Becoming Dragon — Grant Report 1

Cris Beasley — Sun, 17 Jan 2021 17:17:11 +0000

Project Update and Final Report

Hello all, I'm Cris Beasley, ambassador from the 2019 round. My project officially launched into the digital world prior to becoming an ambassador with a limited set of cards you could randomly pull from at becomingdragon.com. When I learned of Coil and WM, I added a one-line payment pointer to stream BTC to my Uphold account.

On the 7th of January, the Kickstarter project to make physical copies of the deck was successfully funded with $11k+, and this brought quite a bit more traffic to the site.

If I ask "How did the project go?" the answer is "Amazing! It was featured in Forbes. We are printing the decks. I grew the team from one to three. We have about 200 active community members."

If I ask "How did the Web Monetization piece go?" the answer is much more murky. The amount streamed to my payment pointer was less than a dollar, which isn't at all surprising given how little traffic I have at this point. Most of my traffic doesn't come from the WM community.

My biggest struggle was mapping a project about Jungian shadow work and personal transformation to be relevant to the community of Web Monetization. I utterly failed to figure out how to integrate what I was doing into the community. It just seemed too out of the left field.

I feel conflicted. If we only fund artists whose work is about WM, there's going to be quite a narrow pool. Most art isn't about the economics of technology, after all. From my point of view, WM must have artists as ambassadors from a variety of genres and topics. If we skew the artists we chose to those that mostly white, male programmers like, that's going to reify the status quo which most need to be disrupted and reinvented.

Progress on objectives

DONE – Publish digital art and guidebook chapters to a web monetized landing page on crisbeasley.com
IN PROGRESS - Print the physical card decks and guidebooks with special perks such as early access or discount for web monetized supporters
DONE - Travel to gatherings of creators and speak about my experience as an ambassador. – I represented GftW in London for the 2019 MozFest for panel discussions and hallway conversations. Further travel was prohibited by Covid lockdowns.
NOT COMPLETE - Distribute Coil trial subscriptions to other creators. – What did happen instead was speaking to other creators who were looking to incorporate WM into their projects.

Key activities

DONE – Create final card art and digitize for 64 cards – May
DONE – Finish drafting the 128-chapter guidebook – October
DONE – Edit and publish on becomingdragon.com – December
DONE – Collect my learnings and reflections into a format to inform the future of web monetization – January

Communications and marketing

Marketing and admin budget $1,150

Podcast Curious Humans with Jonny Miller
Feature Pluralistic.com by Cory Doctorow
Profile Forbes by MeiMei Fox
Instagram Live with @hermitsmirror

Medium essays by Cris
Feeling Like You Can’t Cope? This Might Help.
You are becoming. You are a becoming.
Tony Hsieh: the Dark Side of Happiness
11 Things to Ask Instead of “Why?”

What’s next?

As we continue to build a community around our weekly Becoming Dragon Thursday events, we get more people pulling a digital card which will drive more traffic to the web monetized site.

I continue to be in regular connection as a product design advisor with executives at Coil, Cinnamon, and the incoming Mozilla Fellows who are shaping the program moving forward.

What community support would benefit your project?

Everyone who is up for the adventure of intimacy is invited to join our free weekly calls every Thursday where we use collective intelligence techniques to create connection and dive into deep conversation.

If you know any coaches, therapists, or healers who are up for learning these tools introductions via crystal@crystalbeasley.com are most welcome.

We are seeking to collaborate with a PhD candidate to do grounded theory research to validate and enhance the Enneagram structure of the deck.

Relevant links/resources

You can draw a card!

The Interledger Community 🌱: Cris Beasley