JournoDAO Weekly: Gitcoin Grant, DAO Design, and ONA
Watching the convergence of emerging technology and journalism is a curious thing to bear witness to— being at the center of such a convergence is simply fascinating. JournoDAO’s growth and acceleration in the past month has amplified to the point where we were simply too busy to put out our weekly newsletter the past two weeks. So buckleup, buttercup! We’re going to take you a whirlwind journey that is the past two weeks of our Ride or Die Regen adventure to restore some sanity to the media industry through decentralization.
Quick Links
Please Donate to Our Gitcoin Grant!
FIt’s that time of year again— GITCOIN GR15 IS LIVE! Our grant is up and we’d love fo you to swoop over and just donate $1 to our project. Due to the structure of the grant, which uses quadratic funding to amplify donations, a small amount works in our favor. So scrape that ETH together after the great Merge and head over to GR15 and donate! Be sure to check out this group of projects that Eric created an donate to many of our partners, supporters and collaborators.
JournoDAO: Using Web3 to Upgrade Journalism
On The Road
At the end of August, our founder ventured out into the world, crossed the equator and landed at one giant media party. Literally. Eric traveled to Argentina to participate in the Media Party Conference, sponsored by DECENTRALAND, Cabin, Coordinape, and others. Eric gave the keynote, manned the presentation table, conducted a workshop at a hackathon and managed to make time in his schedule to bond with the ‘Rona while he was there. All joking aside, be sure to read his summary on the week’s events and the amazing feedback and engagement from Latinix journalists venturing into web3.
Last week, Keith and Crystal popped into MCON2, an “unconference” of curated attendees who are active builders in the public goods DAO ecosystem. This is the second year of MCON, an event created by Metacartel and designed to foster conversation and collaboration within the DAO ecosystem. We attended fireside chats on governance, community growth, tokenomics and more. A common thread in every talk was the failure of many DAO founders to anticipate the human elements of running a community governed mostly by technology. Hop over to the blog for a deeper dive into this concept. We realized that we are at a distinct advantage at JournoDAO because, as journalists, we inherently understand human behavior and we also have some serious developer chops on our squad. Win-win!
New Video For ONA
The amazing Hanaa Rifaey has been guiding our founding team through the difficult process of producing a video about JournoDAO for ONA. She helped us develop a script, got us all on video calls, and even edited the final product. She makes ONA stand for Original News Angel.
You can see the video on the Startup Alley page.
And here's the promo page for the talk we'll be giving:
Even if Web3 Is Full of Scams, the Part That Isn’t Might Just Change Everything
Algorithms Might Actually Be Good?
In case you missed it I posted an essay last week exploring how the future of journalism could include, and be enabled by, user-controlled algorithms.
How Algorithms Can Set Journalism Free
Possible Ocean Protocol Grant
We also applied for an Ocean Protocol grant to do research on building a marketplace on the protocol to help journalists sell their work through decentralized mechanisms.
Gathering such data will help us better understand the direct needs of journalists entering or working within web3 and help us explore possible solutions to these pain points. We’ll be in the October grant rounds with Ocean.
CityDAO + JournoDAO + Education
We've been in contact with CityDAO about how JournoDAO can bring some educational content into the real world, and JournoDAO founding member, Climamenic (AKA Spencer), attended a conference their Education Guild hosted.
Here's his update from our Discord:
On the weekend of September 3, 2022, CityDAO's Education Guild organized a two-day academic conference about the impact web3 technology will have on educational institutions. The conference consisted of a variety of seminars and panel discussions, including guest speakers such as Professor Michael Dennin, a Vice Provost and Dean at UC Irvine, as well as a number of DAO leaders.
This conference was a good example of a balanced discussion around non-financial applications of web3 technology, and how this technology may or may not impact educational business models in order to make institutional opportunities more accessible. Much of the conversation revolved around the prospects of a student-owned and student-governed educational organization, as well as the data privacy implications of on-chain verifiable credentials.
Moving forward, especially as more established academics become familiar with web3 technology, it is important to remain cognizant of the various potential downsides involved. That said, these concerns need not dampen our curiosity or passion for improving educational institutions, and if you want to get involved, feel free to join the Education Guild's channels in the CityDAO Discord server.
DoinGud DAO
We've been invited to join the soon to be launched DoinGud DAO as community partners and we're so excited for the potential this platforms opens up for our visual journalists looking to connect their art with social causes. We're also excited to have an easy to use NFT platform to help onboard our new to web3 photojournalists and visual data journalists who are looking to deploy those skillsets in different ways. Stay tuned as we announce this formerly in the coming weeks!
🫡 See you all next time! 🚀 LFG!