It's no secret that newsletters, digests and other forms of curated content are experiencing a resurgence. What's not so clear is how to best go about creating and distributing this kind of content in a decentralized way. In this blog post, we'll explore possibilities for DAO communities to make sense of the word together through curation. We'll also look at some existing projects that are doing things right and offer our blueprint for creating decentralized curation for DAOs.

Decentralized Curation

First, let's look at some of the benefits of decentralized curation. In addition to allowing communities to better control their information, decentralized curation offers a few other key advantages over centralized alternatives:

• User control: In a centralized curation platform, communities may have limited influence over what information is shared and how. Often, available tools have limited filtering options and rely on opaque algorithms to personalize the content being shared. With decentralized platforms, however, all community members have an equal say in which content gets shared and how it is ranked. Centralized curation platforms can often feel like they’re curated by a single gatekeeper, limiting the diversity of content and perspectives that are shared. Decentralized curation allows for a more democratic approach to information sharing, giving everyone an opportunity to contribute.

• Increased flexibility. A decentralized curation platform allows for endless customization and adaptability, making it a natural fit for DAO communities. DAOs need to be flexible because they need to change and adapt to the needs of the community and the ecosystem, and decentralized curation allows for this kind of flexibility in a way that centralized platforms don't.

• Better community engagement. Unlike traditional centralized platforms, decentralized curation allows individuals in your community to contribute to the curation process, which helps you engage a wider, more diverse group of people. Often, centralized curation platforms focus on top-down approaches to content discovery. But with a decentralized platform, you can take advantage of community-driven content recommendations and user-generated tags and categorizations - giving other members of your community a say in how they discover new content.

In the end, there's no one-size-fits-all approach to curation. Determining what's right for your community will depend on many factors, including the size of your community and the relative level of technical expertise among its members.

Examples

That said, a few existing projects are already doing things right and worth taking inspiration from. Let's take a look:

• Content aggregator Steemit allows users to create posts for curation by other community members. This decentralized approach allows for better discoverability of information - and helps ensure that content is relevant to the interests of the people in your community.

• RSS readers are yet another example of a decentralized solution tailored specifically to focus on community-driven content discovery. By bookmarking your favorite sites, you can easily curate and discover content from various sources.

• Lens is a social protocol where multiple community-owned solutions are being developed.

Do you know other examples of decentralized curation? Please give me a shout on Twitter.

In the end, decentralized curation platforms are all about community-driven content discovery - maximizing relevance for users while also allowing them to take an active role in how they find information. When done right, this approach to curated content can be incredibly powerful.

Picking flowers from the digital gardens where you belong

A community digital garden is a metaphor for the sum of all the open and organic insight an online community creates. Just as gardeners carefully select plants to put in a bouquet, digital gardeners can carefully curate content from a digital garden to create a digital bouquet. These bouquets are periodic collections of what is most relevant at the moment. They allow the community to reflect on what has been created and to celebrate its collective achievements. They also help new members quickly get up to speed on what is happening in the community and its ecosystem. By periodically creating digital bouquets, we can cultivate rich digital gardens that are beautiful, bountiful, and well-organized.

Picking flowers from the digital gardens where you belong is a metaphor to understand what digital bouquet are. At their core, digital bouquets are an organic and flexible way for your community to curate content - allowing you to organize what is relevant, meaningful, and valuable to your community. Whether you're looking for inspiration from other DAOs or tips on how to start your own DAO project, a digital bouquet can help facilitate meaningful discussions and provide a snapshot of the insights, knowledge, and expertise in your community.

Digital bouquets are powerful way to think about the importance of community-driven curation. At its core, digital bouquets are collections of intentions that reflect on what your community has achieved and help new members get up to speed on what's happening in your digital garden. Whether you're an online community or a DAO, decentralized curation is a way for communities to make sense of their output as they produce it, rather than waiting until after the fact or for a centralized point of view to organize what they have produced. This allows them to identify patterns and trends and be inspired by their own output more easily.

Digital Bouquets can take many forms, like newsletters, digests and case studies. They work best when created cyclically, as the repetition brings benefits like familiarity and refinement. This repetition can be streamlined through templates, tools and incentives. Digital Bouquets can be used to organize discussions, opinions and valuable information in a decentralized way. They are excellent for deciding about and presenting what is relevant.

Digital Bouquets can be used as a tool for educating and sharing knowledge and a marketing tool to attract readers. While they can be a lot of work to set up and maintain, the benefits of having a framework for making sense of the knowledge a community produces and curates are undeniable.

Digital Bouquets can be used to showcase what is relevant in a community's gardens. This would allow gardeners to see what is being grown in their area and what needs to be improved. In turn, this would lead to healthier gardens and a more sustainable community.

Case Study: Bouquet DAO

To illustrate how the system of digital bouquets can work at scale, this hypothetical case study will help break down each step of the process.

Step 0

It all starts with a community of practice. With a constant flux of creation, experimentation, discussions and deliberation, the need for a reliable space for making sense of that world because undeniable.

Bouquet DAO is a hypothetical (for now!) community of Web3 learners and mentors dedicated to curating, reviewing and contributing to learning experiences in the ecosystem. They’ve started by trying to list all the courses, events, festivals, and bootcamps that involved learning more about web3. But then they saw the scope was just too big, there were just too many experiences out there! Until they could figure it out, they decided to implement a monthly newsletter about the best experiences they could find during that period.

The “Learning Bouquet”, they decided to call it, will be as web3 as possible. This means attempting true decentralization by designing incentives and other mechanisms that leverage meaningful use of blockchain tech.

Step 1: highlights

After the community gets together and agrees with the experiment, with a clear purpose and timeline, the real fun begins. In this system, there are 4 roles. We will explore one at a time, starting with Highlighters. They are responsible for signaling that something is relevant within that cycle. They can do so in many different ways: pinning or tagging a message on discord, saving notes in tools like Notion, Evernote or even Riseup Pad.

Bouquet DAO quickly established a simple routine so that anyone could help “pick digital flowers” as in highlighting something they felt was important for the group's newsletter. Any member can tag #bouquet as a comment to something they find relevant on any of the pre-approved platforms, then volunteers quickly search and collect those. The platforms are Discord, Twitter, Notion, Discourse, and Lens. Collecting consists of filling out a quick form with the title, URL, author, and optional comment for context.

Step 2: proposing

After forming the database of highlights (or a basket of picked flowers), more curators can step up, this time as proposers. They are the ones that get to arrange the flowers-highlights into a proposal for the newsletter in that cycle. One important detail is how the previous cycles should also be considered, preferably even connected to the current one.

Proposers at Bouquet DAO eventually came up with multiple ways to streamline their process, including a playbook on Notion with checklists and templates. Because they are active in both the DAO and the overall ecosystem, they can borrow from experience when deciding what should be included that month.

Step 3: publishing

The final step of the cycle is to publish and celebrate. After the proposal is approved, it can be sent to official channels and archived so it can be referenced later. The celebration includes giving praise, getting together, retrospecting and more.

After a full month of creating, annotating, and curating, it's time to publish and celebrate what was collaboratively built. The publishing is also relatively straightforward, they publish it on Mirror (web3 blog) and Substack (newsletter tool), announce it on social media and archive everything on Notion.

Step 4: wrapping up

After all is done, contributors to the cycle can be compensated for their effort. A fixed budget per newsletter is a good way to align expectations. The distribution can happen per role and as a reward for impromptu or exceptional deeds. The two most important things are economic sustainability and ensuring contributors feel valued.

After each cycle is completed and properly celebrated, their budget gets distributed from fixed rates and their praise system. They use a system for rewarding both small and big actions that don't fall under any specific role but important nevertheless. This system for "praising" such actions is a simple as writing the deeds on a Discord channel or Telegram group, and have a group adding weights to them.

Conclusion

The Digital Bouquet Model is a way for decentralized communities to make sense of the digital world around them. It starts with a community coming together and agreeing on a purpose and timeline, then they implement a system where anyone can highlight something as being relevant. The proposers then arrange those highlights into a proposal for the newsletter. After it's approved, it's published and archived so that it can be referenced later. This model allows for meaningful collaboration between members of the community who are passionate about making sense of the digital world.