It appears that the majority here are finally in favor of Bitshares having a “faucet” just like every other crypto in history. How long did that take? (and you guys wonder why it is taking Dan so long to construct his “consensus machine” when you can barely reach consensus on one of the basic laws of crypto).
Next order of business:
DECIDE ON A BUDGET (this should be the easy part). Don’t spend 2 weeks arguing about how much money we should spend, then spend 5 minutes deciding who to drop the Bitshares on. No, spend 5 minutes agreeing on a fair amount of money to spend on our faucet, so we can spend the rest of the time planning the most effective way to spend this budget. If we can't come to a consensus and have to resort to donations then so be it. Please just decide who gets what and how much, then you can discuss the "how to distribute" (the fun part).
Luckybit has seized the sword from the stone and is the new champion of this thread. I encourage everyone to follow his lead here because his ideas are tactical and well thought out (think contingency planning, you are setting rules for a game). I’m going back to fighting dragons for a while. I’ll leave you with this:
The more attention to detail that you put into the target parameters for your airdrop, the more positive media attention you will receive. This is because you will be able to claim first mover advantage on any new air-dropping ideas that involve the inclusion/exclusion of certain groups based on:
WHAT BITSHARES CAN DO FOR THEM/or why we don’t think that they are a part of our target audience
This is important:
You will be determining how much or how little media attention you will receive. If you create a complex set of rules for the drop, then your media attention will be greater (because people will want to understand the fine print to see if or how they can qualify). But remember that the labor on the developers who will be distributing the coins will be greater the more complicated the rule set is.
I think the budget shouldn't be set in stone. Let it be a percentage of profit which goes into airdrop marketing. Treat it as a marketing expense internally and justify it as a marketing expense.
If it has to be part of the budget then take it from the marketing budget. Since none of us knows how much a Bitshare is worth it's not possible to come up with a budget right now. We can say how much an AGS might be worth though and how much it might cost to do an airdrop initiative.
I think it would be relatively cheap unless you want to do it right (with live CDs, magazine, fully functioning Bitshares network, and videos explaining what DACs are and how they can benefit the social entrepreneur).
I think it's going to take a while to do. I think the video would have to be at least as good as what are bitshares. I think the liveCD should be something secure that you can give out to people who may not take security seriously but who want to have a wallet up and running quickly from which to insert the private key to redeem the airdropped crypto equity. The live CD could contain the videos and all of that.
The magazine could contain editorials from some of us, from Stan, maybe some popular quotes of ours from our discussions so people can see the motivation behind it all and be encouraged to join the conversation.
gamey has brought up a good point as to the conflict of interest stories that can arise if we pick and choose charities.
It's not about being popular with every charity. It's about being popular with the charities which promote social entrepreneurship and which are technologically inclined. A lot of charities won't be supported because those charities aren't strategically interesting at the time.
That doesn't mean you shouldn't choose charities which have strategic significance for the industry you're trying to grow and community you're trying to build. If the Bitshares community is supporting social entrepreneurs then a lot of people aren't going to like that, and if it supports the greater decentralization community a lot of people aren't going to like that either, and if it supports communities around other emerging technologies maybe they won't like that either.
But those are the sort of strategic alliances you build. It's not just about looking popular but about building lasting alliances with other disruptive decentralization communities forming around other cool technologies. It's also about getting in touch with other communities of passionate people who want to make a better world but who don't have the technological equipment to do so.
I mentioned building a faucet months ago by the way. If you want to do it the way I mentioned then reward marketing, don't just give free stuff. Tell people to put Bitshares.org in their signature for example. Do it on a person to person basis on forums, and use Facebook for people not on forums to get people to forward or share different stuff with their friends to earn Bitshares. You can use the airdrop in a way to encourage viral adoption and do it through a giveaway as Mastercoin has done.
But I don't think a faucet will be good enough anymore. Competition has increased since then and it's going to require monthly airdrops, magazines, blog postings, videos, a whole campaign. The first few months there might not be much adoption but over time as the airdrops become more targeted and campaign more polished this will change.
The magazine for example, just giving a free copy to the right charities could go very far in increasing adoption. If they get shares along with the magazine they might buy a subscription. You could even make the magazine company itself a DAC and give shares to the early readers of it in proportion to how early they subscribe.
So subscribe today and you win x shares in the magazine DAC which produced the magazine. Then offer shares to people who write editorials for the magazine, I am sure you can find people on this forum willing to do that.
You will be determining how much or how little media attention you will receive. If you create a complex set of rules for the drop, then your media attention will be greater (because people will want to understand the fine print to see if or how they can qualify). But remember that the labor on the developers who will be distributing the coins will be greater the more complicated the rule set is.
I think you should reward randomly. It should be seen as a gift in response for the service and impact that journalist or individual has had on growing the mindshare for the concepts. This means it doesn't matter whether they just have a blog with a very well written article or they are on a network with a lot of reach. The point is to airdrop to people who truly understand and explain the concepts.
So as a community we should look at past articles to find the articles written by people who actually have a deep understanding of core concepts in this space like the difference between a DAC and a DAO. Articles which do a good job explaining it are written by journalists, we then look at how many other articles the journalist wrote and give a stake to that journalist.
A lot of journalists for example are behind Ethereum and don't really believe in Bitshares. But they are doing a great job explaining Ethereum and the concepts which at the foundation are shared by Bitshares. These journalists in my opinion are more important than some people at Russia Today who barely understand the difference between Bitcoin 1.0 and Bitcoin 2.0 and who don't know the impact these new concepts could have on crowd funding, capitalism, social entrepreneurship, and more.
Let it be somewhat random. The criteria for reward should be known, but a way to choose journalists should ultimately be decided in my opinion letting each member of this thread and others involved with the airdrop compile a list of great articles and then each of us pick our favorite journalist. Then each of our favorites should be guaranteed to receive in the airdrop.
We don't need a vote as that would be more complicated than it's worth. I think we can all agree that Adam Levine and Vitalik Buterin have written very important articles at critical times. But there may be some other people who aren't even aware that they were describing some of the concepts we discuss here and those people should be contacted and given the airdrop as well. For these people it would be almost accidental that they thought up similar ideas on their blog or they just were researching the same subject matter but in my opinion it should go like this:
1. If you can prove you spent a lot of time researching and communicating about decentralized autonomous corporations or compatible concepts then you should be given a stake if the quality of your communication shows a level of understanding.
2. If you can prove you've spent a lot of time on any project in the decentralization community which furthers the ends of the Bitshares community. This would mean the vast majority of altcoin developers, contributors, writers, blogs, exchange owners and pool operators.
3. If you are known not to be hostile to altcoins, or to the vision for the future that the Bitshares community has. The vision being that most people on this forum think DACs should be legal and not banned, and that crowd funding is for the greater good. People who don't support the idea of the DAC (or who push regulation over innovation) probably aren't going to want shares anyway.
A lot of people fit into these three categories. These are the only three I could think of but I'm sure there are some more fundamentals that we all agree on and that the majority of the decentralization community agrees on. I don't think the majority of us want to hurt the little guy or reward botnet operators, thieves and scammers, so anyone shown to have done those things should probably be excluded.