Defining our Mission, Values, & Goals

This thread is to be used as the discussion point for defining our goals ahead of the Season 0 Launch. Please reply with comments, questions, and other input during the next week. We hope to have our version 1 goals ready for a proposal by the end of next week (10/15).

Before posting, please read the following content & conversations that have already happened:

This has left us with the following proposed mission, values and goals/objectives:

Mission: Developer DAO exists to accelerate the education and impact of a new wave of web3 builders.

Values:

  • Transparency (open source everything, conversations in public, document and share journey)
  • Diversity and Inclusion (seek to foster as diverse a membership as possible and support everyone to contribute)
  • Responsibility (as a self-governed community we rely on members to be personally responsible for their actions and commitments to the community)
  • Kindness and empathy (we know that we are living in a complex, stressful, and diverse world and go out of our way to make people’s lives and days better through our interactions)

Goals:

  1. Educate & Support Web3 Developers
  2. Build Web3 Tools & Public Goods

Sub-goals of our organization will fall under these objectives, for example (not including everything):

  1. Educate & Support Web3 Developers
    a. Leading Events
    b. Education / Knowledge Base
    c. Community Networking
    d. Job Board / Job Finding
  2. Build Web3 Tools & Public Goods
    a. DAO Website and Derivatives
    b. Web3 Projects

Big picture impact of the DAO

By fostering an environment that supports achieving our mission/values/goals, Developer DAO can become the go to community for developers looking to meet and build relationships with other devs, for on-boarding existing web2 engineering talent into web3, for developer jobs, and a platform for launching and collaborating on new ideas.

Developer DAO enables shared ownership of and for a community of developers who are at the forefront of building the future of the internet. Being a Developer DAO alumni will mean something.


Please reply with comments, questions, and other input around what you believe our mission, values, and goals should be!

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Edits/additions to Goals:

  1. Onboard, Educate & Support Web3 Developers
  2. Foster Open-Source Web3 Tools & Public Goods

The reason for changing the word “Build” to “Foster” would be that it opens up other possibilities beyond directly building tools. One of the possible outcomes is that DevDAO creates its own on-chain venture fund similar to Moloch DAO, for example, and helps to staff up-and-coming protocols/ companies as part of its value proposition, in addition to capital contributions.

This is similar to what VC funds are doing these days, in that they contribute capital to projects but also have in-house developers and researchers that can add value as well. DevDAO would turn that model on its head – the devs themselves (not the fund managers) would decide on projects to support and pool talent + capital.

Can imagine something like this would be spectacularly successful – if governed well.

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Around the education topic, I would also motion for us to also educate the average person about what web3 is and how they can get “started” in the space. Now for everyone, getting started could mean a different thing depending on their interests; however, I think some legitimate content around web3(accessible to everyone) would be a huge asset to not only us but the whole web3 community. The main aim of this effort would be to lay down the actual facts about web3 and squash the mis-information/FUD around the subject matter in general. We already have a lot of great content creators in the DAO and probs more to come, so we’d definitely have an upper hand.

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I like everything that’s here!

I’ll echo what Narb is saying.

I think that really a layer 0 base of understanding would be hugely beneficial to onboarding new members, and providing value to external sources.

If we can create a “web3 university” where developers can really learn about everything at the ground layer, and learn all of the lingo, I think that would be a worthwhile goal.

While content like “how to make a flash loan bot” is perhaps more “interesting” or “flashy”, it isn’t the most educational thing in terms of content, as it assumes a base-layer of knowledge that isn’t widely available yet.

This is probably more applicable to our Season 0 goals however.

As far as the high-level goes, I think all of this is excellent, and I’m aligned with all of our Mission, Values, and Goals! Thanks for writing this up Will.

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In addition to educating new-comers, would it make sense for us to strive to build a set of “web3 best-practices”?
Obviously these don’t exist too much yet, but I could see it being useful to a web2 developer new to the space to be able to see analogues to their current tech/architecture stack and how to shift their design/thinking and easily discover existing tools that can give them a strong first step.

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just saw nheindev’s reply which seems rather similar. apologies if this is more appropriate for the season 0 goals

It’s hard to point a finger at what web3 best practices looks like at this point but a decent chunk of it involves web2 best practices in my opinion. In saying that however, web3 certainly has its own set of nuances and best approaches to things (i.e smart contract best practices, auditing, etc…) so I do think it’s totally worth while for us to build up content like this down the road. We have this working doc in the website repo which could evolve into what you were recommending @treethought (acting as a base doc perhaps).

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Really like this line of thinking, think the shift in language could be important also. great stuff.

Being able to support projects that aren’t “official DAO projects” (whatever that evens means, TBD) would greatly increase the scope of our impact whilst still allowing the community to have some “official projects” the community can focus on as a whole.

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awesome, thanks for the link @Narb, good to know. I do agree there is a large overlap, and although it would be good (and probably natural) for us to accumulate these types of resources over time, probably does not make sense for an immediate goal.

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On top of supporting @eljee 's thoughts here, I believe we should add a further value…

On-chain > off-chain revenue

IMO this should be a core value for the community to show our belief in the power and validity of web3 as the new internet and financial infrastructure, that we’re committing any financial success we may have in the future to it.

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I don’t know if this get too far, but I like the idea that the token economy is all about incentivization baked in.

So, I think a core value should also be that “everyone gets reimbursed fairly for their contributions”.

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Depending on what we decide re tokenomics and recognising/rewarding contributions, people could be reimbursed using the $DBUCKS token which they can then trade on the open market to regain ÂŁÂŁ/$$.

See image below from this article shared by @Erik_Knobl in the #tokenomics discord channel.

People get paid for their contributions in $DBUCKS to create projects that increase the size of the treasury which then buys back tokens using that on-chain revenue. This has benefits of ultimately increasing the value of tokens rather than just per project rewards which might be better as long-term play for increasing overall value of the DAO. Granted this might mean less rewards in the short-term so maybe we could do a mixture of both, depends on what we’re optimising and what our values are around immediate rewards vs long-term growth.

Definitely need to branch this discussion out into a specific thread with a tighter scope in the near future but thought worth sharing the above :slight_smile:

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I have no idea “how” we should do it.

I just think, it’s important to make fair payment a core value.

I saw too many OSS projects fail, because they didn’t take this seriously. It makes hostile takeovers easier. And it keeps people out who can’t work for free.

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Agree with @Kay, but I guess the transparency value kinda includes fairness in every aspect. Wouldn’t hurt to have it explicitly stated either, though.

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Thanks for putting this up btw @willblackburn. Appreciate the effort mate!

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I feel we’re missing an important point in our values

action > discussion & impact/speed > complexity/decentralisation (at least to begin with)

IMO we need to encourage a culture of building with a focus on having the biggest impact on our goals. For example, we shouldn’t automatically build with decentralised technology in every layer of the stack purely “because we’re a DAO”, we should use the best technology for solving the problem in front us quickly and effectively.

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action > discussion & impact/speed > complexity/decentralisation (at least to begin with)

This makes a lot of sense.

We should use “this over that” statements to help clarify the DAOs vision, like on the Agile Manifesto. They help a lot with decision-making when considering trade-offs.

Is this a good translation?
Partially centralized solutions now over fully decentralized solutions later

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Happy to help with legal - I’m a lawyer :slight_smile:

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YO! This would be A-MA-ZING. Can you ping me your discord handle or drop me a DM there?

:pray:

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I think these read like great mission and values. I’d be hesitant to apply “goals” to what are currently called goals only because currently their defined in ways that are hard to measure. In other words, how do we know if we have achieved the goals? I would recommend that goals/objectives (and their concomitant key results) be defined quarterly as objectively measurable outcomes.

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