Can we build a better game?
Disclaimer: This post is a metaphor and thought experiment intended to get us thinking as a community about how we can evolve the DAO. The underlying insights and ideas presented here are mostly not mine and are attributable to many community members who have shared thoughts, feelings and feedback on the DAOs current model and community experience during Season 1.
It’s not a perfect metaphor and doesn’t account for everything each member feels, but hopefully, it has value in igniting healthy debate to make the DAO better for everyone as a whole.
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TLDR
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Developer DAO currently feels too large, and bureaucratic, which is harming the experience for the majority of members who are here to make friends, have fun, network, learn together and build cool stuff. Without having to worry about budgets, Governance, legal, finance etc.
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Should we redesign our $CODE rewards model to also reward folks for participation and learning, not just contribution, to help foster the primarily social experience that made the DAO great in the first place, and help achieve our mission?
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Can we increase the utility of the $CODE to provide more value to members, by introducing staking, using it to unlock opportunities in the DAO, and/or to allocate treasury funds in a more decentralised (and fun!) way (i.e. like ENS small grants)?
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Should we make the DAO itself smaller, disconnecting $CODE governance so directly to commercial and operational considerations, and rather use Governance to empower members to create Sub-DAOs that can more easily create value for the DAO and its ecosystem overall?
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We can think of DAOs as a game.
Games have various actors. Some build the game, some play the game and some simply enjoy the game.
Before $CODE, we were playing an entirely social game. The incentives were vibes, making friends, learning together and building cool stuff, and this is what drove our shared experience and the relationships formed during this period made the DAO an amazing community.
Since the launch of $CODE and the start of Season 1, we’ve been playing a different game.
The design of this new game incentivises folks to become Builders of the game. People play this game and when they “level up” and become Builders, there are not enough resources to fairly reward them.
Whilst this has resulted in excellent progress within some initiatives, it has resulted in frustration for many Players who want to become Builders of the game, or the majority of folks were quite happy with the old Player experience of vibing, making friends, learning together and building cool stuff.
In some cases, it seems to have put barriers in the way of folks doing many of those things they previously enjoyed as Players, and what gave their DAO membership its value.
Have we designed the wrong game?
If so, what could we do about it?
Redesign our game for the Players
All members of the DAO are equal, they just have different wants, needs and goals. (Check out this awesome talk from Chandler De Kock at DevCon - The Future of Social Coordination in DAOs)
The game should be designed to serve those member “personas” and perhaps focus first on the majority of our DAO members, the Players.
Players are the folks who are mostly here to vibe, make friends, learn together and build cool stuff, without the bureaucratic restrictions that come with navigating Governance, budget proposals, accounting, legal considerations and the like.
They should be able to contribute to building the DAO itself, but it shouldn’t be the only or even the default path they can take, as it largely is now. Realistically there are only so many Builders a DAO needs or can sustain; today’s experience favours the few, not the many.
We shouldn’t be afraid of rethinking and redesigning elements of the game we’re playing. In fact, we should always be actively working to improve it.
The launch of Developer DAO was an experiment after all.
What follows are some ideas on how we might achieve this and a request for feedback, critique, discussion and many many more ideas. 
Reward social interactions
Developer DAO is a community. A network of like-minded folks who broadly share the same values and interests, constantly interacting with each other in different ways.
These network effects are what gave our DAO its initial value.
It made the whole greater than the sum of its parts.
So how can we redesign elements of our game to encourage and reward actions that drive these effects?
One way we could do this is by having a monthly $CODE budget for Players to allocate to each other via Coordinape circles. Folks would be able to recognise members purely for their participation, sharing dank members, asking good questions, vibing in VC5 or helping folks out with technical problems.
Whatever other members feel is valuable participation that makes for a healthy community they want to be a part of, they should be able to recognise others for providing it.
Our early contributor round had its flaws but it mostly allocated elevated Governance to broadly the right Players. How do we learn from our experience and use similar mechanisms to re-energise the social layers in the DAO?
We could also potentially achieve a similar effect by introducing tipping in the server for folks to send each other small amounts of $CODE to show personal appreciation for their contributions. Big or small.
Another path could be giving POAPs to folks who attend social events in the DAO and then allocating a pool of $CODE tokens each month as a reward for participating in the community to make it a healthier space.
We’re trialling this last idea in the Dev Guild after a successful poll between guild members to allocate $CODE to folks who attend weekly syncs.
It’s not perfect and means folks who can’t attend will be at a disadvantage, but we can tackle that together over time and this gives us an opportunity to learn. In the short term, I hope it will increase participation, help folks make friends, vibe and learn together, and build cool stuff.
Reward Learning
In $CODE we have a tool to incentivise and reward anyone for whatever we collectively feel helps us achieve the DAOs mission. As learning is a huge part of our mission, how can we use this tool to encourage folks to level up their knowledge?
One way we do achieve that is by rewarding in $CODE who verifiably complete tracks in the Academy, hold a POAP for attending a workshop or helping someone solve a problem they’re stuck with.
By rewarding folks in $CODE for learning in an open way, we could welcome into our community exactly the kind of folk who could make it a more valuable space, whilst removing the purely economic barriers to entry that are currently in place.
How else could we reward folks for learning in a Sybil-resistant way?
Allocate meaningful funds from the Treasury in a more decentralised (and fun!) way
The current process for applying for a Budget from the DAO is cumbersome, hard to navigate and comes with various expectations. As the Treasury grows over time, how can we better decentralise, simplify and make enjoyable, the allocation of funds to support members building cool stuff?
One idea is to run regular no-questions-asked grants rounds whereby we allocate a certain amount of funds from the Treasury and invite submissions from DAO members to apply for this funding to build their idea.
Rather than have strict criteria, once submissions are made, we could allow the community to vote using the $CODE rewards they get from participating and learning. ENS do this via their Small Grants Rounds where the top 10 voted-on submissions get 1 ETH to build out their public goods project. It can be anything, as long as it’s a public good.
An approach similar to this could make the allocation of funds more “bottom-up” and decentralised, as well as create space for more creativity without the restrictions of the current budget process.
Increase utility in the $CODE token (and the D4R NFT?)
Right now, the only utility the $CODE taken has is community access and Governance.
There are limited incentives for members to acquire the token and hold onto it beyond securing elevated Governance in the DAO.
This has several downsides including
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Favours existing large bag-holders over newcomers. Without strong incentives to increase $CODE holdings, decentralisation of Governance power is likely to be far slower or even reduce over time.
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It means the DAO is solely relying on socialware vs trustware. Defined as follows by forgmonkee, Julia Rosenberg and Chase Champan from Metropolis (formerly Orca):
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Socialware - Mechanisms that create assurances through human relationships, incurring a high social coordination cost
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Trustware - Mechanisms that create assurances through technology, incurring a low social coordination cost
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It creates a market based on sell-pressure, limiting the impact $CODE grants can have on achieving Developer DAO’s mission.
Introducing more utility for $CODE should be a slow process and based on socialware first. Whilst this will present a harder coordination challenge, it will allow us to experiment together on what works, and importantly what doesn’t, before formalising any of the structures on-chain.
The good thing is we’re doing this already and folks’ observations from how our existing socialware-based game is performing are driving this conversation.
There is much thinking to do this in this space but some existing ideas include:
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Introduce staking into our Governance mechanism, whereby to participate in Governance folks must take their $CODE tokens.
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Provide discounted or free merch to folks who earn > X $CODE a month/season etc. Maybe we can also have unique Merch drops for OF D4R NFT holders.
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Staking $CODE tokens to gain access to opportunity, particularly where the Foundation or any Sub-DAOs are taking on elevated risk to provide the opportunity. Staking your $CODE to be a Project Lead or Contributor in D_D Agency could be a good example of this.
I foresee two critically important considerations if we were to introduce such mechanisms over time:
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It must be reasonably possible to earn the required number of $CODE tokens to realise these benefits with 0 costs to a member other than time and participation.
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There must be Sybil resistance to limiting how much the system can be gamed by bad actors with deep pockets.
Ntindle suggested an additional consideration: should we allow members with existing $CODE holdings to stake their tokens to support someone else with less to unlock opportunities? It’s important we have a bottom-up approach to figuring out the fundamental considerations in any trustware we implement.
There have been previous discussions about introducing membership levels in the DAO, this is a related thread of thought to the conversation Erik presented in that forum post.
Empower Builders, or Players who want to become Builders, via Sub-DAOs
For the DAO to flourish, it needs folks dedicated to creating things that add value to the DAO and its ecosystem.
Currently, the DAO feels too large and, in some ways, is restricting the progress-motivated Players who want to become Builders and add value back to the DAO.
Under the current model, there are a few core roles that are well-rewarded (mine included), some rewards flowing to folks supporting those roles (i.e DevRel) and then a lot of people investing a lot of their time for no rewards beyond elevated Governance.
So what could we do about this?
Many other DAOs adopt a model where they create separate entities, or Sub-DAOs, that exist to further the DAO and its ecosystem as a whole. They are free to operate independently in terms of how they manage their day-to-day operations, yet are value-aligned and accountable to the DAO more broadly.
Exactly how the relationship between such entities works would need discussion, but see ENS Labs or Swirlds Labs from the Hedera ecosystem for examples of this happening in practice.
Such an approach could have a number of benefits for the DAO:
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Greatly simplify Governance, removing much of the operational, financial and legal concerns of a small subset of activity from the overall DAO. With other suggestions above, this could make Governance more fun and increase participation.
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Empower members or groups of members to more freely create value that can flow back to the DAO, without being held back by the overhead of being part of the DAO proper (e.g., easy access to financial infrastructure, potential funding that doesn’t mean selling $CODE, but can improve the DAO for everyone, partnerships with other organisations).
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Make the Player and Builder experience much clearer and therefore fairer, with a clearer pathway for how Players can become Builders of the game if they want to (for example, Agency.)
This kind of approach to hybrid structures is not new.
Organisations with public good missions such as the Mozilla Foundation have solved them in similar ways in the past to great effect. Their Foundation has a public goods mission but spins out mission-aligned entities that can more easily take advantage of the markets to have a far bigger impact on that mission and return value to fund others.
This series of articles written by Mark Surman, Director of the Mozilla Foundation, and shared by @Colin4Ward, explain it well.
Conversations have started on what a “D_D Labs” Sub-DAO could look like.
A new entity that exists to wrap (and importantly make far easier and expand) the commercial activities that currently support and fund the DAO (partnerships, VIBES IRL, Job Board, Merch, maybe more), some of which are entirely blocked, and others made much harder by the challenges listed above.
This model could then apply to many other ideas and examples such as Agency, but also P3RKS, Eden and anything else that starts in the DAO, but would likely have a far bigger impact on the mission if they were released to take advantage of opportunities outside of the DAO, too.
Ensuring any such entities are mission and value-aligned is important so feedback from members on this idea is crucial. Seem evident though the status quo with regards to the “size” of the DAO and the existing structures are holding us back.
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Known unknowns in this potential new game
As mentioned at the start, this metaphor is not perfect and definitely doesn’t account for everything or everyone. Hopefully, though, it is effective at helping us think about the DAO, its structure and its reward model from a different perspective.
Some known unknowns that come to mind:
- What impact would such a redesign have on the current DAO structure (Guilds, Projects, Discord, etc.)?
- What kinds of participation make sense to reward vs. not, same with learning?
- How do we limit how much rewarding folks in $CODE for participation and learning be exploited?? (e.g., Ask everyone to complete Gitcoin Passport when joining, maybe reward them for this or PoH, have a mechanism for reporting perceived bad actors, etc.)
- What impact would a new rewards model like this have on long-term Governance and decentralisation?
- What impact would a new rewards model like this have on $CODE budgets?
- How do we fairly allocate $CODE rewards between Players and Builders?
- What would a correct relationship between a Sub-DAO and the DAO look like? (e.g., DAO owns part of it, all of it, revenue share commitment, profit share commitment, etc.) How do we ensure they support the DAOs mission?
- Should Sub-DAOs be issued $CODE as part of their being established?
Hoping this starts an interesting conversation and we can learn from our experience so far to improve the game we’re playing, which so many people have helped create and love.
Appreciate there is a lot here. I welcome debate and feedback/critique/suggestions on every line BUT try to keep feedback focused, it would be great to know if others feel this catches the current state of affairs in the DAO well, and specifically your thoughts the TLDR:
Developer DAO currently feels too large, and bureaucratic, which is harming the experience for the majority of members who are here to make friends, have fun, network, learn together and build cool stuff. Without having to worry about budgets, Governance, legal, finance etc.
Should we redesign our $CODE rewards model to also reward folks for participation and learning, not just contribution, to help foster the primarily social experience that made the DAO great in the first place, and help achieve our mission?
Can we increase the utility of the $CODE to provide more value to members, by introducing staking, using it to unlock opportunities in the DAO, and/or allocating treasury funds in a more decentralised (and fun!) way (i.e. like ENS small grants)?
Should we make the DAO itself smaller, disconnecting $CODE governance so directly to commercial and operational considerations, and rather use Governance to empower members to create Sub-DAOs that can more easily create value for the DAO and its ecosystem overall?
(I’m largely responsible for much of it)
also cc