nounsacademy

It's been 30 days since I joined the nouns community as a full time contributor and creating this channel to document some of the things I've learned and and hope to resolve for the community.

Education and retention are some of the most important things I've noticed during my time in the Ethereum community.

Nouns Esports, Public Goods, NMN Producer

Education is the first thing that comes to mind for providing our community a funnel for talent for growth of core technologies and contributors who can share our mission. In my first 30 days, I had to continuously DM members of Nouns to learn about anything from Agora to Camp, how props worked, what a fork was, etc.

I think that it's great there are several projects trying to solve for this. However, it's extremely difficult to understand the need for multiple front ends and none of them are updated consistently so that a new nouns member can easily onboard. Example: I didn't even know small grants was deprecated until yesterday

My belief is that there needs to be a phased creation of evergreen materials for any future Nouns member. 

Phase 0: WTF is Nouns https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oa79nN4gMPs
Great onboarding -> After I do this, where do I go next? If I don't know the basics of blockchain but love the mission, how do I learn the basics?

Phase 1: Learn about some of the projects and the lessons from them. 
Rusutsu, Quack, Nouns Esports, Nouns Funds Education, so many great proposals, but it is so important that we continue to push on these initiatives to show how someone new to Nouns can do the same thing. This also needs an intro to blockchain tech.

Phase 2: Mentorship is important for retention. When I first joined the space, Stani of Aave taught me how to bridge to L2 at MCON, Justin of ETHDenver taught me ethos, Gitcoin community taught me about public goods and quadratic funding, and from this experience, I was able to transition well into being onchain.

I view this as an educational platform, maybe a Nouns Academy that provides educational resources, retroactively rewards contributors who put in proof of work, and a house to test and try out smaller experiments. Incentives are important here as the majority of the space is constantly bombarded by new exciting things

Phase 3: As these contributors become educated, we also need to provide opportunities for these contributors to connect with each other. My personal experience was from Supriyo, Brennen, Sasquatch, Toady, Profwerder, Ben, and so many others who spent countless hours helping me, but that is not a scalable solution.

There are lessons we can learn from programs like Techstars, YCombinator, Ethereum Fellowship Program, and others that provide alumni systems that allow for those who have capacity to tap in easily quarterly or during specific segments. This requires significant coordination and most likely needs to be a full time prop

This phase is the area where outside help works well. For Nouns Esports, we have taken in outside help of agencies who have worked clients such as Beyonce and Opensea, we consistently lean on our advisory board, ask frens from companies like Bumble and The Hundreds to support, and this allows us to scale quicker.

Utilzing the treasury nouns as a delegation mechanism for supporters who provide value (most likely with a 12 month criteria for transfer of ownership to protect against bad actor) allows for proper incentives to be in place while receiving consistent value is an interesting experiment that may be worth trying out

This would allow for better audit and support for future props along with being able to provide value back to existing props that need it. After surveying over 30 active proposals, there has been consistent needs from UI/UX, Branding, Technical Development, G2M, Merchandising, etc. and we don't have a solution for this

If our media props could focus purely on creating amazing content and not worry about growth of their brand, they could achieve more. If technical teams had support from strong designers they could attract more users. If product props had access to the best facilities, they coul reduce their production costs. etc etc

This is an early diagram of what I see as the future of Nouns Academy. A powerhouse of resources to give contributors the best chance of success in their props.

That's the end of post #1. If you told 23 year old me that the world was mine to explore, I wouldn't have believed you. This strategy has worked for building Ethereum Fellows (2023), the #1 Liquidity Protocol on Sui (2024), the #1 blockchain project in Sri Lanka (2022), and we are going to do this again with Nouns.

Without the mentorship, onchain communities are extremely hard to understand. We need to collaborate to empower others at a deeper level. This could come in the form of digestible 5 minute videos, evergreen articles, monthly workshops etc. Most likely a combination of all of these with consistency of updates.