My experience founding Project Giving | SndBox Summer Camp

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How can I even put this experience into words? On the one hand this has been one of the most rewarding experiences I have had. On the other though, this has been an incredibly challenging experience which I genuinely believe has taught me many important life lessons.

This post is my personal experience developing @ProjectGiving, Steemit's first fully accountable NGO over the last two weeks. This is also my post for the final 2018 #SndBoxSummerCamp and I will outline how the Project evolved, what it was like to lead an international team, and what the successes and challenges were that our team faced.

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If you havent already, I would also highly recommend checking out:

• The official @ProjectGiving introduction post/whitepaper.
• Our team post outlining the development of Project Giving.

A quick summary - What is Project Giving

• Project Giving's primary motive as the Steem blockchain's first NGO is to use the power of the Steemit platform as a tool to provide meaningful assistance to people and projects who need our help all around the world.
• Project Giving's team finds non-profit initiatives either through Steemit or online who are trying to create positive change in their communities or surrounding environment.
• Project Giving's team then creates a personalized blog which shares the story of these initiatives, how they improve the lives of those around them, and how they would benefit from Steemit based financial assistance.
• All author rewards from these posts are then donated to these initiatives in order to facilitate genuine social development, all thanks to the power of the Steemit community.
• Therefore, through Project Giving, all Steemians from minnows to whales, have the opportunity to use their influence on the Steemit platform to improve the lives of people around the world who need our help.

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Project Overview

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Graphic created by @travelling-two

The Beggining

In the previous @SndBox quest we were asked to formulate the outline for a project which could be operationalized on the Steem Blockchain. You can read this post here. Shortly after this quest was over, I was honored to find out that my project was one of few selected which would then be worked on further in the final quest.

What this meant was that all the other participants in the quest (about 50 Steemians) would all choose one of these projects to work on and develop into a reality. Little information had been given to us before the teams had been set up and so out of the blue, I suddenly found myself leading the development of an NGO on the blockchain with a group of 8 brilliantly talented other Steemians.

This came as a bit of shock since I am currently already deep in university summer classes, working two jobs and involved in a bunch of other commitments. But never the less, here we were, 9 strangers, all from different countries and with different sets of skill, tasked with turning an idea that I had been thinking about for months into a reality. Talk about a shock!

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Here is a breakdown of the Project Giving team

Name	Username	Country	Role
Tristan	@tristanoliff	Canada/South Africa	Project Director & Founder
Gabriel	@dedicatedguy	Venezuela	Writer & Researcher
Becca & Sam	@travelling-two	Thailand	Writers & Marketing
Rowan	@raj808	United Kingdom	Marketing & Writer
Hakym	@kymio	Malaysia	Graphic & Visual design
Mustafa	@mnallica	Turkey	Graphic & Visual design
Anna	@anna-mi	Russia	Content Creator
Ayodeji	@golddeejay	Nigeria	Writer & Researcher
Sophia	@imaginedragon	USA	Writer & Marketing

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While the task ahead seemed daunting at first, it only took a couple of hours of chatting on discord with the new team to see that I was lucky enough to be paired with an incredibly creative and motivated team. This was made apparent by the fact that before I had even had the chance to properly introduce myself to everyone, out chat-room was already filled with innovative ideas and an basic agenda of initial tasks which we all had to complete.

My first action in the group was to create a short 4 question message for everyone to answer. The point of the questions were to get to know everyone a little better, as well as get everyone's initial ideas and thoughts on the project. A screenshot of this initial message can be seen to the right.

The Middle

After we had all gotten to know each other a little more, we moved to the task of setting the agenda. Below is a screenshot of one an early message by @travelling-two regarding what the group felt would be the most pertinent things to do.

Over time we added more tasks to this list such as developing our accountability structure, finding initiatives to sponsor, creating a proposal/whitepaper & reaching out to potential investors into our project.

One of my immediate concerns was that some of the group members might be on different pages about what the project was about and trying to achieve, as well as what tasks everyone could take part in over the period of the quest. To clear this up, I decided to create a development plan which would act as the framework for the development of the project.

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Read our development plan here.

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This development plan was very thorough and included an indepth summary of what Project Giving was trying to achieve, how this would take place. On top of this, the development plan also separated all the tasks which the Team sought to complete, including who would be working on what tasks.

Below are some examples of slides from the development plan which I made.

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This slide from the development plan outlines how Project Giving works, from initiative selection, to blog development, to fund collection and donations transfer. These section was created to make sure that everyone on the team was on the same page about how Project Giving would work.

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This slide above outlines all the task which we sought to complete before the end of the quest. While we did not manage to achieve all of them, it was always useful to have a document available to everyone which clearly showed what needed to be done.

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This slide above details task 1 - the creation of graphics and post design. As you can see, the slide includes what task need to be done and a basic idea for how this can be achieved. The slide also includes who will be working on this task as well as a rough deadline for when it should be completed.

Creating the Proposal

Since Project Giving would have to rely heavily on finding affluent steemers/Steemit communities for large donations, we thought it would be important to create a professional whitepaper/proposal which would clearly explain what our project was trying to achieve. Since our project also deals with a lot of finances, it was important for us to show our accountability protocol.

The outline of the proposal was made by @travelling-two while the accountability section was created by @raj808. The logos used were a combination of the work of @mnallica, @anna-mi & @kymio. Meanwhile much of the ideas for the content came through discourse on our discord. My task for this was to organize and write all this information into an easy to read document which could be shared around Steemit.

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Below are some selected pages from our Proposal/Whitepaper.

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Read the official @ProjectGiving introduction post/whitepaper here.

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The end

Once all the previous tasks outlined above had been completed, the Project Giving team felt as though we had built a solid enough foundation from which to create and post our introductory post.

To write the outline of the post, I created a google doc where I outlined everything I believed needed to be addressed in the post. Group members were then encouraged to fill any information on any of the sections which they wanted to contribute to. (This can be seen in the screenshot to the right)

Once this information had been edited by our team proofreaders, it was then transferred to the Project Giving Steemit account where I formed and posted our introduce yourself blog.

Reflection

After months of though and weeks of hard work, to see the official #introduceyourself Steemit post for @projectgiving was quite an emotional experience. This emotion was only amplified by the wonderfully positive feedback we received on the project post, just two days after its completion. Having already raised more than $60 SBD which will all go to charity, I think the entire team has seen the beginning of our presence online as having been a complete success

However, now that that emotion has subsided, I believe its reflect on this entire experience from a critical point of view. I feel as though this is a healthy exercise, and one of the best ways to truly comprehend the past two week. On that note, here is my honest opinion on the trials and tribulations of the development of Project Giving.

Successes

• Strong Belief in Project Giving: In my opinion, one of the biggest successes was that both the team and all Steemians who have read about our project so far have shown both a lot of faith in the project idea as well as its usefulness to the Steem Blockchain. All in all, people are happy to see that Steemit is moving in a humanitarian direction with projects such as ours.
• Strong Communication: Throughout the last two weeks, I believe that our group has been very good at communicating with one another.
• Finishing our introduction post: Just the fact that we were able to complete most of our foundation work and move on to posting a comprehensive and well received first post just goes to show how successful the team has been together.
• Finding initiatives to support: At the end of the day, our project exists to help others. So I believe that one of the best successes for our project so far has been our ability to already find numerous positive and humbling initiatives who seek to work with us.

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Challenges

• Time Zones: While our team gained a lot from being based all around the world, I think that the process of keeping in touch with each other was made difficult by the fact that we all live together in different time zones. Because of this, there was rarely a time when the whole team was online together.
• Delegation of tasks: I believe that one of the biggest challenges for me personally was learning how to effectively delegate tasks to everyone. While the group came up with amazing ideas together, I believe that we could have been more effective as a group delegating tasks between one another. Naturally, all of us run on different schedules and have different responsibilities, but this is definitely something to keep in mind if I ever do project management again.
• Finding Sponsors: Even though we believe we have done as much as possible during the past 2 weeks to draw the interest of long-term sponsors for our group, we still struggled to convince affluent steemit members to pledge a vote a week to our cause. However, we are a young movement and over time we are sure that more support will come.
• Timeline for task completion: This one is a bit of both... On the one hand, deadlines which were set were often very ambitious and not met on time, on the other hand though, we finished most of our tasks for the quest early because of the fact we set ourselves these kinds of schedules.

The future

All in all, working on Project Giving with the team has been an amazing experience. I believe that we achieved all that we could, and at the end of it all, we made an amazing dream of an Accountable, Transparent and Functional NGO on Steemit a reality.

From my side, I had the incredible opportunity to lead a team during a very proactive period of project building. I believe that the lessons I have learnt from this will be extremely valuable!

I must also take this opportunity to thank my entire team from the bottom of my heart for this entire experience. Without you all, Project Giving would still only be an idea in the back of my head, instead of the fully fledged initiative it is right now.... You've all been the best! Thank you :)

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Finally, a huge thank you must also go out to @sndbox and the two organizers of the #SndBoxSummerCamp, @anomadsoul & @GuyFawkes4-20. I can't imagine all the reading you two will have to do at the end of this quest, but we are all extremely grateful for all the work you have put into incubating our projects!

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Thank you all for reading this far!
Long live @ProjectGiving!

Tristan Oliff - Project Manager