[DRAFT] - Talent Coordination Bot Proposal - Soil 🌱 - Unlock Community Powered Opportunity - S1 Budget Application

[Milo.io]

idea came from personal experiences with struggling to show an initiative and being scared to look funny, so get you perfectly!

[BluePanda]

I want to warm welcome @with-heart to our project. I am stupidly excited about the insane impact that he can bring to the project and I think that he is the best addition to this project after @allWiseee

you can find here his info for the project

LFG!!!

[bean145]

Think this tool will be crucial to the DOA, we might want to be careful in thinking of it through a single interface and think of this tool more as a set of critical pieces of functionality for the DOA rather than a single “tool”. Such that we may be build a Swiss Army knife of solutions for the doa that can be rolled out in many interfaces and fashions as the DOA needs it. We might also want to think about if this system could also quantify the amount of $CODE issued to people based on contributions across the doa by an individual. It could also be used to build JIT project maintainer list based on time of need information so nothing gets out of date and the source of truth for the doa in terms of project status and people come from this tool.

[Hmz]

Hamza here , having been in the onboarding team for the past few months , i can say for sure that alot of talent (product managers , senior devs , designers , CTO’s etc… ) joins the DAO but never actually gets involved with a project inside D_D even though they always show great interest and willingness to get involved. This can be caused by a lot of reason (which we are all aware off , Discord having too many channels etc…) .
Why i believe Soil™ has the potential to fix this talent loss : obviously by being a bridge between projects and talent but also by :

• providing guidelines to projects on how to structure the project , how to welcome new people , how to best document all the process so that any member that Soil matches to the project can get involved. ( Another thought here is that it would be great to benefit from the experience of openSource projects and how they’re maintained cc @with-heart )
• providing insights on what skills are needed in the projects ( that can then lead to either the mentorship program or the education platform ).

About the discussion with Sobol , in my opinion Soil has the potential to provide features similar to Sobol but in a different way , as it was stated in the comments above Sobol serves as a directory that pulls data from Discord (and to my knowledge stops there regarding that data). Whereas Soil can do the same but also have that data be as alive as the people involved keep building and interacting with projects through it.
I said this earlier on a call with @BluePanda showcasing how this tool work , it can completely solve the hiring process for DAO projects , OpenSource projects but also companies ( as i don’t see it stopping only withing D_D ).

[Billyjitsu]

I had time to really take the project in and what it could be. I think this is a great idea overall. When I came into Dev DAO early on, I was lost. Didn’t have much direction and really didn’t know anybody. As my skills are getting better, I’m looking for things to contribute to as well. The discord can be overwhelming at times and this tool would be ideal to have my find places to assist.

[BluePanda]

@kempsterrrr

Is there a way we can test this on a small scale before asking the entire DAO to sign-up as it would mean a big change in everyone’s workflows? (although maybe that would be a good thing )

We are committed as a team to not making just the technology but to create a real product with network effects that everyone enjoys using becuase all their friends are inside. So this means that we will definitely not just drop this early to our community, we will carefully craft this from the ground up with everyone. We don’t want to only spend time building the product, but we want to also understand what is the cold start problem of the network, what will incentivize people to use Soil, what is the activation moment etc. etc.

We are working in cycles that are heavily balanced toward the communication with the community

• The first month was development, in order to create a robust solution, that can show the MVP and inspire a conversation plus feedback
• now we are in the feedback moment, the sub-community that you are referring @kempsterrrr already exists as a private discord and has more than 40 members of D_D that tested Soil (some of them already replying on the Forum with their ideas and feedback, and they gave us a crazy amount of ideas errors and feedback real-time)
• Even though its super time-consuming and really difficult mentally we want at this stage to only put people inside 1to1 the reason is that we care about the quality of the feedback, we want to hear your personal stories, your ideas where you want to use it, and more important of all how you imagine Soil to be in the future
• after we gather all this feedback we are going back to the basement for development
• during this time we are launching a micro podcast (20-30 min) @BluePanda @impactbilli.eth and guests rest of the core team, contributors, etc. In this podcast , we will talk about what we are working on this week, what is the biggest updates, etc

So to answer your final part of question, we respect everyone’s workflows and we will definitely launch this the right way in order to only bring positive effects in the way that we operate as a community

[BluePanda]

@luan

@kempsterrrr

How much control will projects have over if/how people are introduced to contributing? Seems most of the successful projects in the DAO are led by a small group, would a project be able to mark they are not currently looking for contributors/what contributors they are looking for so as to control of the flow of requests and not distract from the project?

I think it’s important we distinguish between DAO-specific initiatives (such as the Scribes effort, OKRs Initiative, Guild admin etc), and projects started in the DAO. As I remarked last week, the two often seem to be conflated; but they are fundamentally different.

The former should welcome all, regardless; and depending on what the responsibilities entail, craft a system to regulate how it gets done. What we’re endeavouring to do on the Onboarding Team — by having at least one fixed onboarding session that anybody can host (by claiming the task on DeWork), is a close example of what I’m referring to, here.

The latter, however, may potentially need to have some kind of cap on the no. of contributors. As a bare minimum, reach a point where there needs to be a limit on more people joining the effort. Think of the OKRs Initiative as a pre-alpha of this: various people are involved, but at a certain point, a ‘working group’ is going to be formed, who will be tasked with seeing it reach its next points. This allows there to be some accountability, without necessarily restricting others from participation.

So I think it’s good to draw that line of distinction between the 2 types of projects, and tailor parameters for each.

We are already working with the community to understand

• when a project needs contributors
• what contributors do they need
• what is the position that needs to fulfill
• how they want visual to communicate that to Soil
• how they want to be notified about new potential contributors
• what information do they need to get from them
• how much info does someone needs to read or understand before applying
• what happens when they don’t need more contributors
• what happens when they need contribution again
• etc.

This is one of the most important discussions, and we already have @with-heart in the team that has an insane experience on the topic, but we will assemble a community of people around this problem of Soil to find the best solution for this problem

The question here is not if a solution exists, there is definitely an answer. The question is who is thinking about this topic. And from this point on we will

[BluePanda]

Regardless of the interesting discussion happening regarding Sobol (links below ),

We never develop Soil to improve upon Sobol, we don’t want to make an improvement of a product and make it 2 times better. We want to make a foundational innovation that can improve our amazing community by 10 or 100 times. We do that by creating a new category which is “personal project recommendations using AI”. So right now we are focusing on Artificial Intelligent driven project person match

However, to a lot of you, it’s obvious that:

• the technology that we are using “graph Convolutional Neural Networks(GCNN)”
• the decentralized nature of data entry of Soil
• and the fact that we have D_D building for D_D with @with-heart @allWiseee @Milo.io etc.

Is in a perfect position to 10X the results that Sobol. We are happy to collaborate with Sobol, or don’t use it and build our internal tool and this is something that the community will decide.

I would kindly request to have a meeting with the people that are interested including @Hmz @luan @kempsterrrr Core team of Soil. To discuss that in a synchronous way (voice meeting discord next week) before we make any communication with the team of Sobol. The topic is still really immature, and we need to take some time to think about it and discuss it inside our community

Thank you for the incredible interest and the freaking amazing ideas and comments I am emotional looking at the impact that our hard work has and give me incredible energy to work two times harder

@Hmz

About the discussion with Sobol , in my opinion Soil has the potential to provide features similar to Sobol but in a different way , as it was stated in the comments above Sobol serves as a directory that pulls data from Discord (and to my knowledge stops there regarding that data). Whereas Soil can do the same but also have that data be as alive as the people involved keep building and interacting with projects through it.

@luan

I spoke with @BluePanda this morning, as he walked me through some of this - and I did bring up SOBOL. It didn’t initially appear like there would be crossover, but based on the fact that SOBOL largely pulls data from Discord and Soil (in part) intends to feed data into the server, there may be some fragmented experiences that result in some work being manually actioned somewhere. The intended v1.0 of SOBOL’s usage is serving as a directory. So the primary need would be feeding data from Soil into profiles in SOBOL. BluePanda said he’ll look at their APIs. I’ll also put him in contact with Alex

@kempsterrrr

How do you see this playing with other tools in the DAO, for example Sobol. I wonder how much cross-over there is a if this tool could even replace the need for sobol? I’ve dropped the ball on sobol a bit whilst focussing on the foundation setup and budgets, planning to join @luan and co in the Community Guild weekly to talk about this, might be a good meeting to join so we can figure this out.

[BluePanda]

@bean145

We might also want to think about if this system could also quantify the amount of $CODE issued to people based on contributions across the doa by an individual. It could also be used to build JIT project maintainer list based on time of need information so nothing gets out of date and the source of truth for the doa in terms of project status and people come from this tool.

Yes this is more than possible and we are thinking of a possible collab with coordinate, or other great tools of token distribution

What is JIT?

[bean145]

“JIT” just in time. Taking the term from runtimes/compilers lol. What I meant was we could generate maps of project maintainers and contributors, lists of people organizing guilds, etc at the time they are requested such that we don’t end up needing to maintain a database of these things explicitly but rather let the structure of projects within the doa / structure of the discord at the point in time be the source of truth for this kind of above mentioned data.

[0xChristiaan]

Amazing solution for a problem many DAOs encounter. This is also what we discussed in the Coordination Work Group. Impressive to see what you all came up with. There needs to be a ‘market place’ where people and projects are matched inside the DAO.

[BluePanda]

exaaaaactly we call it on Soil team, dynamic and decentralized mapping of the DAO!

This is exactly what we want, it doesn’t make sense to create a centralized mapper of the DAO that need to spend all his time taking this information

why not everyone contributes and builds that real-time in a decentralized way from the bottom up! you get it 100p

[NikitaVarabei]

Love this project. Spoke with @BluePanda about Soil today and there is 100% a need.

I’m a startup founder myself, building https://treasured.ca/ and finding good people to bring on the team is always a difficulty. I also often build other crypto side projects, and finding teammates to collab with is time-consuming and can be hit or miss. I would definitely be an early user of Soil.

When you join Developer DAO, getting an idea of projects that match you during Onboarding would be awesome, having an actionable next step to interact with the community is really important.

From the Project side, having some way to verify the credentials of the joiner would be awesome. Lots of education projects are giving On Chain Credentials now, so perhaps those can be factored into the algorithm or shown in the UI when a project looks at a candidate. I’ve actually started work on an open-source project to aggregate all the On Chain Education Credentials / NFTs out there, so this might be useful to you https://github.com/nikitavr/web3-verified . I’m using it for a personal project right now that’s like a Web3 LinkedIn, and would love other projects to try it out if it’s useful.

When Matching People to a Project, I think it’s important not to just match the project as a whole, but also to the people/team in the project. When you join a project, Who you work with is just as important as What you are building. Perhaps the person looking to join a project can input what they want to learn, and part of the matching algorithm takes into account the Skills of the project team, to make sure the joiner has an opportunity to learn what they are looking for.

I’m also interested in contributing on the Algorithm side, I have a background in AI and Data Science and lots of personal experience hiring people, so hopefully can help out in this area.

@BluePanda let’s definitely chat again, lots of ideas for this project and ways to help out / collab.

[Milo.io]

Really happy to see that you understand the purpose of this project!

[myz1237.eth]

If you need someone focusing on the bot, I am the right choice for the team

[impactbilli.eth]

Love the remark on people/team match - the whole novel aspect of this is that we can make these opportunity/person matches community driven & encode a LOT of interesting info that comes from the community perspective, such as what types of people you are complementary to & vibe with

[Milo.io]

I remember seeing this graph on one of the calls and how blown away I was with the detail and the vision. I think seeing the problem and demand back then is what pushed us into starting this project and coming up with the solution.

[Erik_Knobl]

Awesome project… but no designers?

[lancendavis]

This is not only a problem I experienced when first joining, but I’m sure it’s a problem several other DAOs experience. Talent matching in decentralized organizations is hard, but it’s important! Cheering you all on

[sylvia]

This is a very exciting and much needed project! So important to have concrete suggestions as to where you could contribute from the start – keeps you engaged in the dao, reduces the sense of being overwhelmed, and helps you meet people and make friends. what is the timeline on forum / snapshot voting?