Launch a Creative and Design Working Group (CDWG) as a centralized function to execute creative and design work for The Index Coop, inspired by the example and success of the Growth Working Group (GWG).
Objectives and responsibilities of CDWG
Centralize and organize the creative and design function in The Index Coop, to ensure we operate from a consistent, high-quality design framework. This will help build The Index Coop brand
Plan and execute projects originated from within CDWG. E.g. - brand framework, new website, new product page
Rationalize and execute projects which originate from other areas of the Coop. E.g. - biz dev/sales assets, adverts, gifs, memes, videos, motion graphics, MVI assets etc.
Work with front end engineers where and when needed for building assets
Keep the Coop regularly appraised of where design assets can be accessed on a self-serve basis
Structure: Personnel
Leader Owls, as co-heads and committee members, similar to Growth Working Group
Propose: @codemathics , @0x_Dev@mestigoit as leaders, given their relevant backgrounds, work for the Coop to-date, and desire to contribute more in formalized roles.
Leaders will organize and run the CDWG and work on specific briefs in the trenches too.
Design Owls: further members who contribute on specific briefs CDWG works on via a briefing process
Itâs expected that thereâll be a small core of Design Owls, which may grow and shrink back down as design workload rises and falls and contributors increase and decrease their time allocation to the Coop.
Structure: Communication & Meetings
Continue using Design channel in Discord.
Non-CDWG members can alert re needs for design work via a Notion board with briefing notes and timeline details. Skeleton Notion board ready to build out here. Coop members should be able to view Notion
Bi-weekly CDWG meeting at a time to be arranged, which will be convenient for various time zones.
Reminders to be shared in the Design channel along with relevant meeting assets/deck ahead of time.
Structure: Assets & IP
Assets and work to be stored in a CDWG Drive folder managed by the committee.
Subfolders to house briefing docs and finished assets, which can be shared with relevant Coop members/other partners.
Public-facing version of brand framework to be accessible via a footer link in The Index Coop website.
Structure: Budget, Committee & Member Compensation
CDWG budget:
Potential to access up to $XXk of INDEX/month where contributions from non-committee members warrant rewards. Often will not get utilized where few non-committee members work on briefs, but having this initial potential budget will be helpful to attract external design skills to also help with the demand, for instance, the MVI launch requires a couple of design work focused on motion graphics and even animations, these take a lot of time and resources to create from ideation to completion, thus, getting more hands dirty other than myself, @0x_Dev and @mestigoit is ideal now that the Coop is growing speedingly. Budgets can be revisited and voted on again at a future date if mechanics are not working. To codify in follow up post
Up to $2.5k/month on design apps and tools (For instance, MVI launch requires such budgets at this time to aid design committee come up with creatives given the time). Budgets here also may not get used at times.
Committee: propose committee members are compensated in-line with other WG leads.
Non-committee members (who work on briefs): eligible for INDEX rewards. Committee to meet in last week of each month and agree on rewards, before going to Treasury Committee each month and requesting allocations for contributors up to $XXk/month ceiling.
Feedback
This is only the third/fourth working group proposed in the Coop, so feedback and comments are encouraged!
Otherwise, we hope fellow Coop members will be pleased to see these efforts to structure Design more formally, make this function more efficiently, invest in design value add, and reward wider contributors for their value add too.
We hope to receive positive votes and feedback here, before finessing the proposal, then submitting a more formal proposal with $ numbers as the next step.
A huge thanks to @0x_Dev and @mestigoit for not just supporting this, but taking so much time on calls, Discord chats, and proposal preparation and edits to get this out. Wonât be a proposal without them!
Great work team - this a topic for a while and I am glad to see these conversations bearing fruit. I also could not think of a better team to head this up, all three are established professionals with 10+ years of relevant work experience. This is the exact level of talent we need to lead these working groups.
Feedback
We need to have Website re-design be front and center here. Multiple steps need to occur before that, however that is the main KPI we need to be looking at for this WG over the next quarter. Elements of that conversation will obviously bleed into other WGs, but this WG should serve as the hub-coordinating those efforts and shaping our vision for that re-design.
This is awesome. We should be using Notion more to organize these kinds of efforts within the Coop.
Proposed KPIs
Most of the qualitative metrics for this type of work are not very useful. These KPIs are meant to be taken holistically. We should be shooting big with our goals - too many DAOs get stuck in the 20-people writing medium articles and organizing folders stage (nothing wrong with medium articles, if I could write them I would!)
Website Re-design: Roadmap for website redesign established. Key checkpoints on that road map serve as the KPIs. Progress updated weekly.
Brand: Broadly track the design efforts around the brand as a whole. I would put it something like this âBy the end of the GW period we aim to complete and implement a full-brand re-designâ
New members on-boarded. Every WG should strive to actively recruit and retain talent within the Coop. WG are the key entry point for talent entry and retention. Adding dedicated and committed community members every WG cycle needs to be an established and tracked goal.
Generally agree with all of that and personally cannot wait to see progress in the brand framework ASAP - which then enables the biggie, the website overhaul (something I know youâre hungry for!)
Great to see you guys put this together and combine your talent and energy into something more focused, I think itâs important for the Coop to get this right (and it probably all starts with the recent Brand DNA survey).
Will keep an eye out for the proposed budget post, appreciate itâs probably a little difficult to forecast but would be useful to see what you come up with as it can go some way towards helping us budget for things as the treasury.
In terms of feedback, it would be good to clarify a little more around the leader roles in particular so people know who is responsible for what/what the skillsets are. Most of the other working groups have gone for lead/co-lead so Iâm interested to understand why you went for a committee style approach?
Overall really looking forward to seeing the output from the group!
In terms of the leaderships/skills/responsibilities, we see the three committee members as equal authority (might need to use majority vote sometimes) but would delineate responsibilities this way by having a DRI (Directly Responsible Individual) for different aspects of the committee.
Based on this, I and the other guys @0x_Dev and @mestigoit had put together this plan:
@0x_Dev: group organization, budget (to be detailed shortly), communication, reporting to DAO, design strategy and some design work. If this needs to be seen as a lead role, that is okay by me.
@mestigoit and I: less organization and communication responsibility, and more creative directors responsibility. Ie - when briefs are being worked on day to day, Owls should expect to interact most with myself and @mestigoit. Eg - how the MVI assets have been rapidly created this last week, the 1:1 planning call session re video last week with @LemonadeAlpha, working with BD on designs for BD decks, continuous updates and modification etc. If this also needs to be seen as co-lead role, that is also fine.
@0x_Dev has amazing communication skills amongst many others which we believe will help us as a committee further deliberate and explain the progress and successes of our work during community calls while we (i and @mestigoit) are busy working on design demands for the Coop.
In summary, what I would personally like to do in this regard, is get my hands more dirty on the Coopâs designs and visual representation, both internally and outside the Coop. Focus is ensuring we create a one-stop-shop for all design matters but in a more organized manner, while not also neglecting the fact that it is autonomous and transparent.
Simplifies decision making as one person has final yes/no authority in their defined domain.
Simplifies interfacing with other working groups as all requests have a point person.
Having a primary owner of working group outcomes ensures raised flaws will be addressed & related improvements will be enforced.
We want to avoid the case where a decision by committee leaves no one with urgency/ownership re: the outcomes from a project.
The engineering teamâs bandwidth is going to be the limiting factor in website redesign progress. @0x_Dev has plenty of experience here in launching the referral tracking programđ . Having it as a north star/key metric to measure working group success may be tough.
It seems the creative working group should in theory function similarly to the analytics working group, in that it is a supporting organization that assists ad-hoc to marketing and product efforts. Some of your post I think agrees with this sentiment.
Suggestions:
Designate a single working group lead.
Consider a different north star/core problem statement for the working group. Website can be a part of it, but know that engineering will be a bottle neck. @LemonadeAlpha might be keen on improving marketing material with the help of a more organized design working group.
Overall I think establishing a more organized working group structure makes a lot of sense. It will simplify/standardize requesting work out of our design community to the great benefit to the rest of the coop. This is just my 2 cents on what will most likely lead to a success outcome for both the proposed working group and the Coop.
I thought this seemed an appropriate thread to go from lurker to contributor.
Introduction
I work for PwC UK as a management consultant specialising in Change Management and Communications. I have taken several new products to market through a PwC start-up hub and have been knocking around in crypto since 2016.
Relevant skills
Fundamentally, I help our clientsâ people change the way they work. As part of this, I have extensive experience developing animations which I have used to increase programme engagement and to help PwC sell work.
How I want to be involved
Short term Iâm keen to develop the animations mentioned above. I hope this provides an opportunity for you to see the value I can deliver as a longer term partner of the project.
For most contributions to the coop, itâs a case of introducing yourself, getting stuck into the something, and then the community provides some rewards based on our assessment of you impact to our goals. (There are exceptions to this where we may have a formal agreement and pay in advance).
If your not on the discord, I would suggest you join and introduce yourself in the design channel.
If I donât need any formal approval to proceed. I will get stuck in developing an animation and drawing in relevant members of the community as and when needed to support this.
Iâve also already started introducing myself to the design teams
Sorry, re: my response on point 1, I see Iâve missed some context in the replies.
Iâm still going to push back a bit: electing a single working group lead does not preclude its leader from delegating functions of the Creative/Design working group to its members.
Having responsibilities spread across 3 working group leads instead of 1 increases organizational friction. Now another working group needs to understand Creativeâs Working Group structure, and match their request to the directly responsible individual. Unless itâs for very good reasons, I donât think setting this precedent makes sense. Imagine just 5 working groups with 3 leaders. It becomes very difficult to navigate the decision making stakeholders.
If we assume a website / page design is out of scope for this period, curious to see a more tangible queue and prioritization of the work.
Iâd also be curious if we could see an example of an intake for someone looking to get assets completed (I canât access the notion at lemonade@indexcoop.com so maybe itâs there).
A few considerations come to mind right now (just rocking through the google doc linked in Laying the Rails):
What is the âcreative and design functionâ in the Index Coop? You might want to share specific examples of what creative output the function has produced and how itâs been used. Most folks are unlikely to know what the contributions have been so far! @jdcook addressed this in his âWorking Group Leadersâ section, for example.
What is the core problem(s) this group is designed to solve? Put another way, what are the design needs of the Coop today? Why are they not being met? How could they be better met?
On "Objectives and responsibilities" â this spans quite a number of different functions. From a distance, âRationalize and execute projects which originate from other areas of the Coopâ seems to be the highest need, but Iâll be curious to read your responses to the first two bullets above.
New website: There are tons of considerations here, so Iâm keeping it brief: I donât think this fits into a Creative/Design Working Group. This is a large, complicated project that will require significant Set resources. It is more âproduct managementâ than it is creative/design. A few resources Iâm looking at: Hotjar, HubSpot, Invision. Happy to share more context on this point!
Who is the lead? Who is the co-lead? Nailing this down would be very helpful (just echoing @dylanâs point here)
Happy to act as a foil as you work towards the formal proposal
Great question on prioritization: brand framework is first step and being worked on at the moment. If website isnât on the agenda, weâll share a new prioritization of work shortly.
Weâre building out the Notion board separately from this proposal, as we need it anyways for community members to submit briefs to. Update to come shortly.
What is the âcreative and design functionâ in the Index Coop? You might want to share specific examples of what creative output the function has produced and how itâs been used. Most folks are unlikely to know what the contributions have been so far! @jdcook addressed this in his âWorking Group Leadersâ section, for example.
What is the core problem(s) this group is designed to solve? Put another way, what are the design needs of the Coop today? Why are they not being met? How could they be better met?
Some of the needs of the Coop are being met today. The CDWG aims to centralize, structure and organize design in the Coop so we can move it to the next level. Design currently happens in an unstructured way, without clear roles, communication and project management tools. We also have @Pepperoni_Joe getting involved now whoâd like to help with the communication and process too.
On "Objectives and responsibilities" â this spans quite a number of different functions. From a distance, âRationalize and execute projects which originate from other areas of the Coopâ seems to be the highest need, but Iâll be curious to read your responses to the first two bullets above.
At many times this will be the highest need, unless the CDWG is pushing on a new, internal group initiative.
New website: There are tons of considerations here, so Iâm keeping it brief: I donât think this fits into a Creative/Design Working Group. This is a large, complicated project that will require significant Set resources. It is more âproduct managementâ than it is creative/design. A few resources Iâm looking at: Hotjar , HubSpot , Invision. Happy to share more context on this point!
Thanks for the ideas here and for working with us on a website project plan for the Coop to understand more via a forum post. More to come on this point.
Who is the lead? Who is the co-lead? Nailing this down would be very helpful (just echoing @dylanâs point here)
Your voice is heard and please see reply to Dylan.
