Friends with Benefits is excited to enter our second year.
In 2021, what started as a social experiment exploring shared incentives and cultural production saw us push the boundaries of what it means to be a community-owned network.
We spent a lot of time together online, gathered around the world offline, created remarkable art together, built tools for ourselves, and formed real friendships — all within the confines of our Discord server.
As FWB grew, so did the needs of our community.
Sub-communities emerged, defined by geolocation or interest areas, and then diverged, as they began to cultivate their own culture, norms, and roadmaps.
To date, FWB has over 16 teams, with nearly 40 projects in the works, made up of over 100 contributors and championed by over 5000 token holders.
Divergence is the act of separation, or extension into different directions from a common point.
Branching off or forking can promote autonomy, speed, and agility, but can also lead to fragmentation.
If DAOs are optimal for divergence through creativity, labor, and empowerment, then convergence becomes necessary for shared learnings, governance, community-owned data, and infrastructure.
For Season 5, we are focusing on two major areas that will allow our community to converge: Social and Governance.
Central to FWB’s mission is equipping cultural creators and maintainers with the community and Web3 tools they need to gain agency over their production.
Navigating the relationship between branching off to form individual subcultures but then coming back together to aggregate community resources will be our formula for success, made possible by the underlying coordination that the $FWB token provides.
As we enter a new Season, new challenges will undoubtedly arise. But our ability to diverge and converge is what will allow us to thrive.
FWB Directory
The strength of our FWB community will be defined by the strength of our one-to-one relationships, and as it currently stands, there’s no easy way to find and connect with one another.
Discord is not enough for our community. There’s too much noise on Twitter. It’s time to start building our own tools.
The FWB Directory will serve as a traversable on-chain identity that enables our members to connect, grow, and move fluidly across the Web3 ecosystem.
Members will be able to search and engage with other members based on shared communities, indexed skills, and past IRL events they’ve attended.
IMAGE
At the heart of the FWB Directory is your ID, a unique non-transferable NFT that is minted upon your membership initiation.
Your NFT will contain your unique metadata, dynamically evolve over time based on your on-chain patterns, and be fully customizable, with stickers and achievements that you earn along the way.
Inputs will include:
- Discord Activity and Engagement
- FWB Event Attendance
- DAO Contribution and Roles
- Governance Participation
- NFTs collected
- Shared Communities
The Directory will be our Web3 hub across the FWB ecosystem, and your ID will be the passport and reputation as you navigate throughout it.
[IMAGE GRAPHIC OF MEMBER DIRECTORY at the center with gatekeeper events, discord, RSVP, events ]
Governance
As FWB grows, so will the processes of how we govern ourselves.
Proposal Support Team
A team focused on bringing proposals to life, and implementing them once passed.
This committee does not have the ability to approve or deny proposals, but exists to help support and refine the formation of proposals that, if they are robust enough, will move to a Snapshot vote. Upvote
Synchronous Discord conversations have not proven to be the best format for complex governance discussions.
Upvote is a homegrown tool that will allow for threading and more effective asynchronous discourse to take place before proposals are taken to Snapshot.
[INSERT SCREENSHOT OF UPVOTE]
This ensures proposals are more active, and gives contributors a better way to facilitate and integrate feedback for the most optimal outcome(s).
SMS Bird Signal
Staying in the loop on major proposals in conversation has always been tough to keep track of.
With Bird Signal, FWB members can opt in to text messages that notify you of new governance proposals.
We believe that expanding communications out of Discord will directly lead to an increase in voter turnout, and to a higher degree of quality conversation and synchronicity.
Voting
Binary voting options have their limitations.
FWB will implement new voting mechanics over Season 5 to allow for more nuanced decision-making, such as on-chain Discord poll votes.
As the scope of what’s meant to be voted on expands, so too will the ways community members can signal their voting power across many potential outcomes, rather than simply voting yes or no.
Conclusion
People’s first interactions with FWB are no longer exclusively digital.
The world reopened midway through our lifespan, and more friends are finding out about us through in-person experiences than Twitter timelines.
This responsibility to create cultural and technical tools that improve the creative class’ introduction to Web3 remains top of mind, and we understand the role we play in this ecosystem as a representative voice in advocating for ways in which things can be done differently.
As FWB enters its second year, we are eternally grateful to the community, which has challenged us to think differently and act boldly.
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Onward,
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Alex Zhang + FWB Contributors