1729writers Cohort 2
A briefing on new initiatives
Welcome to 1729Writers Cohort 2!
In March of this year, Grant Nissly, myself, and 20 or so other 1729ers started the first 1729 Writers Cohort. Our goal was to produce an essay a week for 6 weeks and in the end we produced over 60 essays which you can read here. It was a blast and proved very productive. As soon as it was over we started making plans for the second round.
Our original plan was to run it in the late Spring, but when Balaji announced the release date of his book The Network State, we decided to wait until after its release so that writers might be able to read the content and engage with it during the cohort.
Today marks the first submission day for cohort 2! We’ve made a few changes. We’ve shortened the experience to just 4 weeks to lower the barrier of entry and hopefully maintain a consistent energy throughout. There are a lot of new things happening with this cohort that I’m excited to share with you, which I’ll go into in some detail below.
For more context on the 1729writers, you can read an essay I wrote at the beginning of the last cohort, that goes more into the “why”. Since that essay is already out there and my intentions are the same, this essay is more to-the-point and focused on new initiatives.
Let’s get into the fun stuff.
What’s new:
Distribution: We’re very excited to announce that we’ve brought in none other than Camellia Yang to lead distribution. She’ll be heading the 1729writers social media efforts, beginning with Twitter, to help distribute essays and build the brand of 1729writers. She will also provide guidance to members of the cohort in their own distribution activities. Lastly, she will help with our weekly calls by bringing in talented writers from outside the 1729 community to pass along skills and give us some motivation. She’s got some amazing ones to announce!
ETH Rewards: 1729writers has raised a small treasury of ~1 ETH from the leadership to distribute as incentives throughout the course of the cohort. ETH will go to winners of the Essay of the Week and writers who achieve full course completion. Each Essay of the Week winner will get .1 ETH and those who fully complete the course will get a share of the remaining treasury, which we expect to be over 0.5ETH.
1729writers.ETH NFTs: Three different kinds of NFTs will be distributed to the cohort.
- Participation: Anyone who submits at least 1 piece to 1729Writers will receive a Cohort Participation NFT
- Completion: Anyone who completes and submits all four pieces on time will receive a Cohort Completion NFT along with the ETH reward mentioned above
- Essay of the Week: All Essay of the Week winners will receive an NFT along with their 0.1ETH reward
Below is an example of the NFT minting model and how we will use an auction house like Zora to put the essays on auction ensuring the author makes 0.1ETH minimum, and possibly more if someone bids the price up!
Voting: The voting process, such as for essays of the week, will also receive a much-needed upgrade. We will use the web3 voting service called Snapshot. Now that there are financial rewards tied to competitions, we’ve decided to move to a more secure, token-gated form of voting. To encourage engagement, all 1729 members are eligible to vote, not just 1729writers. Below is a walk-through of the voting process.
Hopefully that is enough upgrades to keep us busy for the month!
A few hopes for this cohort:
Course completion: I’d like to see as many members of the cohort as possible finish all 4 pieces and collect the Full Completion NFT. We would really like to encourage the publishing bias, not least because often the pressure of generating and completing spontaneous ideas leads to better outcomes than you would think. Some of my best essays last term I wrote at the last minute and under pressure.
Collaborate more with the rest of 1729: We will post more work and announcements in lectures, and hope to get more feedback and spark more conversation over there. We would also like to entice more of them to come over and vote.
Technical proficiency: This NFT / ETH rewards program turned out to be a lot of work.
Final thoughts:
Balaji and Jon have made clear that content production is a priority for 1729, and great use of energy while Balaji is continuing his work on The Network State. We need your contribution as well as your imagination. What does the Network State mean to you? What do you think 1729 could / should become? Ultimately it’s Balaji’s decision, but while he’s continuing with his book we should be wrestling and engaging with these ideas.
Cohort 2 will be an exciting one with a treasure trove of material to work with, as well as the ability to actually add raw ideas to Balaji’s Network State as it’s being created. We have new distribution efforts with Cam, NFT experiments, and ETH rewards. But in the end, this cohort is just like any other. It all boils down to you, your laptop, your big brain, and the caffeinated beverage of your choice, developing much-needed and fresh ideas, and putting them out into the world with a group of intellectual peers who have your back.
Make the best of it.
