Ratifying our new mission statement

This is a proposal to ratify the new slogan and mission statement for Water & Music, reflecting our evolution as a community and organization over the last year.

We formally introduced a draft of our new mission statement to the W&M community on August 30, 2022, and gave members roughly two weeks (up until September 12, 2022) to issue feedback and suggest any changes in content or language. The Core Team then reviewed and either accepted or rejected these suggestions in line with the higher-level intention of the document.

You can review a detailed changelog in this Google Doc: https://docs.google.com/document/d/17a0C5W4qDWuJsd6p4Oj2bPnebp5-VlZmd8dTqt2QfYM/edit?usp=sharing

The main motivation to introduce a new mission statement is that W&M has rapidly expanded in the last year from being solely a media company or newsletter, into serving as a much more expansive network of music-industry professionals and researchers, with media serving as just one arm alongside education, events, and more. We are putting this new framing to a Snapshot vote because we want both newer and older members to be on the same page about the new language — which frames networks and connections among people (as opposed to solely media alone) as the primary source of value in the membership, and the driving influence behind all the initiatives we pursue.

Please note that this is NOT a strategy or operations planning document. Rather, it is meant to be a more evergreen set of core goals and principles that W&M staff, contributors, and community members can reference on a regular basis to help drive strategy and decision-making. Unlike, say, a strategy or ops plan, this doc is meant to be completely metric- and technology-agnostic.

The full, updated mission statement is copied and pasted below the dashed line here, and in the Google Doc linked above. All $STREAM holders can vote on this proposal using a 1 address 1 vote strategy (as opposed to 1 token 1 vote).

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MISSION STATEMENT 2.0

Water & Music is a research and intelligence network for the new music business.

Our mission is to make the music industry more innovative, cooperative, and transparent. We accomplish this through a social approach to knowledge exchange, building collaborative systems for music professionals to create, distribute, and discuss actionable, industry-leading insights.

Examples of these systems include:

• Collaborative research projects and databases that leverage the multidisciplinary knowledge and experience of our professional network, with lines of inquiry determined bottom-up by our community’s needs.

• A private online community and in-person events network that serve as the de facto destinations for watercooler conversations among today’s industry innovators.

• Peer-to-peer educational workshops that introduce our community to the perspectives of practitioners building the future of the industry.

We embrace a collective approach to operations and decision-making, empowering our community members to satisfy their own innate curiosities and pursue their own self-directed learning agendas and research projects. Through this process, we hope to elevate our members' wider understanding of the music-industry landscape, and equip them with the tools and mindsets to navigate it successfully.