Guilds Playbook

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1. Overview

This playbook is a collection of best practices and recommendations based on current NEAR ecosystem operations, and can serve as a blueprint for present and future Guild activity.

This playbook is a living document and relies on members of the community to help maintain its accuracy and relevance, so please interact with it, add your own edits to it, and, most of all, use it!

We do ask, in the spirit of open and productive collaboration, that everyone remain respectful and supportive of each other in this playbook and throughout the NEAR community. Any questions, comments, or concerns you would prefer to not share publicly, please contact the NEAR Community Team ([e-mail]).

2. NEAR’s Guild Structure

If you’re entirely new to NEAR and the concepts of our Guilds, first watch the great visual explanation of the NEAR Guilds Program on YouTube, posted by the 4NTS Guild:

Guilds drive innovation, contributions, and project development on NEAR. Regardless of your reasons for joining the NEAR Community, you’ll find that many members are united by the same unending curiosity and desire to further build and expand the NEAR ecosystem. If you are reading this playbook to look to form your own Guild or to join one, see which Guilds already exist here and pay close attention to the upcoming Section 3 - Incubation & Onboarding.

As part of the NEAR Community - as a Guild leader/facilitator, member, NEAR Core/Community Teammate, etc, - we remain open to possibility and ways in which we can support one another.

As a main form of support, the NEAR Community Fund disperses funding to the community through the Guilds and the Guilds Program. To better understand how Guilds are funded, and what other community funding pathways exist, you can read more here.

The Guilds Program houses varied and diverse groups from all over the world. While the NEAR Community Team seeks to promote greater visibility and excitement about the projects all of the Guilds are doing, not all Guilds are at the same level of development and organization. The impetus is on the Guilds themselves, and their leadership, to promote good governance, actively grow and engage their membership, and advertise their successes and learnings as decentralized bodies within NEAR. The upcoming sections should provide some advice on how to go about developing your Guild.

3. Enter the DAOs

What is a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO)? And what is this Sputnik DAO you may have heard about?

Allowing NEAR co-founder Ilia Polosukhin to explain:

“So a DAO is a community united around some common purpose, requiring some rules for coordination and governance, with the flexibility to evolve over time as the interests and goals of the community shift, and the ability to transact and make money as a unit with minimal overhead. With all of these learnings in mind, we set out to create a DAO protocol on NEAR that would empower all kinds of communities — not just technical ones run by engineers — with a flexible, robust framework for working and evolving together.

The resulting protocol, Sputnik DAO, offers a way for new and existing communities and organizations around the world to have on-chain representation of their group, manage their on-chain activity, govern their own decision-making, and (importantly!) interact with other DAOs.”

This may prompt you to ask:

Is a DAO a Guild and vice versa? What is the difference between the two?

Think of the Guild as the social collective - the individuals bonded together by shared interests and common goals, and working on projects together.

The DAO, on the other hand, is the mechanism used for governing and funding to help facilitate those projects. Before DAOs, Guilds used to send invoices, but now, they can send in a proposal to a DAO, which is like a multi-signature bank account. DAOs can also serve different purposes for Guilds and can be set up for specific projects or for the governance and funding of a specific Guild.

Both are necessary to the ecosystem and work together to achieve shared goals. Guilds and DAOs are on these missions together with DAOs standing out as the on-chain mechanisms used for greater transparency.

DAO creation and possible interactions are still being discovered and determined, so as NEAR launches Sputnik DAO v. 2 decide for yourself what you want your DAO to accomplish, and we will help you to see it happen.

NEAR DAO Governance Shifts in Progress:

As shared on the Governance Forum on Discourse (known as “the Forum”), the NEAR Community Team is employing ways to streamline rewards for Guild contributors through Sputnik DAO and Guilds are encouraged to launch their own DAO, and to request funds from either the Community Squad DAO (the Community Fund) or from one of the DAO verticals, defined thus far as:

• Artists, Designers, Musicians, etc. → Creatives DAO

• Privacy Experts and Enthusiasts → Cypherpunk Guild

• Marketing Professionals → Marketing DAO - coming soon

• Education Efforts → Education DAO - coming soon

• Creators / Earners → Human Guild

• Whatever You Need → Community Squad 1

More DAO verticals will be added but their place within the Funding Flow, seen here visually, will still be as overarching thematically-designed bodies meant to support Community Guilds and DAOs on a project-basis. Looking at the Creatives DAO as a test case, you can see how the DAO vertical operates in action.

DAO protocols and processes when it comes to promoting transparency, accountability, and good governance are being workshopped through each of the above DAO verticals as they are being established and learnings and best practices should be shared centrally soon.

To launch your own Sputnik DAO on NEAR, follow this thread.

4. Incubation & Onboarding

General Onboarding

All prospective NEAR Community members are directed to the near.org website > Guilds page in order to complete an introduction form. This form is used to determine next steps in the interview process. If the individual is new to blockchain and is not very familiar with NEAR, or is generally ‘new’ to the ecosystem, they will be referred to The Open Web Sandbox (or “The Sandbox”) for an initial chat. From there a path will be determined with the individual through The Sandbox, to a specific existing Guild, etc. Individuals on behalf of an existing community looking to become a Guild will have a different onboarding pathway from general individuals looking for community, with general individuals invariably expecting to be directed to The Sandbox to start.

If an individual is ready to launch their new Guild, this is discussed and decided following a conversation with a member of the NEAR Community Team. Once on-boarded onto the NEAR ecosystem, a post should be made on the Forum to introduce this new Guild to the community and inviting new members to join, with a set vision and OKRs (See the SWAGGER Guild announcement as an example).

This onboarding process is currently undergoing review and revisions, and updates will be shared with the community soon.

Open Web Sandbox

The NEAR Open Web Sandbox is the best place for individuals looking for a Guild to get their start or to contribute to the NEAR ecosystem. As a hub for Ecosystem wide projects, rolling opportunities, and networks of NEARians/NEAR Enthusiasts, as part of the individual onboarding process, you will most likely start in the Sandbox. (It’s also cool if you would like to happily stay in the Sandbox beyond onboarding to keep playing.)

Contributors meet in The Sandbox to collaborate and accomplish tasks relating to ecosystem development. Different stakeholders post projects according to their specific needs—technical writing, memes, video edits—and offer $NEAR as compensation. The rewards structure ensures that projects on The Sandbox lead to substantive developments of the NEAR ecosystem. One-time projects, called acts, can be combined into a series, which garner larger rewards. For instance, you can simply write a blog and collect your $NEAR, or you can design the blog layout, make a video about the blog, and post about it on social media in order to complete the series. New users simply post their profile in the profile channel on the Sandbox Discord, and are then free to start completing projects posted on the discord. At the end of the month, contributors compile a list of their completed projects, and submit them to The Sandbox Council for review and compensation. [Sourced from nearguilds.com]

Onboarding Members

Some Guilds have set up membership forms (i.e. NxM - Near x Music Guild) and have built their own membership databases to better understand and target the Guild’s activities to their membership’s interests, and to promote project ideation and collaborations. Pinned messages with upcoming events and ways in which new members can get involved on the Guild Telegram and Discord channels are one clear way of conveying next steps for new members, beyond joining the Guild’s social channels. As Guilds grow they can become more direct with their member recruitment, but for now word of mouth and organic member acquisition has been preferred.

Interested in resources and templates to assist with new Guild member onboarding? Let us know!

5. Member Engagement

So you’re leading a Guild - what now? How do you build and connect with your community subgroup or membership base?

Guilds are encouraged to drive membership engagement through a variety of ways. Two of the most prominent means of engagement are bounties and the development of new projects on NEAR. Guild leaders can look to the NEAR Community Team and NEAR social media channels for information regarding community-wide events and initiatives to orient their own membership engagement (i.e. hackathons, new partnership launches) but should not rely on these official NEAR happenings to dictate Guild activities. Consider developing and maintaining robust yet adaptable Goals and Objectives centered around member participation and ecosystem interaction.

a) Reward & Recognition Models

Guilds are empowered to set their own models and systems of member reward for work undertaken to promote and build the Guild and the broader NEAR ecosystem. Every reward should be related to a goal held by the Guild and the Guild’s vision more broadly.

Previously, Guilds were encouraged to reward member activity on a task-specific basis. However, this model did not necessarily encourage deeper and long-lasting Guild member engagement with the Guild community.

*NEW* Guilds at a higher level of independence will be encouraged and assisted by the NEAR Community Team to adopt a project rewards model to drive member engagement and to strengthen Guild governance and oversight.

🚦Guild Level Self-Classification:

🔴Red Level Guild - Guilds at this level have recently graduated from the Sandbox or generally require more assistance from the NEAR Community/Sandbox Teams when designing their rewards structure. Guild leaders at this level are still trying to get their footing and so we recommend they stick to the status quo for now and maintain the points model (see Appendix - the NEAR Community Team hopes to phase out this points model soon) to determine $NEAR reward allocations to members for tasks completed, or follow the detailed example of task-focused rewards as outlined by Open Web Sandbox depending on whether or not the Guild leaders are determining the rewards model independently yet or not.

The aim is to achieve the highest level of independence so as to be operating in a decentralized fashion, and the NEAR Community Team is happy to support you and your Guild to get there!

📀Yellow Level Guild - Guild leaders at this level are experimenting with establishing their DAO and are familiar with Sputnik DAO v. 1, but still need some more support when it comes to determining how best to motivate participation in their Guild. These Guilds are ready to move to a more bundled incentive approach.

This means, instead of offering members rewards on a task per task basis (i.e. writing a blog post) as bounties they can consider granting funds to community members based on linked tasks or series. For example, a posted bounty, instead of breaking out and presenting a reward based on individual Tweets for the Guild Twitter account or independent instances of content creation, members could be encouraged to take on the Twitter promotion and growth campaign for the Guild’s Community Calls for a two-month or three-month (quarterly) period. The community member would be tapped to devise the Guild Twitter growth strategy for this period (or longer) and the metrics to measure success (i.e. __% increase in audience engagement and growth). The Guild leader would work with the community member to determine the appropriate reward for the amount of growth received by these efforts/how well they match their metrics for success. For example, 100 NEAR could be awarded for 40% social channel growth.

At the beginning of this roll-out, the Guild leader may need to specify an approximate number or range of how many Tweets this reward would include to convey appropriate expectations and to transparently convey how the work is being valued based on the old task model, but the hope is this Guild would be able to phase out any reference to task-based rewards almost entirely in the not-so-distant future.

The value and worth of these rewards would be relatively higher for the more dedicated attention and activity from the community member. This should encourage members to take greater ownership over projects as well.

💚Green Level Guild - Guild leaders are operating predominantly independently and are currently working within a rewards model they have largely devised themselves. The NEAR Community Team provides support but it is more in the form of a partnership with little Guild oversight. Moving to a model that is predominantly based on project rewards is possible in the immediate future.

Rewards are determined by ongoing or new Guild projects and events, such as Telegram channel moderator for the quarter (3 months), Community Call MC for the quarter (organizing, advertising, and hosting the Guild community calls), Guild Web Wizard (responsible for website design and content updates) for whichever period is appropriate, etc.

As a result in this shift in the rewards model, Guild members are recognized for taking on greater responsibility of a series and are able to contribute to and grow more within the Guild with projects they can flex more creative muscles with and can sink their teeth into. Some of the organizational pressure of the Guild as it scales up gets redistributed off the Guild leader’s shoulders as well and Guild activity becomes more decentrally owned.

In sum:

Guild Level Type	Description	Recommended Rewards Model
🔴 Red Level Guild	Requires more centralized support	Tasks (Bounties) Rewards Model
📀 Yellow Level Guild	Requires some centralized support occasionally	Mix of Tasks (Bounties) and Project Rewards Model
💚 Green Level Guild	Is fully decentralized and independent	Project Rewards Model (with some tasks as needed)

If you’re unclear about which level of independence applies to your Guild, please reach out to the NEAR Community Team for assistance.

Do you have reward and recognition models to propose? What has worked well for your Guild or what have you been experimenting with? Add below!

Regardless of the chosen reward model, the current preferred process for Reward Claiming is:

1/ Each Guild leader posts a new topic on the Forum under their specific category and with their individual Guild-specific tag and the “Guild-report” tag (and other tags they prefer to use for their own classification purposes).

• Reward eligible projects can be posted all together on a monthly basis or on an individual project basis. Be sure to have a clear subject for the post to make it easy to find!

2/ The post on Forum includes: information on what the Guild leader wants assistance with / the task or project up for grabs, what the bounty or project(s) are worth (equivalent to the work or effort required), the process you want the member(s) to follow when the task or project has been completed (for example, reply to this topic with the required information and wait for approval before submitting to the Sputnik DAO for the payout), the timeline or deadline, any other pertinent details.

• If you’re unsure about what projects should be worth, refer to your fellow Guild leaders’ posts and the Open Web Sandbox to find equivalent tasks and projects and their rewards for your reference. It’s all open source!

• It helps to create a Rewards or Bounties Guide for your Guild you can easily link to and update as needed (here’s an example from the Createbase Guild).

3/ Be sure you and your fellow Guild leader(s) set notifications so you catch every reply from the community as they engage with your post.

b) Channels of Communication

Guilds live wherever makes sense for their membership. The majority of Guilds have a Telegram channel and a Discord channel on the NEAR server but the type of communication and the intended targets dictate which channel(s) get used for what. We have found that generally:

• Discourse - also known as “the Forum” is the central place for ideating, developing, and officially proposing individual and collaborative projects for feedback from the NEAR Core Team and for Guild and DAO proposal approval for funding

• Telegram - is used for general social communications and group announcements and is the most popular channel of communication for all kinds of groups

• Discord - is used for announcements, project-specific communication, and is favoured among developer-focused groups

• Twitter - for community updates and for posting specific projects for the wider crypto-community

• Reddit - for community updates and for posting specific projects (promoting Guild projects and/or individual member or wider community projects)

• Instagram - also for general updates and specific project promotion but in more focused use by creatives in the community

• YouTube - for recorded community calls, events, demos, and tutorials for the community to know more about what you’re doing and building

All communication channels require activation and moderation. Best practices for each of the aforementioned channels will be elaborated upon in the channel-specific playbooks to be published soon by the NEAR Community Team.

c) Events, Community Calls, Hackathons

Whether in person or virtually, real time connection opportunities spark community engagement. Guilds have approached event curation in a number of ways and depending on the interests of the group, this could take the form of AMAs (‘Ask Me Anything’ sessions) on Twitter, Discord, Airmeet (virtual events platform, a more interactive form of Zoom or Google Meet), Office Hours or Drop-In informational sessions, usually on Discord, or larger project work sessions or hackathons.

Guilds such as Createbase and NxM - Near x Music have found hosting bi-weekly community calls great opportunities for members to share ongoing projects and promote upcoming events. Even if attendance is small, those present are usually very engaged and excited to exchange ideas and work toward new collaborative endeavours.

The NEAR Community’s recent Hackathon can be used as a template for a large-scale, three-week event series meant for creatives of all kinds to participate, but should a Guild like to host a hackathon meant for their specific community that is also an option. A NEAR Hackathon Playbook will be forthcoming with tips and tricks for hosting your own Hackathon, but for now check out the Hackathon Startup Guide for a greater understanding of more traditional start to hacking on NEAR.

6. Guild Metrics

Guild leaders are encouraged to do monthly reporting on the Forum under the “Community” and “Guilds” categories, with the “guild-reports” tag, so the NEAR Community Team and wider community can learn and keep up to date on Guild activities.

For an example, refer to the Cypherpunk Guild Monthly Report 2021-5 on the Forum.

It is important to capture and highlight on a monthly basis:

• # of Guild members

• # of successful project proposals (which can be tracked across all Sputnik DAOs here)

• Twitter, Telegram, Discord, Reddit, YouTube, and other social channel activity (# of impressions, # of engagement by way of new followers, likes, shares/retweets/upvotes, etc.)

• Guild content created (# blog posts, new website built, social media content developed and shared, etc.)

• Upcoming events and new partnerships

• Notes on Guild infrastructure and ongoing Guild projects

In order to help capture the above overall Guild metrics in larger, more geographically disparate Guilds, or in the case of DAO councils, encouraging individual Guild members to be mindful of recording this kind of information from their own projects can be done by requesting members to report on the success of their project(s) (complete and/or ongoing) before submitting new project proposals. Members could reply on the project’s original approved Forum post so all information per project is kept in one area for Guild/DAO leaders’ reference.

The following is the recommended structure for this reporting with suggested metrics for project success:

Project Name:

Project Status: [In Progress/Completed]

Project Accounting: [Please post a brief updated project budget if it materially differed from the original + the Sputnik DAO address if relevant]

Updated Project Timeline:

Highlights:

*brag about the attendance or engagement in terms that best fit your project/event (ex. # of submissions, # of physical/virtual attendees, # of presenters, etc.), shout out the project’s star contributors, social media mentions, or any platform or bot-specific metrics

Learnings:

**areas you would like to improve upon next time, feedback from participants, roadblocks you encountered, etc.

Next Steps:

***efforts you’ll be undertaking to onboard more Guild members from this project, new related collaborations you cannot wait to share, etc.

The more data the Guilds capture about their own projects, the easier it will be to see how and where the community can be best supported by its DAO verticals, the Community Team/Squad DAO, and the NEAR Team overall!

Something Missing from this Playbook?

Ask below and you shall receive!