Vision, Mission, Values
Vision
What is the future world we want to live in? Why does FWB exist?
We believe in the promise of a better internet---one where communities and authentic connections thrive, where creativity is valued, and where the future can be collaboratively built.
Mission
What do we want to accomplish every day that helps us actualize that vision?
FWB is the social convening point for the individuals, squads, and institutions using decentralized technology to build a better internet. As a community, we aim to push culture forward while elevating and amplifying each other in the process.
Strategic Approaches
How do we accomplish our mission, and work towards our vision?
The FWB community accomplishes our mission by acting as a new kind of social network---one that values intimacy over scale, governs and sustains itself, and seamlessly blurs the lines between meaningful digital and physical experiences.
We currently use Discord as a 24/7 chat room that functions like a virtual city.
We come together once a year to collaboratively produce an event known as FWB FEST, where our digital city temporarily comes to physical life. We also organize in-person events around the world, hosted by and for our community, that serve as local neighborhoods.
We build and operate our own social software---a set of tools that aligns us and uniquely serves the needs of our community. (e.g. fwb.app, gatekeeper, FairShare)
We produce and publish our own essays, news, and stories to contribute new ideas while amplifying and uplifting one another across this network.
We collectively maintain, evolve, and improve our community through member-driven proposals that spur economic and social activity, and deepen connections.
All of this aims to collectively push this format of what a social network is and can be---one that is operated, governed, and attributed to its "users."
In this regard, FWB can be thought of as a city that does not exist in a singular physical place, but is instead fluid, emergent, and collectively defined by the creativity and interdependence of its people.
Core Principles
What behaviors or patterns do we as a community embody in order to accomplish our mission and work towards our vision?
Collective Effort: We believe in cooperation and collaboration. FigJam over Notes. It takes a village.
Good Neighbors: We all have a stake in making our shared home great. Be friendly, be inclusive, be a good host, and if you see trash, pick it up.
Culture Over Crypto: We're not a crypto community, we're a community that uses crypto. Let's set a new tone for this new internet.
Open Experimentation: Remix, remodel. Emergence over instructions. The only "right way" to do things is through radical creativity.
Civic Engagement: We have a responsibility to show how decentralized technology can benefit the public, and to use our influence as a force for good.
Give Before You Get: Offer your support without expecting something in return. Credibility is built through authentic, caring connections.
Have Fun: We don't take ourselves too seriously, and we don't have all the answers -- but that's what makes this worth doing.
DAO-Wide Objectives
Objective: Upgrade FWB’s overall infrastructural model to improve a series of objectives that encompass membership, governance, and economics
- KR-1: Establish a sustainable revenue model to the FWB DAO whereby enough revenue is generated to maintain community costs
- KR-2: Establish a more sufficiently decentralized governance model for the FWB DAO that manages the Treasury through a more egalitarian governance model.
- KR-3: Establish membership entry mechanics that are sustainable over time, avoiding severe gentrification
- KR-4: Gradually shift the FWB DAO from a centralized group of employees into a hybrid model of sufficiently centralized elected leadership plus proposal based contributors.
Objective: Introduce and successfully integrate a meaningful “post-Discord” digital experience for FWB that enhances the Discord via FWB’s ‘Intranet’ mobile app product (e.g. Member Directory, Profiles, Gatekeeper Events
- KR-1: Launch FWB Mobile App by end of Q4 that contains Member Directory, Profiles, Events, and more.
- KR-2: Achieve 80% migration rate of all eligible FWB Members onto the Intranet via minted profiles by March 31st, 2023.
- KR-3: Achieve 20% DAU/MAU Ratio by May 1, 2023 with 5% growth month over month.
Objective: Execute our flagship event FWB FEST 2023 where our digital city comes to life once a year.
- KR-1: Grow FWB FEST’23 attendance from 500 attendees to 750 attendees.
- KR-2: Aim for FWB FEST’23 to break even and establish a pathway to profitability for the DAO for future years as FEST grows.
- KR-3: Ensure the event is community and participant-driven by having at least 50% of the programming be contributed by FWB members (e.g. talks, music, activations).
Events
Objective: Execute our flagship event FWB FEST 2023 where our digital city comes to life once a year.
- KR-1: Grow FWB FEST’23 attendance from 500 attendees to 750 attendees.
- KR-2: Aim for FWB FEST’23 to break even and establish a pathway to profitability for future years as FEST grows.
- KR-3: Ensure the event is community and participant-driven by having at least 50% of the programming be contributed by FWB members (e.g. talks, music, activations).
Objective: Execute an Events program that bridges our year round local events and our annual FWB FEST.
- KR-1: Produce a meaningful event by gathering our community around existing cultural moments at least once a quarter (e.g. Art Basel, EthCC, NFT.NYC, SXSW).
- KR-2: Implement a revenue mechanic to attend FWB Events for non-FWB members that involves burning or purchasing $FWB by January 31, 2023.
- KR-3: Aim to increase membership application rates by 10% within the month following a major FWB event.
Objective: Execute FWB Local Events
- KR–1: Ensure that at least 60% of local events take place in our core cities (LA, NY, and London) while the other 40% of local events cover global cities.
- KR-2: Create a system to identify new “FWB Cities” (places where at least 20 FWB members reside) in order to facilitate an IRL local event in that city.
- KR-3: Ensure at least 50% of event attendees are FWB members.
- KR-4: Aim to increase membership application rates by 5% in Event Key City within the week following a major FWB event.
Governance
Objective: Evolve FWB’s membership mechanic to refine member experience and economic model.
- KR-1: Explore updates to the FWB membership mechanics model by surfacing meaningful community or contributor proposals by Q4 2022.
Objective: Establish a more decentralized governance model for the FWB DAO
- KR-1: Propose 2 alternative voting formats beyond one-token-one-vote to increase integrity of the voting system by March 1, 2023.
- KR-2: Explore the implementation of a permissionless proposal process in order to decrease proposal friction by March 1, 2023.
Objective: Increase member participation in FWB governance
- KR-1: Increase rate of community proposals by 5% quarterly in 2023.
- KR-2: Increase rate of community voter participation by 1% quarterly in 2023.
Marketing
Objective: Grow awareness of the FWB brand and increase membership applications
- KR-1: Refine the current email distribution strategy to grow subscribers by 5% MoM and open rates by 2% MoM through 2023.
- KR-2: Define our brand voice + style across social channels to share clear throughlines about who we are and how we represent ourselves to the wider community by Dec 31, 2022.
- KR-3: Place at least one meaningful PR story a quarter that thoughtfully promotes the FWB narrative (e.g. WaPo, The Face, NYT)
- KR-4: Continue to position FWB as thought leaders in the space by creating and distributing meaningful content via FWB-owned media channels (e.g. WIP and FWB.FEST Videos) that are measured via growth of view counts on individual pieces.
Objective: Better engage and communicate with existing FWB Members
- KR-1: Clarify and refine existing FWB distribution channels (Discord, Email, Social Media) to increase relevant communication of important FWB news over 2023.
- KR-2: Refine current social strategy to increase social engagement across Instagram by 10% to at least 3K per month + increase Twitter impressions to 500K per month on average.
- KR-3: Establish a new communication strategy to engage the FWB community via native FWB “Intranet” post-Discord experience by March 31, 2023.
Membership
Objective: Refine the new member 30-day onboarding journey by implementing a new cohort onboarding system.
- KR-1: Increase new member engagement by 5% quarterly by measuring “activity” of new members (# of messages sent in first 30 days, # of channels visited in 30 days).
- KR-2: Track churn percentage of members who go through the new 30 day onboarding journey and decrease by 10% quarterly.
Objective: Update and improve membership application process
- KR-1: Increase the “acceptance to wallet connect” success rate to 80%+ for all members accepted in Season 7.
- KR-2: Decrease number of applicants in the “Need More Info” and “Waitlist” stages by 10% quarterly.
Objective: Track and improve health of membership at FWB
- KR-1: Experiment with new Discord formats, strategies, and channel architectures to routinely “refresh” the Discord to improve member experience by NPS via routine Census
- KR-2: Develop dashboard (or weekly roundup) that outputs actionable data on a weekly basis by January 31, 2023.
Treasury / Operations
Objective: Identify and develop meaningful revenue streams for the FWB DAO to become sustainable
- KR-1: Grow two revenue streams by the end of 2023 that together generate ~40% of monthly burn (e.g. Partnerships, Events, Curatorial) to work toward an eventual sustainable DAO operating model
- KR-2: Pilot one new revenue stream by the end of 2023
Objective: Gradually shift the FWB DAO from a centralized group of employees into a hybrid model of proposal based contributors.
- KR-1: Decrease the FWB DAO contributor burn by target 33% by March 31, 2023 (current burn: 286k/mo).
Partnerships
Objective 1: Establish new governance process to decentralize the proposal and selection of community partnerships
- KR1: Establish a partnerships review committee (similar to memberships) that reviews pre-proposals and helps community members take partnerships to vote by Jan 31, 2023.
- KR2: Facilitate at least one organic community-driven partnership proposal per quarter
in 2023.
Objective 2: Expand revenue-driving partnerships
- KR1: Secure $1M in partnership revenue in 2023, up from $750,000 in 2022.
- KR2: Generate at least one additional new FWB offering (beyond Events & Curatorial) for paid partnerships by March 31, 2023.
Objective 3: Expand cultural and value add partnerships
- KR-1: Source 1 cultural partnerships a quarter that provide clear benefit to FWB members beyond revenue.
Product
Objective: Launch an FWB native Mobile App that serves as FWB’s ‘Intranet’ (e.g. Member Directory, Profiles, Gatekeeper Events, Mobile App experience) to introduce a meaningful “post-Discord” experience for FWB.
- KR-1: Launch FWB Mobile App by end of Q4 that contains Member Directory, Profiles, Events, and more.
- KR-2: Achieve 80% migration rate of all eligible FWB Members onto the Intranet via minted profiles by March 31st, 2023.
- KR-3: Achieve 20% DAU/MAU Ratio by May 1, 2023 with 5% growth month over month.
Objective: Properly resource and expand the FWB product team to develop meaningful software that provides value to the FWB community and further proliferates $FWB
- KR-1: Vote on and implement the establishment and funding of FWB Labs as the software entity that is owned by the FWB DAO by January 31, 2023.