Creation of the Writer's Guild

Archive
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Sponsor: frogmonkee #6855
Co-Sponsors: totehoser#9975, bg999#6547, crayonz#3427
Date: May 6th, 2021
DAO Proposal - Writers Guild

WRITERS GUILD

SUMMARY

We propose the creation of a Writer’s Guild, a loosely organized collective open to anyone that wishes to be recognized as a writer. The guild will be a community resource. Effectively a labor pool for anyone to tap into.

BACKGROUND

What is the Writer’s Guild?

The Writer’s Guild represents a group of Bankless community members that are willing to produce written content for the crypto community. It is open to anyone that wishes to join, no qualifications or pre-requisites.

Why do we need a Writer’s Guild?

Creating a Guild gives writers in the ability to group together and gives the community direct access to a source of skilled labor.

Who would use the Writer’s Guild?

Below is a sample of possible needs:

  • DAO-native initiatives: product launches, newsletter contributions, rewrites of outdated content, copy editing
  • Third party content sites/creators working with the BanklessDAO community
  • Personal projects
  • Competitions with prizes & judged by BANK holders

How would I use the Writer’s Guild?

By submitting requests on a Bounty Board that could look like:

1600×495 161 KB

Source: 1Hive

Each bounty should be seeded with some amount of compensation, denominated in $BANK. This money can come from initiatives funded by the treasury or third parties seeding with their personal funds.

These bounties can be claimed by anyone (even outside the Writers Guild). Bounty owners must then approve/deny the claim. Members of Writing Guild will have a record of previous work, letting owners curate the quality of their posts and allowing for future specialization on topics and types of written pieces.

For now, we propose that bounties can only be posted by BanklessDAO members and media nodes. We can expand later as we see fit (thank you @wolfehr for this suggestion).

MOTIVATION

It’s sensible that a movement started through a newsletter has many strong writers. Our main motivation is to organize that talent and make it easily accessible. If the Bankless movement continues to dominate in the crypto media space, written content will remain in high demand. Newsletters, blogs, media coverage, etc. A long term goal would be to see the Writers Guild turned into a fully fledged marketplace for DeFi content creation.

If the Writers Guild proves beneficial, then the model could be expanded and modified for any skill set, including development, design, marketing, tutorials, etc. All of this work could be collaboratively with the participants being fairly compensated.

SPECIFICATION

  • N/A

NEXT STEPS

  • Create a #writers-Guild channel & label on Discords
  • Create a bounty board and formalize any rules and operating practices
  • Include in a newsletter
  • Spreadsheet

CONCLUSION

We’d like to create a Writer’s Guild, a loose collection of community members that are volunteering to write. At this stage, BanklessDAO is a media organization and written material is the bread and butter of what we do. To produce the eventual swell of content, having an organized labor pool will be a valuable resource to everyone in the community. In time, we hope to see the Writer’s Guild specialize and diversify around what the community needs.

SPONSOR BACKGROUNDS

  • frogmonkee - Pseudonymous writer. Wannabe dev.
  • bg999 - Ethereum explorer. Writer.
  • Crayonz - background in philosophy and creative writing (fiction); I’m currently writing my first novel, which largely centers around an angry Wizard named Chris, who curses a lot and is, at least in the first chapter, seen to throw poop at another character. I’m studying crypto and the associated econ theory, but only since January.
  • totehoser - I like DeFi and I write good.
  • Yes
  • No

0 voters

7 Likes
2

I support this. Further proposals can set budgets and parameters and the like. I’d like to see this moved to snapshot quickly.

3 Likes
3

@AboveAverageJoe
Give it another 24 hours of deliberation, then move to vote? We can rush this since it costs almost 0 resources.

5 Likes
4

This sounds great and I’d vote yes.

Where would the bounty board be hosted? A part of the bankless.community website (e.g., adding a bounties tab to the top nav)?

It’d be cool if there was a way for the person submitting the bounty to put the reward in escrow and then have it automatically delivered to the person claiming the bounty once the bounty owner approvers the claim. Obviously not at all a requirement; would just be a cool use of smart contracts and help ensure that everyone submitting a bounty is able to pay the reward. You could even do something like if the bounty owner doesn’t approve or deny the claim in X amount of time the reward is automatically release from escrow.

3 Likes
5

@wolfehr
To your first question, we can create something in Trello or Notion for now. Link to it on our website somewhere, but start small.

There are a bunch of different ways we can incorporate smart contracts. A partially fleshed out bounty board could look some like:

  • Bounty owner places compensation in an escrow contract
  • Both bounty owner and bounty collectors stake some $BANK. Owners are staking their ability to make fair and rational judgements on scope and quality of work. Collectors stake on the quality of their work.
  • After completion, owner releases funds (or not). Both parties can slash the others stake at the cost of their own (ie. If we both place 50 $BANK as stake, then I can slash your 50 at the cost of 5 (or 10 or 25) or my own and vice versa. This is something https://numer.ai/ is working on, I think.)
  • And disputes can be escalated to a decentralize arbitration court, like Kleros or Aragon Court.
4 Likes
6

The Trello option would be an excellent one for those of us in that application in RL.

3 Likes
7

@frogmonkee Love it! One more suggestion… maybe the ability to create bounties should be restricted to BanklessDAO members and media nodes. I think that could be a good value proposition for becoming a media node (i.e., access to the BanklessDAO writer’s guild).

5 Likes
8

this makes great sense to me.

1 Like
9

@frogmonkee great idea, thanks for getting this up and running! I voted and signed up on the spreadsheet.

1 Like
10

I agree, love Trello and happy to contribute with research

11

Trello is cool, big fan of Notion too, be great to contribute (been writing about Bankless on my newsletter https://www.getrevue.co/profile/patey/issues/creating-becomes-decentralized-584660)

12

Great stuff! Looking forward to participating.

1 Like
13

Something else I was thinking about was a way to allow for back and forth ‘discussions’ during the editing process. I’ve no idea how it would work in the code, but it would be helpful for the bounty owner to be able to ask further tweaks to a document after receiving the document/project back.

That said, something like that can’t go on infinitely…there needs to be a set limit on these sorts of requests.

2 Likes
14

Good thinking.

My hunch is that eventually we’ll have coordination between different SME guilds and soon bounties will include requests for people from the editors guild, graphics guild, and writer’s guild all in one place.

Until then, we’ll try to establish some baseline rules for how bounties will be processed. Ie. We’ll have steps like Outline, Draft1, Edits, Draft2, etc.

1 Like
15

Ah. Interesting thought about specific SME groups. I wonder if it will actually splinter that far?

I like the idea of an ‘outline’ for the process. That’s what I was talking about.

16

@crayonz @ToteHoser @AboveAverageJoe @wolfehr @paulapivat @0x_Lucas

I have an alternative implementation plan. This proposal isn’t really a proposal as much as a mandate that says, “You will organize in this way.”
As such, I don’t think we need to waste time with voting with $BANK. This forum soft-vote should be enough.

We should consider this passed and start working on the bounty board. Thoughts?

4 Likes
17

Let’s get to it. Clearly we all think this is the way to go.

2 Likes
18

Agreed. I think we keep the good momentum we’ve built up and start working on the next thing.

1 Like
19

I’m in the Messari analyst program. For research articles, it’s basically a Messari employee editing the analyst. Write-ups are shared via Google docs and there’s a standardized image / chart format. It’s been a pretty collaborative process and the feedback has been quite helpful especially for someone like myself who hasn’t been writing research pieces for awhile.

1 Like
20

let’s move forward.

but, i’m also curious what all needs to be happen to bring this to an actual vote and then what will change once that happens? i assume it’ll require a completed plan, including bounty board and the process/structure.

i’m also curious what all needs to be codified now and what can be added/modified later?