The Mad Hatter Announcement System, aka the Clean Cup Initiative

General
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Author: nonsensetwice#3475
Date Created: September 7, 2021

“Clean cup! Clean cup! Move Down! Move Down! Move Down!”
—The Mad Hatter, Lewis Carroll’s The Adventures of Alice in Wonderland

TABLE OF CONTENTS

I. Summary
II. The Clean Cup Initiative
III. Financial Implications
IV. Success Metrics or KPIs

BACKGROUND

You’re onboard with Web3. You’re onboard with DAOs. You’re not willing to sit back and watch the revolution. You want to be a part of it. And after much—or zero, as in my case—soul searching, you’ve decided to dive into BanklessDAO (bDAO) because, well, it’s fuckin’ BanklessDAO. You dive in, grab a Guest Pass (thanks First Quest and Mad Hatter!), and have spent no more than one week in the BanklessDAO Discord server. You’re excited. You’re ready. You’re going for it.

Then reality sets in.

Hundreds of channels, literally. Tons of projects. Many project and guild leaders and champions vying for your attention. Which is all okay to some extent, but what really hits you are the notifications.

Your phone will not shut the fuck up.

You’re tagged for project and guild updates. You’re tagged for DAO updates. You’re tagged for DAO events. You’re tagged for awareness around initiatives. You’re tagged for funding requests. You’re tagged because some asshat decides their shit is important enough to tag “@everyone.” And all of these tags come blazing through your phone’s notifications, drowning out everything else except maybe your company’s emails.

This is not what you expected. Nor is it what you want. You’ve contemplated muting the server. You’ve certainly turned off notifications for Discord. But as a result, you’re missing the important shit you want to be engaged with. Something has to change.

The reality is, nobody wants this. And that’s what this proposal is all about. Mad Hatter MGMT is interested in improving coordination in the bDAO Discord ecosystem, and notification management falls squarely within this scope. What if we could produce a notification system that minimizes the amount of hits you receive on your mobile and desktop devices while still delivering the wealth of information made available to all bDAO members at any given time?

We’d like to introduce to you the Mad Hatter Announcement System, otherwise known as the Clean Cup Initiative.

THE CLEAN CUP INITIATIVE

The idea is simple: projects, guilds, and individual members submit their announcements to Mad Hatter via a command/form, and Mad Hatter posts all announcements to a dedicated channel, pinging Level 1, Level 2, and Guest Pass members twice a day, once at 0 UTC, and again at 12 UTC.

At 0 UTC every day, the channel is wiped clean and the next day’s announcements are posted. Hence the “Clean Cup” nomenclature.

The initial MVP would require that all parties submit their announcements daily. MVP 2 will include automation for announcements that span multiple days.

BENEFITS & CONSIDERATIONS

The benefits of this system should be really clear. The setbacks will be many to start, as measures surrounding education will need to be implemented to ensure adherence to the system, but as we iterate over and improve the design, these will become few and far between. If approved, as a community, we will need to commit to the initiative, making it clear to every project lead, guild coordinators, and all members that this is the way by which announcements are made. Guild Coordinators, Organizers, and Talent Scouts will need to educate their teams on proper protocol for making announcements. If all goes well, we’ll have a much more effective system in place for making announcements DAO-wide within two seasons.

CALL-TO-ACTION

Make your voices heard! This is, after all, the Mad Tea Party, where anything goes. Provide your support, your contentions, your feedback. Provide your ideas on how this concept can be improved. Speak up! Mad Hatter MGMT exists to serve you, dear members of bDAO. Together, let’s make this the most accessible and welcoming workplace across the DAO spectrum.

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I love it and this is exactly what I need. Now that I read through it though, I was wondering if we can start with 1x announcement per day so it’s not so stimulating and dependng on how much submissions we get per day, then we proceed with 2x per day and see the difference.

Less stimulation, more space to think! Thanks for this feature! <3

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The reasoning behind running two pings a day is to make sure everyone globally is reached. Once a day and only the people who are awake during that time will receive the pings; for everyone else the pings will get lost in the mix of guild and projects tags.

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I love this initiative. Also, this solution would definitely scale across DAOs. I know of one too many DAO faced with this same issue

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this is an innovative which i believe will change the way information get dispersed to DAO members, the number of tags. and announcement across the DAO makes it difficult to track real and genuine information/announcement. this will make our lives easier and also give the confidence that all announcements gets to everyone. Hope the DAO gets this soon

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I vote to end notification whack-a-mole! I have more of the server muted than not at this point and I know I’m missing important stuff all the time. The tags have been out of control for a long time. Let’s please do this!

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I actually really like the announcement batch/queue idea. Training everyone will be tricky, but could be very beneficial.

Also it could allow content teams to have one place to pull from as well.

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Indeed, it will take time to bring everyone on board with the system. We estimate about two seasons’ worth of direction before everyone is submitting their announcements to Mad Hatter with very few, if any, rogue tags. Hopefully it doesn’t take that long, though. It will be nice if we can eliminate the tags altogether, to @Steff’s point above, when most have made it a habit to view the announcement channel as part of their daily catching up.

And that’s a great point regarding content and marketing. We can up the efficiency on those fronts.

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This is a great idea Nonsense. I’m just wondering why there is a need to clear the channel each day?
I often refer to key announcements a few times to check information so personally, I would rather it accumulated.

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Thank you, Trewkat! The idea behind clearing the channel each day is to make it easy to consume each day’s announcements. Given the varied amount of announcements, along with their varying length, one day’s announcements will likely exceed Discord’s limits on messages, requiring multiple messages to be sent to account for everything. As such, it may be challenging for many to determine where the top of the current day’s announcements begin, at a glance. While yes, everything is time-stamped, we want to make consumption of this content as easy as possible.

Perhaps, rather than accumulating content in one channel, we create a system that operates a rotating set of three to seven channels? Each day, a new channel is opened with that day’s announcements, and after three to seven days, that channel is removed, so the announcements category never exceeds more than a week’s worth of content?

We could also work on an archive of some sort. The daily announcement channel is wiped every day, but every day’s content is pushed to a table in Notion for records purposes.

Thoughts?

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Thanks - I agree it makes sense to keep it clean and easy.
I’m not sure about multiple rotating channels, but I like the idea of pushing them to a Notion page or set of pages (e.g. per season) as a view-only archive of the material.
Love your (mad) work!

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