Greetings Fellow Robots,
MetaFactory has been going non-stop doing worrrrk, while trying to scale and keep up with limitless projects and collaborations in our DAO fueled mission to make fun realities and progress this space we call home. We’re going to be doing internal and greater DAO initiatives/surveying to evaluate our short-mid-long term goals, while further building better infrastructure for onboarding. We also want to jumpstart better documentation and scribing of all the highlights, events, partnerships and meta-madness from the last year and going forward.
Apart from Headbots, most don’t get a heavy glimpse into the Factory, its endless Discord channels of collabs and private working groups across Notion, Telegram, Figma, etc. We want to further define these Working Groups, many of which could use additional contributors, and give clearer paths to contributing/finding places to add value to the DAO.
Goal is to establish better tooling and resources to break these groups down, their personnel, needs for support, and materials to train people up to speed when applicable.
Working Group Examples:
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Technicians (Product Project Managers)
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Fashion/Design R&D
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Fulfillment/Shopify
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Customer Service (Shopify, Email, Discord, etc)
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Live Events (MCON, NFT.NYC, Etc)
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Metaverse Events (VR, M3 x Webaverse)
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Content/Story (Written, Video/Audio/Metaverse)
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Wearables
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Devs
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Community/Onboarding (Been all work and no play)
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Coordination (Optimizing tools/guides for workflows)
Distributions:
For anyone unaware, $ROBOT is earned via buyer rewards, drop revenue split between brands/designers/techs, and then the periodic Ops Distributions that utilize SourceCred extensively to automate this as much as possible. The $ROBOT Pez dispenser is always scavenging for contributions. Within Discord, the “Did A Thing” and “Props” channels are a great way to highlight minor contributions that fall outside of normal value capture (Minibot-Headbot or active contributors have access). You can tag someone in the “Props” Channel with a description of something dope you’ve noticed them do, then those who agree can react with emojis to amplify its contribution weight. Same concept for “Did A Thing”, but self-reporting your own dopeness.
-> For larger initiatives that fall outside of normal ops, Retool is a custom interface used to manually enter initiatives (solo or group effort) to SourceCred and their impact can be voted on to determine its weighting. Example would be:
“WSC Beach House” Metaverse Creation
30% Sinkas | 70% Lilia
Then it’s voted as common, rare, epic or legendary regarding its value impact to the DAO.
The remaining Ops are distributed utilizing Coordinape, which allows for more p2p contributor determinations. This last epoch was self-declared teams where consistent contributors from June-October distribute allocated budgets of “Give” among those they’ve been working with and the impact they feel they’ve made. The next epoch we will ideally have more separation by working groups and budgets/weighting established for each group.
Grants can also be leveraged as needed. We also have some pretty dank members that sprinkle their own $robot around for different causes, bounties and acts of appreciation. If that’s not positive sum, I don’t know what is.
Production & In-House Micro Factories:
A few of our production partners have let us down a bit recently and reinforced that our investments into operations like the Berlin MicroFactory headed by Wes are a huge part of the future. The majority of larger-scale production partners that can’t be pilled into crypto, web3 and DAO culture will never be fully aligned and invested in MetaFactory’s success – get some damn $ROBOT, Nike. Our fashion/design teams and the partnerships they’ve been fostering with innovators in the space align much better with our vision opposed to “Hoodie Manufacture #369”. We’ve started discussing taking this to the next level and adding Maker Spaces to the Micro Factories goal list. MetaFactory can invest in production machinery, tools and spaces that could not only be our own factory, but could be utilized in a more open-sourced nature to allow for open collaboration IRL and bridging new talent into the space. The plans for the Curation Game can also fit nicely into some plans for custom blanks from MetaFactory and our relationships with some insane expert pattern makers.
Fulfillment:
2021 Shipdemic has been a PITA. On the note of “some production partners letting us down” we recently shifted to a 3PL fulfillment partner for a large chunk of our products. This should allow for more reliability and better custom packaging. With that shift, some product runs have had larger fulfillment windows. Products should have more detailed information listed on their shipping expectations, as well as references to past products that are the same blank/fit. Shipping rates were adjusted to mitigate any higher live rate quotes. Expedited may be removed as an option for anything that isn’t pre-produced on-hand at fulfillment or on-demand to mitigate expectations for rapid shipping on drops that are never going to feel all that “expedited” lol
International Shipping, EU/UK:
Yeah, we know… customs/import duties/taxes can be whack. Short-term: we’re doing what we can to mitigate these costs as much as possible. Mid-term: we want dedicated EU fulfillment. Long-term: the in-house MetaFactories equipped to custom pack and fulfill. For now, every product that is on-demand should be the best international shipping experience, with the other products being more manageable.
NFT Wearables, VR/AR & the Metaverse:
With some new partnerships and experiments with Webaverse, Kong.Land, Boson, Project Galaxy, and others in-progress; the digi of digiphysical is on the horizon for MetaFactory. I will spin up a claimable Role for Metabot for anyone keen to get notified of updates, announcements, events, etc from the Metaverse teams. If you’re interested in that working group, can drop a line and connect with Jin.
Inbound Interest:
We’ve had a ton of consistent new interest from brands/groups for collabs x drops, as well as talented people looking to find places to contribute and buidl with MF. For brands, unless you’re Vitalik please bear with us while we focus on existing workloads and scaling our roots. Some exceptions may apply, but I’d anticipate Q1 2022 for new inbound interest. For contributors, it can take a little persistence and a self-starter attitude to get rolling in the DAO. If you’ve submitted CGU forms, etc and haven’t heard back, keep engaging in Discord and reiterate on where you’re interested in getting involved.
That is all. Have a Meta Weekend. (fucc zucc)
