Azurbala PFPs: Working With A Community Council
GM & !Bala Azurians and Writers Room Members,
First and foremost, thank you for participating in the first two Azurian Community PFP Surveys. We’re extremely excited about the opportunity to build the new and improved Azurians alongside you all, and our takeaways from the first two surveys are an incredible guiding light for us.
Oh, but to whoever posted that one URL in survey two… you know that photo that umm… was NSFW… yeah we’ve been in touch with the Edokan so the jig is up…
But as you know, these surveys and the broad-scale sourcing of community input is only one of the ways that we plan to design and create these PFPs with you.
On Monday (Oct. 24), we’ll be opening nominations for an Azurian PFP Community Council, which will work more intimately with our team to develop the PFP art and ensure it’s something that everyone will be proud to own.
We learned with the previous Azurian PFP reveal both how important it is to source community creative direction at the beginning of the process, as well as how crucial it is to have a smaller group participating at every stage of the process alongside talented artists. By implementing an Azurian Community Council, we can still surprise and delight most of the community with the final PFP art, while also making sure that many different non-Tally Labs voices are heard throughout the PFP development process.
While we previously mentioned forming a community council in our last Medium article, this post serves as an overview of key details around what it is, why we are assembling it, and how we plan to work alongside the Council throughout the PFP art development process.
What is the Azurian Community Council?
The Azurian Community Council will be made up of 8 community members, all with varying backgrounds. Both Writer’s Room members and future Azurians will have representation. Some members may have many NFTs and others may be smaller or newer to the community. It’s important to surround ourselves with a number of unique perspectives. The common thread among all Council members, however, is that each one will have been nominated by the community and appointed by the Tally Labs team.
We know that each and every one of you are busy people with your own lives outside of Web3 and our project. To that end, the most important thing we can do is ensure that you each are teed up for success.
With that in mind, the core responsibility of the Council will be interfacing with the Tally Labs team to provide intimate feedback at each stage of the PFP art’s development. Our team will ensure that the art is packaged up in an easily digestible format so that all Council members have to do is bring their creativity and ingenuity to the table and spend short periods of time giving us and our artists honest feedback.
The previous Azurian PFP reveal failed because the process we ran was incorrect. With that in mind, we hope the Council will be involved in reviewing the art at the various stages of the project and giving the broader community an inside look into their experience of working with Tally Labs and our process.
Being a Council member will be subject to NDA, and some specific pieces of art may not be able to be shared with the community at large. However, we look forward to Council members being able to give a bit of a look behind the curtain at how the process is going so that every member of the community can regain trust that this process is moving in the right direction. We’ll work with the Council to establish these mechanisms for feedback, updates, and community spaces.
How do I participate in Council nominations?
In the coming days, we will open nomination submissions on the Azurbala Members Portal. Anyone who holds a Writer’s Room or Bored & Dangerous NFT will be able to nominate up to 3 community members who they think would be great members of the Azurian Community Council. You will be able to nominate yourself as well.
We’ll keep the Council nomination form open on the Azurbala Members Portal for 1 week before closing it on October 31. Then the team at Tally Labs will look at all of the submission data in order to reach out to potential Council members.
We do not take Council appointments lightly and we will consider many different factors in the selection of Council members. For example, we will look at the number of distinct nominations that a community member receives, their previous involvement in the Azurbala and Writer’s Room communities, the diversity of their perspective relative to other nominees, the qualitative feedback offered on the nomination form, their ability to be collaborative, and more.
Is this a compensated role?
Each Council member will receive Azur Root mints for their participation and work in PFP quality assurance and development. It’s important to us that Council members have an opportunity to obtain multiple mints of the PFPs they will intimately help craft and to align their incentives with the larger Azurbala community.
Council members will also work closely with ThreadGuy, MtnMan, and Apewood as part of their review process, so unquantifiable benefits like hair tips, best hiking trails, and Luke Combs’ greatest hits are other forms of compensation. Those three swear these benefits are priceless. We’ll make sure you get the Azur Roots as well, though…
Are there any future plans for this Council?
Right now this Council is just for the PFP art development, because our primary focus is to work together to deliver PFP art that the whole community can be excited about. This is the most important thing we can work on right now, in addition to getting into Podcast Licensing and more for the Writer’s Room.
That said, we can absolutely see this Council evolving in the future as our business remains committed to building with the broader community every step of the way from here on out. As such, we expect to continue sourcing widespread creative direction from the entire community and believe it will likely be very helpful to continue the relationship between Tally Labs and the Council.
Of course, if you don’t end up on the Community Council for the PFP project, there will certainly be other opportunities to join at a later date. We intend to create a framework where many different community members have the opportunity to serve in this capacity as time goes on.
If I’m not on the Council, how can I continue to be involved in PFP art direction and feedback?
As you’ve seen over the past weeks, sourcing feedback from the community is something we take very seriously. Firstly, the results of those first two surveys will serve as a guiding light in what we develop with our Artist / Creative Director. Secondly, there will be additional opportunities along the way to give your feedback on high-level direction.
While we plan to use the Council as a way to involve the community’s voice without trying to build PFP art with thousands of “cooks in the kitchen”, we still aim to engage and trust the overall community voice every step of the way.
So if you have ideas you want to share with us, please continue to do so. The ethos of the Writer’s Room is that a large, distributed group of people can create something better than what we can do on our own. This PFP project will prove that thesis again.
In Closing…
Writer’s Room members and Future Azurians, we are excited to build alongside you and we are humbled by the opportunity to do it. We appreciate your support in what is to come — an opportunity to create PFP art that resonates with the entire community by building with each other.
We’ll share more on both Twitter and Discord in the coming days when the Azurian Community Council nomination form opens up at https://members.azurbala.com/
- The Tally Labs Team
