On focusing the vision & not being "everything for everyone"

đź’¬ General
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As we discussed in the last town hall, our biggest challenge today is to decide on our DAO’s “mission statement” so we can begin organizing around it. Currently, the draft goals (defined here), are:

  • Education
  • Events
  • Community building, networking, and collaboration
  • Building and supporting public goods
  • Helping developers to land jobs, grants, and gigs
  • Helping teams and protocols find developers

I think we need to organize our mission around 2 or 3 objectives, and let sub-goals fall below those high-level objectives. My suggestion is:

DAO Objectives

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

Taking the items we have discussed, we can start nesting items:

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

I believe it is important to keep a small number of top-level objectives at the beginning to avoid spreading to thin. Many members will probably cleanly fall in one group over the other allowing their time & resources to be better used.

DAO Legos
A topic on its own, but quickly introducing it here. I tweeted about this here.

I believe DAOs will begin to collaborate better based on function. We have an amazing and high-in-demand resource. If we truly want to think about DAO value and creating something of value for us, we can output web3 development. DAOs will pay for web3 development. Think about being able to quickly pool together resources to knock something out valuable for a DeFi protocol, NFT project, etc etc. That’s exciting… Let’s keep that conversation going.

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This is in part my direct response to @willblackburn’s post above (I pretty much entirely agree) and the DAO canvas PR.

  • To emphasize what was said above, I want to call out the goals organization: the 2 bullet organization will help keep things tightly focused (subordinate points support the mission defined at the top level).
  • Anything that we do should be able to trace its way back to one or more of the bullet points, top level more desirable than lower level
  • Operations is a necessary evil that’s not on that list, so things like maintaining a treasury, etc, will have to be given weight (or even priority) depending on what we’re trying to address.

Now to address the DAO Canvas
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  • Diversity, Inclusion, and minting literally anywhere other than ETH Mainnet: I think that if we choose our seasonal NFTs to be on not-ETH, we’ll be able to get more people in that would otherwise not be able to mint. Also will be a good learning opportunity / source of content (aspiring to the level of the original NFT as solidity smart contract content).
  • I have 2 thoughts on treasury
    1. Can we get a partnership with a DeFi DAO for some kind of vehicle to maximize ROI for our undeployed assets
    2. Can we open up a vehicle for staking-for-the-DAO in which anyone could stake assets to the DAO, which could then deploy the assets and (per the contract) keep the yield on that staking? This implies that the end user has a contract (and reasonable human) assurance of being able to pull their stake as desired.

A common thread that I see in projects discussed (education, resume building/maintaining, job board) is tied to the identity of the user, data (manipulable) about the user, and data (tokenized, immutable) about the user. Based on what I do know, that looks a lot like an application of Decentralized Identity; right now I’ve been looking at Ceramic and IDX but I’m sure there are other tools, but the crypto world is well set up to handle this: you “are” your wallet, you have a DID tied to that wallet, and for hard proof-of-work you could have NFTs or oracle-verified off-chain proof that would then be captured as NFT. Just my two cents and would require more work, but I think that this notion of ID is going to be real important.

Season 1: Perhaps just identity?

  • Education is going to have some challenges, in terms of good curriculum design, that I think most of us don’t deal with frequently (typically it’s me that knows less than my compiler, etc)
  • Both Job Board and Education lean heavily on encapsulating the attributes of a person in terms of achievement/completion tracking.

Boosting each others content: as we saw from the Write Race this week, our community is large enough to make a pretty big impact if we all throw ourselves at something. Boosting fresh content via our individual accounts will help juice anything any of us publish (pending some clever anti-human-boosting that’s in place on a given platform).

DBUCKS pronounced “DaBucks”? Or we go american old-west and refer to money as Bits… DaBits? In both cases, of course, taking that soft “a” so it’s not that far from the “de” in developer. Definitely not playing off anyone’s name.

I think new proposals per week is a dangerous metric as the people that then have to read them would be getting swamped (boost those numbers)
I’d instead focus on tracking milestones inside of proposal completion, or other conventional code velocity tools (but I don’t work at a BigCorp so I can’t speak very intelligently about those)

Caps and Global Constraints: We are obviously capped at 8000 D4R tokens (at least in the original issue); my take is that these are the OG members and permanent. Perhaps we get some in treasury to hand out for outstanding performance as a Season member. In general we want to make people want to be in the DAO - and OG D4R is the way to do that → OG D4R token should be desirable.

Legal Strategy: We start doing things for money, we should probably have that settled. Pending any major developments, it makes Wyoming’s DAO LLC structure appealing in the US - but I’m not a lawyer.

I would like to make sure that as we define personas for web3 education and collaboration we keep in mind the Entrepreneur persona (job boards too, but that might be a less likely use case)

And, as a DAO of developers, we ought to pay attention to anything that we build: is it something a non-technical DAO would use, and can we package it as a RedHat $$$ for opensource software deal if so?
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Thanks for the reply! Those are also good points on the canvas to take into season 0.

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@willblackburn totally agree with keeping the “headline” goals for the community narrow, and building out from there. Not 100% on the wording below but I think you’re thinking is perfect, then we can always expand more on those areas in the `“Bigger Picture” for the DAO and manifesto.

I’d like to share two updates from the WIP DAO canvas which are not yet merged so we can expand the conversation:

## Describe the DAOs goals as explicitly as possible

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

* Education
* Events
* Building and supporting public goods
* Collaboration & support of fellow members

### Top 3 expected values  of this organisation

* 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)

### Why are we deploying as a DAO

* Organisation / coordination and governance at scale
* Value capture and rewarding / incentivising contributions
* To provide liquid community ownership

### 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.

It would be great to thoughts from everyone on these points too.

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Agree with @gjsyme 's points below, in particular being able to trace back decision/proposals to our core aims, the higher up that chain we are the better. great point.

Re the operations point, agree although not sure if we explicitly put that in our mission/values/goals etc.

Really interesting points re the DAO canvas. Our thoughts is largely aligned in most places. Sharing that when/how we did was probably not the best way to spark discussion on these topics, it was done purely as we didn’t want keep it private and we didn’t have a discourse in place at the time.

I’m hoping that if the community backs Season 0 we can begin splitting up tasks/giving responsibility for figuring a lot of that out and open up dedicated conversations that turn into proposals to address them.

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