Introduction

This is the first public progress report of the proposal to address the brand development and website development of the KSM Society.

In March 2021, the KSM Society (Kappa Sigma Mu Society) completed its first association cycle with 150 members admitted worldwide. The development of the Society was planned and approved back in mid-2020. There were some milestones in the original proposal that still need to be delivered. The cyborg self-obliteration narrative is done (first milestone). The brand is a work in progress (second milestone), but website development has not started.

This document reports what the team has done so far and the plans for the next few weeks.

Context

The main objective of the proposed working roadmap is to deliver a website with information about Society. Take a look at the website proposal for full context. The planned deliverables are:

A new brand and assets to be used in future communications and products;
A marketing strategy to communicate about the Society aiming to attract attention from communities interested in the project, with a particular focus on art collectives, musicians, designers, communications professionals, and developers;
A website including information on the rules to join, current members with proof-of-ink, narrative and visual aid behind the program, funded projects, and ongoing ones.

Brand Book

Brand Book V1

A brand representing a Society designed to experiment with the future of governance couldn't have a monolithic structure. With the Brand manual, we want to establish brand governance based on open-source best practices, exercising the brand as a framework.

We want the brand to be flexible, allowing individual contributions and expanding the brand beyond this initial release.

Who can use the Brand Book?

The elements included in the manual were developed to meet the needs of experienced designers but also non-technical users who would like to use the creative assets. The files are organized in various formats, all of them with download links clearly indicated.

How to use the Brand Book?

We expect the Society members to use the brand assets to constantly challenge the brand, pushing it to the limit of their self-obliteration.

We think of this project as a brand laboratory. Designers can experiment with the assets, and software developers can programmatically generate them, creating continuous experimentation and testing of new concepts aligned with the original Society vision. In the manual, we illustrated the best application practices following the flexibility idea.

Please try the assets, mix them with other elements. Give your feedback if you feel something could be different. We are preparing the tools to make collaboration easier.

Website

https://ksmsociety.io

The website will host the web3 application connected to Kusama RPC to interact with the Society Pallet. We're going to start the development of the application in June.

We already started to publish content there. Currently, you can find all the links for the brand assets, vision documents, and references with texts and multimedia we found on the internet. We want the website to host or link all the content related to Society.

The content that will be hosted there:

History of the Society;
Rules of the Society;
Videos and other resources about the Society;
Brand guide & assets;
A section about Kusama and blockchain technology (context).

These are the features we're going to implement in the following months:

Member explorer: profile of all members, one by one, with index, address, poi, and their head;
Web3 integration: for bidders to bid, candidates to monitor their candidacy and voting process;
Section to show latest challenge periods;
Integration with kappa sigma mu lounge to look up the conversation on the website;
A blog for members to create content with pending approval from others by signing.

Vision Document (WIP)

Vision Document

The Vision Document details the Objective, Scope, and Prerequisites of the brand development. It presents the Why, How, and What of the KSM Society. It was produced to guide designers and marketers in developing the new brand and driving the website building.

The document is still a work in progress. It emerged from the research and conducted interviews with selected active Society members. Questions about their vision and future of Society were asked. We compiled and systematized the interviews to understand essential concepts about the KSM brand.

It also contains ideas for future development initiatives that will manifest the visions of the members of Society. It details pain points and desires and shows a preliminary version of the brand application.

Progress

We are at the end of the rebranding process. The main deliverable for this phase is the Brand Book with instructions about how to use the new brand and examples of its use.

We follow the Double Diamond Design methodology. We already finished the research and insights phases and are now ideating and prototyping the website.

All deliverables

Image Research References: In this presentation, you can find references gathered on the web, images, videos, and projects we feel are related to the vision of the KSM Society. This helped the designers and marketers to think about possibilities for the new brand;
Texts and multimedia: On the KSM website, you can find links for all videos and documents released so far about the Society;
3D canary: In collaboration with Ignasi, we tested the possibilities to use a 3D canary for the new brand;
[WIP] Vision Document;
[WIP] Kappa Sigma Mu Brand Book V1 with character, brand, logo and typography;
[WIP] website.

We met weekly with JAM, RRTTI-5220, and Ignasi to show the brand development progress and discuss the next steps. Below you can find the report presentations for each week:

As we now feel comfortable with the MVP, we will start presenting the progress report in the Polkassembly for Society members to discuss it and give us feedback.

What's Next

In the next days we're going to consolidate the Brand Book with feedback from Society's members in this Polkassembly post.

In the next two weeks we're going to deliver the sitemap, wireframes, main pages design prototype and UI components library.

In parallel, we're starting the development of generic React components that will be used in the web application. The finished components development will start when we have the finished material from designers.