MetaGame and Urbánika - a powerful use case

TL;DR:

Urbánika would like to put all MG’s developments into an use case which other DAOs and initiatives can look at as a reference point.
MG would benefit of having the costs and times to make the deployment ready so that it can be properly marketed and priced.

Context

MetaGame is a DAO that has developed an impressive suite of products that could be of great interest to the web3 community. These products include:

  • MyMeta, a social media platform where users can create web3 personal profiles and connect with others who share the same interests,
  • ChievMint, an NFT minter that celebrates people’s successes,
  • QuestChains, a place where users can find and commit to completing challenges in exchange for a certificate that attests to their achievement, and
  • Dashboard a personalized panel from a DAO that shows the most recent news, social media posts, and videos, as well as a leaderboard that ranks users by the experience points (XP) they have earned for contributing to the DAO in regard.
    -MetaSys, a gamified accounting contribution system that turns actions into XP and then to token allocation.

Urbánika is a school of activism that uses exponential technologies such as blockchain and AI to equip urban changemakers with the tools they need to create smart, ethical, and regenerative communities. By gamifying the educational experience and incentivizing users to complete courses through XP and NFT rewards, Urbánika aims to bring more people into shaping the future of cities in postCapitalist and SolarPunk ways.

Proposal

Urbánika is seeking to partner with MetaGame to deploy a gamified learning experience that could be used to showcase the contributions MetaGame has developed to the ecosystem, and thus incentivize their adoption by more DAOs.

Oportunity

Showing Urbánika as an use case opens the possibilities for MG to promote a service of deploying similar things for other DAOs. An example of how others are leveraging their tech in similar ways is the one of Bankless DAO Academy:



Learn more about their model here: https://whitelabel.banklessacademy.com/

MG has developed amazing products that are so in need for the ecosystem, but people 1) do not know about them, 2) do not know how these could be integrated to their needs, or 3) do not want to integrate anything but want a fully operational flow which they can use.

Most recently, @_Anna and I went to Ethereum Guatemala, and there were two people talking about their initiatives and the modules they need to kickstart.
One of them wanted to pay a dev to develop something like MyMeta. Anna and I told him: Check MG. We gave him a quick tour about MyMeta and told him to come to the server.

Would it be of value if everytime Urbánika presents to a conference or a student enrolls into our courses people see that our learning infrastructure and experience is a “white label” decentralized society kit/templates/tools that MG developed and put together?

Specs

Urbánika wants to partner with MetaGame to deploy a gamified learning experience where apprentices:

  • earn experience points (XP) for completing courses
  • earn a NFT that attestates they completed a specific course
  • create a personal profile
  • find other apprentices to contact and network
  • can identify their rank at the leaderboard of apprentices
  • can follow the latest news of Urbánika in a single place

Additionally,
We currently use https://urbanika.notion.site/ as our website. We would require a website that can run the services of MG.

Roadblocks

:moneybag: Urbánika has been running mainly through Humberto’s pocket, however, fundraising strategies could be found to compensate MetaGame for their work. Such as:

  • Our next Gitcoin grants could be done specifically for this
  • Retroactive funding opportunities

However, if we think this as a win-win opportunity. MGamers that are interested could take this as an internal project that aims to put together their developments in a way that others find them valuable.

Conclusion

Urbánika thinks that by demostrating an use case that people can easily resonate with, such as in education, it will blow the minds of others to find MG products valuable for their own projects, and thus MetaGame could benefit by selling the service of deploying their products custom to the needs of customers.

Additionally, going through this full deployment would be useful to draft the expenses, requirements, phases, and pricing strategy.
MG doesn’t need to think about new ways of making income or fundraising, MG has already valuable developments that are needed in the ecosystem. Providing a service of white-labeling and full deployment is a way to take MG products from house to market, as well as increasing the recognition and chances for future retroactive funding.

What do you think?
Do you find value on this proposal?
Would the teams of QuestChains, MyMeta, Dashboard, and ChievMint be interested in coordinating to making it happen?

@vid @alec @tenfinney @polimyl @dysbulic @Dave @luxumbra

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I’m interested in the outcome of this! I have had something similar bouncing around in my head, a more stand-alone version of something like Crew3/Dequest blended with MyMeta and QuestsChains/ChievMint.

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Hey Hbesso!

Yes, this idea (offering a whitelabeled product) has been kicking around for a long time. I have been mostly skeptical of it, mainly because of

  1. the very large lift it would require to productize the current software stack
  2. A lack of market research proving the worth of this effort, essentially: Are there enough customers?
  3. Maintaining somebody else’s whitelabeled software stack is time and capital-intensive, so are the funds there and do we have the team willing to put in the effort? Is there a business model where this effort could be shared?

Were we to embark on this, however, I love the idea of Urbánika being a testbed due to our vision alignment. For starters, I am primarily interested in getting some information about the #2 concern above. Could you reduce the 6 bullet-pointed specs in your post down to one or two? What is the most impactful component of the 4-5 that you listed that could be most easily leveraged for Urbánika?

I ask because productizing the entire stack would require a large capital investment (probably at least mid-six-figures USD), so identifying a smaller, more focused product would be ideal, both to reduce effort AND to make it easier to market and sell.

3 Likes

Thanks @alec for replying with your concerns. Discussing specific points opens the way of finding the how to.

It is smart to break down such massive project into one or two things. Thanks for pointing that out.

Here my reply:

Several times I’ve pointed out people to MyMeta because they were looking for a web3 profile maker, matchmaker, and search platform.

From all the points MyMeta has been the only consistent piece that has been requested by people when talking at conferences or in virtual chats, so that would be a perfect starting point for this endeavor.

I envision the following:
Many DAOs will be reached to enroll into Urbánika’s course, the people enrolling will create their apprentice profile in Urbánika, which they will see it is powered by MyMeta of MetaGame.

People going through the experience of opening a web3 profile will lead to them asking their DAOs to integrate such feature.

Obviously not every person will immediately ask their DAO or collective to do so, but it opens the possibilities for every enrolled apprentice to become a direct advocate of integrating MyMeta to their collectives.

Another point I would love to see are the courses in QuestChains, however for that I’d require that tx are gasless for the apprentices and that when the person joins QC it facilitates them adding the RPC.

Beyond that, the other things can wait or are only nice-to-have.

I am starting to give attestations through Ethereum Attestation Service and Galaxis will then take these and turn them into hypercerts that update visually based on the metadata of the apprentice’s progress.

But well, returning to this post…

Regarding point 3:

What is the cost of maintaining the web3 profiles? and of QC?
Urbánika has an income model of subscriptions. Our content is free to access, but if an apprentice wants additional benefits -such as:
:trophy: Certify your learning progress,

:speech_balloon: Chat with other colleagues who take the same level as you and with the team that created the courses,

:computer: Attend live sessions with professors, as well as leading practitioners worldwide in PostCapitalism, AI and Blockchain,

:writing_hand:t4: Participate in feedback and curation of new course curricula,

:handshake:🏽 Receive direct advice on your urban improvement project to obtain funding or achieve your goals.

Then, the apprentice needs to pay 8$USD/month.

As we are just releasing today we don’t have data of how effective is this economic strategy, that’s why I thought that paying for maintaince could be continued through the donations we constantly receive from Gitcoin and Giveth campaigns.

But also, we could think about other forms :slight_smile:

What do you think?

2 Likes

Def! MG has so much potential but few know about our stack or how to use it. We need ways to facilitate the adoption and combination of such amazing software made here.

@HBesso31 I love what you’ve done with Urbanika. Your videos, Quest Chains, and Quizzes are very thoughtful and high quality. Also, the way you described MetaGame’s suite of products, in this post, is excellent.

I like the idea of white labeling MG’s products. I also agree with @alec on his concerns about how capital intensive this service will be. MetaGame is not at the level of Bankless in the sense that we, for numerous reasons, don’t operate like a well-oiled machine (at least not yet!)

My recommendation is to start small and keep this initiative lean to prove out the use case.

With all this said, I’m looking forward to hearing your ideas on how to minimize the scope.

Finally, I’m not sure if you’re aware but I’ve been working on this initiative, collaborating with DAO Research Collective, to create a mini-course/quest chains based on their peer-reviewed article on Decentralization. There’s a lot of synergy with the work you’re doing so, if you’re up for it, we should talk more!

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The integration prices by bankless seem roughly realistic. $50 - $100 / month, $100 / hour for custom support. The monthly fee would just cover hosting costs.

I’m actually not familiar with QuestChains’ business model but there is probably an opportunity to work with them in that domain.

There would be a fairly large up-front cost as well to do the custom design. Probably not $40k but maybe more like $10k.

This is great feedback, thanks. The first step then would be for the builder team to start talking about what it would take to refactor the codebase such that whitelabeling would be possible. This would involve:

  • stripping out Metafam-specific logic
  • stripping out the Sourcecred integration
  • potentially refactoring the design system to move away from CSS-in-JS so that whitelabeled CSS themes could be applied

plus a whole lot more, I’m sure.

Would those monthly support numbers + up-front cost be attainable for Urbanika?

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