current growing demand?
• There are costs involved in running each session (however minimal). How do we ensure this community is sustainable, and are there ways to monetise?

The following were non-negotiable for us.

• All participants shall continue to have a voice at the discussion table—i.e. no panels, presentations, or any other types of monologues.
• Individually opinionated but collectively neutral: Every bona fide Web3 project has a right to exist.
• Monetisation is secondary, the experience comes first.

Over the past few weeks, some of the stronger ideas started floating to the top.

• Addressing growing demand: Higher frequency sessions with smaller groups.
• Expanding our audience: Streaming our sessions to a live audience who may only wish to tune in and not participate in the discussions.
• Productising the WPRC experience: Starting with a dedicated forum to share our pre/post session thoughts (https://wprc.circle.so) and exploring a "WPRC-GPT" concept subsequently.
• All 3 above: Organising a Whitepaper Reading Conference.

The Whitepaper Reading Conference

This is a day for everyone to slow down and truly catch up.

Multiple WPRC sessions will happen concurrently, and participants will sign up for the ones they are interested in. Ideally, participants will actively engage in deeper discussions around 3-4 topics each. Because each group will be limited to a small size (e.g., 10), each participant must read up adequately before showing up or risk being doxxed as a "free-rider."

Towards the end of the conference, each group will share their newfound understanding of their respective topics with everyone else attending via one of the following ways.

1. Each group will take the stage to summarise their respective topics, with 15 minutes allocated per topic.
2. Free-and-easy conversations at a non-noisy and spacious afterparty location, allowing clusters to form organically.

Event sponsors will list their topics as one of the choices, and their representatives will join their respective discussion groups.

The representatives will serve primarily as fact-checkers and Q&A points to preserve the participants' organic interaction (vs. top-down).

Now, let's imagine this conference will occur just before a major global crypto conference (e.g., Token2049, Devcon, Coinfest, etc.).

The result?

• Attendees walk away smarter without feeling FOMO because "everyone else is here too"
• Projects create new ambassadors, not just short-term users

These attendees are now newly minted ambassadors of projects who are ready to engage more meaningfully at the major global crypto conference.

So, Dear Web3 Projects,

Instead of sponsoring side events with low ROI because almost no one attending is interested in the topic being talked about and is only there for the booze, why not give this a shot?