AMA - April 2022

Hi all,

As you know, I co-founded Gitcoin in summer 2017 and have been with the project since then until present day.

I’ve been working on scaling & decentralizing the context I have about Gitcoin by authoring a bunch of posts on the governance forum. As of present day, I’ve authored 161 posts in order to do so.

I’d love to know what you want to hear from me, in order to decentralize the selection of which context I provide to the DAO.

So here goes. Ask me anything.

Comment below, or if you want to ask an anonymous question you can use this form…

I will answer as many questions as I am able to. I will monitor this thread looking for new questions in the month of April.

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Thanks for doing this! Awesome.

How do you think the future of employment looks like?

I know that employment is an important financial use case for many people, and we know that web3/internet of money reinvents many financial use cases. So from that we can deduce that employment will change because of the internet of money.

Right now the trend seems to be working for DAOs.

I think that question is too broad of a question for me to answer in depth here, but I think my bankless op-ed on the Internet of jobs covers some of my thoughts.

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Anonymous asked this via the google form:

Saw you shared this: https://twitter.com/shingaithornton/status/1508995423616192516

do you think Gitcoin could try this “council” system? If so how would you suggest it could work better?

Here is the tweet to save everyone a click:


I do not think this is up to me. I think it s question for the CSDO since they are part of how the legitimacy flows in GitcoinDAO.

Check out this reference for how legitimacy by process flows in GitcoinDAO, which I have annotated with this question:

CCing a few CSDO members who may have thoughts here @Pop @DisruptionJoe @annika

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hey @owocki thanks for this opportunity, I got here researching about DAOs and the mission of Gitcoin, as an open-source consumer for many years, resonate deeply with me. I hope I can contribute somehow.

I’ve read all the Discourse forum messages since 2021 but still would love to know your experience in a few subjects:

  • Given the freedom of working on DAOs, have you lost key members because they were found another opportunity that required most of their time?

  • If so, at this point is there anything implemented in GitCoinDAO for avoiding this?

  • Have you ever found a big group of holders (or single whale), voting/proposing against the interest/mission of the DAO?

  • Does the DAO looks like you imagine it would be when you started it?

Not that I’m aware of. I’m sure that many people have come & gone in general, but I am not aware of key contributors to workstreams moving on from GitcoinDAO without offboarding in an orderly way.

I have not, but that doesnt mean that it’s definitively not happening. I’d welcome anyone else on the thread calling this out / investigating it if they see it.

The primary thing we were trying to solve with the QuadraticLands.com retro drop experience was enabling a group of Stewards who could be legitimate in governing Gitcoin Grants. Most governance tokens have such low voter turnout, and by enabling delegation at the start, the idea was to evolve past this problem. Here is who the community selected as stewards at the start of the DAO:

E2ey1M8UUAYFRpR

I was pretty happy with how that created a basis of legitimacy for the DAO.

Beyond the structure that was set up at the start and the mission being an organizing principle, I did not have strongly held expectations for how the DAO would work. Like otheres, I’ve been trying to learn about DAOs ( see DAO Design Best Practices ) Egregores ( The Gitcoin/GitcoinDAO Egregore is Emerging ) work. Just others, I’ve been trying to figure out how the dao as an entity scales its sensemaking.

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The FDD is using supervision by council. So far so good I believe! FDD calls it the Source Council and is now using a peer-evaluation system called Coordinape to calculate a portion of the council members rewards. It is the latest iteration of FDD governance and really is the best yet imo.


Question:

The power & resource sharing between state or provincial government and the feds has been a contentious and divisive issue in the early days of the formation of USA and Canada. I see parallels of this in the dao-space.

It has been suggested digital-communities are a new form of nation without geo-political borders (…so far groan). It has also been suggested (thanks E.O.) that groups benefit from a structure of multiple sub-groups due mostly to the fact large groups are harder to operate efficiently.

Kevin, can you please talk about how you see the hard issues of power & resource sharing playing out in daos… Not looking for specific answers just thought exploration.

Some wonderings I have about this area:

Will traditional comprehensive lawyer-negotiated contracts be needed or can we find a newer way via smart contracts?

If a sub-structure is attainable with advanced coordination tools why shouldn’t most daos be sub-groups of the same parent-group? The Public Goods Dao? The New Globe Org? (get it…the new form of NGO haha?)

Is the research about sub-groups current or has it been superseded?

Thanks for your time Kevin.

Thanks for having this!

  1. We have a lot of great discussions about values in DAO Vibes. As someone still learning, a lot of the values of Web3 that are discussed often seem cultural and impossible to program into our money – what are the values we can program into our money?

  2. If you could only recommend one book to someone getting into Web3, what book would it be and why?

  3. Wen moon

I think that with a turing complete smart contract language and oracles that put info on chain, you could plausibly program really any value into money (in theory). But the ecosystem is only a few years old + not mature enough for that to happen yet.

In the meantime, tools for creating intersubjective consensus (like CoordinAPE, Gitcoin Grants, CLRFund) are a nice shim to make sure that financial rewards match our values.

Also checkout How do we scale our sensemaking? - which I think has some novel ideas about how to measure what we value.

Depends on context, their skillset, interests, and background. Also their reason for getting into the space.

Right now I’ve been getting very excited about Impact Networks

This is the book I used to learn solidity + build the MVP of Gitcoin.

Cryptoians by Laura Shin is a great history of the Ethereum launch.

https://twitter.com/owocki/status/1491783099918606339

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