Whatever good things we build end up building us

It’s been a little over 2 and a half months since Developer DAO was born.

A lot has happened since then, and a lot has been accomplished by our community. I want to give an overview of what has happened so far, as well as talk about what we might work towards next.

I also want to share some ideas I have in hopes of gauging the community’s feedback and thoughts around them and sparking a conversation so that we have input from everyone in the community interested in being part of the future of the DAO.

What’s happened so far :brick:

Since the launch of the DAO, the community has gained tremendous momentum, both on Discord and on social media. Our members have stepped up and built out the core infrastructure needed to make a DAO successful - snapshot voting, forum, website, a wiki, guilds, Github, and and now a newsletter among other things.

We’ve established our missions, values, and goals and have ratified Season 0 via a community snapshot with over 99% consensus.

In the short amount of time since we formed, there have already been multiple projects spun out of the DAO, including Open Palette - a generative art platform by Devin Abbott, which already has over $400,000 in sales.

We are joined by some of the most talented and passionate educators creating high quality blog posts, tutorials, videos, open source projects, and general learning materials to help onboard the next generation of web3 builders.

Developer DAO is a decentralized web3 clearinghouse. We continue to curate and share some of the best web3 learning material in existence through our Twitter account which has been growing by over 10,000 followers per month, almost all of our followers being developers and aspiring developers interested in web3.

We’re also able to use our platform to draw attention to the projects, content, and profiles of our members. Many have seen substantial increases in traffic, follows, and likes after joining the DAO. The nature of a DAO combined with our intentional social media focus on DAO members has helped boost the network, visibility, and awareness of those without the fortune of yet owning such a large platform themselves.

We’re already expanding into events, starting with small one-off live streams and IRL meetups, and eventually growing into virtual and IRL conferences and hackathons. The first stream with Austin Griffith (:crown:), only planned a day in advance as an experiment, has been viewed over 5,000 times across platforms.

We’re also exploring the idea of a web3 incubator. As more projects spin out of the DAO, we are in a unique position to support these projects as a collective by providing the resources, connections, and network effects needed to successfully launch new projects and products.

What we aspire to be :crystal_ball:

public good - a commodity or service that is provided without profit to all members of a society, either by the government or a private individual or organization

I’m most inspired by people like Austin Griffith and Kevin Owocki because of their focus on building public goods.

One of the main focuses of our DAO is creating and sharing public goods in the form of content and educational materials, events, open source, and general web3 knowledge. If you follow us on Twitter you probably already recognize that we have one of the best curated feeds of web3 content around.

I think we can set an example of how to create a massive amount of free value for exponentially more people outside of the DAO, while still recognizing the need for sybil resistance of some sort for builders and organizers within the DAO.

As an ethos, we should consider this focus on public goods while still working toward staying solvent by also building projects and doing things that generate revenue for the DAO.

Exciting updates :sparkles:

We recently welcomed Cooper Turley as an advisor, and this week are excited to also announce today that Preethi Kasireddy will be joining us as well in an advisory role! :fire:

We’ve onboarded Quicknode as our first newsletter sponsor. We have also had an enormous amount of interest from investors and other potential supporters and sponsors.

We have not yet decided on all of the ways we will be fundraising for the treasury. We are leaning towards taking sponsorships for 2022 and are open to hearing ideas around how we might structure this, but are thinking something like a tiered system where projects and protocols can sponsor the DAO for a season or for a year, with benefits like having their own dedicated rooms, events, mentions in social activities, and of course the good will of over 5,000 of the best devs around!

We are also open to any other ideas of how we might fund the treasury, so if you have any ideas please share them with us.

New governance token :coin:

We’re working on the contract for the new governance token and are hoping to launch it sometime between the middle of December to the beginning of January.

I personally am hoping we can launch sooner than later, as I think we need to open membership back up as soon as possible.

We are working on a proposal for tokenomics, and will present it in the next few days for discussion, and ultimately voting.

As for the token name, we’re leaning towards $CODE as discussed here.

I think we need to start considering and making decisions about how we enable new membership and participation once our new governance token is made available. I think we should consider the following:

  1. Having a public area where people can access things like learning resources and maybe a couple of general public rooms for people who are not part of the DAO itself but still want to participate.

  2. Sponsorship program - people who are interested in joining can fill out a form with their information and why they want to join the DAO. We gift memberships on a regular basis to people who we think would make solid additions to the DAO, with some % focus on each of these categories:

    a. Under-represented groups
    b. Designers, developers, builders, and creators with some sort of track record
    c. Junior developers looking to get their foot in the door who show potential

  3. Recruiting program - we use a portion of our treasury to recruit people into the DAO that we think would make a valuable addition, maybe even considering allocating a budget of x number of tokens to each guild for 2022 for them to use to recruit for those who they think would be beneficial to their guild.

  4. Open market - regardless of how they acquire them, anyone who owns the required number of tokens to join the DAO can do so

How we move forward :magic_wand:

On October 29th we ratified our missions, values, and goals.

This set the stage for what is to come next, including our first set of initiatives in continuing to lay the groundwork for what’s to come.

As the name suggests, Season 0 is about laying the foundations for the DAO, while continuing to build upon the momentum we already have.

We will be focused on:

  1. Finalizing the DAO structure.
  2. Refining our guidelines for governance.
  3. Funding the treasury through a handful of collaborations, initiatives, and sponsorships.
  4. Researching options for a governance token.
  5. Planning a Season 1 launch event with DAO partners.

DAO projects vs incubator projects vs community projects (:brick:, :rocket:)

I think it’s also important for us to start figuring out where we spend our focus in terms of projects.

Logically it seems like there are three general categories of projects that will spin out of the DAO

  1. DAO projects - projects we build as a DAO to achieve our own objectives. Examples include

    a. a web3 events platform
    b. curation platform for projects incubated by the dao (i.e. vote to fund and support projects at some cadence)
    c. derivatives projects for ERC721
    d. fundraising projects

  2. Incubator projects - projects incubated and funded by the DAO in some form or fashion

  3. Community projects - projects spun out of the DAO whose founders can leverage the network / network effects, community, and social media accounts of the DAO to help push their work forward

Wrapping up :gift:

This post is a bit of a brain dump, but I am hoping to provide more clarity around some of the ideas I have here and to spark discussion and get feedback so that we can all be aligned as we move forward with these important decisions.

Any important decision that we make will also be put up for a vote as we move forward, but we also recognize that there needs to be some room for us to move quickly and make certain less important decisions without being mired in bureaucracy.

I don’t think there’s a perfect answer to how to balance these decisions that are not put to a snapshot vote, but I am leaning more and more towards sharing and talking in public about our ideas and plans so that when we ultimately decide on doing things, it’s already been discussed or mentioned in the Discord and the community has had the chance to provide feedback.

Thank you for making it this far and for being a huge part of why our community has been successful! :heart:

“You don’t set out to build a wall. You don’t say ‘I’m going to build the biggest, baddest, greatest wall that’s ever been built.’ You don’t start there. You say, ‘I’m going to lay this brick as perfectly as a brick can be laid.’ You do that every single day. And soon you have a wall.” — Will Smith

I also plan on sharing an abridged and public facing version of this soon on Mirror.

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Great vision.
WRT public spaces, highly recommend Gather as a public area for collaboration, events planning and collating resources. My remote team use this daily and find it really useful for engaging community members and maintaining working relationships. It helps us devs feel like we are all in the same office, building together.
Thank you for buidling this community Nader<3

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This is an outstanding post. Really a pleasure to read it.

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I love that the governance token is called $CODE.

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Thanks Nader for breaking things down concisely. I think with the new governance token we should try to leverage the work we are doing in the proof of competence (PoC) channel. Where we are creating an interactive onboarding experience for new developers so that they can get ramped up quickly. This interactive experience, which we are calling journeys, can then be used to certify the competence of developers in certain skill sets via an objective score. We believe that PoC in conjunction with the job board, we can become power house that trains developers and then provides talent to the organizations that are looking for it, ultimately taking a small cut on the placement to fund the treasury. This demo was started by @wslyvh for ETHLisbon. Finally, this is our current draft proposal it’s open to edit so feel free to add comments we hope to finalize it soon so we can post it here for more feedback. Thanks again!

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Amazing n awesome work Nader ur doing …I’m lucky to be part of dao team

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$CODE is good. Another suggestion is $BUILD

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Grateful to be a part of this. $CODE is genius. The next 6 months look good for the DAO.

IMO, proof of competence is going to be an important thing to have for when we launch the token onto the free market, letting anyone who owns the tokens join the DAO.

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Absolutely electric update.

Thrilled to be playing an extremely small role in bringing $CODE to life.

This feels like top priority to me. The number of people I have reaching out around how to join it pretty staggering.

I’d recommend polling the group to establish a Membership Committee - or a team specifically tasked with creating and overseeing an onboarding funnel for new members. At FWB, we use an application form that routes directly to a Discord channel using a combo of AirTable and Zapier.

Hosts then “vote” on each new application with an upvote. After it crosses the threshold, new members are “approved” which allows them to join the DAO.

Important to note that joining the DAO not only requires an approval, but also a minimum number of tokens.

While this amount can change over time, I’d recommend setting the first Season token threshold at a fixed amount that is synonymous across anyone who holds a Dev DAO NFT.

Cheers!

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totally agree! would be awesome if we have a club on Gather.town for every member to hang out.

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Talented people flock to the great mission

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stick to the $CODE :100:

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Also, thoughts on Season 0 and Season 1 NFTs (similar to POAPs but more creative) as sort of a badge that members own and future members can acquire to showcase membership even if they don’t obtain one of the original DEV NFTs

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This is a great post. We have accomplished so much in such a short space of time. 2022 is going to be an amazing year for us all. $CODE is perfect and it will be great to get more people involved again.

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Let us look forward to it

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I like $BUILD

I’m a coder but really seems like the DAO is about much more than coding. We need to make sure all our frens who are helping to build the future are included.

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So delighted on how much we have achieved in a short period of time. The $CODE Governance token is great initiative to be candid.

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Love it!

I think there’s probably still some gray area around how memberships will work with the governance tokens. I agree with @coopahtroopa that we should look to add some sort of threshold wrt to the number of tokens and application votes for membership; however, the question comes up around how people can get their hands on tokens if there’s a minimum requirement. I’m assuming these tokens will not be backed by any type of monetary value (i.e. a stablecoin) and will thus have their value dictated by the open market. This could have a negative impact if we’re looking to cater to a wide range of people as they could be potentially priced out of joining. Another thing is if a person applies and gets accepted into the DAO, would they just be given tokens automatically or would a pre-req be having a minimum of X tokens before you can apply?

Coopah I wonder if there’s any reflections/retro you can share around the FWB application system and whether or not a tiered system (i.e. the more tokens you have the more access you get) would be applicable here?

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WRT to token holding as entry requirements. I think we can probably take a look as what the fundamental intention of this and then also provide opportunity to have alternative methods that can be deemed acceptable perhaps. Picking some wisdom from being a part of the AWS community builder. Some examples could be.

E.g. proof of community contribution I.e. Twitch stream , you tube channel, wrote a book, blog, github account maintainer, or any other irrefutable self declared awesome material

It’s probably going to be added an overhead in terms of processing time but I like the idea of the crowd sourcing this via discord votes per application. I would think taking it further and record your upvotes score upon entry lol.

The application process gets reviewed as well as you do an intro before initiating a member into the DAO!

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WRT token name. In my opinion CODE and BUILD both might exclude the awesome content that members put out there contributing towards the general Web3.

How about using CRE8 as the token name? Since we are all creators in some way or another? Arts inclined person can possibly turn the 8 into the D_D incorporated into the token logo and superstitious people sometimes consider 8 as lucky!

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