**POLL ADDED!**Proposal: Language Operations Working Group (LOWG) Q4 2021

Situation

I am proposing the funding of a Language Operations Working Group (LOWG) for 3 months ending December 31st, 2021. This will be the second iteration of the working group and will address continued and growing interest in Index Coop (IC) products outside English speaking markets through the translation of core content. Contributions in Q4 will also cover immediate operational needs in relation to the new Index Coop website and also support expansion into new markets.

What is the core problem(s) you want to solve?

By facilitating content in several languages the LOWG has grown interest in IC products and supported the efforts of contributors in various regions.

In line with the IC’s North Stars and Core KPIs, the LOWG seeks to increase the number of holders of IC products by reaching and communicating with audiences in languages other than English.

The first iteration of the LOWG has helped grow audiences in the key target languages of CN, DE, and ES, as well as several others with promise. Now, with the soon-to-be-released website unifying IC content, there exists an opportunity to further increase engagement and reach because of the visitor-trust and SEO effects of having an authoritative site for our content.

We wish to build on the product knowledge of the group, their demonstrated commitment, and their results to ensure the language facilities of the new site are a great value-add to the customer journey and sales funnel of the IC.

The LOWG also seeks to maintain its open door for newcomers to the IC by having the facility to fund promising opportunities for content in languages that we currently do not serve. To date, we have played a part in supporting the introduction of several now well-established IC contributors, especially in the APAC region.

The LOWG wishes to continue its program of targeted, results focussed activities to serve the growth of the Coop’s North Star’s and KPIs outside of the anglosphere.

Why is this worth addressing today?

It is important to address this problem today because:

  • We should retain and develop the great team already familiar with Coop content,
  • We have the opportunity to translate present Coop’s successes into new regions,
  • Strengthening linguistic and regional foundations will create new opportunities,
  • The Coop should have a go-to team when language expertise is required,
  • Maintaining a formal structure for translation contributions,
  • To not work in languages other than English is to leave business on the table and risk trust and credibility

How will you address it?

This working group will focus on two main initiatives:

  1. Translating and promoting core IC content in key languages.
  2. Prospecting and nurturing opportunities in other languages as we build audiences around the globe.

While the LOWG establishes itself, all contributions are pro-rata.

For the proposed three month period, the LOWG will continue its focus on Chinese (Mainland), German, and Spanish for its key languages. These languages will feature on the new website and fit current Index Coop capacity. Each language will build on last period’s successes:

Chinese: @Tudou has done a phenomenal job of maintaining platforms for IC content (WeChat, Weibo, and Yuque), translating content in a contextually aware manner, and growing impressions - growing blog impressions 518% in the last two months to 3645 and increasing social media impressions 694% to 71,491 over the same two months. Additionally, new contributors have been introduced. Tudou has built on LOWG activities and is now a key part of the APAC IC community and its activities.

Met content targets of 4-12 blogs per month and exceeded 4x impressions target with 7x for social media and 5x for blog.

To maintain blog cadence and 2x impressions target for both social and blog content.

German: @ela and @metigoit both contributed to German content over the two-month initial LOWG period. Though held back due to unforeseen circumstances during the first month, DE content and social media has increased impressions and followers and also featured a new-joiner contribution.

Met content targets overall with 9 for the two months from a minimum required of 8. Started a Twitter channel with a follower target of 50. Almost met with 46 - most added in last month.

To target increased rates of blogging and social activity. Targeting 100 Twitter followers in October.

Spanish: @sver has followed @cryptotexan’s playbook on Twitter and has more than doubled followers in two months to 107. Tweeting multiple times per day we are now expecting a breakout. Blogs were posted at the maximum of 12 per month for both months.

Targeting full coverage of key IC content and 250 Twitter followers.

The three languages above will report engagement statistics and seek growth in impressions and followers. Longer term, as we move to the unified IC website, there will be efforts to attribute sales and other conversions, such as content engagement.

During the last two months, the LOWG rewarded consistent contributions in French, Russian, Swedish, and Turkish. All met and at least slightly exceeded their blog count target of 4 per month. In the case of the French blog, many more articles were added and they are circulated with a newsletter. For the Turkish content, @insidetrader moved IC content from his personal blog to a dedicated Index Coop TR substack.

Japanese and Portuguese contributions joined the LOWG during August and September. Both languages are promising in terms of their demographic coverage and crypto involvement. The LOWG will continue support for both. Notably, @larisaldanha has set up a dedicated substack and Twitter for PT. In light of this, Portuguese will be rewarded as an established channel at $1500 per month if the target of 4 blogs a month is met and with an expectation to increase impressions and content engagement.

The LOWG wishes to remain a place for the Coop to find talented and promising DAO contributors. In the previous budget there was little scope for additional funding of contributions. This budget proposal requests funding for 18 blogs in the 3 month period. Recently APAC members have signalled interest in Hindi and there is also Italian as a prospect. It will be the LOWGs task to choose and guide these contributions to evaluate their potential for the Coop.

What impact will this project have?

The LOWG is a supportive group, assisting all other working groups when called upon. Its independence as a discrete working group creates a focused environment for its contributors and acts as a clear point of contact for translation requests.

The LOWG works closely with the Growth Working Group and the Creative and Design Working Group. Often taking its lead from them, the LOWG seeks to further the impact of their work and maximise returns on content without creating additional overhead.

Though currently difficult to attribute, we want to measure the impact of the LOWG by it’s addition to growth and the Coop’s North Star & KPIs. We seek increased content engagement, impressions, and followers across all our channels. We will continue to assess the promise of other languages that currently have Coop content and work to identify where best to expend resources.

As in the last round, key languages (Chinese, German, Spanish) will produce 1 or more IC blogs per week and engage daily on social media. They will deliver statistics relevant to their platforms and channels.

Regular contributors should produce at least 2 pieces of content each month and provide supporting statistics appropriate to their platforms, such as impressions, subscribers, link click-through rates.

The IC should expect to see increased engagement with people from each language worked on by the LOWG. This may manifest as more people in Discord, more attributed purchases, the head of investment at Binance reading our content, or successes such as the group’s members going on to form other groups and business partnerships.

Working Group Lead(s)

Gavin (mrvls_brkfst), stipend - $5000/month

Request for Funding

Proposed Budget

Q4 maximum $80,700. If every language fulfils every possibility and we have three new languages trialling three blogs each. Funds do not need moving from FC because they are contributor rewards.

Use of Funds

image

Current contributors: ela , sver , Tudou , @blurb (nakamomo), Crypto_sova , @Cryptouf , insidetrader , laridsaldanha @Etsuran 閲覧用

Note: Social media activity might be covered by impression mining but currently the program is geared to EN content and LOWG contributors are in the early stages of establishing their profiles so some compensation is offered while they gain traction. If a channel transfers to impression mining, it will no longer receive LOWG remuneration for social posts.

By the end of the working group period, we aim to have completed the transfer of key languages to the new site and for the blogs to reside there.

Organization

How will it work?

What will you be doing?

How will you interface with the community?

The LOWG will be managed by mrvls_brkfst (myself). Through Q4, I am keen to mentor contributors as well as help with admin and coordination. I will aim to provide more workshops (similar to this quick SEO workshop) and to find new ways to leverage our content.

Contributors will manage their tasks independently and as they see appropriate for their language. Contributions will be tracked in the Index Coop Content spreadsheet. Feedback and reviews will take place. Contributors will be asked to provide statistics relevant to the platforms they use.

Due to time zone challenges, the whole group rarely meets. Communication is via 1:1 calls, chat, and the Discord #language-ops channel. Meetings do take place and are recorded for those who cannot attend. Should a weekly meeting become necessary, it will be facilitated.

Direct requests for translation assistance have so far been manageable and requests may continue via the language-ops discord channel or via myself.

Commitments

I am committed to Index Coop principles.

I am committed to serving the entire Index Coop with my work.

I am committed to open, rapid communication: I know that clear, constant, public communication lifts up the entire Index Coop community. I am highly aware and resolutely committed to this style of communication.

Shared learnings: I will share my progress, learnings with the entire community. I will ensure that anything I create is accessible beyond my own tenure for future generations of Indexers to access & build on.

Intellectual honesty: I am committed to growth and improvement. I am open to feedback and will use feedback to improve my work for the benefit of the entire Coop community.

I am committed to making Index Coop a welcoming, fun, and engaging community to work in!

The Language Operations Working Group opportunity

I believe the value of communication in a person’s native tongue is essential for understanding and trust. For me, Language-Ops and its contributors exemplify what is possible when people work together. The Index Coop is a magnificent recent creation that embodies the great elemental possibilities offered by the Internet and the Cryptosphere - it is a global coordinated effort to build a better future. The Index Coop is best summed up best in its guiding principles and it is with these principles and thoughts in mind that I will continue working to make the LOWG a valuable asset to the Index Coop.

Final Vote - Approve and fund LOWG for Q4 2021
  • FOR
  • AGAINST

0 voters

19 Likes

LOWG is mission-critical for geographic expansion. Keep up the great work!

5 Likes

Well done @mrvls_brkfst

Strongly in favour of this WG going into its next phase of evolution and growth!

5 Likes

Really exciting to see the reach we’re able to achieve with community contributors and hopefully the expanded reach continues to attract new brilliant talent worldwide.

3 Likes

If you consider translation in Romanian let me know and I will help

3 Likes

Strongly in support of @mrvls_brkfst and LOWG driving global adoption and growth.

4 Likes

Strongly support LOWG initiatives

4 Likes

Brief table setting

  • I’m putting on my “Funding Council” hat to pose questions (See Q4 Working Group Guidance to learn more about Working Group proposals)
  • My intent is to ask the questions that ping in my mind with the hope that they help the entire Coop better understand the proposal and thinking behind it.
  • Questions are pretty much posed in the order the topic appears in the post.
  • If a question doesn’t make sense or is entirely off-base, do call it out :slightly_smiling_face:

Two general questions off-the-bat

  • What goes into translating Coop content into other languages? Worded differently: how does something go from translation request → published?
  • How much of the content being produced is original vs. translated?

Interesting, so it is believed that having translated content on a native blog will help with SEO?

Out of curiosity, when is language expertise required? When does that come up?

Noting that further down in the post this is answered to a degree, “The LOWG works closely with the Growth Working Group and the Creative and Design Working Group.”

How is this different than their focus in the proposed-APWG?

How does the LOWG decide which languages to focus on?

Very well written @mrvls_brkfst , you have been a great leader

I have been receiving a great feedback from brazilians who keep up with my portuguese translations from the Coop. This is very important, knowing that Brazil is so adept to crypto and blockchain technologies, even though most brazilians don’t speak english.

I think this proposal is needed because it will result in a more formal and productive work in the LOWG.

6 Likes

I don’t think there’s a more crystal-clear example of meeting our community where they’re at than the stated goals of this WG. If we’re activating the flywheel of adoption that leverages product users as evangelists, LOWG may drive that entire process for non-English community members and contributors. Hearing yesterday that there is a growing need for translation to English really brought it all full-circle for me in terms of the wholistic value that this WG provides; I feel quite fortunate that I can communicate in IC’s native language, but the next 10 great indexing and DAO innovations may be knocking around already in Mandarin or Portuguese or Turkish and I want them here at Index Coop.

@mrvls_brkfst you’ve been amazing at managing and innovating within this initiative ahead WG formation and beyond and I really want to see this continue. Really appreciative of the efforts to date by all contributors within this WG; I will help support this WG in any way I can and will be voting ‘FOR’.

7 Likes

@anon10525910 , thank you!

In the LOWG, we only do translations. Original work comes from Growth and we translate it. In this next quarter, there is potential for new groups and sub verticals, such as APAC, China BD, and India BD, to create local content that we could then translate to English. This will be a new development and likely small-scale to begin. We’re a multiplier for the IC’s content. Original work goes through the relevant WG.

Content for translation is listed in our spreadsheet and translators choose articles they think are good for their audiences. Many times, a translator will be up-to-date and translate an article on its release. Guidance on articles important to the IC is given by yellow highlighting of what the GWG has identified for publishing on the new website and, sometimes, I will flag key texts. There is also a preference to be timely, so new news is flagged in discord or, especially for product releases, we get the text beforehand and publish in tandem - this helps create more of a social media wave as well.

Translators have a target range or number of translations each month and plan accordingly. Occasionally, there are urgent important blogs, such as those helping with FLI, that cause a translator to go over their planned number. In these cases, we have been able to allocate budget from quieter months or under target channels to make up the difference.

It’s not necessarily that translated material boosts the SEO, more that having content on the site that is seen by search engines as the main authority helps it be better ranked and found over hosting content on other sites. For all its cool, substack is often noted as ranking badly in search. I expect the blogs on indexcoop.com to outrank third-party blogs with similar content with the effect becoming greater over time, especially with our site designers being savvy with technical SEO. Badly oversimplifying, a Spanish blog about DPI will do better on the IC’s site than on most private blogs. Also, hopefully, people will read more than one article and we will get a snowball effect as we publish more and more.

There have been occasional requests for pitch-deck and one-pager content in other languages and IC translators were able to help. Also, for the DATA launch, Tudou was involved early on in translating content. I would like for us to have been able to help with other languages in the region but we have our limits and were not well enough established there. This kind of work does not come from the LOWG budget. It is more that having the LOWG means that these people are available in the IC.

Language work with the APWG will be original work and paid for by them much like GWG content is produced. The LOWG will translate it if relevant to English and other languages.
Tudou will manage translations to Chinese from English as part of the LOWG. Unless he wants to go well beyond what is budgeted.

The choice of languages comes from a combination of areas identified in conversation with Growth as important to achieving IC KPI targets and a strong determination and commitment from a contributor to make IC content available in their native language.

5 Likes

Yes agree, just want to clarify that the APWG content budget is only $1250 per month to pay for creating new content for APAC channels. This is much lower than would be required to also translate content. Looked to delineate between creating content (APWG) and attributing translation work to the experts at LOWG

From my IRL work as a senior digital growth strategist I can 100% confirm that Search Engine Optimisation is an essential, highly effective and long-term strategy to increase our online visibility, authority and trust. It makes it easier to be found online and rank on the first page of Google’s search results - which albeit web 2, is still actually a thing for millions of future retail investors. Driving visitors to an owned channel (website) means more data and increased visibility into how well the content we create, actually performs.

3 Likes

I’ve always been a staunch supporter of LOWG!! So my views are bias. Lol. Anyways super stocked… and with @mrvls_brkfst at the helm to coordinate. I’m also seeing a lot of synergy between LOWG and APWG!!! Another hyper bullish WG!! Hh.

4 Likes

Final vote now added as per IIP-85. Thank you for voting!

4 Likes

Looking forward to the next quarter and excited to develop LOWG further!

3 Likes

Hoot hoot!!! waiting for the official ANNOUNCEMENT by @mrvls_brkfst… eitherway… LOWG onwards!!! :fire::fire::fire:

2 Likes

Confirming total budget of $95,700 in INDEX all to be held in the FC multisig

(5,000 *3) + 80,700 = $95,700 in INDEX

@mrvls_brkfst do i have this correct?

2 Likes

Hi @anon10525910, not quite! The budget is inclusive of the stipend. So, $80,700 all in, budget and stipend. All to be paid in INDEX direct from the FC multisig.

2 Likes

NOTICE: Anyone considering contributing translations, please contact @mrvls_brkfst here or in Discord #language ops It is essential that translations are coordinated and approved. There is no budget for submissions without agreement.

3 Likes

Great job, you have described very specific and convincing. What do you think if we expand more in the Vietnamese market, a country with a young population, which is thriving in cryptor segment?

2 Likes