## TLDR

Fund the Calabara team with 50 ETH to continue developing Creator Contests for a 3 month sprint.

## The problem

Twitter contests are an effective means for Nounish projects to spread their meme, attract new creatives, and generate novel interest. Twitter contests can be utilized to align the incentives of a given project and contributors towards driving creation and distribution. In other words, They are an excellent proliferation tool

TNS has had great success with this model, achieving a steady rate of growth and continuously attracting makers to their creative pipeline. So why don't more projects follow suit?

Twitter contests are an administrative nightmare. Hosting a contest looks something like the following:

1. Your community wants to run an art contest on Twitter, so an announcement tweet is sent out and submissions are collected via Quote Tweet. Participation and engagement were excellent, and now it’s time to choose winners.

2. Someone now has to manually pull each and every entry into another platform for the voters to judge. Maybe it’s Discord, but half the embeds don’t display properly.

3. Once the votes are collected, now you have to go back to twitter and dm the winners to collect wallets. Afterwards, they are placed in an excel sheet or other data store for processing and payouts.

Depending on the engagement, there can be up to 3 hours of total admin overhead involved in this process.

## Creator Contests ... WTF?

Creator Contests are a proliferation tool, allowing any Nounish community to auction ETH, ERC-721's, or ERC-20's to creatives through token-gated twitter contests.

Creator Contests automate 90% of this process, allowing any project or pod to run an entire contest, soup to nuts, with as little as 15 minutes of total administrative overhead.

<img src="https://i.imgur.com/cDWuZ26.gif"
alt="Picture"
style="display: block; margin: 0 auto" />

</br>

## Why contests?

For Nounish projects and pods, creating and distributing ***their own*** meme is critical for the path to sustainability, attracting new creatives, growing the brand, and deploying cool s**t. Purpose built for artists, storytellers, memers, and other creatives, Creator Contests allow projects to unlock the 3rd spoke of the creative flywheel, making it easier than ever to implement a microcosm of the virtuous cycle.


## Why Twitter?

Twitter has cemented itself as a content distribution behemoth. As the digital public square, it is one of the best channels for proliferating Nounish creations to the world. We're focused on bringing Nounishness as close to the public-edge as possible, and we're only scratching the surface of social layer integrations.

## Use Cases

Contests are an excellent mechanism for onboarding -- specifically for artists, designers, and other creative thinkers. Creator Contests bridge the gap between content creation, onboarding, and distribution.

We're stoked to onboard the most imgainative nounish projects to the platform to help them create and proliferate. Here are some of the ways contests could be utilized for different projects:

**AI pod**
* The AI pod could use contests to onboard new artists and creative thinkers to AI and show off their latest and greatest models.

**Composables**
* Composables recently hosted a contest in which they observed 30+ new collections and 1000+ new traits uploaded to their platform and shared on twitter.

**Esports**
* The esports pod could use contests to host "best-clip" tournaments or open-source the creation of nounish gaming heads.

**SharkDAO**
* SharkDAO can source and vote on community art pieces to mint as open-editions from the DAO.

**Gnars**
* "Skate Your City Series" - worldwide digital skate competitions hosted by Gnars, run on Creator Contests, judged by GnarsDAO.

**Nouns Ecosystem**
* TNS could host ecosystem contests to remaster existing content, like re-dubbing the OF video.

**Builder Dao**
* Builder DAO projects can run contests to help the community find their meme.

**Noun Sounds**
* Noun Sounds can reward artists with the best CC0 hits.

## Status

We launched in September, and have since helped groups like TNS, Composables, SharkDAO, and others award 8 ETH and 25k ERC20 tokens to proliferators. We've received a total of 582 submissions across 20 contests. SharkDAO gave us a small grant to build the underlying infrastructure, and NSFW did the same to help us implement twitter integrations, which came online in November.

<img src="https://i.imgur.com/wC3iOzC.png"
alt="Picture"
style="display: block; margin: 0 auto; border-radius: 4px" />

<img src="https://i.imgur.com/FytICws.png"
alt="Picture"
style="display: block; margin: 0 auto; border-radius: 4px" />

## Submissions

Take a break from the technical jargon to check out some of the awesome creations we've seen so far.

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<div style="max-width: 48%;">
<img src="https://i.imgur.com/wzKI75k.jpg"
style="display: block; border-radius: 4px;" />
<p><i>@anufo204 - TNS holiday contest</i></p>
</div>
<div style="max-width: 48%">
<img src="https://i.imgur.com/RLhb8Cx.jpg"
style="display: block; border-radius: 4px;" />
<p><i>0xdariush - TNS holiday pfp contest</i></p>
</div>
</div>
<div style="display: flex; margin: -10px; justify-content: space-between">
<div style="max-width: 48%;">
<img src="https://i.imgur.com/mgfgdwl.jpg"
style="display: block; border-radius: 4px;" />
<p><i>@Ekko_Crypto - TNS 9999 pfp contest</i></p>
</div>
<div style="max-width: 48%">
<img src="https://i.imgur.com/dyWeNuF.jpg"
style="display: block; border-radius: 4px;" />
<p><i>@kimmydeuk - TNS seneca pfp contest</i></p>
</div>
</div>
<div style="display: flex; margin: -10px; justify-content: space-between">
<div style="max-width: 48%;">
<img src="https://i.imgur.com/tsngeTC.jpg"
style="display: block; border-radius: 4px;" />
<p><i>@yuniart105 - TNS 4156 pfp contest</i></p>
</div>
<div style="max-width: 48%">
<img src="https://i.imgur.com/1WHb6go.jpg"
style="display: block; border-radius: 4px;" />
<p><i>@darko_eth - SharkDAO comic strip contest</i></p>
</div>
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<div style="display: flex; margin: -10px; justify-content: flex-start">
<div style="max-width: 48%; justify-self: flex-start;">
<img src="https://i.imgur.com/91zelw0.gif"
style="display: block; border-radius: 4px;" />
<p><i>@modrovsky - create on composables contest</i></p>
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<div style="max-width: 48%; align-self: flex-start">
</div>
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## How does it work

### Contest Config

Project operators can start a contest by creating a prompt that asks for submissions in a certain medium, such as art, lore, crafts, memes, jokes, or anything else. The prompt should be centered around a particular theme or idea.

<img src="https://i.imgur.com/jN2NZTM.png"
alt="Picture"
style="display: block; margin: 0 auto; border-radius: 4px" />

After defining the deadlines, the contest designer will choose 1) who gets to submit and 2) who gets to vote. Either can be based on any erc-20/721/1155, but most contests are designed without any submission restrictions.

<img src="https://i.imgur.com/YcwFxhK.png"
alt="Picture"
style="display: block; margin: 0 auto; border-radius: 4px" />

Next, the contest designer chooses the reward structure for the winning submissions. Any amount of eth or erc-20/721 can be programmed as the reward for any rank. Admins also have the option to reward voters that correctly choose the winning submissions in order to experiment with unique incentive systems.

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<img src="https://i.imgur.com/LK2Vg12.png"
alt="Picture"
style="display: block; margin: 0 auto; border-radius: 4px 4px 0px 0px" />
<img src="https://i.imgur.com/IBwqCwI.png"
alt="Picture"
style="display: block; margin: 0 auto; border-radius: 0px 0px 4px 4px" />
</div>

</br>

After defining rewards, the administrator will choose a voting strategy, or how voting power is calculated. We currently support 2 strategies - Token based and Arcade - with plans to add more in the future. Token based is straightforward, similar to how Nouns governance works, while the Arcade strategy alotts a uniform voting power to each qualifying voter. (i.e. Nouns holders of any amount will each receive 20 votes).

<img src="https://i.imgur.com/KpVyBT8.png"
alt="Picture"
style="display: block; margin: 0 auto; border-radius: 4px" />

Finally, the operator has options for some additional parameters. Afterwards, the announcement tweet is automatically sent from the project account and the contest has officially begun.

<img src="https://i.imgur.com/jkCGMtY.png"
alt="Picture"
style="display: block; margin: 0 auto; border-radius: 4px" />

### Submitting

Participants can either head to the contest interface or twitter to create their submissions.

1. If a participant submits through the contest interface, the submission is auto Quote Tweeted for them from their account.
2. If a participant Quote Tweets on twitter, the platform pulls the submission into the interface.

<img src="https://i.imgur.com/ZNtvfTI.png"
alt="Picture"
style="display: block; margin: 0 auto; border-radius: 4px" />

### Voting

Finally, qualifying voters spend their voting power on the best submissions and tokens are distributed based on the reward criteria.

<img src="https://i.imgur.com/fof9elv.png"
alt="Picture"
style="display: block; margin: 0 auto; border-radius: 4px" />

## Roadmap

Our main priority for the funding period will be to bring the codebase out of MVP mode and remove the technical bottlenecks which are preventing us from integrating with every nouns project.

We’ll work on the following upgrades over the next 3 months:

**Tier 1 (high priority):**
* Upgrade our twitter algorithms
* This is a current bottleneck in our ability to scale to more nouns projects.
* Support native video and other creative formats
* Implementing video and supporting additional media types will be a key unlock.
* Simplify contest initialization process.
* To date, we've subsidized the UI for the participant side of the equation. Refactoring contest setup will be critical for adoption.
* UI redesign
* It's time for CC to get nounish. We're planning to do a complete nounish refactor, with new logos, fonts, layouts and more.

**Tier 2:**

* Add vote audit reports
* Add voting capability for Noun delegates
* Implement new voting strategies
* Open contests to communities that may not even have a token yet
* Discord role voting, allowlist voting, etc.
* Add social impression graphs
* Will be key for measuring success transparently.

## Defining Success

We'll be targeting the following KPI's for this funding period:

* reward 250+ nounish creatives
* achieve 350k+ social impressions
* proliferate 2000+ nounish creations
* onboard as many nounish projects as possible

Success for us is tightly coupled with onboarding. We’ll define onboarding for the scope of this project as the following:

* New creatives
* Attract new creatives to Nouns and extension communities via contest incentives
* Existing creatives
* Serve as an onramp for creatives to make larger contributions to the project via Prop House.
* Between Nounish extension communities
* Increase the discoverability factor of extension projects and communities through different contest designs and synergies, i.e.
* TNS and Gnars co-host a round
* Multi-community voting

We’d also like to answer the following questions:

* Are voter rewards a feature or a bug?
* In the voting period, how impactful are visible vote totals on a communities ability to choose the “best” submissions?
* Does submission history serve as a relevant talent repository for other pods?
* Are deep Twitter integrations viable for other tasks, like governance? (Nouncil, Nerman, etc)
* Are there ways to maintain a certain level of submission quality without directly moderating submissions?

## Beyond

Assuming this project is a success, after the 3 months we plan to turn our attention to a trustless, on-chain implementation. We will do this by forking the contracts developed by the Prop House team. In doing so, we can begin to think about layering Creator Contest features into Prop House, assuming it would be of interest to the PH team and the community. In our opinion, the most efficient and productive approach would be to allow both projects to continue solving for unique challenges in their focus areas, with the intention of eventually unifying and merging the learnings both projects will bring to the table, all under one killer app for builders.

## Team

Weez: frontend, designer, UX, support
Nick: lead dev, fullstack

We were both first introduced to Nouns by way of SharkDAO, which we first joined over a year ago. Soon after, we started developing tools to ease some of the unique challenges of a Nounish subDAO. Last Spring, the community funded us with 7 ETH to begin developing Creator Contests. We launched our first contest in September, and have helped fund 60 nounish creatives with 8 ETH and 25k ERC-20 tokens since.

2 months ago, we received a small grant of 8 ETH from NSFW to develop our Twitter Integrations. We have groups like SharkDAO, Composables, TNS, and the Society of Nounish Cartoonists running contests as we speak. We are now ready to take Creator Contests to the next level.

## Links
* [Calabara](https://calabara.com/explore)
* [Github](https://github.com/calabara-hq/calabara)
* [Twitter](https://twitter.com/calabarahq)

## Budget

50 ETH for continued development

3/5 Multisig tasked with sending 30 ETH of project funds to the team wallet upon execution, and setting up a 3 month stream for the remaining funds.

Signers:

Nick: nickdodson.eth
Benbodhi: signed.benbodhi.eth
Juan: juanx.eth
JoshuaFisher: joshuafisher.eth
ToadyHawk: toadyhawk.eth