Friends with Benefits is excited to enter our second year.

What started as a social experiment exploring shared incentives and cultural production saw us push the boundaries of what it means to be a community-owned enterprise.

We spent a lot of time together online, gathered around the world offline, created remarkable art together, built tools for ourselves, and formed real friendships — all within the confines of a Discord server.

As FWB grew, so did the needs of our community.

Sub-communities emerged, defined by geolocation or interest areas, and then diverged, as they began to cultivate their own culture, norms, and roadmaps.

To date, FWB has over 16 teams, with nearly 40 projects in the works, made up of hundreds of contributors, and championed by over 5000 token holders.

Divergence is the act of separation, or extension into new directions from a common point.

Branching off or forking can promote autonomy, speed, and agility, but without a return back to the center, fragmentation can happen.

If DAOs are optimized for divergence through creativity, labor, and decision-making then convergence — coming back together to operate as a cohesive whole — becomes necessary for infrastructure, community-owned data, and shared learnings.

Central to FWB’s mission is equipping cultural creators and maintainers with the community and the Web3 tools they need to gain agency over their production.

Navigating the relationship between branching off to form individual subcultures and re-converging to aggregate knowledge will be instrumental to our community’s success and only further motivated by the underlying coordination that the $FWB token provides.

Here are some ways we will be promoting this divergence and convergence over Season Five.

Social Software: FWB Directory

The strength of our community will be defined by the strength of our one-to-one relationships. As it currently stands, though, there’s no easy way for members to find and connect with one another.

Discord is not enough for our community and there’s too much noise on Twitter.

It’s time to start building our own social spaces.

The FWB Directory will serve as a traversable on-chain identity that enables our members to connect, grow, and move fluidly across the Web3 ecosystem.

Members will be able to search and engage with other members based on shared communities, indexed skills, and past IRL events they’ve attended.

At the heart of the FWB Directory is your ID, a unique non-transferable NFT that is minted upon your membership initiation.

Your NFT will contain your personalized metadata, dynamically evolve over time based on your on-chain patterns, and be fully customizable with stamps and stickers that you earn along the way.

Traits will include:

• Ecosystem Contributions (Interactions with Mirror, Sound, Catalog, Zora, Foundation, and more)
• FWB Event Attendance
• Discord Activity and Engagement
• DAO Contribution and Roles
• Governance Voting History
• NFTs and Tokens Held
• Shared Communities

Your ID will be your passport as you navigate throughout the Web3 ecosystem, and the Directory will be our FWB hub within it.

Global Members (75 $FWB) will have early beta access to the Directory.

Progressively Decentralized Events

FWB has quickly established itself as a leader in the IRL events space.

From token-enabled concerts to intimate dinners in your neighborhood, FWB has developed a top level guide for establishing a vibe.

Starting Season 5, we will diverge this Playbook for Gathering to other FWB Cities, inviting community members from Berlin to San Francisco to reinterpret and throw FWB events of their own, and earn $FWB for doing so – all within the FWB ecosystem.

Dream up an event concept, secure an Event Key, attach a desired token-gate amount, promote through the FWB Event portal, use Gatekeeper to run check-in at the door, and accrue on-chain achievements to your FWB ID.

Governance

As FWB grows, so will the ways in which we communicate and govern ourselves.

Town Hall

Town Halls have become a staple of the FWB community but with the number of active and ongoing initiatives, it’s time to upgrade our format.

Town Halls will transition to Monthly, at a more favorable timezone, and with a new format that involves team-driven presentations.

This promotes a tighter feedback loop between Members and Contributors, ensuring that we are in alignment with our community.

Proposal Support Team

A team focused on bringing proposals to life, and implementing them once passed.

This committee does not have the ability to approve or deny proposals, but exists to help support and refine the formation of proposals that, if they are robust enough, will move to a Snapshot vote.

Led by Thom Mackey and Emerson Kirk.

Upvote

Synchronous Discord conversations have not proven to be the best format for complex governance discussions.

Upvote is a homegrown tool that will allow for threading, phasing, and more effective asynchronous discourse to take place before proposals are taken to Snapshot.

This ensures the right proposals rise to the top and receive proper attention while giving contributors a better way to facilitate and integrate feedback for the most optimal outcome(s).

Bird Signal

Staying in the loop on major DAO proposals has always been a challenge.

With Bird Signal, FWB members can opt in to text messages that notify you of new governance proposals.

We believe that expanding communications out of Discord will directly lead to an increase in voter turnout, and to a higher degree of quality conversation and synchronicity.

Voting

Binary voting options have their limitations.

FWB will implement new voting mechanics over Season 5 to allow for more nuanced decision-making, such as on-chain Discord poll votes.

As the scope of what’s meant to be voted on expands, so too will the ways community members can signal their voting power across many potential outcomes, rather than simply voting yes or no.

Onwards

People’s first interactions with FWB are no longer exclusively digital.

The world reopened midway through FWB’s lifespan, and more friends are finding out about us through in-person experiences than Twitter timelines.

This responsibility to create cultural and technical tools that improve the creative class’ introduction to Web3 remains top of mind, and we understand the role we play in this ecosystem as a representative voice in advocating for ways in which things can be done differently.

As FWB enters its second year, we are eternally grateful to the community, which has consistently challenged us to think differently and act boldly.

With love,

Alex Zhang + FWB Contributors

This past Season would not have been possible without the tireless and creative leadership from countless contributors.

Dexter Tortoriello, Mike Bodge, Emilie Friedlander, Ariel LeBeau, Yuri Rybak, Yana Sosnovskaya, Chuck Anderson, Patti Hauseman, Trevor McFedries, Raihan Anwar, Adam Beal, Zach Tetreault, Jose Mejia, Cameron Parkins, Paul Tao, Laura Jamarillo, Thom Mackey, Emerson Kirk, Cooper Turley, Pat Lok, Brian Mark, Fiona Carty, Jake Waxenberg, Ruby Thelot, Gabe Quintela, Iain Nash, Breck Stodghill, Kaitlyn Davies, Kevin Ngo, Katy Levine, Katie Chou, Derek Taylor, Greg Bresnitz, Alex Hooven, Joey Rubin, Chris Reed, Alex McDonald, Kyle King, Will Griggs, Amit Mukherjee, and Holyn Kanake.