Greetings and Salutations and all that proper nonsense,
It’s a new dawn in the DAO and the Guild and that means another day at play. With so much activity whirling around us, it’s often challenging to maintain focus on one thing at a time. Thankfully, we are working together to build automated systems, workflows, and processes to ease the cognitive load it takes to jump from one thing to another. It’s not easy work we do, outside the writing editing, but it’s necessary, and we’re doing it. And we can call it a win when despite the amount of effort being poured into building these systems, we are still able to focus on what matters to us most, and why we came to the Writers Guild in the first place: the writing.
Welcome to The Scribe’s Quill.
Authors: BanklessDAO Writers Guild Coordination: nonsense 🏴 | Coordinator; frogmonkee 🏴 | Governance; Ap0ll0517 🏴 | Secretary; Samanthaj | Talent Scout; Siddhearta 🏴 | Newsletter Team Coordinator.
This is the official newsletter of the BanklessDAO Writers Guild. If you would like to receive this newsletter in your inbox, please tap or click on that subscribe button below.
Writers Guild in Bites
The Council of Writers Weekly, Monday at 6:30pm UTC.
Weekly Newsletter Team Sync, Thursday at 5:00pm UTC
Weekly Editorial and Publishing Arm (EPA) Meeting, Thursday at 10:00pm UTC
Meeting Notes
Council of Writers, November 29, 2021
Newsletter Team Sync, December 2, 2021
Editors Circle (EPA), December 2, 2021
Team Updates
Newsletter Team, siddhearta | Coordinator
We ship on the regular. Come join us.
Newsletter Stats
Subscribers: 8,801
Latest TOTAL page views:
Weekly Rollup: 7,944
Decentralized Arts: 9,530
State of the DAOs: 10,870
Decentralized Law: 13,806
Weekly Rollup
What happened this week in BanklessDAO
Special Shoutout to EthHunter and Jake and Stake for doing an excellent job onboarding new members into the Weekly Rollup! Their guidance and accessibility in coaching people on the process has been invaluable! DAO culture, we’re flying! ✈️
Next weeks team:
Editorial: DAO Dash by hirokennelly.eth and Saulthorin
Front End: PsychGuy
Back End: Ssasho0
Editor: Trewkat
We have a couple upcoming editorials planned on Season 3 planning, a Season 2 Recap post, DAO Governance (everyone’s responsibility), and DAO Culture. If you would like to write one of these please let us know or fill out the Rollup Editorial Backlog.
State of the DAOs
High-signal, low noise newsletter for understanding the DAO ecosystem
Editorial: Evolution of DAOs by Jake and Stake
We have a longer backlog for DAO editorials, but we are always looking for fresh takes. Add an idea for a piece to the DAO Editorial Backlog or claim an open item.
Governance
We have started Season 3 planning and will be updating the Newsletter Multi-sig to a 3 of 5 (currently 2 of 3). Thank you EthHunter, hirokennelly.eth, and Jake and Stake for stepping into that role!
In Season 3 we will also be updating our bounty structure to stay in alignment with the EPA bounties regarding writer and editor compensation.
Action List
New members grab the Newsletter Team tag in #writers-start-here
We love working asynchronously. DM @siddhearta to get plugged into projects.
Write a featured editorial for the Weekly Rollup or State of the DAOs.
EPA, nonsense 🏴 | Coordinator
There’s a new sheriff in town. Or rather, a new system for managing the editing workflow. Thanks to the efforts of Ap0ll0 and blackwhite, the editing kanban board updates is being replaced by an automated workflow. Some of you may have seen it at work; some of you may have already begun to make use of it. By implementing automation and codifying our assignments systems, we can bypass much of the error and course correction necessitated in manual processes. This will allow us to do less policing and do more of what we came for: writing and editing.
If you’re interested in picking up editing work, you’ll need to have passed an editing test. Please talk to Samanthaj for administration of the test. And if you don’t pass, stick around! We’d love to work with you to improve your skills and help you become a fine editor.
Mastermind Group, siddhearta | Coordinator
The Writers Mastermind Group is a space for writers to talk about writing. We are a dynamic and productive group that offers various perspectives, levels of experience, domains of knowledge, and personal insight.
We are currently meeting bi-weekly on Wednesdays at 1pm PST (next meeting 12/15).
If you have an idea you’d like to pitch to the group add it to the Scribe’s Desk. If you have developed your idea into a shitty first draft, feel free to share that as well!
The biggest surprise so far: it’s fun to collaborate on writing! You don’t need to write on your own in a silo. You can write in the open, with a group. Join us.
From Your Coordination Staff
Samanthaj | Talent Scout
I’ve noticed that our Friday Community Calls are too firehose-style to really show our new members the strength of our bDAO culture. To solve this, I’m putting together a Community Call Revamp proposal, which I plan to submit to the DAO as a whole on Wednesday, December 8th. If you haven’t added your ideas or opinions yet, please do so here!
I encourage new members, or anyone with the interest, to jump into our new WG Twitter project. We are beginning to explore short-form content, so hop into this thread and see where you can contribute. This is a new team and a new project, so there’s lots of space for new members to jump in!
Lastly, as the winter holiday season creeps up, I encourage you to take the time to close the laptop, celebrate your traditions with your families, and invest in your mental health and well-being. The Degen team created an AFK (away from keyboard) function which you can activate by typing “/afk” in any public channel. This will notify people who tag you that you are AFK, similar to how an Out of Office automatic email works. If you need time away (for any reason) and have a project hanging over your head, DM me and I will find someone to fill that slot. We are lucky to have an extensive talent pool in this guild, and I will find an eager writer or editor to pick up the work.
Ap0ll0517 | Secretary
We have a healthy amount of BANK in the guild’s treasury and are starting to diversify with stable coins and PERP tokens.
We recently remunerated all Writers Guild contributors. Were you one of the few who contributed to one the Newsletters and the EPA? You may have received some BANK a few times over the weekend if you’ve edited or wrote any articles during the month of November. Here’s the breakdown.
The WG multi-sig distributed 91,000 BANK for governance roles and HumanDAO bounties as well as 9,000 DAI to authors and editors for the Ultimate Ledger Guide. The EPA multi-sig distributed 73,000 BANK to to blog authors and editors; and the Newsletter multi-sig distributed 45,000 BANK to all contributors including 24,000 BANK going to translators! That’s right, we’re translating Newsletters to French, Spanish, German, Italian, and Chinese! - So bullish!!
Note that some contributors were overcompensated from the Newsletter’s multi-sig. The contributors and the amounts of BANK have been recorded and will be used to calculate future remunerations from the Newsletter project. Next payouts will be in January. Happy writing until then!!
Frogmonkee | Governance
A few points to summarize the work being done towards Writers Guild governance and this position:
The initial discussions around drafting the governance framework is done. The notes have taken, ideas have been brought to consensus, and the next steps include drafting the actual framework.
The next item of note is that Frogmonkee will be stepping down from governance and is looking for others to take up the reins. This Monday, the Governance call will include a discussion regarding the change. If you're interested in governance and possibly holding the role with others, come join us at 8pm UTC in the Writers Room.
nonsense 🏴 | Coordinator
As you can see, we are busy! Considering all the efforts to improve our working environment for ourselves and each other, we are doing as much in the realms of governance and workflow as we are in writing and editing. Questions continue to arise regarding the editing framework alongside discussions of greater alignment between the Newsletter Team and the EPA. And all this alongside conversations around the role of the Guild as a whole in relation to the teams operating within it. The progress we are making in terms of our operations is incredible. The collective collaboration happening between us as individuals in continuing to build the Writers Guild is pure magic. Though it’s a much slower process to create in this manner, I argue that the satisfaction derived from the work is far greater than in any top-down organization.
We’re building our dream place to work. And we’re doing it together. There is no limit to how far we can go. So let’s fly, Writers Guild!
Postscript
The most important things lie too close to wherever your secret heart is buried, like landmarks to a treasure your enemies would love to steal away. And you may make revelations that cost you dearly only to have people look at you in a funny way, not understanding what you've said at all, or why you thought it was so important that you almost cried while you were saying it. That's the worst, I think. When the secret stays locked within not for want of a teller but for want of an understanding ear.”
―Stephen King
Sharing the experience of this challenge falls short of the actual experience of this challenge, does it not? It’s easy to write technical pieces: show the reader how it works. But this is naught more than a manual. To make it lively requires emotion; a touch of something primal, visceral, ethereal; something that sits deep within that we would all recognize with relative ease when conveyed properly. However, conveying emotion is challenging at best, impossible at worst, and rarely is it truly, fully, captured.
Think about explaining the DAO to a loved one who is entirely unfamiliar with DAOs. The verbiage exists to describe what we do and why we’re doing it. The verbiage does not exist, however, to describe how it makes you feel and why you keep coming back. You have to create that verbiage yourself. You have to mix and match words and phrases in such a way that these words and phrases evoke what you feel. You have to understand your own feelings well enough to draw them out and hand them over in such a way that others can pick them up and immediately recognize them.
They should be able to feel it for themselves.
Show the reader how to do something, and they may, perhaps, do it. But if you transfer your enthusiasm about the process to the reader, they are more likely to understand and act.
I leave you with this thought for the week: how do you put into words how you feel about a thing in such a way that those feelings are fully captured and conveyed?
In service to you, to the Guild, and to the DAO,
nonsense 🏴