Announcing the launch of the NEARWEEK News Guild
About NEARWEEK
NEARWEEK is an international network of NEAR stakeholders gathered around the purpose of enabling, collecting, curating & distributing easily accessible news within the greater NEARverse.
The following proposal seeks to democratise and implement transparency in the world of news media. Instead of being the voices of few, which has often been the case with traditional news media, we seek to be the voice of the masses - a crowdsourced news media platform with 100% transparency where profit and information ownership is directly distributed and held by its contributors. We want to use the development and current momentum in the Sputnik DAO framework and upcoming Sputnik v.22, by putting forward an outline of an exclusive, NEAR Ecosystem based, news organization known as the NEARWEEK News DAO “NEARWEEK”.
Why crowdsourced news is important
The planet’s success depends on our ability to coordinate as a species in addressing the existential threats that stand in our way. But instead of coordinating better, we stand more divided than ever. Fake news is being spread like never before and we believe it has led and will lead to some of the worst political decisions in history. Causing chaos, violence and despair. The Internet brought us the tools to share and discuss, but we have lacked the tools to align incentives. Thanks to cryptocurrencies, we are now able to encode transparent incentive systems making it easier to capture corruption, hidden agendas etc. than traditional systems. Developing the new levels of understanding required to bring about a fairer, more open society means altering the current paradigm of information ownership and production in the creation of a new ecosystem for journalism.
In order to maintain the role of accurate information in a democratic society, we must create new, decentralized news structures that respond to the perspectives of the broader public - not that of the rulers. Given the shifts in technology, national diversity, and the organizational economics of journalism, we see a huge need for utilizing the coordination mechanism offered by Sputnik v2 to launch a fully fledged NEARWEEK News DAO. A news media structure whose agenda is not set nor influenced by powerful established organisations or individuals.
The first 6 weeks of NEARWEEK
Since the launch on 16th April 2021 we have reached the below KPIs without doing any notable active promotional activities
- Twitter:
- +180k impressions, +1300 likes, +200 retweets, +450 link clicks,
- From 0-390+ followers
- TG Community: 137 active members
- News delivered: +150
- Website visitors: 550+ unique visitors, 1000+ views
- Newsletter subscribers: +60
- Crowd-sourced news from 50 people via Twitter / Telegram and tipped with NEAR tipbot.
Our efforts have also been acknowledged by Illia and the core NEAR twitter account🤓
The next phases of NEARWEEK
We wish to utilize the core tools within the NEAR ecosystem to empower our news crowd-sourcing model. The long term strategy is for NEARWEEK to become a fully autonomous News DAO based on an ecosystem relying on a peer-reviewed, community-driven model of fact-checking, publishing, and news dissemination. This includes using smart-contract logic to enable the:
- Production and ownership of quality content
- Media NFT’s (photo material, video material etc) - securing creators rights financially
- Contribution model which rewards content owners and producers
- Apply business model to other media genres: magazines (Fashion, Art, Gossip etc), blogs, sports (in cooperation with Pulse and Stakegg)
Objectives for Q3 & Q4 2021☑️
- Increase # subscriber and visitors on www.nearweek.com to 10,000 unique visitors
- Develop, test and implement peer review model and contribution incentive structure (currently every news link posted in the NEARWEEK Telegram is rewarded with $NEAR via the tip bot)
- Increase the volume and distribution of NEAR related content across media channels in order to increase public awareness of the NEARverse
- Collaborate with the community (4NTS Guild etc) - make a shared effort/front
- Pay tech journalists and contributors for coverage / content production
- Promoted tweets and Instagram posts
- Reach out to mainstream media.
- Become the leading go-to news and “discover/educate NEAR” community
- Setup translated version of NEARWEEK in the most demanded languages
Funding request
Initial total amount requested: 30.000 $NEAR over 6 months
The funding will cover:
- Core development work for extending Sputnik v2 as an NEWS DAO MVP
- Twitter / Telegram bots enabling to run the NEWS DAO from these UIs
- Getting legal setup to enable NEWS DAO to grow
- Costs involved in running, developing and maintaining www.nearweek.com
- Bounties for external development and community engagement
- Prizes for campaigns in collaboration with our below launch partners
- Costs involved in advertising: promoted tweets, promoted posts (Instagram)
Impact for NEAR Ecosystem
For starters NEARWEEK provides all stakeholders in the NEAR ecosystem the essential ability to follow all the progress in the ecosystem and find information on the ecosystem: developer tools, telegram channels, manuals (setting up wallet, staking etc) and so forth. This fundamental insight into what is going on will enable validators, developers, users and investors a coherent information flow to be used for the basics of community organization and signaling. Our aspirations to decentralize the crowd-sourcing and curation of this news flow will furthermore provide unique products insights into using Sputnik framework beyond solely being a grants vehicle.
NEARWEEK Core Team
Peter Humaidan - Founder of NEARWEEK & Project Lead
news@nearweek.com / peterhumaidan.near
Frederik Hansson (SWAGGER DAO)
Kenneth Christensen (Full stack developer)
Advisors
Denys “Stardust”, full stack dev (Stardust Staking / Sputnik DAO)
James Young, full stack dev (Abridged & Collab)
Michael Kelly “Ozymandius” (4NTS Guild)
Gustav Friis “Gus” (NEAR Foundation)
Launch partners
4NTS GUILD
Human Guild
Paras
Sputnik DAO
Open Web Sandbox (OWS)
AwesomeNEAR
Subscribe to get your weekly dose of news from the NEARverse at:
Become a contributor and join the NEARWEEK News community at:
Telegram: Telegram: Contact @nearweek
Twitter: https://twitter.com/NEARWEEK