Proposal 271 (Q98): Difference between revisions

Alana here, from Variant. We’ve decided to vote against Prop 271. Our rationale stems from a mix of concerns regarding alignment with the broader goal of NounsDAO, the effectiveness of propagating the Nouns meme, and the justification of the cost of the proposal. One of the things that excited us most about joining NounsDAO was its mission of funding public goods and the self-sustaining mechanism it invented to continue to do so. A middle-grade novel strikes us as distinct from more powerful public goods initiatives we’ve seen, like cleaning up trash in Africa or funding the planting of trees. We’d love to see Nouns devoting funding toward bigger, more ambitious projects. Second, the proposal contains no plans for distribution of the novel. Key to Nouns’ mission is propagating the meme. Creation of content is important, but the true execution is in distribution. Even if we imagine that the novel achieves moderate success, the distribution will be most potent among children (likely 7-10 year-olds, i.e. the ones who read the novel). In our view, that’s not the target audience for Nouns; the funding mechanism only works if people feel compelled to buy into the community, and creating emotional ties with children may struggle to fulfill the Nouns flywheel (auction funds Treasury → Treasury funds projects → projects increase demand for the auction → and so on) in the short-medium term. Third, 25 ETH for this proposal feels expensive, at least with the justification for funds given in the prop. To date, we have tried to avoid debates on the cost of funding associated with proposals, given a key component of Nouns is the ability to easily unlock funding for unique and attention-grabbing experiments. 25 ETH without any plans for exogenous distribution – and simply a plan to release a timed open edition (where demand for the mint will likely be endogenous from the Nouns community) – seems a potentially ineffective use of funds. That’s not to say there may not be a strong justification for 25 ETH without a go-to-market plan; rather, we simply did not see one in the proposal. A more effective request, for instance, would have included detail about market comps for the cost of publication to better benchmark a reasonable expected cost. The reason we feel compelled to mention funding here is because we want to prevent the setting of a precedent in which the Nouns