(PROPOSAL) Announcing the launch of the NEARWEEK News Guild

JPALHUMAIDAN · June 5, 2021, 1:06pm

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

starpause · June 7, 2021, 11:35pm

Love seeing this and what NEARWEEK is up to.

Currently the max we’re granting out of the community dao is 2000N at a time. Would be possible to get a more granular breakdown of spend & activities? Few more thoughts…

These are particularly interesting to me, especially seeing how things go in the Telegram channel and the conversations there about automating the news sorting. Freeing the team up from surfacing interesting stuff so that they can focus on concise summaries would be awesome!

If you’re planning to open source these upgrades/tools it may be more appropriate to submit for a foundation grant which can award higher amounts than the community fund. This isn’t the only project that would benefit from a blockchain native HN-in-a-chat!

What’s the advantage to building nearweek.com from the ground up when there are newsletter services like substack which could be leveraged?

on the importance of marketing (the pixelord nft giveaway last week gained NEAR twitter 10k follwers). Would like to see some spend breakdown and monthly goals to get this immediate-impact bit off the ground quick.

JPALHUMAIDAN · June 15, 2021, 7:04pm

Love seeing this and what NEARWEEK is up to. Currently the max we’re granting out of the community dao is 2000N at a time. Would it be possible to get a more granular breakdown of spend & activities?

The initial thought is to split 2000 NEAR per month 50/50 between operations and development. The rationale for this if following the ambidexterity to make sure that we continue to have an operating crowd-sourced news process going, while also every month developing new automatization and incentivization mechanisms (primarily via DAO modules and Telegram, Discord and Twitter bots) For a more granularly breakdown of the cost pools within operations and development see below.

Operations / 1000 NEAR per month

1. Guild incentive (500 NEAR): Issuance of NEAR to a) news contributors b) news curators, following our weekly cadence.

2. Administration (300 NEAR): Currently Peter has been doing NEAR week in his spare time while taking care of a full-time job as well. This will enable Peter (or other fixed operational people) to focus on NEARWEEK.

3. Content campaigns (100 NEAR): Creation of own content in collaboration with partners such as 4NTS, Human and Swagger guild.

4. Subscriptions and promotions (100 NEAR): For tools such as,Wordpress, Substack, Cloud Server and SEO / Adwords optimizations on campaigns.

DEVELOPMENT / 1000 NEAR per month

1. Core development work for Sputnik v2 NEWS DAO MVP (500 NEAR)

1. Allow a “News Contributor” to Submit a link and earn a reward if it is accepted
2. Allow “News Curators” to get a reward for accepting links
3. Enable basic checks that a link is unique
4. Experiment with further mechanisms of conviction voting / prediction markets

2. Twitter / Telegram bots (300 NEAR)

1. Enable “News Contributors” to submit links via Twitter and Telegram to bots which writes this as Sputnik DAO proposals which “News Curators” will then be able to approve / disapprove
2. Allow approved news to be auto posted and tagging relevant projects tapping into hootsuite style APIs.

3. Ad hoc bounties (200 NEAR)

1. Enable projects to purchase add space in NEARWEEK via a google adds style auction market
2. Utilizing other interesting marketing / engagement tools when they become available within the NEAR ecosystem

Few more thoughts…

Core development work for extending Sputnik v2 as an NEWS DAO MVP
Twitter / Telegram bots enabling to run the NEWS DAO from these UIs

These are particularly interesting to me, especially seeing how things go in the Telegram channel and the conversations there about automating the news sorting. Freeing the team up from surfacing interesting stuff so that they can focus on concise summaries would be awesome!

If you’re planning to open source these upgrades/tools it may be more appropriate to submit for a foundation grant which can award higher amounts than the community fund. This isn’t the only project that would benefit from a blockchain native HN-in-a-chat!

Thanks for the kind words, we do intend to also apply for a software grant as well for some of the more specific software implementations indicated above, however at this stage we believe the community fund is the best place to get going to establish a news guild and collect the necessary feedback for future software development work. taking this to the next level.

Costs involved in running, developing and maintaining www.nearweek.com

What’s the advantage to building nearweek.com from the ground up when there are newsletter services like substack which could be leveraged?

We do not intend to develop any such standard web2 newsletter / marketing tooling ourselves. We do plan to start moving to Substack as well as several community members have requested this.

starpause · June 28, 2021, 5:54pm

Thank you for the detailed breakdown! Can you make a proposal for 2000N to SputnikDAO and link back to this thread?

JPALHUMAIDAN · June 29, 2021, 6:26pm

Proposal has been submitted. Thank you for the help!

Edit: cross link to the proposal

JMaenen · July 2, 2021, 12:55pm

@JPALHUMAIDAN Thank you for submitting this great proposal!
I would like to sync on this in order to find the best way to collaborate on the social media front. I’m quite sure we can help each other in collecting and distributing information. Could you schedule a call with me sometime next week? Calendly - Joep Maenen
Excited about all these plans, you have my approval!