BCard x Nouns x Farcaster
Tldr
Elevating Nounish voices, empowering Nounish communities, and engaging new users to the Nouniverse
Description
Summary
The BCard team has been working over the past 2 years to empower web3 communities, and would love to create a Farcaster client for Nouns that will:
- Elevate Nounish voices
- Empower Nounish communities
- Engage new users to the Nouniverse
We believe in co-creation; we’ve presented many ideas below based on our best understanding of the needs of the Nouniverse, and we’d love to hear your feedback!
Background
gm Nouners!
We’re BCard (formerly Bankless Card), andour aim is to empower web3 communities. Over the last 2 years, we’ve connected with thousands of crypto-natives and crypto-curious and released products that have helped hundreds of contributors such as the BCard vault (shared password manager), Taxman (DAO income tax helper), and BCard (community payment card, currently in private beta).
We believe that community is the heart of web3, and this is why we’d love to execute on a NounsxFarcaster client. Nouns is one of the strongest communities in web3, and we believe if we can make it easy for ANYONE to catch the vibe, the entire Nouniverse will be uplifted.
Design Goals
Our goal is simple: to create a Farcaster client for Nouns that will…
- Elevate Nounish voices
- Empower Nounish communities
- Engage new users to the Nouniverse
To us this proposal is about more than just building a Nouns-specific Farcaster client. It’s about bringing the entire Nouniverse together in a value-aligned way. Our app will serve as a “wading pool” for all Nounish activity. When users find something they like, they can dive in deep to engage with the Nounish product where it lives. This approach leverages the composability of web3 products to create a positive-sum hub that will (hopefully) enrich all Nounish projects.
App Overview
Our proposed app has 3 main sections:
- Contribute
- things you can do to contribute to Nouns. This could be things like voting, bidding on auctions, reviewing proposals, claiming tokens, minting, and more. We’re hoping that this will mainly be accomplished via Farcaster frames.
- Communicate
- a place to discuss/read/learn with other Nouners. These will mainly be accomplished via Farcaster casts and channels.
- Profile
- a place where you can explore and deepen your Nounish identity. By connecting your wallet or FC account, you will be able to see all Nounish projects you’re part of, as well as explore those you aren’t (yet) part of.
GOAL: Elevating Nounish Voices
A primary problem that has come up many times during our research phase: there aren't enough Nouns in your home feed. Perhaps the biggest improvement for a Nouns-specific FC client is a tweaked cast ranking algorithm.
We feel you, brother.
Like everything else, ranking algorithms can’t be made in a day. They have to be iterated upon until we find what works. Here’s a proposed starting place:
- Users should see posts from people with high Nounish Identity (see below for more info)
- Users should see posts that are liked/discussed by many Nouners (this could eventually turn into up/down votes like Reddit)
- Users should see the most timely/relevant conversations/actions
Another way to elevate Nounish voices is to elevate Nounish conversations. We could use Farcaster to help aggregate conversations about proposals. Consider the following chain of events:
- A new proposal (Prop 555) is posted to Nouns.wtf
- @nouns-dao posts to /nouns on Warpcast
- All discussion related to the prop (including votes w/ reasons) can be shown inline under the post above
What is a Nounish Identity?
What does it mean to be Nounish? Nouns has spawned so many communities and sub-communities that it can be hard to keep track. Luckily, as an on-chain community, we can read a user’s on-chain footprint to get an understanding of their “Nounishness”:
What it means to be Nounish is changing, but luckily web3 composability comes to the rescue again. Nouns Name Service has been working on $NOGS, an ERC-20 token that is distributed based on any Nounish action - voting, bidding, and more! We can build Nounish NFTs and $NOGS into the cast rank algorithm to elevate Nounish voices.
GOAL: Empowering Nounish Communities
One of the reasons Nouns has consistently attracted attention and builders in the space is because the community has kept its decentralized ethos. An example: the Nounders famously shut down the official Discord to ensure the protocol remained neutral.
The solution needs to keep that decentralized ethos alive by empowering Nounish communities as much as possible. The app can do this by surfacing community content and allowing users to dig deeper when they find something that speaks to them. Every place a community is mentioned is an opportunity for engagement; therefore every place a community is mentioned is linked out to the community:
GOAL: Engage New Users to the Nouniverse
One of the biggest potential strengths of Farcaster is to bridge the gap to Nouns-curious users; people who are interested in Nouns but haven’t yet taken the plunge. For this reason we propose making the app open for anyone to read. Hopefully through reading they will be encouraged to engage.
Co-Creation Plan
The ideas presented above are a preliminary plan, but software products thrive through experimentation and feedback. This proposal isn’t “what you see is what you get”, it’s an invitation to the Nouns community to co-create the kind of app they want to use.
The BCard team is lucky to have software product veterans on board, and they follow the agile philosophy. We’ll get into regular 1-2 week cycles where we will…
- Deploy something that can be used by users
- Post about it on /nouns and solicit feedback
- Gather and process feedback, deciding on next steps
- Share the output of on /nouns
- Go back to step 1
The hope of soliciting feedback every 1-2 weeks is to ensure we’re building something of value, and keep the community engaged as we go.
Keeping people engaged as part of the process will help them feel ownership of the app, because a true Nounish app should ultimately be owned by the community. It may even be beneficial to create a Nounish subDAO whose responsibility it is to maintain the app (similar to BuilderDAO). We’ll cross these bridges when we get to them, but keeping the community engaged will result in a better product being delivered, as well as create a community around the app itself.
The Team
BCard is a semi-Nounish community. We came from BanklessDAO, but have been working with Nouns Name Service to create a community card for Nouns for the last 6 months. We have 60+ contributors, and our core team are the following:
links - Champion and Product Lead
links is a 15-year startup veteran, developer, product manager, and startup artist.
NFThinker - Partnerships Lead
NF Thinker is founder of the BanklessDAO AMA workstream, networking enthusiast, and web3 community builder.
Tomtranmer - Lead Developer
Tom is a BanklessDAO OG, lifelong learner, and swiss-army-knife developer.
coffee-crusher - Communication and Campaigns
coffee-crusher is a member of BanklessDAO and RaidGuild among other DAOs. She’s a marketing manager in the real world.
Reinis - Communication and Content
Reinis is the founder of Bankless Latvia and BanklessDAO Design Guild, and does video production and music promotion as his day job.
We’ve worked together for 2 years, and have executed on a number of projects together, including:
- BCard Vault, a shared password manager for DAO teams
- Taxman, a DAO income tax helper
- BCard, a community payment card (closed beta, see screen below)
Some screenshots of BCard app (currently in private beta)
What do YOU think?
If you’re reading this, I’m talking to YOU! Feel free to drop into /bcard and let us know your thoughts on our proposal.