Proposal: Pro- and Retroactive Funding for Continuous Production of DotLeap Newsletter
DotLeap is on the verge of entering it's third year in production, with 102 weekly editions distributed.
With the growing operations of the RMRK team it has become necessary for Bruno Škorvc to hand day-to-day operations of DotLeap increasingly to gbaci, RMRK's professional content writer and accomplished author of Polkadot for Beginners.
Additionally, with operating costs in excess of $50,000/year, it has become necessary for DotLeap operating capital to coalesce from sources supplementary to Bruno and gbaci's generous donations of personal financing and time. Production of DotLeap up until this point has been a labor of love.
This post serves, dear community, as our request for pro- and retroactive funding for DotLeap - so that we may continue to service the growth of our quality community, and so that we may continue to assist the easy entry of new participants in our ecosystem.
Please review our proposal here and feel free to leave comments and feedback. We will answer your questions and make adjustments to our porposal accordingly.
Thanks so much, Dotsama fam, for two years of DotLeap success!
Comments (7)
Hi Mark,
Thank you for submitting this proposal on behalf of Gbaci and Bruno. We all routinely appreciate getting our weekly dose of condensed ecosystem news in the form of DotLeap with such consistency and professionalism.
A few comments/questions/requests:
Firstly, I am wondering what will become of the Governance section (aka the bulk) of the newsletter once Gov2.0 kicks in and 100+ referendums under 10+ different tracks get filed and voted on at the same time. Will it still DotLeap still list them, one at a time, or will a selection be made regarding the most significant (controversial?) ones while leaving the rest to governance-focused aggregators?
Secondly, it seems to me that the Community & Ecosystem could be further expanded to better reflect outreach and diversity initiatives that are happening around the world. We have strong communities emerging with speakers of Chinese(s), French, Hindi, Polish, Portuguese, Spanish, etc. I think the ground work that they are doing (organising events, AMAs, meetups, workshops, etc) year-in year-out also deserves some sort of recognition/broadcasting within the ecosystem. I understand that this could possbily bloat the newsletter, but my take is that this doesn't have to be an extensive recap of everything that is done in these communities. Rather, Head ambassadors and Communities like Polkaworld and Polkadotters, could help provide some input, as they are already overseeing happenings in their local areas.
I also believe that the Tools section could be used to give more visibility to user-friendly dapps that are being developed by ecosystem/community developers. For example, one edition gave a special mention to Polkawatch in the C&E section, whereas it really is an analytics tool, and should thus figure in the Tools section of the newsletter. Also, I didn't see this special mention applied to other ecosystem-wide tools that are also Treasury-funded and/or widely used. Meanwhile, we still have a range of ecosystem participants that don't even know that the Polkadot/Kusama/Westend Staking dashboard exists and that have no clue that they can vote via OpenSquare. Too much focus on Polkadot-JS and Apps is literally keeping potential users at bay and/or preventing existing users from making the most of Polkadot's technologies. DotLeap could be instrumental in helping remedy this dire situation.
Similarly, the Jobs section looks somehow stale, as it only ever mentions jobs at Parity and W3F. What about parachain teams? What about infrastructure projects (i.e wallets, bridges, etc.) and Treasury-funded projects?
Lastly, I see that there is a business model/funding attached to the newsletter in the form of Ads (i.e People/Businesses can buy an ad on Singular to appear on DotLeap). Are you planning to keep this feature once funding from the Treasury comes in?
Looking forward to your answers! :)
Anaelle.
I wonder if there's some overlap here between your newsletter and what GuillitoImo wants to do with his youtube page. I see that your interactions aren't amazing. The content is great (I just registered), but we need more people seeing it. I wonder if the two of you could work together to build a dotsama centric platform for news and information? His interactions are better but he could use some help in the content department which you can provide. Maybe a spanish version of your news letter with his translation help? Something to consider?