About the Workgroup

The Monero Community Workgroup initially began as the Monero Marketing Workgroup in March 2017. Diego "rehrar" Salazar was interested in helping grow the Monero community, so he contacted Justin Ehrenhofer and set up the r/MoneroMarketing subreddit. At the time, the idea of a Monero marketing initiative shocked many in the community, who greatly appreciated Monero's general distance from the marketing efforts by many ICOs and scams around that time.

The Monero Marketing Workgroup focused mostly on preparing educational materials and getting people involved to work on Monero-related initiatives. Shortly after the workgroup began, it transitioned into an area that needed more love: community organization.

Up until this point, the Monero community was focused around the developer meetings and the r/Monero subreddit. While these are still highly relevant in the Monero ecosystem (for good reason), there wasn't a great way for people to stay updated with the latest news and to discuss non-development items. The Monero Community Crowdfunding System (at the time Forum Funding System) submissions weren't discussed in the same way that they are today, and there was no central Community Workgroup to help bring initiatives together. It was obvious that with a larger, more diverse Monero community, a dedicated set of resources would be necessary to connect all these projects together.

The Monero Marketing Workgorup became the Monero Community Workgroup during the first Community Workgroup meeting on 18 June 2017. These meetings have largely occurred every other Saturday ever since and serve as an essential community service to discuss CCS proposals, hear workgroup updates and news, and discuss new ideas. The Community Workgroup channel (#monero-community) is used for many other purposes, including other scheduled meetings on deemed-necessary items of interest and regular feedback, questions, and chat.

On 7 October 2017, the workgroup hosted its first Coffee Chat, a casual conversation covering the month's recent news and most important discussion topics. These Coffee Chats help humanize the Monero community, who until this point typically were only known by their pseudonyms. This YouTube channel began as the Fondajo channel, named for a now-defunct nonprofit idea, and is now entirely the Monero Community Workgroup's channel. This channel hosts the Monero Konferenco, Critical Decentralization Cluster at the Chaos Communication Congress, and Monero Village at Defcon livestreams and derived content. It also hosts Breaking Monero, a series that features members from the Monero Research Lab who discuss Monero's limitations.

A year after the Community Workgroup became its new name, the newly-founded Monero Outreach Workgroup took over many of its initial ambitions in June 2018.

In April 2019, the Monero Community Workgroup held an online event celebrating Monero's 5th anniversary. It featured physical meetups throughout the world (primarily in Vienna, Austria) and included nearly 6 hours of content.

The Workgroup has held several important meetings outside of the normal meeting schedule, including meetings on the future of Kovri, payment IDs, and Monero's mining algorithm. It continues to serve the community as the cryptocurrency ecosystem changes.