REMINDER: The README.md is the most up to date version

                                                          #ARTCO
                                                          
                                                          
                                                    Web3 Community Outreach
                                                     
                                                     
                                               (a tezos-gitcoin hackathon project)

1. MISSION STATEMENT

DEFINITIONS OF KEY TERMS IN THE MISSION STATEMENT

• What is a Cultural Institutions? A Cultural Institution is an organization with a culture and a mandate to preserve or promote art. They may be museums, libraries and archives, churches, art galleries, theaters, concert halls and opera houses.

• What is an Outreach Program? An Outreach Program is a way of providing services that prior to its provision where inaccessible or hard to access by the target communities.

• What is Web3? Web3 is a decentralized protocol of the internet which makes use of distributed network of computer, people and resources to achieve important social goals of decentralization, security and privacy which protects its users and puts them first.

As the digital age proceeds, we have come to a place in which a space is required where art can thrive, art for its own sake, art for its own beauty.

We aim to achieve this by creating an outreach program styled in form of a DAO with a focus on building a decentralized cultural heritage of the world housed on the internet. We identify with the core values of :

• Outreach Programmes - education, creativity, collaboration
• Culutral Institutions -promotion, presevation of arts and culture;
• Web3 - decentralization, community and a creator-first ecosystem.

Our Mission is to be a place of communion with art for art lovers.

2. OUTLINING THE GOAL

AIM

We aim to produce, promote and preserve art while providing the following services: I. Education II. Collaboraion III. Marketplace IV. Loyalty Programs V. Investment DAO

Our services is formed to be a 5 - step process to be achieved in phases, because we see each succeding phase as building on the previous one.

SERVICE DELIVERY

Education

Education is a very important tool in creating a community around your outreach program because it gives you the opportunity to show people what your mission is all about and why they should be part of it. In our case, ArtCo is providing access to digital arts education to the general art community. We believe people have a natural thirst for self-improvement, and providing this particular service is our way of tapping into the art community. We want to bring together people who are passionate about learning, in one place where they can learn together. These student-members alongside more established artsits and educators who will assist in creating the curriculum and provide mentorship and guidance will form the crucial core of our membership in the beginning.

Problem Statement: Inadequate and fragmented access to quality digital arts education.

Solution: We aim to educate our members in two ways, by creating an online-learning platform and providing spaces for art discussion and appreciation.

The online learning platform will feature a well-curated curriculum on the most important digital art skills to learn at the moment, which will include digital painting, animation, 3D modelling, pixel art, etc. We will also offer topics at the intersection of art, technology, marketing and sustainability, so there will be courses offered in story-telling, documentation, art recreation, emulation and ethical issues, etc. We will like to give our members a well rounded education that offers them a vision of the importance and possibilities surrounding art in the digital age as we move towards a more virtual future.

Art spaces will be spaces organized to envourage and spur art discussion and engagement. To make this even more attractive, we will invite more established artists, curaotors, archivists, art influencers, techpreneurs. The goal here is to bring in more synergy to our community building and not make it one-dimensional. Naturally social media will be a very important medium for this discussions. Social media platforms like Twitter, Instagram, You-tube are the perfect place to put ourselves out there and have these discussions. it's also a more proactive way of inviting prospective new members into the community as we discuss hot-topics in the art world. As an added benefit for members, we intend to actively make use of Discord, an important tool in community engagement. Discord will be a space where student-members can have constant communication and support each other. It will also be a place where they can actively ask questions and get their answers with guidance from mentors within the community.

Tezos Application: At this stage, most of the community activities will be conducted in web2 especially social media. However we envision a use case of tokenizing members participation in the education stack i.e members who have completed the curriculum will be presented with Non-Transferrable Tokens (NTTs) which will serve as badges showing proof of participation in the program. This badge will be available in their Tezos wallet (Kukai) which becomes an addeed bonus to their digital resume. Another use-case that can be built on this is utilizing this badge as a neccessary proof required to participate in sponsored programs like art-residencies.

Another possible application of tokenization is to keep track of community members participation right from the start, for example Discord has a bot-enabled ranking system which can be tokenized into a point-based system that can be managed using a decentralized storage system like IPFS. This can be utilized in future on-chain to access benefits like discounts, free NFTs, etc. Naturally once this is redeemed, the value-worth of a discount for example will be deducted from the accrued points.

Collaboration

The collaboration phase is billed to follow the education because we believe education is a fertile space to nurture the the spirit of collaboration through community collaboration, education and engagement. All the ideas flowing around in this initial spaces becomes the seeds we want to nurture to excellence in the collaboration members. We want to create a healthy open space for innovation, creativity and the birth of new art forms never seen before.

While collaboration is billed to be the outcome of a success education program, we do not intend to limit it to just student-members, instead it will be open to art lovers in all diversity. This include artists looking to showcase their skills, to techies who want to innovate solutions in the art space, as well as art patrons, creative types who have bright ideas who require skilled collaborators who can bring the ideas to life. We recongize that our membership has the potential to include more than just artists only, and the art collaboration phase is the stage where ArtCo seeks to open its doors even wider to the broader art community and folks on its periphery.

Problem Statement: Insufficient artistic collaborations

Solutions: Art collaboration will be be nurtured in three broad ways:

Exhibitions will be an open for all opportunity for artistic creators to exhibit, showcase and promote their art, while providing patrons and cultural institutions a wealth of art productions to curate. Exhibits will also serve as auctions, points-of-sales for creators and a way to interface with sponsor cultural institutions and tech companies particularly in the gaming and VR industries on possible collaborative use-cases for their art works. Competitions which will be similarly open for all, will particulary double-down on team-work and collaboration with an hackathon-format which places high value on experimentation, cross-over applications not limited to the traditional art space, innovative products. Naturally there will be prizes up for grabs on this one and participants will be challenged to think outside the box in how they imagine the artistic creativity process, the limits of what can be done in terms of producing, promoting or preserving (digital) art. The residency program is probably the one that may be exclusive to members as a means for not only rewarding those whole have completed the curriculum both to also provide them access to more resources in terms of tools, mentorships, grants, etc. Member artists will be exposed to a variety of new techniques, cultures to stimulate, polish refine and most importantly reimagine all they have learnt prior to now in new forms set for the canvax.

Finally we intend to conduct these services have both virtual and on-ground formats of these programs, these will provide full benefits and access to art lovers of differing temparements, styles and resources.

Tezos Applications: The blockchain applications of Tezos to the collaboration phase is similar to the use of NTTs as badges for proof of participation, however there are possible usecases that can be stacked on NTTs in this particular section. This includes making the NTTs regenerative, this is a fun way of proofing that you have participated in more than one ArtCo collaborative projects, as your NTTs changes form with each new program you attend or participate in. This usecase can be extended to being used as ticketiting for art events, where the rarity of your NTTs can determine if you are allowed VIP access for instance.

Marketplace

Following the art collaboration phase and the production of high quality art-pieces, creators who have participated in this phase are naturally ready to trade on the marketplace and while we intend to make use of existing marketplaces on Tezos like KalaMint, we forsee additional usecases not presently available on this platforms that may require us to build ours in future.

Problem Statement: Low utilization of NFTs usecases and value in the marketplace

Solutions: Some of the usecases which will aim to add to NFT marketplace functionalities is an auction market and NFT collaterization. An auction market is an effective outcome of a succesful art exhibition, but not only that notorious/unique art pieces may be put on the auction market where the highest bid. NFT collaterization on the other hand is a way of place high value digital NFTs as well as traditional artworks as collaterals. It will be intersting to see if exchanges like Tezfin will allow NFTs as collateral given the fact that the same principle of over-collaterization can be applied to them as well. There is also the additional benefit in the case of traditional artworks have a relatively more stable valuation which can be leveraged on the market. The next section details how this solutions can be applied effectively on Tezos blockchain.

Tezos Applications: The first point of business for NFT markeplace applications on Tezos is the use auctions. Auctions are actually popular usecases on the blockchain, which require bids be sent by bidders into a smart contract. The outcome is that the highest bidder wins. Naturally the bidders are unaware of each other's bids and the auctioneer is also prevented from placing a bid through smart contract logic. Let's look at a scenario:

• Van Gogh's letter is billed to be auctioned
• A-Bidder sends in a maximum bid value of 5000 XTZ
• B-Bidder sends in a maximum bid value of 3000 XTZ
• If the incrementalBid function increases by 100 XTZ
• At some point B-Bidder will notice that they have been outbid and can choose to increase their maximumBid through the UI interface
• This cycle can on for rounds until a winning bid finally emerges.

An additional usecase that be applied to auctions is the use of synthetics. Using the same scenario of Van Gogh's letter, non-participants on an exchange like SEXP can decide to bet on the outcome of the ongoing bid, all they need to do is bet on the price range at which the art will be sold, in this way:

• Axx bets that it will be sold below 5000 XTZ.
• Bcc bets that it will be sold above 5000 XTZ.
• If it is sold above 5000 XTZ, Axx wins out and takes all. If for example the bidding is taking place off-chain, an oracle-system can be utilized to fetch the winning bid and transmit to the smart contract, which effectively achieves the same scenario of choosing the winning bid.

Synthetics can even be taken further to betting on the value of speculative NFTs, in this case:

• A popular NFT called Pixie is listed on Kalamint with a current value of 100 XTZ.
• Axx bets Pixie value will increase by 20%
• Bcc bets Pixie value will decrease by 20%
• They both send 100 XTZ into a smart contract
• If the value does go up by 20% >> they split the difference in which A wins out.

NfTs loan collaterization suggests making use of NFTs with a superior or equal value as collateral to the borrowed funds. There will always be pratical scenarios in which a borrower may possess insufficient capital but a superior asset base or collection which they should be able to leverage in DEFI. Of the two digital arts possess easier liquidity conversion value than traditional artworks. However traditional artworks will often have a more stable value. The utility therein means a borrower can use digital arts as NFT loan collateral in fast-pace market conditions where they can get into consistent short posistions of betting against marketplace behaviour. This method has a taste of NFT flipping to it in character which will be infinetely attractive to degens.

Alternatively using traditional artworks as collateral is useful for long-range market conditions which may require a bit more foresight and planning, which is particularly useful for those who are borrowing to carry out specific capital-intensive projects like DAO launching. Currently Tezfin collects loan in fungible tokens, however it will be interesting if this can be extended to non-fungible tokens as well to widen the market base and encourage more utilization

Loyalty Programs

The loyalty program is designed to reward members participation in the community particularly in tmarketplace phase where their benefits can accrue and be redeemed the most. This does two things, it retains existing members and incentivize them to be more active in the community while also attracting prospective new members to the cause.

Problem Statement: How to reward customers effectively?

Solutions: Some popular incentives that can be applied to the art community include:

• advance notice of/early access to new products
• early access to sales
• free merchandise or enhanced services
• special services, like free or expedited shipping
• members-only discounts
• The loyalty program also forms basis to the DAO governance

Tezos Applications: There are various ways of utilizing a reward system in a decentralized way. Ideally the reward system will be connected to the wallet address of members with an on-chain messaging system similar to EPNS for notifying patron-members of benefits like early access, discounts, etc. Some systems to adopt are:

Points-based system - based on rate of purchases - in which loyalty points which are are stored and tracked in real time via the use of smart contraacts are calculated to be equal to token values which can the traded on-chain for discounts, bonuses, free NFTs, etc. Loyalty points may also be designed to be useful outside the community by partnering with other DAOS and cultural institutions. These kinds of partnerships is important in making the loyalty program more valuable.

Tiered-based system - which leverages community participation - particularly on social media linked apps like discord, patreon and twitch - the bot-ranking system on discord for example may be utilized for offering exclusives, whitelist access to active community members. This can be done by making use of APIs to collecting data on the bot-ranking-system which are the connected to a decentralized file system like IPFS for on-chain utilization. Another tier-based use case is the use of Patreon membership which will be especially useful for partner cultural institutions to provide event access, early-acecss, VIP tickets for community members who choose to actively donate and participate in cultural institutions activities offline.

HODL is a special function of rewarding members for holding NFTs for as long as possible. This is a direct implication of identifying with cultural institutions core ethos by choosing to preserve arts for its intrinsic value and beauty rather than using it as a tool for speculation. We want to encourage and reward members for holding this NFTs by giving distinctive rewards by giving exclusive access to never before seen collections of artistic works both online and offline as well private access to the creator's creative process, etc.

Investments DAO

The Investment DAO is the final phase in our roll-out services and it's expected outcome of an income-generating community in the marketplace that have fostered camaraderie,collaboration and community building. At this stage member-patrons can pool their resources together and use it to invest in specific socio-political caus and projects that have been identified to be fitting with the community ethos.

Problem Statement: Building a DAO focused on art investements

Solutions: Community members as patrons form an investment group (DA0). Investment pools is a way of bringing members resources to achieve the following goals:

• jointly acquire artworks
• sponsor specific projects
• participate in the speeculative art market
• invest profits from art-sales in liquidity pools designed to pay back members through automatic payouts.

Tezos Applications: NFT – Fractionalization for allows for patron-members to pool ther resources together and invest jointly in ownership of artworks, in which each members ownership-share is equal to their contribution to the pool. The community may choose to issue these fractionalized tokens to the contributing members who can then choose to trade with it on secondary markets. NFT fractionaliztion particularly offer higher liquidity opportunities for members.

This usecase can be extended to liquidity pools where investing members can stake their fungible tokens in liquidity pools, yield farming strategies and expected automated payouts into their wallet by making use of existing automated streaming protocols

Finally the incidence of DogeCoin shows their is a possibility of creating a stablecoin backed by expensive artworks using the same principle of NFT fractionalization, the idea is to invest in high quality expensive works of art prefferably classicals that are housed in cultural institutions wrap an NFT around it after acquistion and then fractionalize the token by redistributing the value among DAO members by issuing fungiblle tokens based on it. The idea is that high quality works of art is have a stable and rising curve of valuation which time which makes them an intersting usecase for creating a stablecoin free from volatility,

3. Target Market

Our focus group is the the Millennial - Gen Z generation who possess financial, social resources alongside tech-savviness to navigate the internet. We believe our product and services are self-marketing on their own due to their attractiveness and usefulness to the community. Nevertheless, we aim to use the full power of social media to network and market ourselves using Tik-Tok, You-tube, Instagram, Twitter, etc to engage meaningful discussions and content around art.

• Community Discovery : Reddit, Twitter, Instagram, Youtube
• Cmmunity Engagement – Discords, Blogs
• Cmmunity Activation – Patreon, Twitch

Building Relationships

General Guidelines

• To be seen, to be consistent, to be open, and deliver on our promises as an organization.
• Include as many people, and organizations in our outreach to widen the net of communication and connections.
• Treat everyone with respect and dignity befitting of stakeholders.
• Nurture the principles of diversity, genuiness and sincerity within the community
• Carry out extensive consultation with all stakeholders, before launching, and continue after launching on a consistent basis

Building Relationships with Members

• Validate the importance of each community member by involving them in goal-setting and governance of the community.
• Keep an open line of communication and manage members expectation by clearly defining the goals and services being offered.
• Clear the air on concerning issues within the community to reduce negative feelings and viewpoints.
• Actively listen to community members, encourage inquiries and questions to figure out what members consider important.
• Encourage diversity and encourage members to treat each other in a dignified, sincere manner.

Building Relationships with Partner Organizations

• Research and reach out to:
  • organizations with similar missions, purposes, values
  • organizations with different missions, purposes, values but may have a similar vision, rationale, and objectives to explore potential partnerships with us
  • important community leaders and influencers
• Look for common links, allies, connections and use them as a basis to bond
• Attend events, webinars, workshops and use it as an opportunity to bond
• Engage potential partners in important conversations like:
  • what you each do and ideas for what you each need;
  • ways you can benefit one another;
  • the communities and networks both organizations reach;
  • the strengths you can each offer with regard to a potential partnership;
  • cultural competence and communication styles.
• Create a statement clearly outlining the partnership’s vision, rationale, and objectives. Also, explain why you are partnering. Be explicit about each partner’s role and assign tasks and responsibilities based on strengths. Begin with smaller tasks and responsibilities, and then increase their size and complexity over time.
• Establish metrics to track desired activities, outputs, and outcomes (e.g., logic models or fidelity scales). Share relevant data as much as possible.

Specific Strategies

• Conduct a needs assessment to understand what the (digital) art communitites require the most and focus on that in terms of design for the DAO
  • Collect accurate data, stories, case-studies to get the perfect picture of the reality on ground.
  • Identify the most important issues raised and the most important features needed and implement based on that
  • Let the marketing outreach focus on telling stories
  • Minimize assessment or intake procedures to lessen the bottlenecks for incoming members

Possibe Conflicts Between Communites and Cultural Instituions

BENEFITS FOR BOTH COMMUNITIES AND CULTURAL INSTITUITIONS

4. WHAT COULD GO WRONG? AND RECOMMENDATIONS

• Risk of failure or low adoption of the online learning platform, perharps due to poor learning tools or low reach or attractiveness towards potential learners
• Poor community bonding, detached members, not engaged enough
• Risk of duplication, of doing the same thing, again if the marketplace is not attractive or unique enough
• Loyalty program not incentivizing enough, too complex, or not broad enough in usecases in case of cross-chain, or off-chain interoperability
• Fraud in case of investment DAO, or power aggregating in the hands of a few donors in terms of DAO direction.

5. CONCLUSION

• As the digital age proceeds, we have come to a place in which a space is required where art can thrive, art for its own sake, art for its own beauty.

• The core - ethos of cultural institutions is to preserve and promote art, we recognize this and identify with the need to bring art lovers who share this spirit together.

• Our mission once again is to bridge this divide between cultural institutions and art lovers and provide the foundation for a decentralized cultural heritage as our moves close to virtuality.

6. APPENDIX