Web3 Design DAO - ideas on uses and a question: do we need one?

[beltran]

(This Design Dao/Agency has a dedicated Telegram group > join it here

Copy pasting here a conversation from Telegram to keep it independent

I think there is an opportunity for our community to create a DAO to

• coordinate on certain decisions (we could use different tools but having a DAO sounds interesting)
  ie (moving to another multichat like rocketchat, changing the date and time of the community call etc)

• experiment with incentivization and reward to participation (like @sarahbmills and @SimonaPop where suggesting...ie to reward designers who put in work for the collective good.
  Can we create our own DToken?

• experiment with the LR Liberal Radicalism funding method proposed by Vitalik,+ Hitzig + Weyl 2 months ago

• proposing, funding, creating, managing, subprojects the community decides to pursue as a whole (ie the Web3 design system, or preparing a DesignCon, or launching a research group on design for plasma, or design for state channels, creating a blockchain for designers course, pushing forwards the education glossary, or what design did Vitalik had in mind in the LR paper... and more )
  Some of these things could also be funded by Bounties @SimonaPop but I'm interested in experimenting on how we can coordinate together and decide which projects are more important to pursue as a community

and these are only some of my initial ideas
but would love to hear more from you on what you DAO experts see we could benefit from using a DAO (your DAO)

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Pat | DAOstack answer

Beltran — I would encourage you to visit and view the proposal history at alchemy.daostack.io — I recommend using a reputation system like our own and not a token system for governance as it introduces a plutocratic attack vector.

My overall take here: unless a DAO has more than a significant quorum of decision makers (around Dunbar’s number) there’s no real reason to use one over some sort of centralized voting structure. I’m not sure this community is of high enough quantity to meet that number.

I think you’ve made some assumptions here on what a “good” DAO structure would look like without examining the possible options.

---

my reply:
admittedly this is only an idea, to launch the discussion
and a large motivator is just "let's play with a DAO (even if probably we wouldn't need one)"

[tagpatch]

To continue this conversation from Telegram, I think a good way to start playing around with the concepts of DAO's is to center around the work we want to produce as a community.

How do we decide on what work to do?
And how do we incentivize and reward community members that produce high quality work?

[tagpatch]

I would also add that voting may not be the best mechanism to rely on all the time. If we need to vote as a community to make every decision, then work will be painfully slow and inefficient.

Instead, I think there will be some natural leaders that arise and start making certain decisions around what to work on, what to fund, and how much to fund these issues. (At a certain point, these leaders could be justified by their reputation in the community). But only when a community member doesn't agree with the decision of a leader, do we raise a dispute and vote to determine the outcome. This would insure an efficiency in the community and avoid bureaucratic overhead.

[charlieellington]

Hey @beltran,

Love the idea

I had a similar idea back in June . It was more business minded than a design commons. Although this was a secondary feature.

The main idea was to get a bunch of freelance designers working together. Working with exciting projects, startups and protocols. Earning tokens along the way. The tokens would then go into a fund/DAO/smart-contract in return for a share of. Spreading risk like an investment fund. On the start-up logic that only a few projects and teams head to the moon.

Between jobs I did a sprint and mocked up a MVP landing page and paper:

https://www.decentralizeddesignagency.com/ -

Summarising a load of paper notes and an intense day of work. A very early mock up full of mistakes and rough ideas

I shared with few people and it was placed on the back burner over client work. Thinking since was to pursue a more centralised route of sharing work. With the fund a cool idea to build as the work built up. And, maybe make it a DAO. But, in business order, with the resources and time over living day to day, that pretty much came last

I love what you're proposing. If there's any synergy in ideas, it would be awesome to get on a call and discuss them further.

[beltran]

Awesome, we've been brooding about the same ideas
let's see how the community responds but we definitively have to talk

[beltran]

hey I had an idea that would allow the DAO to get funds and hence would make having a DAO more valuable:

what if the DesignDao is like an agency
where each company pays a monthly subscription
members of the DAO would be designers, who also work at these member companies,

The services are mutually beneficial: when one of us wants to do some research or tap into the collective design knowledge
a "job" or "project" is started
other designers who have knowledge about that topic can decide if they want to participate
or can be asked to participate
and be rewarded for their collaboration and knowledge with some of the funds / tokens from the subscriptions
(or a work token, burn and mint per cycle ... TBD later)
and some DesignDao governance tokens probably based on the value of their contribution (ie Colony model @tagpatch or Wetonomy model )

Maybe one day we can also sell these services as an agency to non-member companies,
but I'd start from building the tools and projects and help for the whole community and each other first.

It's a way to tap into our collective Design Knowledge
+ incentivize designer's participation into building the projects and tools we want to have

and/or some/all of the funds could go to sponsoring the projects we want to build and tools that we all need
(hints in the first post up)

what do you all say?

[markoprljic]

Interesting observation, let me crunch it for a while and I'll get back to you. Sounds like an open marketplace, worried about the value prop or ROI for the companies.

[tagpatch]

Yeah I would also have to chew on this one a little. At first glance, I almost imagine it being a sort of patreon model. We (colony or other companies) 'subscribe' to this DAO because we recognize it as an investment into the larger UX ecosystem, which would eventually be beneficial for our dApp. (yes,)AND we could possibly use design resources for UX audits, user testing, or other projects that our company may need.

But I agree with Mark, I would have to think about the ROI of this. But the concept could work as long as the projects the money is funding is directly benefiting the larger Ethereum UX ecosystem.

[charlieellington]

Hey, who's keen for a call on Friday?

@pet3rpan, @beltran, Mattybchats - we were discussing in Telegram. I understand that i make the time zones awkward this week:

Ref: http://bit.ly/2Q101GT

I've set up a Doodle with some suggestions:

Doodle: Design Dao call

Brazil : Berlin : Sydney
5:30am : 9:30am : 7:30pm
6:00am : 10:00am : 8:00pm
6:30am : 10:30am : 8:30pm
7:00am : 11:00am : 9:00pm
7:30am : 11:30am : 9:30pm
5:00pm : 9:00pm : 7:00 am (Saturday)

[pet3rpan]

done, thank you helping organise. Dropped the ball on this

[beltran]

Capturing some conversations that happened in Telegram that will be otherwise lost forever (I had missed them for example)

Jim Kosem @jkosem

(in reply to my post)

I’ve been thinking a lot along the same lines. One thing though would be how to organise and potentially stake each ‘job’. Would each have to have its own charter of sorts?

The charter (or whatever you would want to call it, ‘constitution’ may be a bit offputting) could define how it would run, most importantly what defines success and pay out scales
and then in theory there would be votes on this

Charlie Ellington @charlieellington

I've been chatting to someone about something similar. It might not work on all contexts.

At the end of a project or weekly sprint. The people on the project vote on the input of the individual team/project members. Funds/payment is then distributed based on the contribution.

Jim Kosem @jkosem

Ah thats interesting and I agree, would not work in all contexts. Would have to be quite task specific.
Charlie Ellington
I've been chatting to someone about something similar. It might not work on all contexts. At the end of a project or weekly sp
Why would you vote at the end of the sprint? Shouldn’t it be before start?
I guess the issue is how to define value and that you did what you said you were going to do. Much harder in design realms. I think its possible though if there was some sort of user story sort of mechanism - meaning that the story is fulfilled then its done, and thus paid or paid into a pot
this might again require some sort of vote or stake
at which point the designer/worker in question might feel like he needs to jump through a lot of hoops - whereas in theory he isn’t. In fact you would be not having to deal with all sorts of usual agency nonsense like multiple, subjective and potentially baseless restarts, etc.

Charlie Ellington @charlieellington

I think it wouldn't work in a lot of cases. We were coming from the context of solving a creative problem. You run a session to solve it. Then at the end of the session. The group votes on people's input.

In that case, it would be a system to make sure no one was rewarded for just showing up and making no input.

Jim Kosem @jkosem

So from a workshop as a payable thing
I’ve worked with people before who use and define design tasks quite well - quantifying a creative task is hard though

Lili CryptoDecks @lililashka

The combination of reputation system and staking/voting system based on the amount/difficulty of work would work. There are many elements crucial to the success of the project that are difficult to quantify (care, level of participation, etc). Went to a workshop by P2P foundation recently and we were discussing about this

Jim Kosem @jkosem

Do you have any links by any chance?
You would have to potentially incorporate some agile sorts of ceremony on each thing/card/task, but it could work in terms of quantifying complexity instead of how long it will take
so if you’re using the fibonacci scoring, you might be able to link that task complexity score to a price somehow

Lili CryptoDecks @lililashka

Unfortunately the sess was not recorded. But what they proposed called ‘Distributed Cooperative Organisation’ — instead of the usual DAO

Jim Kosem

Good to have a new name
Well hopefully we’ll see some more of this come out - happy to help in discussion, etc.
@Lililashka let me know

James Hancock

DCo-op pronounced “Dee coh op” or Distributed Cooperative.
Definition of a Coperative "A cooperative (also known as co-operative, co-op, or coop) is "an autonomous association of persons united voluntarily to meet their common economic, social, and cultural needs and aspirations through a jointly-owned and democratically-controlled enterprise".
Being an organization is implied in being a Cooperative. So no need to leave in the O.
Sounds a bit nicer to me

Jim Kosem

Yeah good point. I would agree. Distributed Cooperative.
Try saying Decentralised Autonomous Organisation three times fast

James Hancock

A bit more info on Coops for those itereseted.

Cooperative

Jim Kosem @jkosem

I suppose a cooperative is by default distributed in a sense

James Hancock

distributed in a blockchain sense way for DCoops
As a subset of a DAO
an example of distinction, Governance of my project I hope to be a dao where stakeholders can signal what we prioritize working on.
But I wouldn't say it is a Co-op because there is no "Economic participation by members"
They aren't working on the site or improving the Econmomic prospects for other group members who are members of the site.

Jim Kosem @jkosem

Whats the project? I’ve been chatting with people about organising design work this way

James Hancock

Jim Kosem
Whats the project? I’ve been chatting with people about organising design work this way

It is Tennagraph. A signalling website for ethereum where stake holders can signal their stances on EIPs
Much like http://coin.dance

[jkosem]

Hey all wish I would have seen this before. I guess our messaging is a bit too decentralised as well.

[beltran]

So today (2018-11-30) we had our first DesignDao Call #1
that you can rewatch on youtube

a lot of interesting people and discussions
read about the participants and the topics discussed in our HackMD agenda and Meeting Notes
https://hackmd.io/s6IL_NesQ6qzdAPq5Y2F3w

[markoprljic]

Following up on the question: "Does anyone have a project/client that might be interested in trying this approach?"
Few days before design DAO idea came out I proposed to do an experiment at the consultancy I work at to convert it to DAO. Not sure if I'm going to get buy in on that but I took it as a side project and will do it myself.
I believe we could use it as a blue print for our design DAO, because it has similarities in many aspects, even touch points with startup structure. We have around 50 people with different job titles, many projects and clients, internal/external processes etc. all which can be re though and taken into count when designing a functional DAO.

Besides that, I'm collaborating with few more people on the very same idea, how to turn traditional organisation into DAO. I believe I'll have more info after our call next week.

Let me know if all this makes sense and anything rings the bell.

[markoprljic]

Maybe we should talk to these guys and see how they did it https://comradecoop.com/

[charlieellington]

Hey @markoprljic, do you have any contacts at Comradecoop? Looks super interesting.

[charlieellington]

Hi everyone,

// Short Read:

I created a Design Dao Prototype to create projects and work together:
http://project.deepwork.studio/

...

// Introduction

Before I went on holiday, I was debating the centralised agency approach vs. going fully behind a decentralised design DAO.

I believe there are huge benefits to both. I started a mini personal 'Design Sprint'. Working alone is not the best community approach. All ideas are early, non-defined and up for adaptation.

My goal was to see if there was a way to combine the benefits of the traditional agency client relationship with a decentralised community of designers.

If you're not familiar with Design Sprints - I recommend reading up the intro to the process here: gv.com/sprint/ . If you're a Design Sprint expert - you'll notice I deviated from the process considerably .

I also had little internet connection. Most work was done on pen and paper and then summarised on my iPhone. I apologise for the very rough notes, grammatical errors, poor handwriting and other fast approaches making this difficult to consume.

...

// Summary

For those who want to skip my process and notes, this was the end result:

A prototyped solution to create a design project in the Design DAO: http://project.deepwork.studio/

Example User Stories:

A relayer wants to create a project with multiple designers to solve a design problem for a client.

Designers in the Web3 Design Community need a method to work together on projects and earn an income in the process.

When companies need a design problem solved that benefits the ecosystem, they can fund from multiple resources and get designers to solve it.

...

// Process

// Day 1

Goals and design problem:

Link to rough notes: https://www.dropbox.com/s/o9jeejcza7ez276/Sprint%20Day%201%20-%20Goals%20and%20Design%20Problem.pdf?dl=0

// Day 2

Exploring existing solutions
Creating competing solutions

Link to rough notes: https://www.dropbox.com/s/kxzcep27afex0ue/Sprint%20Day%202%20-%20Competing%20Solutions.pdf?dl=0

// Day 3 Morning

Picking the focus

Link to rough notes: https://www.dropbox.com/s/m47gj3adi4hkim0/Sprint%20Day%203.1%20-%20Focus.pdf?dl=0

// Day 3 Afternoon

User Flow, Storyboards and Wireframes

Link to rough notes: https://www.dropbox.com/s/lz5kuzcxcs1xs40/Sprint%20Day%203.2%20-%20User%20Flow%20and%20Wireframes.pdf?dl=0

// Day 4

Building the prototype:

Prototype Link: http://project.deepwork.studio/

// Day 5

Now and next steps:

Community Feedback
One on one UX interviews
Going to share with my existing clients for feedback

...

// Results

I'll update here with the Sprint results. The next step is the feedback and building an action plan from it.

..

// Actions

If anyone would like to do a one on one call, please let me know on Telegram: https://t.me/joinchat/Fx2Anw8d0PCeH5DtuaWOOw

[markoprljic]

I don't but won't be a problem to reach out and ask them.