Crowdmuse and IDEO CoLab Ventures Cyberphysical Contest Retro

This fall, Crowdmuse and IDEO CoLab Ventures Creative Residency, in collaboration with Lens, launched the Cyberphysical Brand Concepts Contest.

Throughout a three-month campaign, we explored themes around the adoption of 3D design, genAI, and digital tools to help creators design concepts of physical products to sell and showcase ideas without overproducing stock.

These themes led us to experiment with a creator contest to explore our assumptions and use onchain tools for voting and social commerce to leverage community engagement and support the distribution of digital product concepts.

Context

The architecture of web3 social apps like Hey, Orb and Zora are a massive step forward for creator ownership and monetization of their content, and these new frontiers have cultivated a wealth of creative communities. We saw their complex fractal geometry as we looked into these social webs.

To give direction to our explorations, IDEO CoLab Ventures Creative Residency partnered with Crowdmuse, a social commerce for creators and brands to collaborate and earn from their products.

We began with an initial concept asking creators to express a perspective on the creative process of creation, monetization, ownership, and access.

We quickly realized that a simple design contest would underutilize the new opportunities of creating onchain. The potential of these architectures, and their native communities, created an opportunity for a contest where individuals could collaborate, vote, and directly shape the future of a design or concept.

The barrier between creator and community is falling, allowing creatives to better build and execute alongside their fans and supporters. As activation becomes easier, these communities are fast becoming core facets of distribution.

Crowdmuse encourages creators and brands to take advantage of this buy-in by selling their products on a preorder basis on its marketplace. This avoids creating dead stock as products have to hit minimums before production begins. Any order that doesn't hit the target minimum triggers refunds back to the buyers. This “pull” production model subverts inventory challenges, avoids waste, and allows for specialized production for smaller, invested, communities.

This work is made possible by the, sometimes radical, transparency of working onchain. With a public ledger, your actions and social interactions are tied to you. This also allows Crowdmuse to experiment with connected goods. These IRL/URL artifacts act as portals between the real and digital worlds and reflect a broader trend of thoughtful approaches to cyberphysical design.

Launching the Contest

To broaden our exploration, we asked creators to submit a concept for a drop or a brand and were eager to see how they approached balancing authenticity, audience, and cultural belonging with relevance to trends and evolving taste.

We launched our contest with a call to action accompanied by the Contest Handbook detailing the mechanics, timeline, rules of the contest, and information on the $2,000 cash prize. We promoted the contest on Hey, Orb, and X accounts, and on the private Crowdmuse Community Telegram channel.

Contestants were asked to mint a digital version of their submission on Crowdmuse for showcasing purposes alongside a Figma with concept references and storytelling.

We screened each submission for any inappropriate or offensive content, though we did not need to exercise any intervention.

Feedback During the Submission Period

While much of the early reception was positive, the submission period was our first opportunity for feedback.

Some creators expressed frustration as, after activating their communities to mint their proposals on Crowdmuse with the assumption that this would increase their chances of winning, they learned we would only launch the community voting mechanism later. In retrospect, we should have made the instructions clearer that the number of collections of a digital mint would not affect the final vote.

This frustration increased over the fact that while the mints themselves were free, the action of minting required spending money, not for the competition, but for gas and credit card fees. Some incorrectly assumed that this money went to the contest organizers.

While we understood these frustrations, whenever a miscommunication arose in our contest, we addressed it by standing by the rules as written in our Contest Handbook, to maintain fairness and objectivity for those who had read and understood the rules. This issue caused some creators to remove themselves from the contest, but at the end of the submission window, we moved forward with 12 fully vetted and approved submissions.

JokeRace contest page
JokeRace contest page

Community Voting on JokeRace

Instead of selecting the contest winner with a panel of judges, we worked with JokeRace to organize a community vote. JokeRace is an open-source and onchain community voting platform where users create and run community voting contests with the benefits of earning rewards and engaging with their community.

Terms for voting:

  • Voters included anyone who had interacted with Crowdmuse on socials, was a member of the Community Telegram channel, or worked with Crowdmuse previously

  • To avoid bot votes we used a pay-to-vote system

  • To make voting accessible, each vote cost as little as possible, 0.0001 eth, or roughly 31 cents in USD at the time of the vote’s launch

  • We chose not to use a free vote as it would require curating an “allow-list” before the contest of wallets permitted to vote

  • The earrings from the pay-to-vote would be distributed to the top three winners via JokeRace

  • The proposal with the most votes at the end of the contest would win

  • There would be no additional voting rules–intentionally

  • In addition, we used stack.so for the contest leaderboard

  • Only one winner will be awarded the $2k cash prize and be taken to the next phase of the contest

Competition Questions and Assumptions

By promoting our contest to the Crowdmuse community, we assumed that our voting group would consist of design-minded individuals literate, to some degree, in the mechanics of web3. We assumed that some contestants would activate their communities to vote, and that the success of these activations would rely on the quality of the idea. In choosing this community we believed the best idea would rise to the top.

We chose to focus our energy on designing the contest, rather than pre-litigating any additional rules for casting votes. We believed that self-policing within the community and social norms would curate a “fair” contest. While we expected that some unpredictability could come, we also understood that the transparency of onchain voting would allow us to see where, and when, voters diverged from these assumed norms.

Our questions included:

  • How would participants activate their communities for votes?

  • How would vote distribution span wallets?

  • How would the contest affect the growth or fracture of the community?

  • How would vote transparency affect how users voted?

  • Without any control valves, where would community voting take us?

Running the Contest

Voting opened at 10 am PST // 5 pm UTC on October 21, 2024, and closedat 10 am PST // 5 pm UTC on October 24. To maintain neutrality the contest's organizers did not vote.

The contest generated 3,440 votes from 53 unique wallets. As per the Contest Handbook, we selected the winner based on the highest number of total votes.

“SLING” from xael.eth (Sean Thielen-Esparza) won the contest with 1,722 votes. “No bulky headset, just sip this blue liquid” Gilbert took second with 1,250 votes. “Save Our Venues” from acutek.eth came in third with 235 votes.

SLING from Sean will receive the $2,000 reward and prepare a merch drop based on the SLING concept as the first 'artifact' to promote the concept and court customers. Pre-order sales of the merch must hit 25 units to move to production with our dedicated manufacturer Everywhere Apparel and NFC chip partner Arx.

LEARNINGS AND FEEDBACK

Contest Mechanics in Action

Votes ticked in fairly consistently throughout the voting period, before a notable, and transparently verifiable, uptick in the seconds before the contest’s conclusion. This included votes from creators’ communities native to Web3 Social and activated by the contest to join Web3 Social.

With 31 seconds left in the contest, eventual winner Sean paid 0.0515 ETH to cast 515 votes for themselves, accounting for nearly â…™ of total votes, pushing them into first place by 472 votes. These votes are reflected on the JokeRace dashboard and onchain.

Sean was not the only creator to vote for themselves, as second place winner Gilbert cast 24 votes for themselves, and fourth place winner, jordanisgreen.eth, cast 25 votes for themselves.

All of these votes were valid and fit within the scope of the Contest Handbook, which did not limit vote totals, or limit voting opportunities beyond our general contest voting period.

Reflections from Winner

After the contest, we interviewed Sean as part of our Creator Editions ORBIT series hosted by Crowdmuse Content and Comms Lead Tyler Scharf. You can see the full interview here

Additionally, we asked Sean a few questions in the days after the contest’s conclusion. We have included excerpts from that interview below.

Can you provide feedback on your experience of the community pay-to-vote contest?

I felt that the pay-to-vote dynamic created an auction-like dynamic, especially with last-minute strategic voting. For example, I withheld my own vote until the end to maximize its impact, creating pressure that was strategically sound but might have been discouraging to other participants.

Contest configuration options like limiting last-minute voting, preventing participants from voting for themselves, or extending the contest if last-minute votes disrupt the rankings are all ways that I could see the JokeRace contest structure improving.

How did this system affect the distribution of community votes?

I think that community voting can serve as a productive distribution mechanism, but many of my supporters faced significant friction navigating the process of creating a wallet and acquiring crypto, adding unnecessary friction. I spent time onboarding supporters one-on-one, often sending them free crypto to ensure they could participate, but this was extremely time-intensive and required spending my own money.

What are your thoughts on demand-driven production?

The demand-driven production thesis is immensely compelling. Many of my supporters expressed excitement at the concept and expressed intent to purchase the future product, but intentions don’t always translate into actions.

Purchasing a T-shirt not only signals interest but also delivers immediate value to supporters while identifying high-intent future customers. I’m excited to see if this proves effective for the SLING concept!

Reacting to Controversy

Our hands-off voting system inadvertently created a prisoner’s dilemma, where group benefit and individual gain were at odds. While we can acknowledge some temptation to adjust outcomes to reflect the broader voice of the community in competition, doing so would betray and invalidate our exploration, and jeopardize our reputation.

As with our approach to mints not counting as votes earlier in the competition, it would be unfair to adjust the rules in retrospect and disadvantage those who read and acted by the Contest Handbook. It is possible to iterate and improve rules, contests, and executions, but reputations and trust are not so readily managed.

Some contestant, voter, and observer feedback included displeasure with the number and timing of Sean’s 515 votes, but not for the act of voting for oneself. As we know, other participants also voted for themselves. This reflects a perceived “grey area” around community acceptance.

Without absolutes, communities must actively determine what falls within the bounds of “good faith,” either expressly, or through repeated community action. While this can be done proactively, the transparency of onchain voting also gives communities the ability to retroactively illustrate norms. By giving, or withholding, ongoing community support communities can determine the acceptable line between self-interest and community benefit.

Measure what you want to make

Our competition netted a wide and weird set of proposals. All used digital showcasing tools to bring their concepts to life. While some participants focused on solving real-world problems, others created physical artifacts for digital activations.

As some feedback pointed out, though, our voting system’s design opened itself to the mechanics of more traditional economic models.

  • If a system can be gamed, is it capable of measuring anything other than an individual's ability to game it?

  • What happens to quality if the metrics of these economic models become the standards we measure, and benchmark designs for?

  • What responsibility do creators and communities have to engineer these systems away from more traditional systems?

How might we change the voting system?

If we wanted to change the execution of our contest, we could change the rules of the community vote in several ways including:

  • One vote per wallet

  • Time blocks between votes

  • Prohibit self-voting in totality

  • Make each vote increasingly expensive

  • Free voting (necessitating an allow-list)

Ideally, these would help communities reach effective vote administration and serve as stronger scaffolding to establish social norms.

It is not clear, though, if these would solve all voting issues. The door remains open for not yet foreseen, and more complicated, means of gaining an advantage. This could create an arms race of looking for and protecting against, advantages that could bog down the execution of such contests.

We could also abandon community votes in favor of judging panels, but this would be a rejection of community voting, instead of improvement, which would move many of these same issues upstream to the process of selecting judges.

While we understand there was some difficulty in onboarding new voters, our exploration was of web3 social, and we did not want to turn away from these frictions by enabling web2 voting systems.

How might we change our communities?

As communities establish norms and build stronger connections, these disagreements and frustrations may simply be growing pains. Given enough contests, communities may develop their norms and adopt rules to arrive at a shared understanding.

If however, we were looking to design communities to avoid these frustrations moving forward, we could adopt a few strategies.

  • Increase voter pools to dilute the influence and power of the individual.

  • Shrink voter pools to increase the weight of personal reputation

  • Establish trust as a desired outcome of the vote alongside choosing a winner

If we are going to build strong communities, we must create a sense of what it means to belong in this community, and proactively propagate an ethos of acceptable, or unacceptable behavior.

In some communities that could mean celebrating the individual best able to gain an advantage, while in others it could mean rewarding cooperation over self-interest. In either scenario, our social systems must strengthen the relationship between creator and supporter, and protect against the erosion of trust.

"LANGUAGE" LONG SLEEVE TEE Pre-order
"LANGUAGE" LONG SLEEVE TEE Pre-order

The first SLING drop

Contest winner Sean will move forward to make his brand vision a reality for SLING. As part of the contest, the winner gets access to the Crowdmuse curation team and partners Everywhere Apparel and Arx, to create a premium merch item on pre-order to help support Sean in showcasing the overall concept and get his first 25 customers. The product is available for pre-order on Crowdmuse.

This drop includes a long sleeve t-shirt and will give access to buy the SLING product at a discounted price when it is released.

Contest Phase II: Do community votes translate to sales?

This first drop marks the start of the second phase of our contest in which we explore how community activation translates to sales and financial support. Our creators successfully activated their communities, including onboarding supporters to web3 platforms and navigating pay-to-vote to get votes. The question now is: whether community votes translate to sales.

For our exploration, this is not a theoretical question. Sean will need to reach the 25 presale minimum to go into production with this first piece of merch and move forward with the creation of SLING with the contest cash prize of $2,000.

Conclusion

Web3 social offers expansive frontiers for creativity, collaboration, design, and execution. The ability to own your work, build your community, and activate support for your projects transparently opens the doors for new financialization models and streamlined support.

As we establish new norms for social trust and action, we must design systems and marketplaces that promote creativity, activate communities, grant meaningful ownership, and balance the voice of the individual with the will of the crowd.

Doing so will not only continue to push the frontiers of creative possibilities but build communities that are both fair and resilient.

Subscribe to Crowdmuse
Receive the latest updates directly to your inbox.
Mint this entry as an NFT to add it to your collection.
Verification
This entry has been permanently stored onchain and signed by its creator.