Public Nouns

Abstract

Given how rapidly the web3 industry advances, and given how much of the educational content available to new users constitutes marketing content, there is an outstanding need for credibly neutral educational content for users of various languages and technical literacies to learn about this technology.

To this end, Education DAO has compiled a multilingual glossary of technical terms pertaining to web3 and other decentralized technologies, with the intention of maintaining this glossary in a community-led manner. This glossary, named Words of Web3, is built as a public good in the spirit of credible neutrality. It is open-source, free to access, and does not depend on any underlying revenue model or vest interest aside from the provision of sound educational content.

This glossary marks the beginning of a high-quality and canonical source of terminological truth, to address the needs not only of new users seeking to learn about this technology, but also developers and content creators seeking consistent and unambiguous language for their documentation.

Words of Web3 Github repo: https://github.com/mapachurro/web3-glossary-website
Words of Web3 website: https://wordsofweb3.eth.limo/

Background

EducationDAO was started as a container to put the Consensys Developer Bootcamp content when the decision was made to deprecate Consensys Academy. Initially the idea was to have the community keep the repos up to date and offer the course as they like.

The core team, however, decided to expand the scope of the DAO and shift the focus to not just supporting a crowd sourced course for training web3 developers in the Ethereum ecosystem, but to provide a receptacle for credibly neutral content about the overall decentralized web3 space and to start with a more direct product of a web3 glossary, as the overhead was less than that of the developer bootcamp.

Being a set of web3 learners and educators, and wordsmiths, ourselves, we are very aligned with a glossary, especially a multilingual one, which supports universal global learning, and can be used by developers, documentarians, educators and learners alike. After Oliver gave a talk at Devcon VI about terminology in web3, several audience members specifically asked for a community terminology resource, which was the seed for Words of Web3. In building EducationDAO, it is increasingly clear to us that people are not interested in Doing Web3 in product- or ecosystem-specific silos, and resources that give opinionated explanations are fragmenting discourse and tribalizing opinion.

Many glossaries are not large enough, not maintained well, hard to navigate, and product specific. Many are on one page, making it difficult to collect granular metrics about terms. Words of Web3 aims to collate existing glossaries, develop a review process for entries, and partner with aligned organizations to either expand contributors, or incorporate their content. The only community managed glossary that we know is the EFs, which is ecosystem specific.

The product and chain agnostic nature of our glossary not only sets it apart from most other glossaries, but it allows anyone to contribute content, so long as it follows our editorial guidelines.

How does this initiative support public goods?

Knowledge is a prime example of a public good. Users of emerging technology deserve access to sound educational content which has been created without any marketing-related ulterior motives. Moreover, this knowledge should be accessible across a variety of languages, which is why our glossary involves translating entries into over 20 languages, with the ability to add languages as needed.

How can Public Nouns benefit from this partnership?

This is a tool that any Public Nouns community members can use and contribute to! Also, as many education programs are not getting funding, Public Nouns would stand out in this space. We would also be happy to discuss custom glossary applications for public Nouns.

How is it non-excludable?

The glossary is open-source and free to access. If protocols or companies want custom integrations of the glossary into their documentation, that could be handled as a paid engagement, but broader access to the glossary’s web app will remain free to users across various languages.

How is it non-rivalrous?

One person learning from this glossary does not prevent another from doing the same. Because the value of knowledge is virtually inexhaustible, our glossary qualifies as non-rivalrous.
as protocol.land, fleek.xyz, Arweave Naming System, and more. The precise dWeb stack is still to be determined, but this transition will be gradual. The goal is to build the glossary web app in a manner resistant to deprecation and capture, such that its reliance on Education DAO’s continued funding is minimized.

Consensys will be a trial user of Words of Web3, embedding glossary terms in their support and documentation site. We hope this provides sufficient initial exposure to the project to build out usership and contributors.

How is it being maintained?

Currently, the glossary is being maintained by Oliver, our lead terminologist and internationalization specialist. We plan to have a submission review schedule for user submitted terms/definitions/changes. Our scraper will run on a regular schedule which will have its own review process. We will also set up a glossary PM through our Hats tree.

What is the on-chain component?

Firstly, Words of Web3 is being hosted on IPFS via Fleek. We would like to move the repository over to Protocol.land, or some equivalent once we are ready to make the repo public.
Secondly, we would like to enable contributors to receive remuneration for their contributions in an on-chain fashion that could be in the form of a reputation marker and currency. We are exploring using Seed Protocol for our attestation mechanism.

In the terminology world, reputation markers on forums is a clear signal of expertise and we want to ensure that reputation based signaling in this field is bridged over to the web3 terminology environment. This can take the form of attestations, in some combination of EAS, querying, and internal curation, which is on our roadmap for development.

Why does it need funding right now?

We need funding now to get it across the line to MVP. Our developer has built out most of the backend required, but his skill set does not include front end and UI/UX capabilities. Additionally, the proliferation of a multilayer/multichain ecosystem has increased the burden on us all to understand with specificity jargon and terminology to safely and successfully DO THE THING. The value of credibly neutral canonical terminology cannot be understated.

Impact

The primary goal of this glossary is to enable individuals around the world to better understand this technology. This impact would be achieved primarily through multiple modes of user engagement, whether it be a user simply reading the glossary, a developer using the glossary to inform their technical documentation, or a content creator referencing the glossary for canonical definitions. In all cases, the result is the delivery of reliable technical information to users.

To measure impact by end of Q1 2025, we plan to:

• Test the implementation of the glossary by partnering with Consensys’ Support and Customer Support docs teams, which will use the glossary as a reference in their docs.
• Track user engagement by term, length of time spent on the website, location of user, language, and number of unique users. The format of our glossary allows for this, unlike most other glossaries, which are simply a single word list.
• We aim to have the content submission process ready by the beginning of Q1 2025 and would like to have at least 50 terms contributed by the end of Q1 2025 through community submission.

Deliverables

We have already built most of the backend, but there are various other aspects this grant funding would enable us to complete. Most importantly, this grant would fund the last mile of our MVP development process, allowing us to take the glossary web app to market. As for what we have in mind when we aim for an MVP, we simply mean a web interface which can be effectively navigated by users who wish to browse and cite the glossary, with existing backend functionality. We expect this to take until the end of Q1 2025.

Beyond this, our roadmap involves other features, such as peer-to-peer storage of glossary content (e.g. Arweave), community submissions of new terms, translations, and resources to the glossary, and creation of an API for glossary content allowing API consumers to embed glossary terms directly in their content (for a fee, ideally). While we feel confident that this funding would enable us to ship an MVP, the completion of these later features might require more work.

Feedback loop

Once the glossary’s web app is public, we will be better able to engage with our target audience of end users, developers, and content creators. Even before we have the infrastructure for programmatic community contributions to the glossary, we can still facilitate submissions in a more manual fashion using pull requests.

As for the long-term prospects of this glossary, we aim to build it in such a way that maximizes preservation and minimizes overhead, using a variety of decentralized web technologies such

Recipient address

0x1526360946a692284e50c9E887F18e9b3E52E467 (education-dao.eth, EOA)

Budget

Amount in ETH

3 ETH

Given a 3 ETH grant, we will spend it as follows, subject to unforeseen operational circumstances:

• 1 ETH for retroactive compensation for previous dev work.
• 1 ETH for continued part-time dev work to bring the glossary to an MVP.
• 0.5 ETH for part-time project management to see the project through to MVP.
• 0.5 ETH for a contract with a UI/UX developer, to take the MVP and create an attractive and user-friendly web interface for our intended audiences (end users

Team description

• Oliver Renwick, developer, translator, terminologist
  • Twitter, Farcaster, 2023 ETH Bogota talk
  • Lead technical writer and internationalization lead at Consensys Spanish<>English interpreter and translator for 12 years in the medical, community, and legal fields; Full stack developer
• Elizabeth Cusma, project manager, translator, partnership lead
  • Twitter, Farcaster
  • Co-Director at EducationDAO; Spanish<>English translator in community and legal fields for 10 years; Program Director and Translation Manager at immigrant integration non-profits for 5 years; community organizer.
• Clinamenic, advisor
  • Twitter, Farcaster
  • Co-founder at JournoDAO
• Opeyemi Stephen, Software Engr, Technical Writer, Ecosystem Builder
  • Twitter
  • Consensys, Hyperbolic, FUEL, Education DAO