BIP 28: Guest Curator Talks

homerfan33

Summary
Create a program to invite respected outside voices (guest curators) to share their curation perspectives with BottoDAO members.

Rationale
Bringing in outside perspectives from respected curators will:
1) Help Botto members consider broader art community’s tastes and views on Botto and AI art
2) Provide food for thought that will help elevate our curation discussion and considerations as a community
(Bonus): possibly add more strong and diverse views to the DAO membership (either the curators or people attracted by the curator talks)

Setup

Committee of 2-3 people to be formed. It will exist to ensure proper execution of program. Their responsibilities:
- Regularly ask community for their top choices for guest curators
- Do outreach to community’s top choices and select a maximum of one guest curator each week (note: we don’t need a guest curator guide every week)
- Facilitate Guest Curator Talk in Discord
Guest curators will be asked to perform the following:
- Review fragments in voting pool
- Guest Curator Talk: answer questions in a Discord voice conversation (e.g., “How did you go through the process of looking through fragments?” “Did you have a framework for how you evaluated pieces?”), including answering questions from the audience
- Optional: Twitter Spaces, participate in Town Hall, etc.
- Guest curators will receive an honorarium of 1,000 $BOTTO and a Botto pipe

Proposal Specification

Pilot program for 2 months
Create Guest Curator Talks Committee of 2-3 people. The role of the committee is to solicit ideas from the community, facilitate outreach to guest curators, give instructions to guest curators, and host (or assign someone to host) the Discord AMA.
Quimp & homerfan33 will start as Guest Curator Talks Committee co-chairs. In the #curation channel there will be an open call for an additional DAO member to volunteer to join the committee. If more than 1 person volunteers, a Discord straw poll (i.e., reaction via emoji) will determine which is added to the committee.
There will be an open call every quarter for new committee members, so that we can have people rotate in and out of the committee
Committee will communicate asynchronously via Discord but may choose to do voice calls on occasion
Each committee member will receive a 2,000 $BOTTO honorarium per month for serving on the committee
Quimp & homerfan33 to measure program effectiveness at end of pilot and make recommendation to either:
- Continue guest curator talks program as is
- End guest curator talks program
- Expand guest curator talks program

Budget

Up to 10,000 $BOTTO per month
- Up to 6,000 $BOTTO for committee members
- Up to 4,000 $BOTTO for guest curators

Timeline
May 15 - July 15

Success Metrics

Straw poll in Discord where at least 75% agree that “Have guest curator talks contributed to elevating the DAOs curation and discussion overall?
In a post-survey, at least 75% of guest curators agree that “I would recommend other top curators to be guest curator for BottoDAO”
Increase in activity (total # of messages, unique # of users posting) in #curation channel

hudsonsims

Love this initiative. Think it’s very positive to have an open approach to what works to learn as we go, and I imagine different formats will work for different curators/artists.

Re: what is expected of Guest curators
I would keep expectations minimal other than the interview about their approach as a curator and what they look for in AI art, and how they view Botto in the context of that (though acknowledge it is ideal if they can also experience Botto and spend some time in the voting pool beyond just the mints before the interview). Again, this probably varies a bit depending on the individual, just wouldn’t want to set expectation of added workload of going through Botto’s process as this keeps us open to having more outside views to learn from but are representative of parts of the art world (even if we don’t agree with them!)

Honorarium

I like the pipe as a special gift that comes with voting power. I will check on pipes we have in DAO’s possession, but may be extra budget to acquire.
Noting we can also do a special access pass that costs basically 0.

Also noting that we can record these talks same way as we record the town halls and post to our podcast channels.

A little extra work on committee to add description and title and do some minimal editing (for townhall we pretty much only cut beginning and end random stuff, and maybe a bad middle section if something is private)
Could budget for more production quality if successful

quimp

Super excited to get this going. 😃

Some small changes that came to mind, before we bring this to the official vote:

1) I would change the success metric to "Increase in perceived activity", unless we have the channel's current stats as a baseline.

2) I would keep Pipes as they were initially intended: as a reward for the early stewards of Botto. Therefore I would create a special Guest Curator Access Pass as @hudsonsims noted.

3) I lean towards being on the generous side here and make sure these curators are incentivized to keep voting and being active after the program. We will select them for their great artistic judgement, let's onboard them fully! Thus I suggest we give 2k tokens instead of 1k, and a generous amount of VPs attached to the AP's.

I also agree with @hudsonsims to try a bunch of formats and see what sticks. Discord chats should be recorded and uploaded like the Townhalls.

What I like most about Twitter Spaces is how they help us connect to the guests' network -- great for building awareness.

Let's goooo

hudsonsims

oiseau can chime in here on some of the soft commits. Mika, a curator from SuperRare focused on AI art is one. There are a number of others I don't necessarily want to name, but I've mentioned to a number of potential collaborators who were all interested, so could see Ryan Koopmans and Alice Wexell as a pilot there 🙂 @homerfan33 and @quimp I know have also mentioned soft commits, but will let them say who.

Re: community ideas, agree it shouldn't be dependent on that necessarily, but have seen some success with taking advantage of collective intelligence, even if there are stretch guest requests. Check out Rehash Web3 Podcast for instance: https://twitter.com/rehashweb3 All guests (and even some hosts) are community curated. Occasionally there are stretch requests and there aren't responses but they do a not job of being transparent and handling the non-response well, but also surprising at how much it works out because of validated community interest!

Re pro-curator, my 2 cents is the latter as well. Thinking of someone like Claire Silver, who is an artist but has also seen a lot of AI art through their AI art twitter competitions. Personally I'm really curious to hear from folks who have seen a lot of AI art, especially over many years, to see what stands out for them.

Re: cycling, I think you have a good point about consistency in running it and building experience. At the same time, cycling I think has some benefits: gets people used to being involved beyond voting and having responsibiltity, that can build awareness of the many considerations in that kind of role and helps people contribute more to other areas as well, and ultimately makes it more sustainable long term as it's not dependent on a few key people. At the same time, the period of a cycle should be a fit for the role. For instance, something that takes time to build up experience with and do well should be longer (e.g. hosting/facilitating) vs. something that is relatively easy to jump in to (e.g. editing/posting the podcast). Anyways, i like the spirit of it, but not necessary either to establish now and can figure out as we go imo.

P.S. @homerfan33 and @quimp We don't have Pipes in the DAO's possession, so would need to budget if using that. A special AP is probably better.

quimp What I like most about Twitter Spaces is how they help us connect to the guests' network -- great for building awareness.

I think this would be a more special case. Having in Discord allows us to go broad on their views, but more easily ground it in Botto's context with questions from audience. In Twitter it'd be harder to go broad and not have questions go in all directions away from Botto. Could go twitter spaces when it's more focused on Botto? At least that's how I see it in terms of the objectives. Open here.

oiseau

Great initiative. In some ways Botto is like a venue as well as an artist, so having something similar to an 'audience development' strategy makes sense to me.

Couple comments:

If you already have some people lined up, start date seems fine. Otherwise a bit close.
On that note, I'd support this without names, but think it's a stronger proposal if you have a soft committal from the first 2-3 curators to make it more concrete.
Think it's fine to solicit ideas from broader community, but would put less emphasis on community selection & more responsibility on the committee. Of any names suggested, would expect some to be uninterested/unavailable/unresponsive, esp. as going into summer - so the work is less selection and more scheduling.
Not sure if proposal is meaning to focus on pro curators, or whether 'curator' is being applied loosely and it can be anyone (artist, collector, etc.) in the same way that anyone can vote with Botto. Personally prefer the latter, though of course would be interesting to have some dedicated curators in the mix.
Not sure about cycling committee members every quarter - think it's a bit disruptive. Loses some of the benefits of people getting experience / developing a network / growing into a role. If it's changing faces all the time, then is also harder to reach out to people / communicate over time - is like getting email from the intern. But I guess it doesn't matter for the pilot.
Not a success metric as such, but think committee members could track their time, divided into the main tasks (makes it easier to budget if the programme continues).

Anyway, very promising. I listened to the conversation with Ryan and Alice the other day - shows the potential imo!

rishabh_r

Love it. A natural next step!