Title: Content Gateway Season 3 Budget Proposal
Authors: @0xNSHuman
Date Created: 2021-12-10
Date Posted: 2021-12-18
SUMMARY
After releasing the Beta version of Content Gateway in Season 2 and having the aggregated data distributed to the first user-facing product, we are going to focus on growth towards being a platform for other projects in the DAO and organizations outside it, as well as adding new content to the system, which now has a good cost of implementation with our existing tools.
However, there are important considerations that affect our budget request.
WE CUT OUR FUNDING REQUEST BY 50%. WHY?
In Season 2, we deliberately kept all the roles assigned to just two contributors, because we believe in the power and productivity of small and highly-specialized core teams at the earliest stage of development. We achieved everything we wanted, and I’m convinced that the value DAO received is worth the BANK spent.
In Season 3, we couldn’t be more inviting to have new contributors take the tools we’ve built and start executing on many of the roles. However, we just started talking to the first potential contributors and it will take more time to onboard people and start distributing the workload.
This presents a challenge for us, because one of our biggest goals in Season 3 is to achieve self-sustainability and marketability for the platform, and we can’t just keep working on features 70 hours a week. Besides that, we need to allocate time for participation in the DAO and Dev Guild governance.
For these reasons, we’re seeing the need to manage expectations and risks until we have a clearer picture of what our new team is going to look like, how delegation of the scope will affect productivity (remember, bigger teams are often less productive, as counter-intuitive as it sounds), and what our market opportunities are.
With the intention to remain a long-term asset in the DAO, for optimally distributed pressure on the treasury, and for our own peace of mind, we’re asking for 50% of what our actual estimated budget is — 336,000 BANK.
We will focus on team growth and market orientation, and once we’ve onboarded more contributors and synchronized with them on the workflow and values — we will submit application for additional funding later in the season.
In addition to that, we have allocated 69,420 BANK from our Season 2 budget to use for contributor incentives, which is going to be carried forward to Season 3.
Total funding requested: 336,000 BANK.
SUMMARY OF ACTIVITIES IN SEASON 2
This season we started approaching the problem of content aggregation, organization, filtering and delivery in the DAO, to leverage all the individual guild and project outputs, maximize and multiply the value of the content produced, and ultimately enable any 3rd-party platform or application to build unique and rich consumer experiences on top of all this content, whether it’s isolated or combined together.
By the end of the season, we got our MVP complete, the system running, and the first DAO product built on top of it and distributed to initial group of users.
Our first batch of pilot integrations includes:
BANK Token Accounts and Transfers data
POAP Tokens, Events and Transfers data
BanklessDAO Website Content, including Newsletter, Announcements, Partner articles etc.
Bankless HQ Podcast videos, along with their metadata, stats and any intelligible descriptions/transcriptions
Bankless Academy courses with all the data and metadata to provide learning experience on any platform
Bounty Board data; applicable for read-only use cases only though
On the way to deliver this, we began researching a way establish references between all these data entities, so that in the future we can build a complete cross-product data collection for each DAO member that will let applications show all the content relevant to a particular user.
The full version of our most recent milestone update can be seen in the discord post here.
SEASON 3 PLANS AND GOALS
How and Why
Our Season 3 strategy relies heavily on the research and analysis that we’ve done recently, including discussions with other product teams and guilds, polls on the forum and internal roadmap prioritization.
Content & User Experience - Season 3 Sentiment and Priorities
Click here to see our full research post.
Our priorities for the upcoming season are derived from the diagram above and split into three categories. This is a favour to ourselves, because it increases our awareness about the work that has to be done outside just adding features on top of features, and lets us leave room for other things in the bigger picture. These categories are:
-
Implementations — well-researched features and system components that address certain product needs and add value to the system.
-
Research — mid-to-long-term infrastructure goals that have enough stakeholders and marketable applications to make them worth spending some time on. They can’t steal too much of our time, but we need to care about these to be able to make big moves sooner than later.
-
Growth — the things that push the project towards self-sustainability and opening new streams of revenue for the DAO, either through discovering market niches to sell to directly, of helping other products generate revenue indirectly.
Priorities
Implementations
-
Snapshot Governance Data Integration
- Have the snapshot proposal history and voting results included in the aggregated storage, and later connected to the notification engine to notify users about events.
-
Discord Server Data Integration
- Start collecting Discord server data, beginning with the records that apps can utilize, such as the announcements feed.
-
International Media Nodes Content Integration
- We have reached an agreement with some of the IMNs to introduce their translated content in Content Gateway, and link the translations to the original articles, as well as between each other, for easier delivery, enabling the apps to switch between languages on the fly. We are also looking to figure out ways to include metadata that will help IMNs promote themselves and possibly receive tips for their work from content consumers.
-
HQ Newsletter (Non-Premium) Integration
- We’re looking to expand the HQ content collection with the Newsletter items in addition to the Podcast.
-
Notification Generator and Events Pipeline Development
- Having fresh data records coming in every second from the different sources, Content Gateway can recognize and extract events from that data, and then send these events to users as push notifications, as well as to other systems that do their own magic, and so on. We are looking to create a platform capability to make this possible, so that every piece of data in Content Gateway can be turned into an actionable event.
-
Authorization and Content Gating
- We need to protect the system and some of its data from unauthorized access and modifications in order to enable more serious use cases.
-
Zapier Platform Connection Development
- Zapier is a platform that lets anyone automate tasks and build amazing workflows by connecting any two of 3000+ available integrated applications together to create something unique. With zero coding knowledge. This is huge, and we would like to connect Content Gateway to those 3000+ applications, so that our data can be fed into any pipeline. Skipping the code!
-
ENS Record Map Integration
- In order to make it easier for applications to translate your ENS name into Ethereum address / Twitter / Discord / Github and other supported records – and back – we are going to get the entire ENS record database in Content Gateway.
-
Community, Guild and Project Call Recordings Integration
- Ok, this is a last-minute idea that’s worth exploring and is technically a very low-risk opportunity. We can turn some of our public recordings into content pieces with a decent user experience around them. The biggest example is the Weekly Community Call. If we give applications a way to show them in a nice way and combine it with sponsorship opportunities — this presents education, promotion and monetization opportunities.
Research
-
Entity Relationship Standard
- Development and adoption of a cross-project entity relationships standard, to make it possible, for example, to link all the independent data sources to a certain DAO member.
-
Decentralization and Tokenomics
- Researching monetization and decentralization models that would let independent content producers monetize their work, and figuring out how can we distribute the storage and maintenance to make it more decentralized.
Growth
-
Attracting Content Integration Partners
- In late Season 2, we allocated 69,420 BANK for contributors that want to integrate new data sources into Content Gateway. We are carrying this amount to Season 3 and hoping to make this incentivization program a reality.
-
Attracting Application Developers
- Same as with data sources integration, we need to attract application developers that would add new products to the line that started with the Mobile App.
-
Contributor Onboarding and Support
- Our initial plan was to build a framework that other contributors can take over and build amazing stuff on top of it with us. We’re now going to work on making this a reality sooner than later, and dedicate a good amount of time to making newcomers happy and supported.
-
Out-of-DAO Outreach
- As we believe that Content Gateway can be valuable to organizations outside Bankless DAO, we’d like to start looking for opportunities to attract support for the project from such organizations, in order to reduce the possibly the pressure on out treasury and promote Content Gateway as a platform provided and maintained by Bankless DAO.
-
Developer Toolbox Improvements
- We’ve released API & SDK in Season 2 and are planning to work on feedback and various issues to make it a better tool to create integrations and applications with.
FINANCIAL IMPLICATIONS
The assumed hourly rate is 1,000 BANK / hour.
The assumed delivery period is 12 weeks.
Project budget breakdown by role:
-
Platform Growth Dude
- Duties:
- Outreach to other teams and organizations to promote Content Gateway as a way to present content on new platforms.
- Grow the network of partners and developers around the system.
- Work on monetization strategy.
- Collect feedback and translate product requirements to the team.
- Hours per week: 4.
- Weeks: 12.
- Role funding subtotal: 48,000 BANK.
- Assignee: @0xNSHuman.
- Duties:
-
Project Manager
- Duties:
- Manage roadmap and deliveries.
- Maintain weekly reporting to the DAO and represent the team.
- Organize meetings and coordinate discussions.
- Track compensation for contributors.
- Hours per week: 4.
- Weeks: 12.
- Role funding subtotal: 48,000 BANK.
- Assignee: @0xNSHuman.
- Duties:
-
Integration Coordinator
- Duties:
- Maintain high-level architecture consistency with outside world.
- Evaluate technical solutions based on priorities and risk tolerance.
- Coordinate communication and collaboration with the other teams.
- Manage integration priorities and verify the execution.
- Schedule and take part in the integration testing and delivery.
- Hours per week: 4.
- Weeks: 12.
- Role funding subtotal: 48,000 BANK.
- Assignee: @0xNSHuman.
- Duties:
-
Team Lead
- Duties:
- Maintain implementations aligned with the roadmap.
- Support other team members and eliminate blockers.
- Onboard contributors.
- Hours per week: 4.
- Weeks: 12.
- Role funding subtotal: 48,000 BANK.
- Assignee: @addamsson.
- Duties:
-
Software Architect
- Duties:
- Design system components according to the roadmap.
- Conduct research and lead the discussion around long-term priorities.
- Hours per week: 4.
- Weeks: 12.
- Role funding subtotal: 48,000 BANK.
- Assignee: @addamsson.
- Duties:
-
Software Engineer (Platform & Tools)
- Duties:
- Implement solutions according to system design and budget limitations.
- Create documentation for the tools facing 3rd-party developers and platform users.
- Participate in the discussions with the internal and 3rd-party teams.
- Hours per week: 28.
- Weeks: 12.
- Role funding subtotal: 336,000 BANK.
- Assignee: Contributor(s) to join or replace @addamsson.
- Duties:
-
Software Engineer (Integration)
- Duties:
- Integrate upstream systems (data / content sources) with Content Gateway.
- Assist and support CG SDK users with integration.
- Work with the rest of the core team on integration tool improvements.
- Hours per week: 8.
- Weeks: 12.
- Role funding subtotal: 96,000 BANK.
- Assignee: Contributor(s) to join or replace @addamsson.
- Duties:
Scope Total: 672,000 BANK.
Upfront ask: 50% of the Scope Total.
Total funding requested: 336,000 BANK.
SUCCESS METRICS OR KPIS
As in the previous season, the growth of the infrastructure is measured by the amount of data integrated, and more importantly the amount of data consumed via consumer-facing interfaces such as the mobile app.
-
Content producers integrated.
- Number of independent projects plugged-in and having their data passed through the gateway.
-
Content consumers connected.
- Number of products using the aggregated content API.
- Amount of data consumed via the API per a reporting period.
POLL
Do you support funding the growth, development and marketing of Content Gateway and Bankless Content Platform?
- SUPPORT
- DO NOT SUPPORT
