There are some crazy theories and assumptions based on faulty or just too little information about not only ARK but the Lisk communities inner workings, so I decided to give a quick overview of how the ARK team has formed and why. I tried to make it as factual as possible, correct me if you see a factual mistake.
At the very beginning of Lisk when the ICO just begun and people started to gather in Lisk Chat, malreynolds organized a group of people called Trusted Delegates. The TDs original goal was to find trustworthy Lisk supporters to run the Lisk delegate nodes. The initial the main effort was to exlude sockpuppets, people trying to run multiple delegates. For this reason the initial TD members were those with history on BCT and/or meaningful continuous involvement in Lisk chat. The group formed and as these things go, it got more organized, rules and guildelines were made, members supported each other, some members become inactive while others joined, a community was forged (pun intended).
And what an active community it was and still is. The private channel had many times the activity of all of the public channels combined, because it was such a good group of people that we all fealt comfortable talking in there even on subject that belonged to the public channels. Max, Oliver, Joel, isabella and fixcrypt were also in the channel for many months. They only decided to exclude themselves later on when we started concentrating on voting power because they felt -and rightly so- that discussion about our voting strategies should not include them.
This group stayed strong long after forging delays were announced throught the closing of the private channels in Lisk chat (our fault, sorry, we should have been more active in public channels), and remained very active, rebranded to GDT (Global Delegate Team).
The beginning of ARK were just some off and on brainstorming session on a remote slack channel (#sharktank, I think), that slowly grown by then (again) including fixcrypt who just parted ways from Lisk. Anyone from GDT was welcome to participate and many did. A new Slack was created with open invitations to all GDT members and those who joined now known as the ARK Crew, I think it was almost 50 members. Discussion continued and the most active from these group, those who at the time had the interest and the time to actively work on a new project became the Ark Founding Team that has 25 members.
So we didn't built such a big team from nothing, but formed from an already select and battle tested larger group. We didn't even assign former roles to each other we just contributed wherever we felt we could make the most of our abilities. We weren't all large holders who wanted to take over, or replace Lisk. We just had an idea in our daily interactions and we had the will, the time and energy to make it into a reality.
Today GDT is still by far the largest and best organized group in the Lisk community and still supports Lisk and includes most of the people who long time supporters, made tools for Lisk, run it's testnet and mainnet delegates.
ARK members are still GDT members (amongst the most active members in fact), we are just sub group with a side project. Others has other involvement outside of Lisk, ours just more noticable being a Lisk fork and because of fixcrypt as a developer.
So any claims that ARK tries to overtake, replace, etc Lisk is just silly. Harming Lisk would be harming ourselves. Of course if you ask various members the exact interpretation of this statement may vary because we have different views on Lisk after 8 months of involvement, but that's just shows that ARK as a group has no agenda for or against Lisk. Individual members...you will have to ask them personally.
Source:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1649695.msg17201069#msg17201069
