Announcement: New Lab Updates

Update: The first Session Lab Update can be found here.

The Lab Update is a treasured part of the history of our project, we have been doing them every single week for well over four years. With that being said, the Lab Update isn’t perfect — some of you have mentioned it is too same-y, a week isn’t a long enough time to show real progress, they don’t generate enough discussion about the project, and they don’t really give the community a chance to have a say in what’s going on or ask questions. 

We feel these flaws from the inside as well, the Lab Update takes up a good chunk of time every week, and progress on any given project usually tracks across at least a few weeks, so it can be tough to keep the update feeling fresh and relevant. 

But really, what is the Lab Update supposed to be? It is supposed to be a bridge between the team and the community, to provide transparency about our work, progress, and plans. Recent feedback from the community and the team made us question whether the current set-up was the best way to achieve that.

There’s a better way to provide updates to the community — and we are going to do that starting from now. 

What’s the new update going to look like? 

The New Updates™ will be bigger, better, and more packed with information. 

The Update will now be introduced with comments from Chris’ desk, providing a more top-level review of the goals and direction of the project before diving into the more specific work of tech and marketing.

The dev section will still contain information about what development progress has been made, but with an added focus on highlighting key progress and milestones that have been hit.  

We will be doing the same thing on the marketing side, leaning more into project summaries of major marketing activities, as opposed to honing in on highly granular day-to-day activities. This means that marketing updates might start to look a bit more ‘hype-y’, but importantly they will also be a lot clearer and concise — giving you a much better insight into the main goals and activities that we are doing in marketing. 

We have some other things we are considering, which we want to get community feedback on before implementing.

The new updates should be more community-inclusive, so we may open a new ‘Question Box’, where throughout the month our community members can pose questions—related to the project or otherwise—to the team. The most popular, interesting, and insightful questions will be answered in the update!

Another option is the addition of a monthly community stream. This would not necessarily be a Q&A format every month, but it can be a space for information to be discussed and revealed to the community in a more informal way. 

For practical reasons, updates will be once a month instead of once a week from now on. We want to emphasize that this change doesn't signify a reduction in our communication with the community; rather it is a commitment to sharing even more with you.

The first edition of the new update will be launching in December. Given the timing with the transition to Session Token, it’s important to make sure that our community updates are as high quality and approachable as possible. We of course welcome any and all feedback, but think that this will make the Lab Updates more bullish than ever.