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Who is behind this proposal?

cdt.eth - Christian is a software engineer who has worked on the Nouns POAP team, created ToadzToolz for Cryptoadz, and SharkDAO’s website as well as the forthcoming SharkDAO PFP project and a secret Nouns project with 12BNoun. He’s also opened some PRs on https://nouns.wtf/ and has been an early-supporter of Nouns.

What is it?

Nouns Center (nouns.center) will be a home for the Nouns community. The hope is to document all existing creators & projects, and help people discover the hundreds of new ones that will launch in the future. I did something similar with the Cryptoadz community by creating ToadzToolz.com, but that was mainly to showcase projects. Whereas my vision for Nouns Center is to serve the community in 3 main ways.

1. Knowledge Center

• Brand & product design resources
• A traditional help center
• Responses from Nounders to FAQs

2. Project Aggregator

• showcase all projects built off Nouns
• prove the power & track scale of CC0
• inspire more art & derivatives

3. Onboarding Ramp

• help others use Nouns in projects
• explain Nouns buying process
• submitting proposals

Whether you want to buy a Noun, create a derivative, contribute to the codebase, or submit a proposal, this information should be clear and immediately accessible to you.

Video Explainer

Here is a pitch from Christian to Seneca on the idea, for anyone who might prefer to hear him talk through his vision for Nouns World.

1) Knowledge Center

I will compile all Noun trait files, fonts, logos, colors hex values etc in one place to help people get up and running to build with Nouns. Until the forthcoming Design System is released, which can also live on this site. Imagine simply visiting https://nouns.center/assets and finding everything you need to work and create with Nouns. Whether that be PNGs for artists or links to the folder on Github. The answers to all questions asked should be one link away.

My second pitch is to the Nounders to open their Discussions forum feature on the monorepo to begin to capture all the answers they give to user questions every day. I added some example categories below to help visualize this. We could break up question types be category and begin to collect dozens of questions & answers in each section. The Nounders have spent a ton of time answering every question imaginable and very thoroughly, on a daily basis and I want to give them their time back. It will be some work up front to get the Discussions content up and running, but to have a technical content repository would be invaluable.

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Github Discussions is free, comes with Search built-in, and the Nounders are Github-native. My plan is to fetch this data and bring it into the site. Imagine, if someone has a question they could simply visit https://nouns.center/dev to find all these answers, and I would fetch the data on this new site because artist and non-devs could benefit as well. Those who don’t have a Github account nor would ever go to the Developer channel on Discord could simply go to https://nouns.center/artist to find questions answered already about where to find assets, how to compose a Nouns, canvas dimensions etc.

It will snowball once the infrastructure is in place.
Questions will be asked once, and linked forever.

2) Project Aggregator

I’ve aggregated every piece of Nouns content (so far) that I could find in this spreadsheet.

It’s a lot. We’ve done a lot. I want to showcase all this effort.

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Imagine going to https://nouns.center/projects and being able to see and access every single derivative, podcast episode, proposal project, YouTube video, and news story about Nouns. We should have a one-stop-shop for that as well. It should be compelling visually and truly highlight the power of CC0 and our community. We’ll highlight creators and link to their profiles as well. I’ll create a backlog submission system so we can capture user-submitted projects to streamline the process of getting added to the site. I did this with https://toadztoolz.com/ideaz.

I want to inspire the next hundred projects to spawn out of Nouns,
and we’ll be ready to give them the tools to do so.

3) Onboarding Ramp

Lastly, I’d like to reduce as much friction as possible with people understanding the concepts & processes of NounsDAO. I’d like to find an artist to help with create some infographics about some key aspects of Nouns to help explain concepts like Proposals (How to Submit, Criteria, Timeline, and Payment), the Auction & Settlement process, buying a Noun = 1 vote in Dao, cloning & getting the Nouns webapp running locally for devs etc etc. There’s plenty of room to play with here, and yes, all these questions can be answered by a long paragraph of copy, but I loved what The Oracle did with the Proposal infographic.

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Make the unknowns, known.
Let builders get back to building.

Where Does This Go?

Some random thoughts where this could go in the future:

• integrate Nouns official Design System?
• sub-DAO onboarding?
• Nouns Newsletter?
• Verb Team Nouns O’Clock integration to build something off auction endings?
• Specific Nouns lore (integrate with nouns.wtf sub-pages? show projects using a specific Noun in them?)
• Decentraland meetups with 3D Nouns?
• _________________?

Right now my plan is to establish this site as the central resource hub to serve the DAO and our community. Once the solid foundation is established the site can serve as a flywheel for creativity and projects to be housed and built on top of it.

Funds Requested

This proposal requests a total of 15 ETH from the DAO for design, development, planning, commissioning an artist, and maintenance for 6 months:

• 6 ETH up-front
• 3 ETH on go-live
• 3 ETH reserved for an artist (TBD) which will be returned if we end up not using them
• 3 ETH at the end of 6 months

Excited to hear your thoughts and I’m happy to answer any questions. Also, I’m looking for any Nouner who wants to work with me on this project.

That’s very impressive. Best of luck!

This is an incredible proposal, filled with tangible ideas for how to push forwards the Nouns ecosystem. By empowering builders & creatives who can further proliferate Nouns, and minimizing the friction associated with exploring & contributing, Nouns Center will become an incredible starting point for those who want to get involved. Brilliant work, Christian!

I plan to contribute my design abilities to help advance this vision for Nouns Center wherever possible. Full steam ahead!

Fantastic proposal. It’s very well thought out and detailed. I loved what you did with toadztoolz, and I think this would be a wonderful resource to have for the nouns community! Christian is a true builder at heart, so there’s no doubt this would be successful.

I think this is a brilliant proposal and it solves for a number of the issues I had fully understanding how to work with Nouns when I first started my own project. Very flattered to have my project included on your list!

I would love a chance to throw my hat in the ring as a potential artist for the infographics. I’m a trained studio artist with experience in graphic design and I regularly create similar visual explainers in my day job in order to break down complex processes followed by our on/off-shore teams.

If someone would be interested in giving me an example of one of the infographics you’d like to produce, I’d be more than happy to try and put together a first draft for the community to consider and revise. Either way, I think this is a game changer for people like myself who are trying to get a Nouns project off the ground, so I hope to see it come to fruition.

A knowledge center of this kind is badly needed in the ecosystem. I am fully supportive of cdt building this out. He’s been an active community member from the beginning, a great builder and an all-around great person to vibe with. We’d be lucky to have him as a prop builder!

Awesome. Just watched the whole video and I’m on board. There are even some things I would contribute related information offered to onboard new members.

I fully support this effort. Many great answers and explanations are lost in Discord history. I can lean in to fill gaps in the knowledge base if needed

thanks @solimander, yep i anticipate needing to work you, seneca, and carrot when setting up Discussions if you’re down since you 3 steward the monorepo. i’m open to whatever categories you think will alleviate your workload the most and make sense.

i added more questions last night from Discord (16 and counting) starting at row 95 in the spreadsheet. i’ll work through the private dev channel and aggregate some more. maybe after figuring out the categories we can “seed” Discussions with these questions and any other obvious ones the core team answers over and over. that will help a bunch to mitigate losing questions in the Discord Void™.

would love to hear them @noun22, either here, on a call, or via DM. whatever works best. one section i didn’t highlight here is new Nouner onboarding. I was going to reach out to my sponsor or a Nounder about that since i think it’s definitely helpful, but I’m not sure:

1. what it involves
2. can that information be public (if not, how do we solve?)

New Nouners need onboarding support as well!

thank you, as always!

Of course! love the project.

As far as the art, i’ll keep you posted. I need to flesh out the requirements a bit more first. If you wanted to create a draft you like said I’d be open to looking at it for sure. Several ideas that could be turned into infographics are:

• Nouns Daily Auction Cycle
• Every 10th Noun goes to Nouners
• Auction Settlement & Receiving a “won” Noun
• Proposal Pitching (i.e. raw idea → proposal-idea channel → discourse → nouner sponsor → voting → approval)
• Approved Proposal’s Payment Timeline

Again, still early on this point though. Plenty of options here and more to expound on. I will say one requirement I will have is that each infographic will need to be made twice. Once for desktop (landscape) and one for mobile (portrait). I want don’t want bad UX on mobile since it’s probably over 50% of visitors.

Appreciate it! Excited to scheme up ways to get some sort of 3D Nouns experience into the site!

So excited to work with you

thank you @leoclark! if you have any future thoughts or ideas my DMs are open!

@cdt.eth Bitstrays here.
Really love the idea and we are a derivative as well.
We forked the front-end and the NFT contract and produced our own art.

whoa, interesting. would love to learn more. I’ll check out the site more in-depth!

Such clear identifying of what nouns community needs IMO. Well done, im really excited to see this happen!

thank you @goldy.mov, means a lot coming from you.

I love this idea and think a repository of base knowledge for the Nouns universe and a place to keep up with what’s happening in the community is necessary. More information on the steps for governance and proposal generation is useful so new proposers don’t have to keep asking the same questions every time

appreciate that @noun53! you’re exactly right, both Proposal generation and Developer FAQs have been the strongest responses, publicly & privately, that I’ve received. Definitely the greatest needs. Interested in your thoughts on anything else, from a Nouner perspective, that could help round out a future Nouner’s onboarding.

This is amazing! What a great idea C!

thanks @iamdelpiero!

Excited for this proposal, could be a big value add to the community.

How long after the proposal passes would you expect the site to launch? Would you roll out individual features/pages or big bang delivery?

Hey @Oni, in the spirit of getting out an “MVP” & working in public. My thought would be to get the baseline version of the major sections out. I’d rather it be useful sooner.

What’s funny is that even in the last 3 days of me publishing this post I’ve been reached out to by folks about new ideas to add on to the site, which is great, but will blur the definition of “finished” for this every-growing site.

i forsee getting to a good point with Pixelz within as early as a month, and once we have a value-additive site ready to show I personally woudln’t want it to be hidden because of a set “launch date”. I think we’ll need more time for some of the more ambitious features, but I’ve already collected all the data for the Project page, just needs to be designed. Open to discussion if this should be more process-oriented with hard dates, but i’m a “put the work out” kinda guy and want to get this in folks hands asap.

Hey everyone, thanks for the overwhelmingly positive response.

Thank you!

I appreciate the enthusiasm and questions. I got several DMs with extra ideas of what else could be built into Nouns Center, and that’s really encouraging. I spoke with my Nouner sponsor, Wag (Noun 68), today and caught him up on everything so far. The main 2 points of feedback have been Proposal generation & developer resources so we will definitely make sure those get done perfectly. I’ve also spoken with @pixelz (designer) and we will set up weekly calls as we prototype through the week.

I wanted to share some new ideas that we either brought to me or I thought of myself.

1) Proposal Template

What if we created a tried-and-true Proposal template? It would be created by a mix of Nounders/Nouners and that way we’d ensure that Discourse posts are concise & complete.

2) The Idea Garden

I was approached by @verb-d & sn0wberry about an amazing idea they had to aggregate pre-proposal ideas. i’ve named this The Idea Garden for now. Imagine you have the “seed” of an idea but its not quite ready for a full-fledged proposal. We should capture that “seed”, stick it somewhere like a job board people can view or a reddit-like upvoting form for anyone to check out periodically and see if they could help “grow” an idea or get connected with a new potential teammate. Point is, we should capture every idea, ready or not. It can be revisited at a later date when the time is finally right. We, as a community, should be generating 10x more ideas than we do now, give our treasury size, but only really fleshed out ideas should hit Discourse. I found this product for $50/month that gives us API access to an idea management tool that could work. It has native search, categories, upvoting, and filtering.

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3. Nouner Support

I’ve been speaking a lot with @noun22, our Community Lead, about Nouner onboading and support. He’s got a document prepped and we discussed other ideas for smoothing a new Nouner’s first experience joining the DAO. Imagine we have nouns.center/nouner page with onboarding details, private channel descriptions, @Oni’s weekly call minutes etc etc.

4. Media Press Kit

Lastly, for now, I saw someone mentioned in the Discord about getting a media press kit prepared. This would be easy to do, especially once we get our Design System in place. I’ll work with @pixelz on it. Not sure what all needs to be in it, but it could include logo png file, glasses png file, 2:3 thumbnail group Noun image, 16:9 banner of glasses, and maybe a couple standalone nouns.

5. Updated Spreadsheet

I added a couple new projects and a ton more developer FAQs to the spreadsheet. Also, I extract every real user’s answer to the Discourse “Intro Yourself” post to see if that can stir up any new ideas.

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I’m excited and ready to get to work. I’ll post this in the #proposal-ideas channel for any last bit of feedback before going on-chain. Let me know there or here if there’s anything else I can help clear up or answer!

This is outstanding Definitely a huge opportunity for collaboration for folks that have limited free time and still want to execute some fun stuff=)

definitely! i’m looking forward to it

I think this approach makes sense and is along the lines of what I was hoping to hear!

glad to hear that! anything else just let me know, @Oni

So good! Great demonstration of CC0. Love the fact that we would compile assets, whether they are snippets of codes, full repos, font, 3D assets, color swatches. for example someone who wants the color palette, just needs a picture with all the colors at the simplest level. I saw this PNG flying around the discord and it would be great to have it consolidated with all the other assets. 3DNouns is happy to link our assets down the line. We could even do project management with this, merge it with house of prop somehow. If you need help just let me know.

Hey @Coralorca! Thank you. Yeah, I really want to build upon Nouns and help others to do so. I’ve saved your notes to make sure we add those things to the artist page, and yes, the opportunities are seemingly endless and we totally could merge somehow in the future. For now, I want to build a strong base to server devs, artists, and Nouners. I’ll need to pick your brain later as I flesh out the artist page as far as what else you and other would like to see there!

@cdt.eth Here’s a first draft of how I’m think we could visualize Proposal Pitching

I wanted to try and work within what I see as the emerging “visual language” of Nouns wherever possible to tell a story newcomers will be able to easily understand. Here that just looks like the use of pixelated assets and using the Nouns color pallet and font as well as the Nouns characters themselves. I went through several iterations trying to create the simplest visual representation of these 7 steps.

1. Raw Idea
2. Proposal Idea
3. Discourse
4. Nouner Sponsor
5. Voting
6. Approval
7. Approved Proposal’s Payment Timeline

I settled on a version that attempts to rely on language as little as possible to tell the story. I still expect that the images will always need to act as a supplement to a more detailed written explainer so I see this as just one piece of what the user would see on screen. The first frame in the story gives us Noun 2 coming up with a raw idea and learning about Discourse from Noun 1 and them working together to propose the idea. The second frame depicts Noun 3 & 4 loving their idea and sponsoring it. The third brings the larger Nouns group together for voting. To depict the approved proposals payment timeline I just opted for a simple timeline that reused the speech bubbles for now, but expect to improve on that somehow. I think we should be able to slice something like this up to create versions optimized for both Mobile and Desktop fairly easily.

Would love to get your thoughts on the direction I’m going in here.

Thanks!

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I support this proposal!

This is OUTSTANDING! i will have the images I promised and the 3D printable files to you in a week or so, been a bit swamped

this will be very helpful for so many that are visual communicators
thank you

As someone new to the ecosystem, this type of stuff is so helpful. It’s amazing what’s been done in less than a year and I can only imagine what it will look like several years from today. This type of investment will be needed several times over.

New to the ecosystem, am searching and finding everything I need to fork my own Nouns.

nouns-center is a great, natural extension to the nouns-monorepo ecosystem.

Thank you for this project!