Sharing draft proposal with the community for feedback before we go on-chain.
tl;dr
We are building a community of Nounish families, and creating a family focused mobile and web app to drive engagement. This family experience called FamilyNouns will make it super easy and fun to get families into Nouns and create Nounish things together.
The vision is to proliferate Nouns and do good for families across the world at scale. This prop is to creating a minimum viable experience of FamilyNouns, that includes effective community engagement, web and mobile app, characters and experiments in governance.
Why
So families create together, have fun together, learn together and most importantly proliferate together.
The fun, absurdity and accessibility of Nouns makes a rich creative space for different generations to create with each other. Bringing families together with FamilyNouns will benefit improved mental health, relationships, education and reduced stress. Our goal is for families to have more fun, do more good and spread more nounishness; and as a result, share the positive impacts with their friends, creating a positive self reinforcing loop.
âThe best thing for me about Nouns in that my 9 year old daughter into it with meâ.
We will make it easy for families to get involved in Nouns together, maintain motivation and create a simple on-ramp into Nouns, community governance and web3.
Public Goods & Proliferation
Nouns has the potential to bring hundreds of thousands of families to create together and in doing so, can generate significant social benefit.
The family is a massive subculture that we can activate in a big way. Most families are already a bit nounish; they like to have fun and make the world better. Weâll make it easy to become fully noun-pilled.
Families are great proliforators, they tell other families, they play with each other and the meme gets spread. Families and young Nounish creators also make for great stories. This is the FamilyNouns flywheel.
Vision
The vision is for these kinds of stories to compound through network effects:
- A 12-year-old girl noun-pills her Dad, becomes the youngest member of Nouncil, is a fractional owner of a Noun with her Dad and recently spoke on stage about Nouns in Australia.
- A Nounish professor convinces her teenage son to create a Nounish collection and work together with his mom! What teenager does that?
- A nounish dad co-creates all things Nounish with his 9-year-old daughter to the point that she enters The NounSquare contests on her own and releases her own AniNouns collection to the world.
We want to spread this Nounishness and bring in 100, 1,000, and 100,000 more nounish stories like these. We want to reach existing nounish families and those not yet familiar with Nouns and activate the Family subculture.
The Challenge
It is currently difficult for families to create on Nouns because there isnât an experience designed for parents and children. From our experience as parents wanting to bring our kids into nouns there are 3 key reasons:
- Community experiences donât work for the kids in our lives (twitter, discord, spaces etc)
- They donât have a profile
- They content isnât directed at them.
- Finding and creating activities takes time
- Time poor families need it to be easy
- When they donât get feedback on their creations they arenât motivated
- They want a place to share and people to care
Proposed Solution
We will create a platform for FamilyNouns by nurturing a community, building an app, and developing an ecosystem for nounish families to come together, create and share.
This will be provided through an app (web, iOS and Android), discord and socials (collectively the platform). The app will be the main point of participation, we will use socials to engage with parents, and to share the families creations with the wider community.
The platform, focused on 4-12 year olds and their parents, will include the development of new activities, integrate existing Nounish family friendly activities, and bring future activities into a single experience that builds a strong family focused community.
To make the platform as accessible as possible we will focus on the nounish experience not the technology. It will be a Web2 platform in the first instance, focused on ease of use and enjoyment. Web3 elements are on the roadmap, with the intention for users to be able to âbridgeâ their assets onto a web3 chain.
The focus for this prop is to get the core experience working well and becoming sticky with the beta testers who we are nurturing as the early adopters and core community.
Community
We will build a community of families creating together with Nouns. This will provide encouragement, fun, friendship and support in the nounish family journey. Through this prop we will establish the early community of 50-100 families, some already nounish and some not-yet nounish, who will beta test the experience.
The Community will provide a place to do things together:
- Contests to create together and then share with the community as well as collective efforts as a community
- Gamified ecosystem that rewards users for daily activities and community engagement with native tokens, POAPs, and leaderboards
- Creative ideas, thought out and prepared for busy families to easily start creating together. No fuss. No hassle. Just jump in. (âFamily creative fun in a boxâ)
- Encouragement for families to get together and do stuff
- Activity collabs with other Nouns communities such as âbaking cookies with Food Nounsâ
The Community will provide a place for belonging:
- A natural place and way for families to gather together in this new world of a nounish journey
- A place to bring friends and families you know to share in the fun and creativity
- A place to potentially reach out to âbrokenâ families with a light of fun and creativity
We will explore standard options like Twitter and Discord, but will also seek to creatively use tools that are natural to web2 families ranging from email to IRL and everything in between. How we do this most effectively for families will be an experiment.
The core of the family experience will be the app which provides the space for families to find activities, share what they create and get positive feedback.
App
Build an app that enables families to find nounish activities, create and share together.
Mock up pages to give a feel for what we will make (not final artwork)
Features:
- A platform that brings together all nounish activities for families into one easy to use experience where families will be able to:
- Make a family pfp and profile
- Create a nounish pfp in-app, using traits that you earn for completing and sharing activities. Create a profile about your family and all your family members.
- Do nounish creative activities, including:
- Family Noggles Selfie
- Nounish poem
- Make an animal Noun
- Nounish dress up
- Create a story about todayâs Noun
- Collab coloring
- Make family generative art
- Create with Noundry
- Noun cookie baking
- etc etc etc
-
some example activities here
- Activities will be pages on the app with instructions and links to resources
- Share creations
- Upload photoâs, share screen shots, or paste in text
- Get rewarded with tokens
- Tokens are non-monetary, an in-app âpointsâ system.
- View and like what everyone else has created
- Take part in daily competitions (tokens as prizes)
- See where you are on the leaderboard
- Trade tokens for traits on your family pfp
- Make a family pfp and profile
Timeline: 2 Months from funding, agile development in response to team and user feedback.
The app will initially be released for web, and will also be deployed on iOS and Android (we are building with Flutter which makes this straightforward with minimal cost)
Art
Commission artists in the community to produce three specific Nounish characters for FamilyNouns to be used as assets in the app, and on socials and community platforms.
Governance
We will start to bring elements of governance to the family. That may not sound like fun, but think about the benefits and excitement of:
Tiny Grants- micro grants to lil builders (Imagine kids getting funded to build!)
Prop House- families creating ideas and building together to grow FamilyNouns
Games like âHow Would You Voteâ to think and discussâŚ.
We see this as a core part of building the community and engagement.
A note on safeguarding
We recognise that safeguards need to be in place when working with children and take this seriously.
ChrisCoCreated who is leading this prop for UglyNouns runs a government regulated care business in the UK, and has worked with vulnerable people for the past 20 years. It is something we have strong expertise in and is core to the way we are building.
Practically we are taking these steps in our initial release:
- All images and comments are pre-moderated by the core team before being visable on the app
- Strict moderation of discord by the core team
- All accounts are owned by an adult in the family. It is their responsibility to manage their childrenâs access
Who
UglyDAO are passionate nounish builders with a significant track record in Nouns DAO.
Ugly includes three active Nounish families who are part of the team.
Core members of the Ugly Family:
Lead: ChrisCoCreated - social entrepreneur, builder, artist, Nouncillor, dad of Lil Turquoise Panda
ThaSwami - co-founder Alps DAO, builder, artist, dad and assistant to 13 year old Nouncillor Little Purple Blueberry
Little Purple Blueberry - 13 year old nounish artist, web3 curious, Nouncillor
Prof Werder - Entrepreneurship Instructor, Nouncillor, builder, mum of WatercolorNouns
Other core members from Ugly DAO:
Bradq - onboarding & communication, community, Nouncillor, and all things telling your story better
Supertight Woody - musician and producer, content creator extraordinaire, Nouncillor, builder
Advisors and Contributors
WatercolorNouns - 14 y/o nounish artist, co-founder of WatercolorNouns, Prop House contender
Lil Turquoise Panda - 10y/o nounish builder, co-creator of AniNouns
Lead Dev - https://github.com/screendead who works regularly with ChrisCoCreated and has developed similar apps for Chris care business.
Care Business Example: video demo of app
Web3 example: https://afoxlikeme.xyz/
Budget
For Phase 1 - MVP Funded by this proposal
To build Initial Product Release of the platform. An app experience which includes the first layer of activities. Build an early community of beta users. Develop characters, and experiment with governance.
Items:
10 ETH for App building
- Webapp, and iOS and Android ready (achieved by building with Flutter which transpiles across all platforms)
- Core functionality:
- User accounts
- Share activity in the app and store in a database
- Moderate posts
- Collect tokens for sharing activity & likes received for your activity
- In-app assets and tokens
15 ETH for User experience and community development (3 months)
- Nurturing the early community
- Gathering and managing user feedback
- Moderating & approving all posts in the app
- Commenting on all contributions (making sure everyone gets seen and acknowledged)
- Developing new activities
- Social media management
- Discord building
- Experiment with communication tools (including email, and alternatives to discord)
- Managing family governance
- Doing the the activities with the community
- Admin - metrics and reporting
90 days x 0.166 per day
(distributed across the core team of 6 - average 2.5 ETH for 15 days work)
2 ETH for Artist
- Creating FamilyNouns characters, and assets and traits for use in the app
1 ETH Contest Prizes
- 0.5 ETH for Nouniverse contests with Extension projects such at Food Nouns, The Nounsquare, etc.
- 0.5 ETH for twitter contests
1 ETH Governance Experiments
- 0.5 ETH TinyGrants
- 0.5 ETH PropHouse for Activities
Total: 29 ETH
Funds distribution
Funds will be managed by the UglyNouns multisig
App dev (10 ETH) will be paid 50% up front 50% on completion
User experience (15 ETH) will be paid through a monthly coordinape for the core team
Artist will be paid 50% up front 50% on completion
Governance and Prizes will be paid out as used
Success
We will consider this phase of work on FamilyNouns successful when:
- We have established initial product market fit
- We have a core engaged community regularly interacting with the app and community
- We have developed the infrastructure for a wide launch
- We have a wider community of family âguardiansâ engaged and supportive
Future Plans
This first phase will have developed the infrastructure for a wide launch after beta. The next phase we will continue to onboard families and develop family activities in order to reach thousands of families.
Will we be asking for more funds from Nouns DAO? This is of course an option we will consider, though we are also open to alternative funding routes, including establishing a FamilyNouns DAO.
We will continue to explore and build to activate the massive family subculture
we are building in the open!