Brainstorming on tools to power JournoDAO 🧠

#1

Hey folks,

I had some interesting tech ideas and questions that I thought might interest you and help get some brain-juices flowing on the next big ideas for JournoDAO.

Some Context :national_park:

I see JournoDAO as being in a young state characterized by a search through the many problems of 2020’s journalism for an opportunity to help out, eyeing web3 as a new lens to view the problems through. In the long-term, I think that JournoDAO is at least partially interested in orchestrating web3 journalism tools for a use case/persona, or creating one of their own. I could envision a future stage for JournoDAO characterized by hypothesizing lots of ideas, disproving a few, and experimenting with a small remainder of those.

With JournoDAO’s forum as an excellent and less-scrollable backdrop, I’m interested in hearing some ideas on web3 journalism tooling from anyone interested.

The Goal :dart:

My goals for this thread are:

  • Spread web3 journalism tool ideas and kickstart even more ideation conversations in hopes of creating more opportunities to validate solutions that can help JournoDAO scale sustainably.
  • Generate a list of new ideas to explore with JournoDAO
  • Secondary to both of the above, find at least one idea small enough in scope to hack on in the name of experimentation. Something that would just be a few-week long part-time hacking sort of project. I’m not betting on getting this far :smiley:. That said, if it does get that far, I am interested in implementing with a specific tech, and I’ll get to the why behind that a bit later.

My ask to you :pleading_face:

I’d just ask folks to freely discuss:

  • problems in the space
  • ideas for web3 journalism tools
    … whether building off of someone else’s idea, or providing a completely new one, I don’t think it matters too much!

Some ideas :face_with_monocle:

To start, I’d like to give some examples, based on ideas we’ve discussed in the past.

Past Ideas

  • A publishing system where the story version control is stored on-chain as a public record
  • A publishing system where necessary pre-publish work can be concealed and then revealed later
  • Witness protection
  • Anonymous tip line

Others:

  • Chain with gas paid through day pass/subscription/other payment model
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#2

And one more comment. I had some specific ideas related to tech.

Some Substrate tech, ideas, and a caveat

I originally wanted to do this thread on Substrate-focused ideas, but I changed my mind on that, since tech-first product decisions do not work, according to legend. Regardless, I wanted to still offer some tech benefits of Substrate, in case that helps spur some thoughts.

In addition to the properties listed below, Substrate is capable of anything you can imagine smart contracts are currently capable of.

Tech properties of Substrate

  • Simplified blockchain development focused on application-specific L1s!
  • Ability to specify fee structure for transactions, including no-fees(for parachains)
  • More decentralized UIs through light clients
  • Forkless upgrades
  • Trustless communication with some other chains(for parachains)

Example ideas based on the above

  • Chain-native integration with things like Streamr, or anything else
  • Subscription-based chain, or other payment model customized to the Publisher
  • Publishing system featuring smart contracts that are focused on publishing actions
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#3

Thanks for starting this!!!

Some quick responses to your prompts to keep the ball rolling:
NEEDS/PROBLEMS TO SOLVE

  • Incentive structures that emphasize reporting quality and depth over quantity and speed(Think Tim Urban, Frontline on PBS, etc)
  • Anything to incentivize anyone with a bit of passion towards reporting who lives in a news desert and thinks they can do a better job than Facebook of covering their community to just get started.
  • Yes to version control and increased access/transparency of the primary sources that go into reporting.
  • We’ve talked about basically setting up the crypto version of Getty images.

I’ll continue ruminating…

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#4

There is also the possibility of setting up some collective Mirror account, perhaps involving a multisig, wherein multiple writers can contribute to the same Mirror account. Maybe there are already ways to do this, but I’m not sure.

In principle, we may be able to start formulating a web3 newspaper business model, provided we can use Mirror in this way.

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#5

It would be good to also review what we’ve tried in this realm so far. Early members have often thought of JournoDAO as having incubator-like features, where we support a small number of projects for a period of time (batches or cohorts).

Some of the initial candidates that were proposed:

  • Factland – Tries to solve the problem of opaque reporting/logic chains while also democratizing sense-making with novel incentives.

  • dBranch.news - Which seeks to re-imagine the roles of each node on the news production/consumption chain.

  • Substack without Substack – We received $7.5k from Streamr to build a proof of concept tool that would allow journalists to decentralize and monetize their content feeds. The project is ongoing with some technical success. It needs some love from a few different areas, but mostly development to make a front-end that can display the stream content for subscribers.

  • Connectivity – The more we explore how to server news desserts, the more we see that JournoDAO might need to get into the infrastructure game. The inequality of journalism usually correlates to the inequality of connectivity. I personally would like to form a working group to research the bleeding edge of mesh networks and last-mile internet access.

#6

All really good points to explore, I feel like there’s 8 different possible discussion threads in here.

I like the incubator concept, for both entities/collectives and individual journalists exploring or building out their web3 skillset. I almost feel like we’re standing at an intersection where we can test existing or very new tools (like Chainverse) and then help devs tweak them for the needs of journalists in ways they hadn’t thought of prior to working with us.

Almost like we’re moving into a hybrid of strategic advisors, web3 media tech incubator and web3 education for journalists. Seems like logical silos to make collectives or circles out of for the organization.

As for building the tools, I kind of feel like us actually building things would take quite a bit of bandwidth that we might not have right now (I might be totally wrong), but pairing with teams/DAOs/protocols already building seems a more logical option given our size and resources.

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#7

Yeah, I think we’re seeing the rough forms of guilds or working groups start to emerge here.

@Jfrevert I get the sense that you’re energized by the idea of building something small that would benefit the DAO, and if so, I say go for it. And if you’re feeling up for it, you could even take the lead on some sort of Tool Building working group. I feel like I would want to be part of that working group as well since I’ve done some building already and want to push what we have forward in the coming months.

Or maybe that’s introducing too much bureaucracy too soon? Seems like a light enough structure to help define what’s going on without too much restriction …

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