Sampo Season 1 Impact: August 2022 Update

⚛ Community Updates
1

Promised in Funding Proposal

  1. Launch a simple, first $TEC token utility service

    • As the first simple token utility service the “Discord Token Holder Channel” is now live and can get access to it by holding at least 1 $TEC.
    • The purpose of this project is, first and foremost, to experiment with running a token gate on the TEC’s Discord server as part of our longer-term goal of building utility around the TEC token. In this initial phase, we are starting simple by using the channel to share TEC financial health, community updates, and calling to light key governance information.
    • Now that the token-gated channel is up and running, we will work with the Comms team to determine which TEC updates make the most sense behind the token gate as a way to increase token utility and which ones are better left un-gated. In the near future, we also plan to use the token-gated Discord channel as a channel for publishing community-curated content (see Content Curation Service below).
    • As a reminder, the token-gated Discord channel was originally envisioned as a test. Early next year, we will attempt to assess its impact on perceived token utility and on the TEC culture.

  2. Advise Transparency WG on “Unified Working Group Spending Reports”

    • The first phase of this work is done. The Sampo team contributed ideas and feedback, but the work itself was all done by @rex as part of the Transparency Working Group’s responsibilities. The resulting spreadsheet templates are already proving extremely useful for coordinating financial reports across working groups within the TEC. The reports coming out of these spreadsheets also serve as the source data for the financial updates that we are publishing within the token-gated Discord channel.

  3. Develop and test framing/language for TEC’s value propositions to funders

    • This work is now folding into a broader purpose document outlining a strategy for building services and developing the economic layer of the TEC that we will put through a community advice process in late September.

  4. Identify and prioritize a list of potential grantmakers

    • Submitted first grant application to File Coin and Unfinished Explorer Awards for $9,072. This application is intended to fund a large portion of the costs of the Content Curation Service (see below). This is a very competitive grant-making process at a time when many organizations are applying for funding, so it is a bit of a long-shot. We hope to hear back by mid-September.
    • For the upcoming Gitcoin Round 15 (GR15) grant application, we switched our strategy to move away from a “general support” request to a project-specific request to fund the Content Curation Service. Within the philanthropic sector, it is well-established that these more specific and tangible requests for funding get donors much more excited. GR15 runs September 7-22 and we plan to work closely with the Comms team to organize the TEC community to maximize community-wide participation.This will involve extensive outreach in our Discord channels, TEC forum and Twitter With Gitcoin’s quadratic funding model, even very small gifts can have an important impact on Gitcoin’s matching fund allocations. This round will be a good opportunity for the community to strengthen its ability to organize around fundraising.

Followup from Last Update

  • Develop a treasury policy and strategy and begin earning yield

    • During this month the Treasury Policy went through advice process in the forum before it was voted on and successfully passed on Snapshot with 100% of the participants voting “Yes” to the proposal.
    • Now the First Investment Strategy is being worked on and will be shared with the TEC community in the coming days to go through the advice process before being submitted to CV in accordance with the Treasury roadmap.

  • Roll out the TEC’s first “Minimum Viable Service"

    • The Token Engineering Request Board project is on hold for now. The service has lots of points of potential synergy with the Token Engineering Academy, so we are waiting until they complete the launch of the Token Engineering Fundamentals course before moving forward with these plans. This change of plans delays the launch of the TEC’s first “minimum viable service” by a couple of months but plans are already underway for a new service that is every bit as exciting.
    • The “Content Curation Service” (final name still TBD) will be the first of the TEC’s Token Engineering Schelling Point Services. In simple terms, the service will enable existing and potential community members to share links to valuable content about token engineering and related topics (governance, DAO operations, etc.) within the TEC’s Discord server. People’s emoji reactions to the posts will then be used as curation feedback to identify content that is broadly valued within the community.
    • We envision that the resulting curated content will be used in several ways. The initial applications will be quite simple. The first is publishing the resulting “TEC greatest hits” (name still TBD) in the token-gated Discord channel as part of our experiment in increasing the perceived utility of the TEC token (see above). The second will be used to generate interesting content for the TEC’s Twitter account. We hope that by acknowledging both the contributors and the authors of these posts within our tweets, we will help to build engagement and help attract many new people who are interested in these topics to the TEC. Our goal is to launch this initial release in early October.
    • In subsequent releases, we hope to work with interested working groups within the TEC to use this service for more topic-specific knowledge sharing. Though details have yet to be worked out at this point, our first priority here will be in helping the Omega Working Group to use the service to fulfill their ambitions around the Consilience Library project.
    • The Sampo team is working with the Common SenseMakers collective (a partnership including members from DAOstack, Tangible AI and Veeo) to build this service. Development costs are being contributed at no charge to the TEC. Our only real expenses are related to specifying our requirements and the community organizing work needed to build community engagement with the service.

  • Work with Comms WG to finalize plans for an initial fundraising campaign

    • The focus here in the short-term will be around organizing around the Gitcoin GR15 grant (see above).
    • Beyond that, the Sampo team will be working closely with the Comms Working Group on campaigns aimed at driving growth in TEC’s Twitter followers, Twitter engagement, and ultimately new members on the TEC’s Discord server. Success here will set us up for better engagement with the TEC’s future services and longer-term fundraising success.
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