April 18th Writer's Room Town Hall Recap
April 18th Writer's Room Town Hall Recap
Vibes, custom software for dashboards & the ebook & a licensing marketplace, bits of information about Azurbala, the Audio Experience, and more!
As we discussed in our most recent VC post, the updates have been coming fast and furious for the Writer’s Room and Jenkins the Valet project. We even had ANOTHER update between when we posted the RM 2.0 check-in piece, and the Town Hall yesterday. The Writer’s Room was excited to welcome the newest addition to the Tally Labs team, and one of the first people to have the very Web3 relevant job title of “Director of Vibes", @notthreadguy!. Let’s take a look at some of the major and most interesting announcements from the Tally Labs team.
Tally Labs Team
They are a team of 6 full time people now, with contractors sitting across Legal, Finance, HR, Animation, and Design, which gets them to the 20-25 range.
Most recently have brought on Heads of Product and Engineering
Thread Guy was introduced, and the Director Of Vibes job title was explained a bit. He was clearly the Tally Labs teams’ first choice. What the title means for them is someone who community facing and community focused. They want to make sure that their community has one of the best experiences in the NFT space. He will be sitting across social, content, Jenkins and SAFA’s own twitter accounts, promotional content, partnerships, hosting Spaces, in Discord, and in certain instances, representing Jenkins and SAFA on the ground level.
Thread Guy spoke as well. “ I just want to say I'm extremely excited to be part of the Jenkins team and be working hand in hand with the community. If you followed me long enough, there's a slim chance that you've read a thread of mine, from probably six or seven months ago. Jenkins was one of the first projects I wrote a NFT thread about, I think the floor was .05? I’m excited to be working with this community and directing the vibes.” “I'm extremely pumped. Especially, with a project like Jenkins. I feel particularly good about it, because I've been been connected to you guys in this project in this community. It really was something organic that I was interested in well before Twitter followers and job offers and whatnot. And that makes it, extra special. I feel like this project has so much under the hood in so many directions and substance with it that it's the perfect project to have a Director of Vibes and to really build this community.”
SAFA reiterated that this project is now much much larger than 1 book, and we all believe that this will be the future of decentralized content. Concerning the software they are building “Individuals building their own IP and monetizing it, us providing a platform for that to happen at scale. We really believe that like the next generation of worlds and characters, will be born from the blockchain. When we started to build Jenkins, almost a year ago, nothing like that existed. So we needed to go out and do it ourselves. We want a platform like this to be able to serve and help folks who have ambitions to tell stories and embody their character.”
Town Halls are going to be a huge priority going forward for the team
Software/Writer’s Room Portal
They touched on the gated e-reader experience they are building, and how they didn’t like what was out there for this task right now…so they decided to build a better one themselves. Sensing a theme here? The e-reader can scale past literature and will be able to be used by authenticating with your Book NFT.
This quote from Jenkins was particularly interesting, “Gated Web3 content, remember that every character that is named in the book is an NFT. And if you imagine what you can do, knowing that that's the case, how you can bring characters to life or show characters, auxiliary information about characters. Those things are really, really important to us. So it's really imagining a reading experience from scratch, knowing the information that you have available to you when you're taking text that was written and putting it into software.”
There is a new licensing portal/interface dropping around the podcast, which will be much improved, and has been directly driven by user and community feedback
Both Writer’s Room NFT holders, and avatar holders, will be able to “shop” for a match for licensing within the portal
The Jenkins Audio Experience
The team then touched on the fiction podcast they are creating with Salt Audio, also known as the Jenkins Audio Experience.
This podcast project will be the next time you are able to use your Writer’s Room NFT for licensing
The team is actively brokering and discussing participating in the podcast with other Web3 communities. Attorney are involved, as this would include other project’s branding, marks, name, IP, etc..
There’s a staff of 20-40 people actively engaged and dedicated to the podcast including writers, directors, actors, etc..
Book 1 NFT
Confirmed Book 1 NFT will be launching in Q2 (by end of June)
The physical book from Book 1 that NFT holders receive will be a special edition and be different (likely the cover?) than the future editions, which will likely be printed and sold in your normal book retailers
The team discussed the process of voting in the Writer’s Room portal, and how that has informed the writing of Neil Strauss
Dropped what I think was a bit of new alpha, or at least clarification, that newly named Book 1 cover artist @mbsjq will actually be doing the cover of both the physical AND NFT edition of Book 1
Stated that they searched for the best “Search and Find” artist on the planet, and found IC4 design from Hiroshima, Japan, whom have previously worked with such notables as Google, Adobe, and Mercedes Benz
There are 2 more collaborators on Book 1 that they have yet to announce. One must be the musician/audio creator for the track that will accompany the Book 1 NFT right?
Book 1 is expected to be premium. They’ve packed a number of amazing creators and collaborators into the project. “And we think that it's going to have its own premium consumption experience to go along with it. And then once you buy it, it's really just the beginning of the game theory.”
Book 1 is mostly written, but there are still things that need to happen such as copy editing, designing and laying out the book, “Where’s Jenkins?” needs to be finished, and illustrations need to be finished
Azurbala
Intention is to have a fair amount of information out on Azurbala before Book 1 launch, since burning Book 1 for an Azurian avatar is a key mechanic
They’ve been putting a ridiculous amount of work into Azurbala. Emma Needel (creating the world with inputs from Jenkins and SAFA) has put a ton of thought into every aspect of Azurbala
They are putting a ton of work into the avatars, not just how they look, but also their funcitonality, which they indicated should be a first for the Web3 space
In the words of Jenkins: “You will first be introduced Azurbala with an interactive web experience that shows you a map of Azurbala, and gives you the ability to navigate it and see the each of the factions that exist.” The UX and the UI for that are done
They're in production with all of the 3D scenes that are being made to show the different corridors of Azurbala
The Interactive Azurbala Web Experience will launch before the Book 1 minting experience
From SAFA, “for the last year, it’s been a blessing to not be a pfp project, but to be surrounded by pfp projects. We’re really excited to get these out, and actually have people use them as their pfp, as normally you wouldn’t just use a Writer’s Room ticket for that. So we're excited to give you all something to proudly represent the Writer’s Room and we think that it has franchise level potential.”
Media DAO
This is where the community created IP will be housed going forward.
From SAFA, “We don't want to operate as simply a private business just licensing avatars for the foreseeable future. We would love to and we plan to usher in a world where we create the IP with you all, and it sits in something that's truly decentralized and truly community governed. And so that has been a massive undertaking from a legal standpoint.”
Questions Posed
Community member SaveZ asked the team about freezing the metadata for the Writer’s Room NFTs
The only way to check if an NFT is licensed or not is through the licensing portal right now
They have discussed having someway of reflecting licensed/not licensed visually on the NFTs themselves
They think this would be useful in the future on the Secondary market for searching for licensed/not licensed, and then also how many projects an NFT is licensed to
Someone named, let me get this right, was it SpaceWalk? He shamelessly promoted the world’s foremost Writer’s Room focused newsletter, Valet Confidential, as well as asked a few questions.
The first question was ‘ How do think about the supply for pfp drop?”
The team is very excited to see how the game theory plays out, with a pfp drop that is a bit different than normal
They’re actively trying to make the game theory decision of burning vs staking the Book 1 NFT as hard as possible
If all holders decided to burn Book 1, they can’t have the original total supply of those books be a number where there were just entirely too many Azurian avatars now. So being very careful to ensure the “proper” amount of Azurian avatars ends up existing.
The second question was “ Are you going to choose the narrative of the factions, or will you leave it up to the community?
There are stories and plot devices and a few things setup in a way that the founders and Emma Needel envisioned, so the factions will not be blank slates\
There will be a bit of a point of view, but power and control will be in the hands of Azurian holders.
Anything can change and anything goes. Sounds like what happens in Azurbala stays in Azurbala.
All Azurians are born common, and will have opportunities to join factions
Finally, a plea for something, anything, in regards to the huge news that SAFA has repeatedly hinted at
Disappointingly the answer was, “ it’s going to be exciting, can’t say more at this point”.
Great try though SpaceWalk!!
All in all, it was a productive Town Hall complete with some laughs, some nice updates and alpha, and most importantly, !vibes. Please, go back to the Spaces link and listen yourself, especially for interaction with Nick at the end. Vibes on vibes. Until the next time.
Some Disclaimers: None of this is financial advice. DYOR. And yes, FilmBook and SpaceWalk are WR collectors and long-term hodlrs.