Q3 22 updates

The third quarter of 2022 has come to an end. A lot of exciting things happened and another lot of exciting things are cooking for next quarter and beyond. Let’s go through it.

Pallet updates

Governance v2 was merged into Kusama’s code and it’s very close to going live. This means that Society V2 is very close too! The benchmarks are done, most of the code too. We are just waiting for the final details before merging the code and finally getting it included into a runtime upgrade.

You can check Society V2 progress here. We covered all the changes that will be introduced by Society V2 in our last update post.

Website

The alpha version of the website is finally here! You can use the next round to test the website, voting for the acceptance or rejection of the new candidate. The alpha version includes:

Member Explorer with 3D environment
Partnership with Gilberto Gil
Cyborg Guide
All essential features (bidding, vouching, voting for candidates and defender)

Check it out: https://ksmsociety.io/

Challenges (feedback is welcome!)

The Kusama Society is a bleeding edge experiment and deserves a bleeding edge website to celebrate it.

A lot of creative and technical work has gone into it to create an aesthetically provocative experience. One of the biggest challenges was optimizing the experience so it doesn’t take forever to load and crash your machine. Another challenge was making the member explorer mobile-friendly.

The website is still far from perfect, that’s why your feedback is necessary and welcome. If you’re having any issues or you want to request a feature, feel free to open an issue on our GitHub repository.

Motion 186 milestones

The alpha version delivers the 3rd milestone of Motion 186. Let’s recapitulate the milestones:

Narrative, marketing and comms outreach strategy and development
Brand development
Website development
Society treasury funding for new members, taking into account maker’s fee and candidate reward.

Brand and website development were covered in this two-phased spending proposal. Now let’s recapitulate the deliverables of the spending proposal:

Phase 1

All the deliverables of Phase 1 were condensed on the Branding Drive.

Phase 2

Design System
Website
Website admin: We decided to go with this Subsocial space instead of building something from scratch.
Web3 Integrations
Final report: The final report will be done after we get feedback from society members. The alpha version delivers the 3rd milestone of Motion 186, but any bugs will be covered and smaller features are still going to be added for the next few months. For next year, another spending will be necessary to maintain the website. If you’re a developer and are interested in helping maintain the website, let us know in the society lounge.

Happiness is made of metal

Happiness is made of metal is the partnership between Gilberto Gil and Kusama Society and it was the first spending proposal to address the 1st milestone, especially focused on marketing and comms outreach strategy and development.

The main deliverables for this proposal were the following:

Scanning Gilberto Gil and some of his most iconic clothes. Some of the process was covered in our last update post.
Create and mint an NFT on Gil’s 80th birtday. The NFT was created and minted on Kusama and is available for preview on Singular. Regarding the NFT distribution, we are still in communication with his team to make sure all legal details are in order before distributing the NFT to Society members. Gilberto Gil is one of the greatest Brazilian artists ever, he and his team have a very tight schedule. We are working around their schedule, doing our best to accelerate the distribution. We believe we will be able to distribute the NFT before December begins.
A journal documenting the entire process. Now other teams can reproduce the same process with other relevant people. Maybe some team from Europe could scan Gavin Wood and place him on the homepage of the Kusama Society website next? :)
Press release: The press release was able to reach some of the biggest news outlets in Brazil, like Exame, Folha, Money Times and Cointelegraph. Just googling “Gilberto Gil NFT Kusama” outputs another dozen results.
A bust of Gilberto Gil on the website homepage and a dedicated page to tell the story of this project.

Bonuses! This deliverables weren’t included in the proposal but emerged as natural extensions of this project:

The bust was supposed to stay on the homepage only for a week around Gil’s birthday. The result was so cool that we asked and got a green light from his team to extend it indefinitely!
A video of the project was exhibited on NFT Rio during 4 days. You can catch a glimpse of the exhibition here.
The first Kusama Society band? We also created an audiovisual experience combining Kusama Society’s narrative with Gilberto Gil’s song Futurível. The piece was executed live and uploaded to YouTube. You can watch it here. This piece is an example of how the digital assets and the brand book can be used to create compelling artistic experiences that can spread Kusama Society’s philosophy.

(The lyrics are in Portuguese, but you can turn captions on, we translated it to English!)

That’s it for now, see you in the next update!