Budget Proposal: Developer DAO Blog

Budget Proposal: Developer DAO Blog

Authors: @Kay
Supporting Budget Steward(s): @kempsterrrr

Summary

This proposal seeks to compensate the blog editors and writers to ensure the continued success and growth of the Developer DAO blog.

Motivation

The Developer DAO blog is a Hashnode team publication with dozens of published articles written by DAO members. In 2022 the blog had an average of 4000 unique visitors per month. The blog has three goals:

  1. Telling the story of the DAO and its members.
  2. Educating people about Web3.
  3. Allowing members to get writing experience.

Currently, the blog doesn’t have direct obligations to sponsors, but some of them want to post guest articles to our blog. The sponsors themselves usually write these guest articles; the blog editors take care of quality assurance and scheduling.

The blog is publicly available, and every article is shared on Twitter by @Developer_DAO, making it an asset for promoting D_D to potential new members. The blog also features D_D announcements and guides for members to navigate the DAO.

Mission, Values, and Goals Alignment

The blog lets members tell their Web3 and D_D stories and is a window into D_D for members and the outside alike. Members make friends, get jobs, and learn new things about Web3, and the blog makes this public, so even people who aren’t on Discord (or aren’t even D_D members) see what’s happening. The blog can motivate new members to join D_D and help improve the public image of Web3 in general.

The mission of D_D is to accelerate the education and impact of a new wave of Web3 builders. The blog accomplishes this by allowing members and sponsors to promote their own educational content and teach readers about Web3-related concepts, ideas, and technology.

And finally, it’s a way for members who want to start blogging to get their first articles out without creating their own publication and the help of the blog team.

Brand Usage

The blog is published by and for D_D under the Developer DAO Hashnode team publication.

Scope of Work

A team of D_D members maintains the blog. Most active members write or edit multiple articles a week. Members can review the scope and format of the blog on Hashnode: https://blog.developerdao.com/.

Financial Implications

Currently, the leading work on the blog is reviewing and editing articles. Then there are some more minor administrative tasks like article scheduling and discussions with writers about topics and deadlines.

The workload is four articles a week, but this rate will probably increase with this proposal passing. The current editorial schedule is laid out for ten articles per week.

Article Editing

Editing and reviewing an article can take 0.5 hours on average, depending on the length of the article and the writer’s skill. For example, a 500-word article written by a skilled writer might only take 10 minutes to edit, while a 2000-word article by a beginner might take hours.

Budget: 10 articles * 0.5h = 5h

Quality Assurance

The editors do quality assurance. If at least one of them deems an article appropriate for the blog, they can edit and publish it. This means some pieces have to be reviewed by multiple editors if they didn’t pass QA with the first editor. So, for the majority of articles, this is included in the first edit work. A buffer of 1 hour should be sufficient for now.

Budget: 1h

Onboarding Call

For the next season, we plan to do a weekly 1 hour long onboarding call, where new writers can get ideas on articles they could write for the DAO blog.

Budget: 1h planning + 1h call = 2h

Administrative Tasks

The editors also do administrative work, like scheduling articles and helping the writers. This can mean giving them feedback to their writing endeavors and getting Hashnode set up to submit content. It also includes talks with MDB about guest posts.

Budget: 2h

Overall Budget

For the next season, a budget of 10h a week should give the blog team enough time to do their work, with some buffer for small things that can pop up along the way.

10h * 16 weeks in season 1 * 15$CODE per hour = 2400 $CODE

Team

Right now, the team consists of the following active members:

  • K.#1570 project lead/captain
  • Colin4ward#6586 editor, QA
  • wolovim#8537 editor, QA

Success Metrics & KPIs

For the goal of being a window for the public into the DAO, the success metric could be more readers. (Currently ~2900 unique visitors in May)

For the goal of giving DAO members a platform to tell their stories and educate people, the success metric could be more writers. (Currently 25)

Next Steps

There will not be any radical changes to the publishing team’s process should this proposal get funded; however, we believe that this proposal is essential to ensuring the retention of the current team and recruiting new writers to keep pace with the growth of D_D.

VOTING

  • Yes, I support this budget application
  • No, I do not support this budget appliaction

0 voters

5 Likes

What about adding bounties for specific themes?
Related, what about rewarding the writers with CODE?

See the DevRel section in [FINAL] MBD S1 Budget Application

In the first eleven weeks of Season 1, we published 26 articles: 19 educational articles (the goal for S1 was 16) and one guest post from a sponsor. The rest were D_D-related or WAGMI Wednesday articles. Additionally, we had regular posts from DevNTell every week.

I spent most of my time editing, mentoring writers, and doing organizational work (explaining DeWork/Parcel, DevRel, blog, MBD, initiatives leads, etc.) I also talked with partners (Surge) about content sharing, which we will start as soon as they greenlight my first article edits. Right now, I’m okay with my budget.

2 Likes

Thank you for the summary @Kay!

Just for the clearance on the status update:

How many readers do we have now (related with proposed KPI)?

How many writers wrote these articles (same as above)?

We had 3,700 unique visitors last month and 19 writers in season 1.

2 Likes