Proposal: The Nouns Square - a community-driven daily Noun O' Clock celebration

TL;DR

We are a community of Nounish builders setting out to create a Daily Celebration of Noun O’ Clock called The Noun Square, administered by a Nouncil-like body and with the goal of proliferating Nouns by turning Noun O’ Clock into a “Shared Moment” for the entire Internet. We have successfully completed a Pilot Week using a combination of Small Grants and out-of-pocket funds for prizes (data from which which has informed our Proposal below.)

Our vision

For anyone who grew up in the 70s, 80s or 90s, “The Price is Right” holds a special place in our collective psyche. For over 50 years, its daily blend of ritual and play has entertained hundreds of thousands of people the world over. We believe Noun O’ Clock can recreate this kind of shared experience for web3.

Broad Goals:

  • Turn NOC into a daily shared moment - administer a community-driven daily Noun O’ Clock event called The Noun Square.
  • Model our community on Nouncil - a collective of builders all over the globe with varied skillsets, collaborating to organize and administer a daily Twitter Spaces, featuring contests based on the Daily Nouns, Special Guests, FOMO live, and collectible daily POAPs by nounish artists. We want to be the very first Decentralized Daily Show… How nounish is that?
  • Be consistent (”one NOC, every day, forever”) - we believe consistency is key to cementing NOC as a daily celebration for the Internet.

The Format

  • Begin 15 min before NOC every day.
  • Contest Review & Announcements.
  • Casual Guest interview while watching/discussing end of daily Noun auction.
  • Play FOMO Live together (we invite as many attendees as possible to come on stage and keep mics open for an interactive experience.)
  • Give live Secret Word for those who wish to collect POAP for attendance.

The Founding Team

  • Toady Hawk
  • Noun 142
  • Ser Noadz
  • SuperTightWoody
  • Goldy
  • Joshua Fisher
  • Maty
  • Benbodhi
  • !Xargs
  • Sam Ellis

Growing the community

  • We want to grow the community and build in the open. We have created a Discord server open to anyone who wants to contribute. We have also created a public Google Sheet that tracks our progress and metrics and future plans for anyone to follow along.
  • Hosting a live Spaces every day is an audacious goal (albeit one we are excited about), and will require participation and help from Nounsfolk in all timezones, especially as NOC drifts into the North American Night.

Compensation model

Our ask for 30 days is 60 ETH:

  • Contest rewards (0.5 eth/day * 20 weekdays = 10 ETH)
    • We will experiment with these numbers and the cadence of them as we move forward, but so far this amount and cadence has produced excellent participation.
  • Team reward (See Budget Below): 50 ETH
    • Because we intend to build this initiative as a community effort, we will be modeling our team reward, at least for the first period, on Nouncil’s proven model of a Coordinape round, where all active participants will allocate tokens based on contributions. We think this will ultimately be a fairer and more frictionless way of properly rewarding the team than attempting to itemize every hour of effort, etc.
    • Based on our Pilot Week, Toady and 142 have estimated how many man-hours it takes to run a show like this every day. We think these are reasonable overall estimates. All blue cells are parameters that you can edit.

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One Week Pilot Results

Twitter analytics

Massive reach within 7 days!

Space Participation

  • Attendance has been growing every day to average around 115 people a day.
  • We hit FOMO players ATH at 110 on our first pilot space and have been averaging between 60-70 every day.
  • Twitter growing by approximately 30 followers per day so far.
  • Averaging 30 entries to our daily contest, with many high quality submissions.
    • NB: Small Grants sponsored our first Week of contest prizes (thank you!) Noun Square Team members Toady Hawk and 142 have agreed to fund the current week’s prizes out of pocket to keep morale high pending approval or disapproval of this broader proposal.

(Excerpt Above from our Public Tracking/Planning Document.)

Gamifying NOC with POAPs

We are using POAPs to gamify NOC and create both engagement and loyalty. We feel that our use of Daily Attendance POAPs is the purest use case for the tech (literally “Proof of Attendance”) and we want to use them to incentivize people to attend Noun O’ Clock every single day if they can.

So far, it’s working! Ser Noadz has been creating amazing daily animated POAPs based on the new Noun of the Day and would continue to do so for the first month (after which we would explore other “Series” by other Nounish artists.)

We also want to experiment with doing Bonuses like physical Merch drops for those with Provable Streaks of Attendance, and raffles that are easier to win the more times you have attended.

Example Possible “The Noun Square” Merch Drop for Attendance Streaks:

Playing FOMO

The peak moment of The Noun Square is, of course, playing FOMO live and minting a new Noun together. When FOMO starts during the Twitter Space, we ask all speakers to unmute and speak their mind, to create as much chaos, interaction and fun as possible. The feedback so far has been that people have been loving it!

We have noticed anecdotally that FOMO seems to take longer on average with more players, until we hit that beautiful noun that reaches some consensus. We think the Nouns minted over the past week or so are especially legendary, and believe it’s related to our efforts to Gamify FOMO and bring in new players.

Our plan for the next 30 days

  • Host a Noun o’ Clock every. single. day.
  • Run a contest based on the new Noun most every weekday.
  • Have a different nounish guest join every weekday.
  • Invite a different nounish extension, subdao or community to host every weekend.
  • Invite as many interested Nounsfolk to join our Discord and share ideas, volunteer to help where they can.
  • From this interested group, curate an Organizational Committee that handles all the day to day tasks to keep this going in a decentralized manner.
  • At the end of each 15 day period, reward contributors by Coordinape Round.
  • Strive to reach over 500k Tweet Impressions on our @noun_o_clock Twitter account.
  • Strive to grow Twitter following to 1000+.
  • Strive to grow daily show attendance to 125 per day, and average FOMO Players to 85+.
  • Produce over 800 unique pieces of Nounish content in the form of public entries to our Noun O’ Clock contests. We have already seen amazing pieces of Found Art, Haikus, Custom Art and more during our Pilot week. These contests are the very definition of Proliferation.
  • Teach hundreds of new people about Nouns and Noun o’ Clock through our informative and entertaining spaces.

Potential challenges

  1. July gets into very late night EST and we may have fewer participants. However, we believe that consistency is key, as well as the opportunity to get more people from non-north america timezones to hear about nouns.
  2. Over-saturation is a risk of course, as with anything that happens daily. But as with The Price is Right, we hope to create a shared ritual with the community we are building, such that the daily show is something they look forward to, rather than a chore they get bored of. We are building variety into the structure of the show, with a mixture of weekly segments and novel guests and contests to keep things interesting for many, many months (and hopefully longer!)

In Summary/Conclusion:

Over the past week and a half, we have kicked off a tradition of making Noun O’ Clock a daily celebration, featuring live Twitter Spaces, interactive contests and special guests. So far, people love it. (See feedback section below)

We believe that, if given funding to execute our vision detailed here, we can bring new attention to Nouns and the daily auction every day, while also supporting extension and sub-DAO communities, and engaging active Nounish builders.

Let’s work together to make Noun O’ Clock into a shared moment for the Internet!

Feedback from attendees has been great:

“The Noun Square gives a much needed voice to what is Nounish. A platform to congregate daily, learn and vibe, uniting Nounsfolk, and beyond, around the world!” -Metamonk

“I don’t watch TV anymore, but I do miss the days when I would spend my evenings with David Letterman on the Late Show. It was home to me. And that is what the Noun O’ Clock team are doing right now. It definitely feels like home to me.-Leo Clark

“This event is now something that I want to do every single day. I am literally trying to figure out how to turn over my entire family’s sleep schedule! Getting to hear my Nounish frens and what they are up to is amazing. This event has also proven to be a wonderful way for me to onboard new folks into Nouns. I leave this every day with dozens of new and Nounish ideas, and feeling great and motivated.” -!xargs

Having a common and consistent place to gather for a Noun O’ Clock event is something folks need–a kind of programming schedule that they can tap into every day. The engagement events have been fun and accessible and rotating guests have been a good way to introduce folks to extension projects while celebrating the nouns in general! The POAPS are great and give a feeling of being part of the history of the noun minted that day…” -Sam Ellis

“For a couple months, I’ve tried to touch base in the Discord during FOMO as a fun way to interact with those in the Nouns eco system. Having this extended virtual event via Spaces has taken that to a whole new level! The Spaces, the guests (David Horvath!), the games, the prizes and the POAPs all bring different aspects of interaction, energy and motivation to attend. Unlike 20 years ago, we rarely have shared cultural experiences as a society anymore (think TV show series finales etc.) We have an opportunity to create one here that is open to everyone to enjoy on a global scale. How exciting!” - Prof Werder

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Now this here’s a good idea and one I’m happy to participate in! Get ready for your Noun O’ Clock jingle!

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It’s been a lot of fun watching Nouns Square take off in the past couple of weeks. Great interviews, Nounish friends, and always a fun game of FOMO to round things out. I can’t wait to watch this community-driven event grow!

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Love noun o’ clock, had a great time the other day on the broadcast and the OG spaces soon after inception last year was a really great way to huddle together around what like minds are increasingly passionate about, hope it continues.

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So I think Nouns Square is incredible and needs to continue. My only question about the prop is if the hourly rate for work is negotiable. I may just be out of touch, but that seems pretty high to me and I’m not sure $700k per year to run the show will be sustainable. I could be wrong, but I would start a little smaller and work up to a higher number as it continues to prove it’s growth and value.

That’s just my 2 cents. Certainly the DAO has the funds to run it as a test, but it would kinda stink to start high and end up having to lower or cancel it later.

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Thanks for everyone’s feedback! @AndrewLaddusaw That has certainly been a concern. First, I want to reiterate that our team is loaded with the best of the best experienced talent. Professional salaries are a real thing for professional quality. That said, we are coming up with a lot of great ideas for involving community, and remember that the budget is an estimate, and that Coordinape will be used for distribution. If you spend some time in the discord, you will see amazing ideas popping out every few seconds. This structure makes space for growth, not only of our offerings, but to shift things around in a way that moves with the community in the space.

Between the time this proposal was drafted, and right now (NOC -20), we have a whole slew of things in the works, including a website that will keep a daily record of our historic events, which in turn will make information about Nouns and our Nounish guests, more accessible than ever. No more will these events be lost in twitter feeds. No more will people wonder which place is the best for finding info on Nounish projects. No more will they wonder what ever happened to this project or that project. It will all be in one place. TheNounsSquare.wtf - Each daily post will have info about the guest(s), links to their twitters and projects, the Noun that was minted, the POAP, the twitter transcripts (hello SEO!!), and much more!

Per the challenges… Our Aussies are sleeping through right now, but we will be solid in their timezone soon. I have been working on onboarding people overseas as well. I know I am not alone in that. And, solid discussions are under way about how to avoid burnout. Our team has so much collective experience, many of us from broadcast media. Burnout is old news, and we are not going there. :slight_smile:

This project already does wonders for proliferating Nouns and Nounish projects, and with the website, that process will become ongoing and ever present.

Please feel free to hit any of us up in the discord!

Thanks for your time and attention!
~!xargs

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Thanks Nate, can’t wait! (Oh look I’m a poet do you need any help with that jingle?)

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Xargs already took a stab at answering above, but I would just add that when @Noun142 and I were drawing up the budget for this, we considered it from two perspectives:

  1. Value this initiative will bring to the DAO and
  2. Approximate man hours required to run the initiative + prize funds.

In both cases, we came to similar amount. If you look at what we’ve accomplished in one week largely out of pocket, and extrapolate that to a full month, I think the value of “1/2 of One Noun Auction” is a fair ask from a Value perspective.

Most of our contributing team are professionals in their fields, some with normal hourlies in excess of what we used for estimate’s sake. We also want to attract the best talent in the Nouniverse to help build out our community, and rely on CoordinApe rounds to ensure all contributors are adequately compensated. Of course we are always open to feedback on all aspects of the proposal, but we have put a lot of thought into the structure of the ask and we feel it is fair, and good value for Nouns.

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Thank you as always for your support David. You have a standing invitation to come on as a guest any day!

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Thank you for the quick response from both of you! Please know that my pushback is only to clarify the value prop and see this last for the long term. The Nouns Square is incredible and needs to continue one way or another. You’ll have my support the whole way for this first run.

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I always appreciate a devil’s advocate. :slight_smile: Thanks for your support!

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Hello, thanks to !Xargs, I just joined here.
My English is not good enough to read and understand the contents of here without misunderstanding, but I would like to introduce Nouns Square to NounsDAO Japan.
I think I will log-in here on occasion and feel the atmosphere of new culture of cc0 or DAO.
Thank you for this wonderful opportunity.:four_leaf_clover:

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@Momocy Thank you and welcome! I will touch base in the discord. We would love to bring this around for you!

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As @tracybcarpenter mentioned, we’re already discussing ways to include NounsDAO Japan!
Can’t wait for the fun to ensue.

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I’m obviously in full support of this and really appreciate the team involved.

All points that @toadyhawk and @tracybcarpenter have voiced echo my opinion also.

This is a really fun way that has instant and measurable ROI in terms of proliferation that is only growing. We should aim to keep the momentum going and make this the most fun Twitter space that you can swing by daily.

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I support The Nouns Square 100%. It’s fun, engaging, and contagious. It’s run and hosted well and has a great group of people that is growing but also has many regulars.

But I want to commend it for a more significant reason than that. I’m relatively new to the Nouns and the nouniverse (~4 weeks or so). I’ve milled about, researched, highly engaged with the Nouniverse of Twitter, and even gotten involved with an extension project. But it’s really the Nounsquare that over the last 10 days has reshaped my thinking and daily ritual. Because that’s what Noun O’Clock and The Noun Square are…a new daily ritual for a new culture.

I haven’t done it every day (maybe 1/2) but I already:
–Think about Noun O’Clock every day and know what time it is
–Know very well, the previous day’s Noun and the upcoming Noun
–Know the price of the Nouns

And then alongside that is the fun and gamification with POAPs and contests. The contests really seem to draw people in and introduce us to who’s really bought into Nounsquare.

Nounsquare has brought me into ownership of Noun O’Clock, the daily Noun, and the daily ritual. If that’s not proliferation of the Nouns brand, I don’t know what is. I feel like this is the thing I could invite my non-web3, non-NFT aware friends to get introduced to this great new world without overwhelming them and letting them catch the wave.

Keep Nounsquare going! :slight_smile:

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Love Nouns, love the vision, love the team.
What else? Let’s do this!

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@bradq, @leoclark, and everyone here - thanks so much for your support! We love ya back!

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Listened in to Noun o Clock for the first time today (albeit a recording) - and made it all the way through!

I absolutely love the idea of FOMO, and seeing how many ppl tune in daily, this can certainly evolve to be part of the “Nouns Culture”.

Budget is reasonable and team is competent. Most importantly, a fully “Nounish” idea. So this gets a resounding YES from me! Good luck team!

Okay, now how do I claim da POAP :wink:

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Noun O’Clock and the events around it are core Nounish lore that needs to be celebrated.

The auction itself is entertaining - we can bring attention to the bidders, new Nouners, make the final moments of an auction a community event.

The real power here though, imo, is a flurry of activity the moment a Noun is born. We have 24 hours where the virtuous cycle can actually return tangible ETH to the treasury. Art contests are a great example of this, we are effectively marketing today’s Noun and increasing its sale price.

The ask in the on-chain proposal is 55 ETH for 30 days. This feels like a significant amount of ETH to be spending monthly. However, marketing revolving around the daily auction is one of the most effective places I can imagine to spend our ETH. On top of this, the proposal here has many of Nouns most prolific builders and trusted community members.

A pilot month for this project gets an easy yes from me. I expect this team to over-deliver, experiment with whats effective, and knock this one out of the park. The results need to be seriously impressive because the next steps (ie funding 6 months) are going to have significant asks.

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