Coordination: @carrapatoso (Tibira DAO)
Realization: Pajubá (@gbonfiglioli)
TL;DR: Develop Community Talks in NEAR Ecosystem inviting LGBTQIA+s to share their experiences and perspectives. The talks with be hosted by Tibira DAO starting with 6 intersectoral talks about LGBTQIA+ community.
Objectives
Governance forums, especially when money is involved, can be a stage for conflicts and hard discussions between members. It is expected that moderators can support and intervene impartially in these discussions and guide the members to a harmless resolution.
However, conflicts can arise in situations that the moderator is not familiar with: maybe for not having previous experience or even not belonging to the group that is being attacked. Also the general community members may not even know that certain expressions or terminologies can be offensive to a determined group of people. How can we guarantee that the moderators are empowered and are comfortable to actively intervene in sensitive situations? How can community members be more empathic to under-represented groups? How can users from under-represented groups feel welcomed and supported in conflicts in the governance forum?
As a way to share experiences and make the moderators – at the same time, community members – feel more comfortable in working with differences and other under-represented groups, a series of focus groups Community Talks are proposed to sensibilize about and welcome diverse people to the governance forums.
NEAR Community Talks Proposal
Organize a series of conversations hosted by Tibira DAO that has a defined periodicity (e.g. weekly on every Monday) in which different people, with different life stories, are invited to share their experiences and tell more about their role in society. Each of these individuals will share their unique perspectives as a way to approach community members and moderators to topics and life experiences that may be out of their comfort zone.
The Community Talks are the way where new topics, new experiences can be accessed and discussed.
Tibira DAO will organize 6 meetings with the focus in the LGBTQIA+ community to sensibilize the members of the NEAR Ecosystem about the realities and sensitivity of under-represented groups.
What is Tibira DAO?
Tibira is a DAO focusing in connecting LGBTQIA+ community and allies interested in creating projects using blockchain.
The DAO is the meeting point for creatives, developers, communicators, and all professionals that want to expand the presence of the LGBTQIA+ community and allies in the digital realm.
In 1614, two years after the arrival of French colonizers in Northern Brazil, Tibira, which means homosexual in the Tupi language, was sentenced to death for sodomy by Yves D’Évreux, a Capuchin monk. Tibira attempted to escape the charge, fled into the woods for several days, but was re-captured by French authorities. Before his execution, Tibira was baptized by D’Évreux in the name of Saint Dismas, strapped to a cannon, which was fired, killing him.
The chosen name aims to remember the evil that colonizers did in foreign soil, that homophobia is not inherent to native communities, that LGBTQIA+ community is constantly chased and needs to be in constant alert state, and that they always need to create means to avoid these cases from happening again.
The goal of Tibira DAO is to create a culture for crypto projects inside the LGBTQIA+ communities around the world. Our goal is to expand the number of people interested in the topic and engaged with the DAO itself. The success is measured by the increasing number of participants through the several activities proposed.
In other words, Tibira DAO is for everyone interested in proposing projects to support the global LGBTQIA+ community.
LGBTQIA+ Talks
LGBTQIA+ Talks will be a series of intersectional focus groups that will take place in the Community Talks, online, and open to everyone inside the NEAR Ecosystem.
These groups will discuss different aspects of prejudice and exclusion against the LGBTQIA+ community with special focus on digital discussions. The goal is to promote an injection of otherness, showcase of difference and a reality check of how diverse people are and behave. Also it is expected to sensibilize users and moderators about the sensitivity of talking in public forums.
We will have 6 different focus groups, one per week, as following:
| Order | Session | Target | Format |
|---|---|---|---|
| #1 | LGBTQIA+ essentials | NEAR Community Moderators | Masterclass - Main topics: introduction on gender identity, introduction on sexual orientation, the meaning of the LGBTQIA+ acronym, inclusive language, terminology, the importance of intersectionality |
| #2 | LGBTQIA+ essentials | All community members | Masterclass - Main topics: introduction on gender identity, introduction on sexual orientation, the meaning of the LGBTQIA+ acronym, inclusive language, terminology, the importance of intersectionality |
| #3 | Gay & lesbian experiences | All community members | Discussion - With 2 guests, who will share their personal experiences regarding digital discussions based on the specificities of their sexual orientations (gay & lesbian), eventually intertwined with other social markers such as ethnicity, race, disability, etc. |
| #4 | Bisexual & pansexual experiences | All community members | Discussion - With 2 guests, who will share their personal experiences regarding digital discussions based on the specificities of their sexual orientations (bi & pan), eventually intertwined with other social markers such as ethnicity, race, disability, etc. |
| #5 | Trans / Non-binary experiences | All community members | Discussion - With 3 guests, who will share their personal experiences regarding digital discussions based on the specificities of their gender identities (trans woman, trans men & non-binary), eventually intertwined with other social markers such as ethnicity, race, disability, etc. |
| #6 | Hands-on activity: real world situations (& how to address them) | NEAR Community Moderators | Workshop - We will analyze 8 situations and discuss strategies to address each of them. The output will be a document with the chosen strategies and also some other hypothetical paths to avoid. |
Methodological remarks:
#1 Intersectionality
The experiences will be LGBTQIA±focused and necessarily intersecting with other excluded social makers. Intersectionality is important as shows different specificities and layers of exclusion and prejudice (eg “you can’t be black and gay”):
Possible intersections:
- Gender and race intersection: black LGBTQIA+ people
- Health: LGBTQIA+ people living with HIV
- LGBTQIA+ immigrants
#2 Active moderation
As for sessions 2, 3, 4 & 5, the moderator plays a role that goes beyond time monitoring and setting up the speeches’ order. PAJUBÁ’s moderation methodology is about encouraging the discussion. We will do that by throwing baits in the event’s comment section, inviting the audience to comment on what is being said as the speeches happen. Further on, moderation will select some of the audience’s remarks to ignite the first questions of the Q&A.
People will also have the option to write down their questions in the comment section if they don’t feel comfortable asking them live.
//// Duration of each focus group: 1 hour
Structure:
- Introduction/context (PAJUBÁ + TIBIRA) - 10 min
- Guest’s speech - 20 min
- Q&A with the audience - 30 min
To help pass the message through different audiences, the talks will have the same thematic that will be used in all the communications to sensibilize and attract audiences. For this first experience, the theme below is proposed:
Exploring The Plurality of the Digital
The experiences of the LGBTQIA+ community in the digital realm
The invited LGBTQIA+ people will talk about their personal stories while interacting digitally, relating to issues regarding work, money, technology and cryptocurrencies. Although the digital reflects our society, the guests will try their best to approach the topics to the dynamic of a crypto ecosystem.
The invited guests will depend on the schedule, but will have people already in the NEAR ecosystem as people outside but relevant in the technology field.
//// Duration of the whole project: 6 weeks (one session per week)
GTM Strategy
The main effort for the GTM strategy is to bring users from different channels (eg. Discord, Twitter, Governance Forums, etc) to attend the live event.
Based on that, a creative briefing will be developed to produce the invitation’s visual identity. Considering the difference of thematics to be approached in NEAR Community Talks, each one should have a unique visual identity, that is why that the briefing will consider only the LGBTQIA+ talks.
The creation of an invitation (still image, copy + layout) will be used for the official announcement of the LGBTQIA+ series describing the theme and the schedule.
Deliverables
After the discussions, resources will be drafted and proposed to the NEAR Foundation. The objective of these resources is to give a starting point to NF to develop their own processes to manage sensitive situations in the governance forums and social media channels. Also, it will be a where-to-go reference document for moderators and community.
The goal for the documents is to be more an etiquette resource rather than a restriction in the community. It will be a best practice resource on how to deal and manage sensitive situations. These documents will depend of the discussions, but can be listed and not exhausted with the examples below:
1. Users guidelines:
- Analyze the current documents and guidelines
- Make additions to it to cover sensitive situations
- Define a escalation process in case of sensitive situations
2. Moderators resources:
- Best practices of how to react to sensitive situations
- When to intervene in heated discussions between members
- Active moderation vs user’s liberty restriction: how to define the line?
- Common cases as examples
- Adaptation of specific situations to each platform:
- Gov Forum - how to create a structured level of argumentation to back the project?
- Discord - how to create an educational environment regarding LGBTQIA+ issues?
- Telegram - how to create better criteria for content that will be shared with 50k+ people?
- Twitter - how to adapt these guidelines to NEAR’s social media interaction?
Budget
| Deliverables | Units | Fee | TOTAL |
|---|---|---|---|
| PAJUBÁ [2 “LGBTQIA+ essentials” masterclasses (sessions 1 & 6), curatorship, moderation and production for 4 focus groups (sessions 2, 3, 4 & 5), session 6 workshop facilitation, report/compilation, creative briefing for visual identity] | 1 | US$ 4,700 | US$ 4,700 |
| Guests fee | 7 | US$ 104 | US$ 728 |
| Coordination + Deliverables Development | 1 | US$ 343 | US$ 343 |
| Administrative costs (30%) | 1 | US$ 1,731.3 | |
| TOTAL | US$ 7,502.3 |
