These are the current objectives of the DAO. This is a living document that members contribute to. For more information or questions you can contact the DAO and council of cats on discord https://discord.gg/UVrCjxgCyn

Welcome! Let us introduce ourselves.

Hi! We’re the Stoner Cats, and we are the Metawood Studios DAO. We’re all owners of a Stoner Cats NFT, and we’re united in our dream that Hollywood can be decentralized, creators can be rewarded for their work, and that incorporating a community into the development of art helps all of us be content creators.

We work to help bridge the gap between technology, community and the business world primarily in the animation and media space. We believe that this method drives diversity, and will lead to content that not only better represents the creators, but content that aligns with the community and allows everyone to feel empowered to contribute.

What’s a DAO?

Before we dive more into how we work, we thought it would be good to explain a bit more about what we mean when we talk about how we’re structured as a DAO, or Decentralized Autonomous Organization.

Peter Yang has a great example of a what a DAO is and how it works from Twitter, and we’re going to quote him here:

Imagine you want to work for a hot tech startup… Instead of applying for a job, you can just join this startup’s Discord with one click. There’s no real onboarding — you see an overload of information, but you’re curious and start exploring.

You introduce yourself, and since you’re new someone reaches out to explain how things work here. They point you to two different ways to work for this startup, Bounties and Teams.

Bounties is a massive JIRA board with tickets on everything from taking meeting notes, to shipping a feature. [You start] by taking notes for a meeting, and share them in Discord. Someone marks the ticket as done, and you [get paid with] a few shares of the company in return.

You want to contribute more, and check out the #Growth Team Discord channel. Someone leads this team, but nobody reports to them. You volunteer to ship a marketing page for the website for 100 company shares. You’re finding it hard to coordinate with other people on this team, as everyone seems to be part time. Somehow you still manage to ship the page with another contributor, and you both get more shares.

You like that you only get rewarded if you put in the work vs. face time. You also figured out why people are part time — they’re all working for 5 other startups at the same time! People are just choosing to work on whatever they’re most interested in. And almost all decisions at these startups are public for everyone on the internet to see.

There do seem to be 20 people who are less part time at this startup. These core contributors all own significant company shares, and can vote on decisions. A month into working for this startup you want to get some performance feedback. However, you don’t have a manager. Instead, you meet 1:1 with core contributors to get feedback.

There’s also no career ladder, but… Someone submits a proposal to give you an $150k salary for your hard work. There’s no CEO to approve this. Instead, all contributors vote and the proposal passes. You feel validated that you’re getting a salary. Maybe you’ll only work for 2 other startups instead of 5. So that’s how this startup (DAO) works:

1) Most people are part time and work at multiple DAO’s

2) All decisions are transparent

3) You earn the right to own more of the company by putting in the work

In our DAO, our voting membership is made up of around 4700 Stoner Cats NFT owners. Our current equivalent to the Core Contributor is our Council of Cats, made up of 25 members who volunteered to help get the DAO up and running! We’re working on getting our equivalent of a voting / governance reward for contributors up and running, and at the moment we live in Discord. Now, before we get into how our DAO is structured, let’s talk a bit more about why we set up a DAO in the first place, and what our purpose is!

What’s the point?

Before we get to why we’re here, it’s time for a bit of a history lesson. This project was started when three fearless creators, Ash, Chris and Sarah, quit their day jobs to make their dream animation show. To quote their manifesto:

At Stoner Cats we believe that storytellers deserve an outlet where they can be valued and supported without having to bow to the machine of big media. So we’re tilting the model on its head and testing a new architecture using NFTs that can connect storytellers directly with their audience and essentially decentralize content production.

Maybe a strangely touching story about cats who get high, and the woman they love coming to terms with her memory loss and her mortality can be our unlikely hero in the story of decentralizing entertainment. The creators have lots more amazing Stoner Cats stories to tell (there are ball gags involved and it’s great.) If we’re right with this experiment, then this tribe we’re building online, anchored around access token NFTs, is structured to reward early believers, community participation and breaking down barriers between creator and consumer. If we’re right about all of that… then this will be a wonderful way for innovative, unique stories to be told for years and years to come.

Ash, Chris and Sarah were friends with Lisa Sterbakov and Mila Kunis, and through the teamwork of their production company, Orchard Farms, and their crypto/business incubator, 3050 Gang, they came up with the idea of funding their dream show with an NFT. The creators and the 3050 Gang partnered with Mack Flavelle and BigHead Club for the NFT’s, and that’s how we got here.

As part of that funding, they wanted to empower the NFT holders and Stoner Cats community to explore if the community could be used to build a DAO that could help solve 3 business problems:

1Primarily, determine if producing media content using a non-traditional / crypto / Web3 based model could produce a viable product,

2Embed the creators in the community to provide an almost instantaneous feedback loop between show and community, thereby shortcutting traditional, biased and slow feedback methods

3Build a decentralized organization that would be able to curate and produce future decentralized content in a financially sustainable manner that rewards creators and outside the box thinking.

And that’s why the DAO is here. Through voting proposals, the community has the chance to easily help guide the story, characters and anything really that we as a community decide! The artists, designers, writers and cast are all NFT holders too and together, we’re making something better than we could apart.

As we learn and experiment with Stoner Cats, we’re also working to bring the community that we’ve built to help produce other shows, bridge other creator / community gaps, and maybe even be the glue that holds a platform of decentralized content together in a Web3 world!