<aside> đź’ˇ TL;DR: JournoDAO is seeking support from Future Quest grant funding to design and pilot a global decentralized climate journalism initiative to document and communicate the scope of the climate crisis, its impact on local communities and amplify efforts to adapt and build resiliency in the hope that such projects can be supported and replicated on a broader scale.
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The climate crisis is a global problem that manifests in the form of myriad different threats on the ground across countless communities worldwide. From the threat of rising sea levels to extreme weather events, wildfires and even glacial lake outburst flooding in mountain towns and cities, each community faces a unique array of challenges as the climate crisis continues to intensify.
Journalists play a critical role in helping humanity understand, document and respond to the complex set of impacts faced by peoples and ecosystems worldwide. Unfortunately, the current set of incentives and business models that drive the news business appear to hinder rather than help journalists rise to this challenge of a lifetime.
We believe that the principles of decentralization and Web3 tools may represent a better way for journalists and impacted communities to coordinate and collaborate to cover the story of the century.
A decentralized newsroom of trained reporters, citizen journalists and other contributors is the ideal type of organization to help us all make sense of our changing world, respond to critical emergencies and help inform adaptation and regenerative rebuilding. We plan to test the concepts, tools and incentive models that have seen success in other areas of Web3 to test our thesis that they can improve the process of and prospects for journalism. This could include the use of NFTs, soul-bound tokens, on-chain attestations and data storage, oracles and the development of a novel “document-to-earn” incentive model.
We have chosen two project managers from within our core to see this project through to completion.
Eric Mack, co-founder of JournoDAO and one of the project managers is a working journalist with many years of experience covering climate issues for outlets such as NPR, Forbes and CNET.
Crystal Street, founding member and project manager, was a contributing member of All for Climate DAO and helped provide support to their writer’s collective during her active time in the DAO.
Step 1: Research the scope of a decentralized reporting infrastructure to implement this project on a global scale.
Step 2: Build the reporting protocol based on the research gathered in Phase 1. Our vision is to construct an infrastructure based on existing web3 protocols that will be open source and serve as a public good to be forked by other web3 communications and media projects.
Step 3: Test the decentralized reporting protocol with climate stories, projects and contributors that JournoDAO selects or curates from existing web3 climate reporters or citizen journalists in the ReFi or Regen communities.