Writers Guild Season 7 Budget

Grants/Funding
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Writers Guild Season 7 Budget Proposal

WRITERS GUILD MULTISIG

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SUMMARY

The Writers Guild formally requests 993,000 BANK for Season 7.

SUMMARY OF ACTIVITIES IN SEASON 6

During Season 6, the Writers Guild focused on building strong vibes in our community, educating current members through live editing sessions, writing challenges, and other opportunities, onboarding new talent to our projects, spinning up a new project, tentatively titled the Web3 Toolkit, and further refining our governance practices.

The Office of Talent Management focused on onboarding new members to our Guild and projects, nurturing the growth of existing contributors, and maintaining and promoting the vibes throughout the Guild.

Marketing continued its regular cadence of tweets for all five newsletters, writing tweet threads for our articles, and producing the Weekly Rollup Recap, a visual recap of the Weekly Rollup newsletter.

Governance continued moving forward with refinement of the Writers Guild Governance Framework by way of implementing three proposals approved last season, developing two more proposals, and raising conversations around challenging issues to determine Guild membership. Furthermore, the Writers Guild began exploring and transitioning to GitHub to manage governance processes. This transition is ongoing.

The Education Coordinator launched a weekly live editing session for Guild members and others to watch our editors in action, refining contributors’ skills along the way.

In order to help BanklessDAO members gain confidence in writing and publishing, we continued our partnership with Taptive to run a cohort-based writing program. This program is designed to improve writing, grow members’ online reputation, and strengthen the relationship between members.

The Notion Administrator promoted the Notion Ninja courses and reiterated the importance of ensuring the Notion display name matches the Discord handle. New content from the live editing sessions was uploaded to Notion and we created a new page for tracking Writers Guild poll results.

SEASON 7 PLANS AND GOALS

In Season 7, we will continue to focus on onboarding, education, and community. The Guild will guide and support the collaboration and coordination of its related projects, and work to increase and improve in-house educational systems to assist writers and editors in creating high-quality content.

The Guild will launch a new project, tentatively titled the Web3 Toolkit, which will provide a series of short articles designed to quickly educate people and onboard them into web3.

We will continue the partnership with Good Morning News to provide another avenue for our writers to publish their work and earn bounty credit within the Guild.

FINANCIAL IMPLICATIONS

The total amount requested for the Writers Guild for Season 7 is 993,000 BANK.

The Writers Guild defines active members in our Governance Framework as any Tier 2 (Scribbler) or above member who has completed a minimum of one paid task (or two in the case of Good Morning News). Based on this criterion, we use payouts from the Writers Guild and associated projects: Newsletter Team, Decentralized Arts, Bankless Publishing, and Good Morning News to determine active contributor status.

Current Active Members List: 72 members.

Based on Member-Based Guild Funding, the total budget is as follows:

  • 260,000 BANK base role-holder salaries
  • 13,000 BANK Notion Admin
  • 72 members x 10,000 BANK = 720,000 BANK
  • Total: 993,000

The budget breakdown is as follows:

  • Guild Coordinator, Talent Coordinator, Education Coordinator, Marketing Coordinator, Treasurer, and Governance Coordinator roles = 7,000 BANK/week each.
  • The Guild, Education, and Governance Coordinators will have a 15,000 BANK pool to bounty out tasks, as outlined in the Writers Guild Governance Framework.
  • The Talent Coordinator will have a 25,000 BANK pool to distribute to new members who complete the onboarding process.
  • The Marketing Coordinator will have a 36,000 BANK pool for bountied work related to tweet threads and content promotion.
  • A Writers Workshop Lead, for leading seasonal cohort-based Writers Workshops as part of ongoing educational efforts to improve talent across the Guild, DAO, and ecosystem.
  • A Notion Administrator position, as directed by the Operations Guild.
  • A Guild Bounty Pool for projects, ad hoc bounties, and contributor rewards of 173,000 BANK.
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Thanks for writing this post! Love what the Writers Guild brings to the DAO.

Quick question, how did you compile the list of active members? In Writers Guild Executed Bounties, it does show you have >80 unique members who were bountied, but I can’t find some individuals listed (eg. ETrinty, Feems, probably more)

Did you use another way to calculate?

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id like to see the list of the paid tasks that the 80 members did

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I am also counted as an active member and have no idea why, i have the tag, but i don’t participate in the guild other than checking the chatter and encouraging folks to join the guild. ive never been through the onboarding process, have no scribbler tag to my knowledge

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So writer’s Guild has a budget, EPA has a budget and each newsletter has a budget? just kind of hard to tell where the funding is going and it looks like the guild considers folks that are active in the newsletter projects as active guild members?

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@links @ernest - It’s right in the proposal:

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Ernest, you had authorship co-credit on a Rollup article, and were remunerated via a bounty for that.

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ya i didn’t do that work for writer’s guild. I still wouldn’t consider myself a member and not sure how i have the Scribbler tag. Though i would consider myself a fan and community member

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You have the tag b/c you completed a bountied task, ala the above. As you know, Guilds may define active membership as they like. Unlike most Guilds, we don’t use attendance as a metric. I’m more than pleased with that choice.

You know I appreciate your diligence ernest, and I know you have the best interests of the DAO at heart. Thanks for keeping it real.

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The active member list you have submitted does not show what these users did to grain active membership. I assumed you used Writers Guild Executed Bounties, is that true?

The reason I ask is because Feems and ETrinity aren’t on the executed bounty list, so why are they on the active member list?

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Contributions to newsletter project or BP count as well

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Are those in a different place than Writers Guild Executed Bounties? I see some Newsletter bounties there

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@links @ernest_of_gaia

Writers Guild Executed Bounties includes the bounties for the Guild and related projects, so yes, that’s where the Active Contributor count was pulled from. @Trewkat and I will double check re: Feems and ETrinity and report back :saluting_face:. Maybe one of our Notion Ninjas can figure out a way to make our Bounty spreadsheet ez for you curious folks to review our paid bounties. I assume your heightened scrutiny is because you are so amazed that we are able to support so many contributors in the DAO :rocket:

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I made a new view which filters for active contributors…kinda!

I think it’s my regular level of scrutiny :sweat_smile: but yes, it’s because I think the WG is killing it and I wanna point to WG as an example of what’s possible in web3

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Both these people are on the executed bounty list as having completed bountied tasks for the Weekly Rollup on 29 October but were marked as Season 6 in error.

The payments happened in Season 6 - so they were included. We will have to ensure that that column is accurate in future but with multiple people entering info I guess it was an error.

We don’t need a separate ‘view’ of that database - that database is our active contributor list already by virtue of it listing people who have been paid by WG or associated projects. The only work left to do on top of that is add anyone that isn’t already covered but did two tasks at Good Morning News.

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Thank you for going back and fixing the errors in Notion. To date, 72 WG members have earned bounties in S6. The Proposal has been updated accordingly.

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Thanks @hirokennelly. Where guilds are 100% funded by the treasury, is there a plan on sending the additional funds in the multisig back to the treasury? Additionally, is there a plan to deduct any BANK that is remaining in the multisig at the end of season 6 from the season 7 funding request? Thanks!!

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gm! TBH, there are no plans to return or offset S6 funding against S7 funding, but it’s a good question, esp to the latter, which accomplishes the same thing w/ less movement.
Automatic guild funding is just that, automatic, and there is no implied look-back period or other mechanism for recoupment. I also think auto-guild funding kneecapped productive guilds, as it limits our ability to prototype projects or otherwise operate autonomously.
FWIR, the GC was tasked with setting DAO-wide standards for Guild funding, but it failed to do so in Season 6. Hopefully this gets fixed in Season 7. There’s a clear preference for having attendance not count as ‘active membership’ but many Guilds rely nearly solely on that in their current funding proposals. In contrast, the Writers Guild relies solely on bounties earned through it and its related projects during the current season to arrive at its ‘active membership’ count, and I wish this was standard practice. The goal is to move people to projects, and this type of funding incentivizes that movement.
Projects are different b/c they are discretionarily funded season-to-season, so an offset based upon unspent BANK from the previous season is appropriate in that case. Thanks for your question and the opportunity to share my thoughts!!

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gm!! Thank you for responding quickly, I appreciate this! I 1000% agree with you on everything. Additionally, I believe that with more support, some necessary changes could be captured through a bDIP similar to bDIP-05

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Do the Writers Guild and Newsletter Guild work together?

If not, why not?

If so, why so much $BANK between the two?

Where does the Marketing department fit into this equation? If it doesn’t, it should!

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gm gm my fren! Thanks for your questions. Guilds and Projects are different, as I’m sure you know.
Guilds are automatically funded, and their members contribute to our projects.
I see you also posted in the Newsletter proposal, so I’ll let that conversation speak for itself.
As for Marketing, we’ve been working over the past few seasons on strengthening those ties, hence the Marketing Coordinator. TBH, we’re all still learning to work together, but each season the silos we’ve traditionally lived within crumble more.

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