Human Guild's Report

Near Community and nodes Guilds
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Hi,

Wanted to provide rough overview of what we’ve been focusing on, what we are seeing as working, where we are focusing on next, etc.

First of all, if you want a bit more info on Human Guild, check out this slide deck: Intro to Human Guild - Google Slides

Human Guild wants every human to be rewarded for bringing their creations to the world.

In practice, our main metric is amount of earners in NEAR across all of the applications launched and launching on NEAR.

We help founders launch applications sooner, and post launch we help with product improvements & user acquisition experiments, with everything focused on driving the number of earners in NEAR. We believe that this is how you build the real economy on top of NEAR.

We are also starting to see early positive signs of creators (not just developers) interested in doing their own projects in space, and we are actively thinking about best ways to support them.

Last 3 months:

  1. Were mainly focusing on increasing amount of people who get paid in NEAR across all of NEAR applications, which was at ~250 when Human Guild started, and at ~1k today (across ~15 or so launched apps) → we want to get to ~5k by end of this year, but time will tell whether it’s realistic
  2. 65% of current NEAR earners are coming from 1 application - NEARCrowd
  3. To support these initiatives, via YoloDAO, gave out ~20k NEAR per month for last 3 months for projects focusing on creators, gaming, and other verticals related to increasing amount of earners. You can see the detail here: SputnikDAO (under yolo.sputnikdao.near)

What we are doing at the moment:

  1. Set up entity in Switzerland, accepted grant from NF, and started new DAO (SputnikDAO)
  2. Have 3 areas of focus - creator economy, gaming & web2 marketplaces
  1. Within out community, starting to conduct weekly hangouts in CryptoVoxels so people get to know each other (you can join us on Fridays)
  • Find Discord link on our website https://humanguild.io/ if you’re interested to join our community of founders & creators

What we see working well:

  1. Launching applications definitely contributes to number of earners
  • the more applications launch, the more ways people have to get paid in NEAR
  • see slides 8 & 9 for overview for how people are getting paid today and how they get paid tomorrow in NEAR ecosystem: Intro to Human Guild - Google Slides
  1. Applications like NEARCrowd (but with closed loop economy) are likely candidates for generating lots of earners, but we haven’t decided to productize it ourselves or launch generalized version of NEARCrowd (e.g. we had ideas with data sets like OpenStreetMaps, and for translation services marketplaces, and might find a team to pursue on them in the future)
  2. Building communities works well - early stage projects need a lot of “connecting talent to each other” and “connecting talent to ideas”, and thus us focusing on building community makes a lot of sense (admittedly, we are noobs at building communities, but learning as we go)

What’s not working as well:

  1. Launching applications on top of NEAR natively is still a big challenge, and we know it takes several months to launch projects
  • Blockchain space attracts a lot of perfectionists (people who want to launch perfect product, and thus delaying launch), where we actually want to bring more web developer mindset, focused on shipping and iterating (seems like Rust & AssemblyScript lands towards this different mindsets, Rust towards perfectionists & AS towards iterative developers)
  • With new products like “web4” that Vlad is working on, we aim to bring more web developers
  • We need more teams like Paras, and this is the right mindset for founders (iterative approach over perfection, with caveat that it works for non-financial applications, whereas perfection is needed when you deal with larger sums of money, e.g. DeFi)
  1. We haven’t yet been able to scale ourselves as much, and didn’t yet engage our community beyond them working on their projects & conversations in our Discord & CryptoVoxel hangouts
  • Idea is to use DAO as a way to bootstrap community engagement → you transfer funding decisions to community and empower / create ownership mentality by doing so
  • We are also very careful with bringing people on board and don’t want to do this prematurely
  • We are in “survey the land” part of our adventure, with execution coming up soon, but not quite yet (hence, we are keeping it small)
  1. More creators need to follow footsteps of people like Valentin & Varda in NEAR ecosystem and realize that you don’t have to be a developer in order to actively contribute → you can create your own NFTs, communities, projects and this is exactly the right approach
  • from the survey we’ve done (State of NFT Creators), we know that 1 in 5 NFT artists wants to do their own projects in space, and this is really positive data point, so we need to focus on identifying and empowering such creators
  • not having lots of sales at times (e.g. volume on Paras is lower vs last couple months, although number of earners are record high at ~140) discourages some artists from doing more

What can you do to help Human Guild and driving our mission:

  1. Join our Discord (see invite link on HumanGuild.io)
  2. Join our hackathons (we’ve done 1 game jam & planning 1 hackathon at the moment)
  3. Find ways to contribute to projects in space (see slides 12 through 29 here: Intro to Human Guild - Google Slides) or start your own projects in space! We are here to support you and make you successful
  4. Get in touch with us and let us know how we can help (we are most active in our Discord)
  5. Apply to our DAO (talk to us prior to this ideally) and as long as we can drive amount of earners in NEAR further, we’s love to support you on this front as well.
  6. If you want to passively follow our progress, follow our Twitter: https://twitter.com/humanguild
  7. If you’re very new to the space, and want to learn about diversity of ideas in space, subscribe to our podcast: https://nextcreators.simplecast.com/

See you online :slight_smile:

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Would love to get Community Squad in lock step for this. We are planning on 1 or 2 more hackathons this year.

I’m curious if the #card4card event played into this. We did see a Paras traffic spike that weekend.

Learnings from that event:

  • Simplify participation instructions. Eg. Mint some cards for 0.1N, share them on twitter using #card4card hashtag. We got direct feedback that the instructions were too confusing & we didn’t see the viral pickup we were hoping for.
  • Promote in advance. We popped this event up in hopes of it feeling organic, better to take advantage of the full marketing reach of NEARverse. 2 weeks minimum to hit the Activation Button.
  • Automate rewards. 5N was awarded to any participating artist so that they could afford to collect .1N cards from others (or just HODL). It was fairly manual having them submit to the DAO and approving each. The process did introduce many new artists to DAOs, but doesn’t scale. If we want 1,000 artists participating instead of 100 then incentive through something like rabithole.gg would be better.
  • Optimize Onboarding. This went well, Paras team was able to quickly approve people who registered for the event. However, it was still very manual and often 1on1 hand holding through account set up, minting approval, and the minting process itself. It could have gone even better if we had a way to automate approval, such as using :rabbit2::hole: to reach a target market or having a DAO to approve artists.
  • Longer event. Because of time differences, many artists were only able to set up their accounts before the weekend was over. Going for 5-7 days seems reasonable for this kind of event, even if it spreads out the urgency and excitement a little bit.

Will try and catch you! My Earthchan card is burning at Mo’s CV Parcel :yum:

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Very helpful feedback on the event! I pinged Riqi to check your feedback out here.

Regarding Cryptovoxels - we do it on Fridays, i will ping you for the upcoming one! :slight_smile:

Regarding the upcoming hackathon - will likely happen in August or September, with active participation from Paras team. Would love community team’s support!

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Hey folks!

Thanks @sashahudzilin for pinging me

Totally agree with this, we at Paras will push this further in the ecosystem. We might need to allocate grants and a pool of developers that can help all these creators bring their ideas to life (something like https://raidguild.org/ but focuses on NEAR ecosystem)

Amazing! Yeah very happy to be part of Human Guild hackathon. Let’s schedule a call around next week with @sashahudzilin @vgrichina. We’ll also ping some cool projects on Paras and see if they’re interested to join in.

Yeah and we actually wanted to make it a monthly event on Paras. Andini will reach out to you guys to pretty much evaluate + prepare for #card4card in July.

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