Season 8 Budget Proposal for Bankless Publishing

Grants/Funding Season 8 Proposals
1

Bankless Publishing

Project Champion: Trewkat#1933
Squad: HiroKennellyᵍᵐ🏴#0001, Kornekt🏴#2334, Frank America#0610
Authors / Editors: Trewkat, HiroKennelly

Purpose: For-profit AND Public good
Affiliation: Writers Guild, Design Guild

Date created: March 23, 2023
Date posted: April 3, 2023

Funds requested: 999,978 BANK
Project wallet(s): 0xD26b6De62363Ce83d4fA6362Da283594d0DF4EcC

Writers Guild Discord server: https://discord.gg/TKtMnMwqPY

PROJECT TEASER

Via our decentralized submission process and quality-focused workflow, Bankless Publishing ships articles designed to inform, investigate, educate, and entertain audiences who want to learn more about going Bankless and other opportunities afforded by the technologies underpinning web3.

SUMMARY

For Season 8, Bankless Publishing is requesting 999,978 BANK based upon projected expenses and our existing multisig balance.

In Season 8, Bankless Publishing will continue to grow its readership, cultivate talent, and work towards project self-sovereignty. We will focus our energy on developing Bankless Publishing as the home for both introductory ‘101’ content and subject matter expertise. We are always looking to expand the number of editing and social media roles available to contributors, further decentralizing the project to enable a greater number of members to help us further the Bankless Publishing mission.

S7 RETROSPECTIVE

  • We have shipped two articles every week on the Bankless Publishing website. This has enabled us to give new life to educational content from previous bDAO newsletters as well as publish original content from new authors. This cadence will continue in Season 8.
  • We have resurrected the BanklessDAO Mirror page by shipping a Crypto Basics Series article each Monday. Publishing on Mirror allows readers to mint the article as an NFT to help build their crypto reference library, while bringing in a small amount of revenue to Bankless Publishing. We plan to serialize more of our content in Season 8 via Mirror.
  • The Bankless Publishing audience is steadily growing. The number of Twitter followers has reached 790 — on track to smash the Season 7 KPI (grow to 900 followers from baseline of 565). Our Telegram group currently has 58 members.
  • We’ve grown our Twitter audience thanks to the regular high-quality content, but also by producing informative Twitter threads about published articles and tweeting content from other outlets as a way of demonstrating our leadership in this space.
  • The Bankless Publishing Recap newsletter has continued during Season 7 — this pithy and potent combo provides more than 19,400 bDAO Substack subscribers with summaries and links to the latest of our published articles.
  • We’ve strengthened the connection between this season’s BanklessDAO Writers Cohort and Bankless Publishing by introducing a streamlined editing workflow for any Cohort pieces submitted and accepted for publication.

FINANCIAL IMPLICATIONS

SEASON 8 ROLES

Lead Staff Editor

  • Assess incoming article submissions in terms of required editing lift and writing style.
  • Manage the Kanban board and ensure accepted articles move through the editing process in a timely manner.
  • Post editing opportunities for qualified BP Editors tag holders and ensure equitable assignment of editing tasks.
  • Act as central point of contact for submissions of the editing tests by prospective staff editors.
  • Take notes at the weekly BP working session.

Content Managers (3)

  • Website management.
  • Attract and engage advertisers/sponsors.
  • Overall strategy / content placement.
  • Work with current authors to get articles ready for publication.
  • Cover design coordination (working with bDAO designers to get a custom cover).
  • Final edits and tweaks of the article for quality assurance (QA) and SEO, draft article tweet and social preview copy.
  • Shipping on Medium, banklesspublishing.com, and Mirror.

Treasurer

  • Work with Content Managers to ensure proper bounty input, and execute payments fortnightly.

Social Media Lead

  • Develop and maintain a Twitter strategy, plus other platforms such as LinkedIn.
  • Produce high-quality, consistent threads of articles.

PER ARTICLE BOUNTIES

Writers

  • Writers may submit an article for consideration at any stage during the season. If accepted for publication, the writer will work with the assigned content editor to finesse the piece for publication.

Content Editors

  • Having passed the Content Editing Test, work with the submitting author to improve thesis, structure, cohesion, topic coverage, and flow.
  • Ensure article text aligns with the current Editing Framework, while contributing to the continual improvement of this framework.

Copy Editors

  • Having passed the Copy Editing Test, proofread assigned articles and edit the copy, ensuring aspects such as linked references, grammar, capitalization, and punctuation are correct, and clarity of expression is excellent.
  • Ensure article text aligns with the current Editing Framework, while contributing to the continual improvement of this framework.

Cover Designers

  • In consultation with Content Managers, design and produce cover artwork and / or graphics for articles published by Bankless Publishing.

Compensation Breakdown

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SEASONAL KPI

  • Grow Twitter to 1,200 followers.
  • Attract one sponsor for website or BP Recap newsletter.
  • Reach 75 mints across all Mirror articles.

COMMITMENTS

In Season 8, Bankless Publishing will continue to expand and evolve the brand through several initiatives to grow our audience, reach new markets, and attract quality writers, editors, and designers who can help to create content that is both engaging and informative.

These initiatives are also intended to attract sponsors for the Bankless Publishing brand and to foster a sense of community among our readers, supporters, and contributors. With these goals in mind, we look forward to establishing a strong presence in the web3 publishing space.

By attracting sponsors and exploring paid content options, we aim to support operations and potentially bring in revenue. However we feel also that this project meets the definition of a public good as it fulfils the DAO’s mission to help the world go Bankless by creating user-friendly onramps for people to discover decentralized financial technologies through education, media, and culture.

BRANDING

Bankless Publishing leverages the BanklessDAO brand through retention of the Bankless concept and by maintaining a strong presence on the DAO’s social media channels. We aim to continue this strong trend and enhance ties with Bankless entities.

FURTHER PROJECT CHANNELS

Project Notion Page
Pitch Deck

Websites:
https://banklesspublishing.com
banklessdao.mirror.xyz
BanklessDAO Medium

Do we have your support for this Season 8 budget proposal?

If you decide to vote No, please leave a comment detailing your objection – we’d love to change your mind if we can. :slightly_smiling_face:

  • Yes, I support this proposal
  • No, I do not support this proposal
  • I abstain, but understand my vote contributes to quorum

0 voters

5 Likes
2

Hi @Trewkat Thank you for this very clear proposal!
I see on the pitch deck, I see that Bankless publishing works with other protocols. Can you tell me a little more about this? Specifically, if the Bankless brand/name is extended to them for use through the content produced

1 Like
3

Thank you :slight_smile:
That refers to what has been traditionally known as the Client Services part of Bankless Publishing (spearheaded by @FrankAmerica) and is what we call it when we write and publish an article that is sponsored i.e. paid for by the external party.
The most recent example is this Vertex article: Is Vertex the Future of DeFi? - Bankless Publishing
but you can see others on the pitch deck.
I suppose you could say that the Bankless brand is extended to them through association - the fact that the article is published on BanklessDAO platform. However we make it clear at the base of the article that the material has been sponsored.
image

It’s worth noting that all potential clients are considered for value alignment - if it is not a good fit the relationship is not pursued.
Also, client services revenue is shared with the DAO (10% back to vault).

2 Likes
4

Thanks for responding so quickly! Initially, I had abstained, not wanting an outstanding question to not count for quorum. But I am now able to vote yes! Thank you for all of the great articles. I have earmarked a few to read during gap week!

1 Like
5

That is AWESOME feedback, thank you :star_struck:

6

Hi @Trewkat could you please provide a description for each role
Also the accounting breakdown
Additionally a description for this transaction, where Bankless publishing (and writers guild) each sent 35,000 BANK to this address. I am not seeing a role that would receive a 35,000 payment GnosisSafeProxy | Address 0x4126c203a7049246bda9031198ddfd7f465404a3 | Etherscan

7

There is a description of each role and an accounting breakdown included in the proposal.

The transaction you refer to is for the Web3 Wayfinder project which was included on our Season 7 budget (known then as Web3 Toolkit).

Writers Guild and Bankless Publishing are co-funding this project which will produce a connected series of short definitional pieces on key web3 terms.

1 Like
8

I see the breakdown per role. I don’t see what each of the 3 content managers does.
Specifically I am looking for an accounting sheet with the breakdown of who BANK is getting distributed to and for what.

9

The content managers share those duties as listed in the proposal. We publish two articles and a Mirror post weekly and a newsletter every two weeks. The work involves publishing the pieces but also prepping for the upcoming pieces, so it’s shared.
We don’t make role holders count every task but you can see all bounties paid on this Notion page: https://www.notion.so/bankless/b417183c1cdb4ee180f72757da75e5d3?v=1dc7d98a4b6a4d83b3f9d824287a9786

1 Like