Fund the Calabara team with 60 ETH to continue developing Creator Contests for a 3-month sprint.
Hi NounsDAO, we’re nick and weez, the tandem behind Calabara and Creator Contests.
Both of us were introduced to Nouns by way of SharkDAO, which we first joined over a year ago. We were fascinated by the Nouns protocol and community and soon began building out sharkish tools to ease some of the unique challenges of a Nounish subDAO. We created a dashboard for SharkDAO, which included widgets for a snapshot client, calendar, and token-gated document center. We wanted to build a simple interface for casual members to be able to quickly catch up on the latest in SharkDAO and Nouns. Soon after, other communities asked if they could have their own dashboards. We open-sourced the code, modularized the components, and invited other web3 groups to join. Today, we’d describe Calabara as an open-source design house for public infrastructure and applications.
By prop 62, we began to get excited about many of the ideas being communicated by the Prop House team. We'd been thinking deeply about community funding protocols for some time ourselves, and were eager to experiment with the Prop House model. Unfortunately, we weren’t yet able to run our own Prop House rounds at SharkDAO (because we don’t use an erc721 for governance). Prop House wasn’t open-source yet, so we decided to fork the core ideas of Prop House and build something of our own: Creator Contests.
Creator Contests are a nounish middleware for distributing funds to creatives.
Creating scalable funding infrastructure at all levels is a critical building block in establishing Nouns as the world's largest open-source brand. Creator contests build upon the strong foundations developed by the Prop House team while experimenting with novel features to create unique incentive systems and new ways to fund builders – allowing any Nounish community with an ENS the ability to start running their own contests.
Similar to Prop House, participants create submissions in response to a contest prompt, and voters choose the best ones. Once the contest is over, funds are distributed to the winners. All contests follow this basic model, but administrators have full control over the contest settings to layer-on additional components. Here’s what we offer today …
Vote total visibility
Anonymous Submissions
Self Voting
Before Spring 2022, we had bootstrapped the project ourselves. We were lucky enough to receive support from SharkDAO, and they funded us with 7 ETH to develop an MVP of Creator Contests. We launched our first contest in September, and have helped fund 45 nounish creatives with ~4 ETH and 25k ERC-20 tokens since. 2 months ago, we received a small grant of 8 ETH from NSFW to develop the Twitter Integration mentioned above. We have groups like SharkDAO, Composables, TNS, and the Society of Nounish Cartoonists running contests as we speak. We are now ready to take Creator Contests to the next level.
For this funding period, we’d like to focus on “Top of the funnel” funding infrastructure. This means implementing a scalable protocol for funding creatives in the 0.069 - 3 ETH range. Our goal is to fund 100+ nounish creatives in the 3-month window.
While bringing the codebase out of “MVP mode” so it can sufficiently scale to other Nounish pods (and make it easier to fork), we’ll work on the following upgrades:
Support native video and other media formats
Add vote audit reports
Add voting capability for Noun delegates
Experiment with new voting strategies
Simplify contest initialization process.
Improve our twitter algorithms
UX redesign - It’s time for CC to get Nounish
We’d also like to answer the following questions:
Prop House already sees a certain percentage of “low quality” submissions, and we’ll see higher levels at this funding tier. Are there ways to ensure a certain quality standard without direct moderation? Learnings from this experimentation could be layered on top of Prop House and other applications.
Success at the funding tier we are targeting is tightly coupled with onboarding. We’ll define onboarding for the scope of this project as the following:
Of course, success for us also hinders on our ability to proliferate the meme. Twitter integrations drastically increase our proliferation potential -- elevating contests from a siloed web app to a publicly discoverable and interactable experience. We're focused on lifting the stack as close to the "public edge" as possible and see the potential for these integrations in other Nounish areas.
Defining success is one thing, measuring it is different. For this funding term, we’ll do so manually by following up with participants and winners while exploring ways we can automate and better measure this in the future.
Why not just fork Prop House for real?
While we haven’t really heard this much, it’s a valid question that we anticipate some Nouners might have.
Halting further experimentation to go back and layer our changes on top of the PH codebase feels like a step backwards at this point in time. We envision a coordinated approach where both PH and CC are able to sandbox and test different ideas and merge the ones that work. Ultimately, the far more relevant component to fork will be the smart contracts for a trustless implementation that the PH team is leading, which we fully plan on doing.
At worst, CC is an alternative client for Prop House. At best, it is an experiment in funding infrastructure, working alongside Prop House in developing sound protocols for high velocity, trustless, and scalable funding infrastructure for web3 communities – all powered by Nouns.
Weez: frontend, designer, UX, support
Nick: lead dev, fullstack
60 ETH for continued development
3/5 Multisig tasked with sending 30 ETH of project funds to the team wallet upon execution, and setting up a 3-month stream for the remaining funds.
Signers:
Nick: nickdodson.eth
Benbodhi: signed.benbodhi.eth
Juan: juanx.eth
JoshuaFisher: joshuafisher.eth
ToadyHawk: toadyhawk.eth
0x55d1f4091Ced357cD4C4F9dd12531b8fDBe2dd26.transfer(
60.0 ETH
)