What problems are we solving?
Successful projects in the Web3 ecosystem thrive primarily due to their ability to foster a community of engaged members. You can have the most secure protocol, the most amazing new tool, or first-of-its-kind NFT... Still, most efforts are doomed to fail without a community of engaged individuals who develop relationships and a support system for all.

With this in mind, it should be no surprise that individuals with community-centric skillsets are at a premium. Yet, there aren't nearly enough today. It takes skill, practice, and patience to curate vibes, create feedback loops, provide technical guidance with developer communities, and not to mention, communicating this sentiment to stakeholders. 

Community Management is a versatile skill. It’s a career path once not taught in schools or made available by companies— today, it’s one of top 5 roles to hire for when bootstrapping a startup in web3. With this integral workforce, a broad range of scope for “community”, and the impact this non-technical role can have on the ecosystem— we see a future and a responsibility in leading Community professionals to their careers.

Developing, building and managing communities is about doing. To better onboard and educate professionals into the space, we open bounties or projects that incentivize proper community management skills. Wgmi DAO is not a small business that aims to make money off people yearning to be community managers. We’re a collective of community-first leaders that believe in redistributing our learnings, opportunities, and resources to instigate a better future driven by communities rather than a small group of people.

CURRENT STATE

Wgmi was initially a pursuit to open sourcing Community professional education to web3 participants. Through this process, we onboarded 2,000 members to Discord, and were able to refer 20+ individuals to Community roles in the web3 space. In all, we developed a nation-state of Community-first individuals that believe in the mission of bringing more community managers to web3— imagine a community of community managers!! 

We set out to accomplish this through: 
Open-source resources, standards, strategies, and tools that will support this future workforce;
Create boot camps and workshops that help grow the talent pool of the space overall, and;
Be the leading DAO-as-a-Service for Community development in Web3.
We see this work as a public good for Web3 community stewards

To accomplish our goals, Wgmi has been focused on building out the “Community Pro Bootcamp” and the Service DAO. The Bootcamp was modeled as an accelerator program for incoming web3 community managers. This will be a feeder program to major web3 companies that need technical and non-technical community leaders. 

The applicants to the cohort are web 2.0 community professionals exploring web3, web3-curious folks looking for a job in the space, or web3 founders and devs looking to make their project more community-first. We think there is still a lot of promise here, but should be spun up as a subDAO in the future or working group.

The “service DAO” consultancy model has been migrated to “Wgmi Consulting”. We found that a lot of web3 companies needed Community consulting services such as (1) full stack Community strategy, (2) IRL Ethereum community event management, (3) Chat or Forum setup.

Demand for Community professionals is still HIGH as web3 companies reach out to Wgmi for consulting work and referrals to community managers. The bandwidth to handle the work is out of scope for Wgmi DAO as it should be more focused on evergreen tasks or more repetitive projects that don’t rely on polished delivery, strictly observed SOWs and client management. 


FUTURE STATE
• Onboarding Talent 
We want to find the best Community professionals in the space. They may have done Community work in web 2.0, but are learning the ropes of Web3. Or, perhaps they’re web3 natives who have existed in the belly of Community but now want to understand the tactical skills to retain sticky communities
• Work for the Ecosystem
There are some obvious gaps here: (1) Ethereum needs community professionals, and (2) a handful of individuals want to become Community managers, leaders, etc! We believe that through Community Calls for protocols and applications, we can both teach newcomers and support the ecosystem. To find product-market fit, produce ecosystem demand, and foster community— we’ll first provide pro-bono services to high priority projects in Ethereum. The initial revenue model will be through grant proposals to Wgmi DAO and the various ecosystem grants programs. 
Over time, our goal is to onboard community leaders that have incentives or skin in the game to provide community management, support and stewardship where they receive residual value. As a Wgmi economy begins to develop through tokenized functions, our focus will be contributing to projects where we find value in their native tokens or impact in the ecosystem. We also assume that participants of this network will align to these economic mechanisms as well.
• Learn and Earn
Rather than imposing tuition costs on individuals seeking to enter the industry or level up their community skills— we will function as a public good. Apprentices looking to learn and actively practice how to be a Community professional in web3 will have paths to earn tokenized ownership during their early phases of the program

Why a Gitcoin Grant?
We’re a community-first DAO…obviously… We’re looking to attain a grant for bootstrapping the next phase of Wgmi. With our focus being around coordinating community calls for Ethereum apps and protocols as a service, we’re also hoping to rally support from some initial projects that want to work with us. Our goal is to contribute to the Ethereum ecosystem, while up-skilling individuals on how to be great community professionals in web3. This funding will help support these newcomers and the ecosystems we support! 

Why should you contribute?
Help us bring more community coordination to Ethereum! 
We’re on a mission to 
1/ bring more community professionals to this space, 
2/ upskill them to be highly qualified community leaders, and 
3/ execute community calls for Ethereum apps or protocols. 

To help us scale, we’re in need of work to assign to our community of community managers, funding to bootstrap operations, and we’re always looking for top Community talent! Over time, we are looking for technical contributors to help us open source our community professionals materials, resources, and content. In addition, our goal this year is to align value between community managers, protocols, and stakeholders by creating a token economy that creates an efficient system where community professionals scale with the demands of the ecosystem. 

If you want to join us on our quest, you can donate as much as you’d like to via this grant.. We won’t stop you from being awesome… ;) But really, even 1 DAI means the world to us. 

All grants received from this round will be used to fund community managers with proposals to support Ethereum or EVM-compatible protocol and app community calls. If you’re interested in participating in the governance process of these grants, please reach out for details!

Other ways to help us
Did you contribute? Thank you so much!!!
Did you not contribute yet? Still thank you for your interest and for reading so far.
In either case there are many other ways to help us:
Spread the word! 
Become a contributor, here 
Hire us! Contact us for inquiries
Join our community 
Twitter: https://twitter.com/wgmicommunity
Discord: https://discord.gg/h8STHyNr
Forum: https://forum.wgmi.community/

Stay in touch and get more info
Read more in our website: https://www.wgmi.community/