[Community Discussion] Achievements & Problems & Further Plan

Creatives Creatives DAO
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Hello all!!
first of all, thank you Paul and Creatives-mods for all the efforts on join ideas, suggestions and opening this discussion topic.

we’ve been talking about it on Creatives chat just now, and I’d like to highlight somethings here, that think should be well discussed.

about this topic, I really think it’s difficult to put all we do in these boxes - for example, we have interdisciplinary activities, educational activities and also other kind of activities that does not fix in these boxes. We argued at the chat, and maybe it would be great to think out of the box. I also think that categorizing like this may lead us into a kind of competitive thinking, that is no healthy for the ecosystem as a hole. So, opening this discussion, my question is - how can we understand and categorize what we are doing in other scales, more related in direction of building community? I’d like to invite @sarahkornfeld to this point, who gave interesting inputs in the chat today.

in this direction, going to this point:

If these categories should be discussed, I wonder about the Moderator role. I understand that the first important thing is to have an intercultural group, form different countries and realities, and also that could be aware about the guidelines of evaluation. And because of this, I think that the guidelines could be more discussed and reviewed in order to contemplate the community thinking as much as possible, always in dialogue to the ecosystem.

about this, I understand this sheet you shared as a good roadmap for DAOs to overview a way of growing inside the ecosystem, but I’m afraid about the competitive aspect that it can generate, if DAOs with highest scores should be approved. Does it really help other DAO’s growth? Or maybe how can Creatives DAO use this as a support to help DAOs growing, by promoting more interaction inside the ecosystem, by connecting DAOs and creating a collaborative ambient? And as saying Creatives DAO I am saying US, looking to each other.

I have some other inputs, but think that for now it’s a lot to think.
Thank you for opening this space of collective thinking
With best
:purple_heart: :slightly_smiling_face:

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Wonderful, I’m so glad these steps are being taken. Value and return of investment are important for communities too. In a way these problems have plagued anarchist and community governed systems for decades and certainly this is where lot of DAOs are going to fail. But the ones that work will lead the way for future systems.

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Hey @beetlejuice, they’re good questions indeed!

Yes, it will allow a DAO to have more time for its objectives, and NF will have proper time to issue a payout/reward agreement.

NF has huge costs, we’re now in the bear market where conditions are hard, and Creatives are a public good at this stage. NF treasury is not unlimited, therefore we need to take proper steps to focus on quality, how we can measure that, the hard cap of available money to support, and its correlation between time and a DAO’s growth.
In the current circumstances, it will not be reasonable to stay with the same monthly hard cap of $5k, at least during the bear market. We could raise the hard cap in the near future, but this should be related to further CreativesDAO’s development and upgrades.

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These two above sound good!

NF is offering grants related to Education, I’m not sure if Creatives should cover that.
Recently, the funding related to Education was put on hold, same as Creatives - Education grant applications paused. I believe it’ll be returned soon.

Could you please elaborate more on this? What exactly “Market Based Proposals” should cover?

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I believe that having a little healthy competitive spirit in the ecosystem won’t hurt anybody if this will be related to the value provided by a DAO to the NEAR. Thanks to that, we will be able to outline these DAOs that are the strongest ones, and that should work as motivators for others.
As the evaluation workspace will be shared with the community, a DAO will be able to see insights, feedback, and pros & cons left by CreativesDAO Moderators/Contributors. We need to develop solid questions related to the evaluation, which will be used during the rating of a DAO.

CreativesDAO has grown since its birth, and it’ll be even bigger if the community will move things forward, therefore it’ll be nice to have a few categories, without that, we may have a little chaos related to Problem No. 6 (Specifying what exactly CreativesDAO supports).

Yes, it does (or it should be :slight_smile: ). It all depends on properly asked questions based on which Mods will be doing the evaluation. In theory, the questions should more or less orientate a DAO.

NEAR has Education grants - About the Education category.

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I think the categories should not try to cover ‘too much’. Education and Marketing as core activities should look to different verticals.
Maybe what is missing is a way for DAOs with a large batch of activities to understand how will they fit.

I have no brilliant proposal, but maybe looking at it the same way we always looked at the limit for council work, capped at 30%, is a way forward. I have written this in another Topic, but I believe having % in the guidelines for what is considered a core-activity or a non-core activity might help DAOs figure out where they fit.

For example, if a DAO has, as a core activity, something related to music, it might still be creating educational activities in order to grow the community; if a DAO is educational in its core activity, even if it uses art-related activities, it might be better of asking to the Education Vertical, if that is a thing.

And if a DAO has some art-related project as it’s core, but that is not web3, and only the educational projects are web3, that will also affect how the DAO fits in the system.

In the past, because this was the one Vertical that functioned really well, almost all DAOs presented themselves as ‘creative’, but if the ecosystem is properly functioning, than that would not be the case. Something to discuss and even talk to NF, I would say.

another quote from another topic, regarding metrics for the Creatives DAO itself:

Responding to @ritamaria , who raised a very important question, regarding competition and how will smaller DAOs be able to grow.

Regarding competition, I think that will be the nature of the game, because in a output-focused environment that will always be the case (capitalism and all :stuck_out_tongue: ), but we should definetly try to limit the negative impact of this.

I think the lower the tier, the more DAOs should be able to get support; from my experience, only a small handfull of DAOs will trully strive for the highest possible tier, since those will have agressive metrics, and I also think it’s normal that some DAOs who are able to achieve it will not be there all the time. @Paul Are you thinking of creating a cap for how many times a DAO can reach the highest tier? Or some sort of forced interruption, for example after a semester if a DAO has achieved the highest tier it must be lowered for x months?

Either way, I also think there are other ways of supporting DAOs other than the direct funding. For example, if the strongest DAOs help organize NFT Fair in which all can participate, or Hackathons with prizes for hacking but also for innovative projects in the ecocystem, this will create incentives for the smaller DAOs. Something to think about.

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Since the community is looking at this categories and unsure what they include, maybe we should work on them a little more. For clarification from @Paul , can you maybe add a note on what they include and use cases? Like a FAQ for what is and is not in each category.
I will try a first draft:

Music
(core activity)

  • web3 concerts (events)
  • music-NFT publishing
  • web3 record labels
  • NFT ticketing
  • …
    (non core activity)
  • live concerts with NEAR publicity (marketing)
  • on-boarding new musiciais (educational)
    *…

Art
(core activity)

  • web3 Art Fairs
  • Any agency-like relationship with artists, selling, creating, showcasing, etc, NFTs
  • web3 Art bounties
  • …
    (non core activities)
  • educational workshops
  • web2 content (youtube, IG, etc)
  • …

(note: by art, you mean visual arts, but also sculpture, generative art, photography, and what is generally considered art in the west?)

Film
(core activity)

  • film-NFTs
  • web3 video content platforms
  • …
    (non core activity)
  • web2 video content platforms
  • …

Culture (I’m unsure of how to look at this category, maybe @adrianseneca can help here)
(core activities)

  • NFTs or tokenization of cultural objects/practices?
  • web3 live events
    (non core activities)
  • live events with NEAR related publicity
  • …

Being able to describe what is inside these categories is of great importance, and being able to recognize what is web3 and what is not is also crucial.

These kind of lists never include all possible activities, ofc, but they must be able to generically describe what is being supported by NF/Creatives DAO, otherwise we fall into ambiguity.

I propose that people try to edit this list and after it’s finalized moderators can use it as a guideline for evaluating proposals. IF a significant number of artistic activities are left outside, we do need a new category. If not, these suffice.

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This whole restructuring is really a good idea but coming up as a dao, there is a question being asked and i quote " As a Dao what are your sustainability goal " this is to be questioned upon as so many old daos have being receiving fund from NF and yet no sustainability goals have being achieved. There should be a time frame for sustainability not just forever funding and yet no sustainable goal achieved. I think new daos should be given the opportunities to grow and build. @Paul @ted.iv

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Those goals were not included in the discussion at the time (2021), so while I agree that generating revenue (which is what is discussed while discussing sustainability, right?) can be a reasonable goal for a lot of DAOs, there are also DAOs that can never produce revenue, for example those focused on on-boarding.

Plus, just on the matter of revenue, if it’s true that big platforms like Mintbase still get NF grants, it should be well thought out what it means to achieve sufficient revenue, because that might not be the case for anyone during a bear market.

Now that we have NF as part of the discussions it’s the time to put all those questions answered, so that we, as a community, know exactly what our value to the ecosystem is, and if that goal (sufficient revenue) is to be part of the tier system and how.

edit: There are many DAOs with revenue models that are applied outside of the web3 world; should those be considered sustainable models? Or only web3-related revenue is to be considered?

Example: if I get $ from NF and then ask for tickets on my live event, paid in fiat by people who are there but not using web3, is that considered?

I would try to focus as much as possible on expanding the possibilities of web3 to generate revenue, for sure, and would use that as a metric when looking at DAOs, but also with caution, because they are exploring territory: the users are not there yet.

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A welcome development. Nice one

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Sustainable is able to be maintained at a certain rate or level. As long as the goal of a dao is maintained on her own without external help whether be it outside web3 or Web3 so far her goal is in check with Near Protocol. It is considered Sustainable Model. Though sustainable goal wasn’t included in the year 2021 but A Dao for such a long term of $5k funding with proper management, Marketing and Business strategies should be big by now and not join upcoming daos for funding request. I just hope I’m not creating anger here. Just my thought and observation.

Also focusing on expanding the possibilities of web3 to generate revenue would be use as metrics, that’s good but what about opportunities to the community? If a Dao can’t stand on it own, they cant be an opportunity and meanwhile it will be obvious that when NF stop funding, Most Dao will close. Upcoming Dao should see Old Daos as a movement.

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I generally agree with you, but disagree with this particular sentence. imho NEAR has no goals related to sustainability of DAOs, that is, the only thing that matters is providing value to the ecosystem; NF goal is to give out all their tokens, so, in the long term, (when funds from NF do not exist) doesn’t really matter if a specific DAO continues do exist or not, as long as the ecosystem is alive and well, with billions of users and of entities building on top of it.

What might exist is the assumption that sustainable DAOs will be able to continue existing after funds cease to exist, and are therefore ‘more interesting’ to fund for the moment.

What also might exist is a secondary assumption that DAOs that look to become sustainable are ‘more serious’ and do not want to live of funds. This is probably a useful way of looking at it (and that is why I agree with you that we should look at sustainability), but it’s not the only metric, otherwise zero entities would remain. Since there is no user base for web3 on a larger scale, and certainly not on NEAR (for example the NFT market moves only 4000$ a day), we all need to add other metrics to the discussion.

Also imho, if you fund a DAO that has a proven revenue model outside of web3 and no intentions of applying that model on web3 (for example using NEAR tokens instead of fiat) you are only dissipating $ from web3 into non-web3, i.e. money from NF to pay for non-N-related projects. I disagree that that is good for our community, at least as a core activity. A certain amount of funds going into non-web3 is normal, as long as it builds community, for example, and is a small % of the total.

If you have a DAO that can stand on its own, and plus bring their model and implement it on web3 and NEAR Protocol, well, that’s just awesome! More of that and we all grow, because that is bringing users, use-cases, etc.

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@Romanus i totally agree with you, new Daos should be giving an opportunity to grow, build and prove themselves. As much as i can see here these new daos are really making good efforts and contributions as regards to their objectives, checking from their social media engagements and contributions here in the ecosystem i think new daos should be well considered aswell.

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This effort only makes sense if the goal is to on-board much more people and many more DAOs, agree with you.

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Hello @Paul and @frnvpr
continuing here, I’d like to give 2 more points about this, that could help us thinking more collaborative and less competitive

How can we create different mecanisms to change the game? Is it possible?
I think that Creatives DAO, in power of this information about how DAOs are growing, could create special projects building bridges interDAOs, in order to help them growing together. Like a meta-curation, or something alike…
So the DAOs with highest tiers could be stimulated to create proposals, or projects to other DAOs that need support in growing - It can work in a win-win game, as the hole community could grow together but in their own time, and having support for this.
It can work in a sustainable way, and also help us seeing each other to get inspired in creating collective and collaborative projects… does it make sense?
something in this direction:

and also about the categories, think it’s a good start,

maybe we can create a sheet mapping all DAOs, so we can understand better these categories, and also include interdisciplinary as a category… just thinking here…

at last, about education, it’s a little difficult for me to separate art and education sometimes. I think that there are points of intersection that Creatives DAO could be aware, and this is something we can build together

Keep reading all here. Thank you for this incredible and productive discussion

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this might be a solution, just wondering if ‘art’ is interdisciplinary enough. Lookiing at the categories, my impression is that

  • music is ± easy to understand and has many DAOs under its umbrella.
  • Film is ± easy to understand, but has few DAOs under its umbrella; maybe it should be film + audiovisual? Or even photography.
  • Culture is, for me, the hardest, because In my professional life I consider culture to be really different from art, and therefore I am just not sure how to categorize it. I am assuming most DAOs that look for integration of various Peoples from around the world would fall in this category, and that’s why I tagged @adrianseneca , but I may be completely wrong about this.
  • Art includes many disciplines, like painting, sculpture, architecture (historically), literature, music, cinema, and theater, and we can add photography, VR, generative art, sound-art, performance art and many others. Let’s say we remove music from this list (its own category), cinema (its own category=film), it’s still a big field. How much of the DAOs are here represented? A large %? If yes, then re-working the categories might be useful.

For example:

  • Music and Theater
  • Film, Photography, generative-art and VR
  • Art (or maybe visual arts?)
  • Culture (crafts?)

A list like this removes Design and maybe some other relevant ‘creative’ activities from the equation, for example. I don’t consider Design art, but certainly the ecosystem would benefit from us using a ‘larger’ than normal filter. I’m also not sure how to split generative art and VR from the general art category, because most serious artists who work with those mediums will consider themselves ‘artists’, not ‘digital artists’, but maybe assuming the artificallity of these categories is something we have to do.

Maybe adding one category would be useful, like @ritamaria proposed:

  • Music and Theater
  • Film, Photography, generative-art and VR
  • Visual Arts
  • Culture
  • Interdisciplinary projects

or even

  • Music and Theater
  • Film, Photography, generative-art and VR
  • Visual Arts
  • Literature and Culture
  • Interdisciplinary projects

or even

  • Music and Theater
  • Film, Photography, generative-art and VR
  • Visual Arts
  • Culture
  • Literature and Interdisciplinary projects

or just adding 2 extra categories

  • Music and Theater
  • Film, Photography, generative-art and VR
  • Visual Arts
  • Culture
  • Literature and theory
  • Interdisciplinary projects

Caps can even be different considering one category might have 20 DAOs and another 5 DAOs.

Honestly, the community should try to arrive at the ‘best possible’ categorization so that the moderators can have something they can work with.

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I find it interesting as well since we already have some DAOs doing interdisciplinary projects.

That’s definitely one of the purposes of this post, thank you for some examples here. Based on what already have on Creatives DAO & in relation to the number of DAOs in each group, I personally go for this:

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Hi @Paul – Thank you for posting this.

Yesterday, our Creatives weekly talk on Telegram turned into an amazing 2-hour conversation with people from around the world sharing ideas to move forward. We had a really insightful, collaborative conversation as working artists and creatives.

I think it’s fair to say that the consensus was that we need a much better sense – in very concrete terms – of best practices and case studies from around the world to give truly strategic responses to this proposal here.

In order to plan for sustainability, we really need to know what’s working, what’s “selling”, and what is trending as investment needs.

Therefore we are having a 2-hour Zoom THINK TANK to support the overarching goals of the emerging NDC, NF funding, and ecosystem growth. (The call is this Thursday – 9am US Time – link below for more info)

PLEASE come to listen and share, and let us know if there are other people and DAOs from around the world that should attend, or please invite them. If the report you folks developed for your meeting with the mods would support this call, please let us know.

Thank you!

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Thank you @sarahkornfeld, however, in my humble opinion - Creatives DAO should not be affiliated with NDC. We should implement our own processes, guidelines and a plan, this is the goal of this proposal.

It’s good to see here such a huge community engagement, ideas, observations and constructive criticism, moreover, much more is welcomed, as feedback left here will be used to fine tune the proposal.

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While I agree with checking what already works on other ecosystems and aplying that, I also agree that affiliating this with the NDC and adding unecessary layers to this discussion might have the opposite effect of what is intended.

That does not mean, however, that currents mods should overlook any contributions coming from the zoom meeting @sarahkornfeld is preparing - that seems a lovely idea.

For example, this current discussion should not be super worried with ‘best practices’ in terms of moderating - that can be discussed in the NDC context and then applied here. It should, however, be super focused on the governance model to apply to the Creatives DAO - something the NDC is not interested at the moment, since it is pursuing an altogether different model.

Imho there is less overlap than it might seem at first hand, at least for this stage of the discussion.

NDC might overtake all other forms of funding in the NEAR ecosystem, but until that happens, a model for the Creatives DAO has to be worked on.

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