Hello Gnosis community,
My name is Alexander, and my background is in content and localization within Web3. Over time, working across different projects in this space, I’ve been drawn toward the question of how this work could be organized differently, and I’m currently building toward an answer.
There are a couple of topics I’d like to suggest for discussion that could be relevant to your ecosystem and potentially lead to further collaboration. I’ll go step by step.
Topic 1 – Text Quality
As ecosystems grow, the volume of content increases — technical documentation, marketing materials, UI, and localized versions across different languages. Beyond producing this content, maintaining consistency, tone, and meaning, both within the original and across languages, becomes increasingly important to ensure everything is communicated as intended.
AI and machine translation can now generate reasonably well-structured, grammatically correct texts and translations. However, based on language industry dynamics and my personal observations, achieving top quality still requires a human eye.
Human contributions can come on a volunteer basis, typically from community volunteers who contribute out of interest in the project, or from internal team members who take on copywriting or translation alongside their main responsibilities. Such contributors bring a strong understanding of the context, but their availability and level of involvement may vary, and they may not always have prior experience with this type of work.
Paid contributions, on the other hand, come from experienced professionals — linguists, writers, content creators. They understand best practices, can independently navigate the wider content framework, and deliver consistently once cooperation is established — but require resources, as this work is their primary professional activity.
While volunteer contributors can generally be sourced from within the community, professionals are typically engaged through centralized intermediaries, which take two main forms. The first is agencies: customers hire the agency, which distributes work across a pool of freelancers, captures a margin, and mediates communication between the customer and the contributor. The second is platforms and talent marketplaces, which connect customers and contributors more directly, but charge their own fees, retain control over user profiles and data, and don’t always offer a reliable way to execute agreements.
Beyond sourcing, coordination presents its own set of considerations. Consistent output depends on shared infrastructure: glossaries, translation memories, style guides, task distribution, schedules. What is less immediately obvious is that even with this infrastructure in place, output quality is closely tied to a contributor’s familiarity with the project. Understanding its tone, terminology, and intent is something that develops through sustained involvement rather than an onboarding brief.
Topic 2 – Decentralized Solution
Taken together, the challenges on the demand side of content and localization work tend to center on two things: establishing an effective coordination framework and sourcing the right contributors. Both are addressable, but current solutions rely on centralized structures that add cost, limit transparency, concentrate control over data, and are shaped by internal teams rather than the users.
Building a zero-fee, reputation-driven solution whose details are defined by its community of users has long been my goal in addressing these challenges. However, establishing such a structure is not straightforward, and even within Web3, decentralization in its original sense is increasingly seen as impractical and, more importantly, as something that doesn’t fit conventional profit models.
And this points to an interesting contradiction. Decentralization is one of the foundational promises of Web3, yet most products in the space are built and operated by centralized companies with operational costs to cover and revenue to generate. From that perspective, shifting control to a distributed system of participants reduces what can be owned and monetized — and is therefore not in the interest of the organization, even when it would clearly benefit the users. Moreover, users of centralized platforms are rarely motivated to drive this shift themselves, and are generally not aware that it is even possible or how it could be accomplished.
Perhaps the implication is that a genuinely decentralized solution is unlikely to emerge from within existing structures. If so, building one may require a different kind of framework entirely — one that builds around an already existing economic activity, aims primarily at providing functionality within that activity, takes shape through community input from the ground up, and incentivizes this type of structure through its tokenomics while avoiding operational costs.
And this is the direction I’ve been working on with my project, Pump Translations.
Discussion Questions
To better understand how these dynamics relate to your current experience, and to ground the discussion in practice, I suggest starting with one of the following questions:
1. How do you currently approach content coordination and contributor sourcing? Are there any challenges you’d like to discuss?
2. Have you thought about translating your website, documents, and other materials into different languages? If so, what has prevented that from moving forward?
3. Do you see operational costs and the need to generate consistent revenue as factors that limit decentralization? How is this approached within your organization?
4. Based on your experience, do you think it’s possible to connect on-chain governance to platform UI changes in a way that allows automatic execution following a successful vote?
5. Do you think that transaction outcomes within Gnosis Pay could be reflected in an on-chain reputation system?
Cc: @Kenk @ernst @Adrienne_Adz