IMPACTS
This quarter, the Bloomers Without Borders Engineers team completed several features that benefit Local Bloom communities. This post is a summary of what we did and the impacts it's having. Apologies this is long. Next quarter we will publish a monthly update. xoxo
One of the things we've found as we've begun to invite more people and projects from our respective local communities to join Bloom Network, is that folks have been confused about if they need to organize formally as a Local Bloom, and all the overhead one would assume that implies, or even give up their own identity. Bloom is not about circumscribing things into our thing. We are a backbone network architecture for values aligned people and projects to support one another across silos.
Bloom Network as a social network is intended to be truly place-based - in fact, we have the legal planning done to formally make Bloom Network owned and governed by place-based communities around the world! Now that our first members are onboarded to our very own online social network, and we've begun to grow, we've implemented a change that removes the anchor project from the top of the page, and puts it instead as the first project in the featured projects section. We've found that this is making Bloom Network more accessible and understandable to new projects that Local Organizers want to invite to join Bloom to receive the benefits of our local market connectivity building and our Local Action Rewards grants.
We're especially proud of the Featured Projects Section. It uses a Netflix-like UI, where users can swipe or scroll horizontally to view projects operating in this Local Bloom. The wholesome content the world needs!
At the request of Local Bloom leader Danibelle Gennety, we've added the ability to see your Local members, instead of the whole global network of members. This is a private members-only feature for privacy reasons, but when members go to the "Bloomers" section from your navigation sidebar, you can now toggle members' profile cards between global and local. Or, access your local members from your local media feed.
Another request we received from members was to make it easier to find their post drafts. We added a My Drafts button at the top right of your post editor. This is a similar UI pattern as how you find your draft posts on Twitter, cough cough, X, cough cough, "oligarch social media much?".
One thing we found when trying to give Bloomers' money through our Local Action Rewards program, despite us having created training materials and how-to videos and offered office hours and and and, is that no one was going to the trouble of setting up a Metamask wallet. So we decided to replace BloomNetwork.earth's login with a system that automatically creates a Web3 wallet for them.
During this action reporting period, members of dOrg.tech supported Bloom in implementing Capsule for sign-in. We found several incompatibility bugs, namely with older devices that don't support passkeys, which the Capsule team has been responsive to and pushing new features to address the issues that our extremely non-technical community has found. Bloomers are now able to receive money from our grants pool in cryptocurrency, and swap it directly into their country's currency, without going to the trouble of setting up an exchange account. This is insanely improved user experience.
This enabled us to distribute $15,000 to Bloom members during our first grants round!!!
For any fellow web3 app developers reading this post, please know that what on the ground people need is plainspeak descriptions of what each interaction or button or display is. Anywhere we have been able to add those in-line explainers to web3 tools we are using, there has been zero confusion, whereas anywhere we don't have the ability to write custom text into modals or features, we had over ten hours per week of user questions, for only a small 150 person initial user base! Please take note if you are designing for mass adoption.
Lastly, during this time period we adjusted the media feed display to show each Impact Report's impacts. We've received feedback from our marketing team that the feed is still difficult to read - i.e. it's not easy to read the title and impacts and understand what is happening in Bloom, in the way that a Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter feed reads. In reality we are mostly longer form content like Medium, but we are getting reports that we haven't found the right middleground here for folks who might want to simply glance through the media feed and click into the occasional post that piques their interest. If you have any ideas at all for how to improve that, please get in touch with us at community [at] bloomnetwork.earth with your suggestions.
If you have other features or improvements you'd like to see, hit up the Engineers team at https://bloomnetwork.earth/learn/faq
Bloomers Without Borders January Report
Results: Our activities this month are largely pre-impact, but we set up systems to support deeper establishment of local and bioregional economies; Completed the FLO (Flowers) Marketplace for local business discovery and surplus-sharing ...
Food Forest Maintenance And Community Building
Results: Facilitated community connection for 12 people; Performed maintenance on a community food forest
Our Local Bloom On Giveth And Gitcoin
In order to more fully live into reciprocity…sharing our stories while inviting financial reciprocity.
Facilitate Strategic Retreat
Results: Facilitated strategic plannign retreat for NOFA NH including 12 board and staff
Introduction
Introducing myself
Momo Is Coming!
coliazul - theater - community - creation
