DAO Vibes (1/12 - 3/2)

👋 News and Community
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Gitcoin’s DAO Vibes is a weekly hour (Weds @12 EST) for the community to hangout and discuss DAO values, current events, and crypto twitter. Gracefully hosted by Loie and Owocki. We have discussed everything from campfire Schelling points to baboon coordination mechanisms and the war in Ukraine. Catch up on prior DAO Vibes by reading the notes below and be sure not to miss the next one on 3/16 in the Gitcoin Discord

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3/2 DAO Vibezzz

Welcome Nanopunk who has remix’d Kevin’s greenpill podcast
Podcast: ‎GreenPill on Apple Podcasts

Gitcoin Grants: Potential Future for Matching Pool Funding Mechanism

Leon explains possible new system for calculating grant matching by looking at pairs of people and determining how much overlap they have between communities. This is used to reduce the effect of social bonds when determining matching funding — putting less weight on people who already cooperate and more weight on people who do not yet cooperate.

Quadratic Funding rewards projects which are widely supported by many contributors. How do you make sure you aggregate the poor and many rather than just insiders? The above solution reduces the weight of funding given by insiders with established relationships

Grants which receive donations from people who have less in common (as measured by pair relationships, soul bound tokens) will be rewarded more

  • Grants which have lots of disparate communities support should receive more funding
    • Reward unity to a certain point. IF too similar there is a disincentive
    • Data to determine will come from previous and current grant contributions
    • Long-term grants attestations reward highly unique contributors and aids collusion resistance

Value of truth determination methods: one way is looking at deep personal involvement or relationships. New grant system rewards those who are less involved or have less relationships because it indicates the truth of the way they determined to fund that grant was more independent and less due to social relationships.

Gitcoin Quadratic Funding is a very cool way to aggregate mass opinions and distribute funding for projects.

Gitcoin Grants 2.0 post on governance forum (https://gov.gitcoin.co/t/gitcoin-grants-2-0/9981)

Gitcoin Grants R13 starts March 9th.

  • 9 ecosystem rounds.
  • 3 cause rounds.
  • $2.5M committed funding to the matching pool.
  • Visit gitcoin.co/grants to apply now!! Apply sooner rather than later to be approved

What if we did a music quadratic funding round? Nanopunk is producing music about what gitcoin is doing!

How do we respond to local or global disasters in terms of mutual aid? Can we recognize when we’re out of our depth?

  • Recognizing that we do not have expertise in foreign policy, refugee crises, and yet still wanting to help. Crypto has raised millions of dollars to support Ukrainians during war
  • Folks who are really experiencing a disaster are the ones in the best position to determine how funds should be best. Folks on the outside can funnel/forward resources towards those on the inside
  • Many opportunities for greater combinations of intelligence and strength to come together. Trust peers ability to do something useful
  • Technology as an accelerant. Accelerating war and the passage of information about the war — through things like social media. Advanced weaponry enables devastating war to take place in hours.
  • Do you ever wish the internet wasn’t invented?
    • Dabble with the idea
  • Do you see mutual aid requests in Venmo/CashApp?
    • Activists culture of supporting one another financially (peer to peer funding)
  • It was easy and fast to raise funds for Ukraine in crypto. Grassroots effort
  • Governments across the world have been sending aid
  • Paypal/corporations skim off the top of people’s mutual aid requests
  • One year from now will we have a culture of mutual aid requests via ENS name sharing?
  • Donate not just funds but time or physical resources (Elon musk sending starlink)
  • Vitalik tweeting about Ukraine and not being neutrali https://twitter.com/VitalikButerin/status/1496695587495981056?cxt=HHwWgMC92Z-tqsUpAAAA
  • People who want to do something to help will find a way to make it happen
  • The power of the individual in the Information Age is greater than ever
  • Information Age creates attention contest in the media. How we do we make sure this is a good thing instead of bad?
    • One way to do this is to adjust how we push content to the top: could push content which has the least disagreement instead of most controversial/attention grabbing

Tip.Party is a gitcoin moonshot collective product and way to reward participation

  • DAOs can try this now. No code tool!

Schelling point took place on 2/17 at EthDenver. Next Schelling Point is 4/21 at EthAmsterdam. Visit schellingpoint website (https://schellingpoint.gitcoin.co) to see the speaker list and checkout the playlist

2/9 DAO Vibezzz

Hacking & Justice

the $4bn bitcoin hack

There was another hack of $300M last week. Public/Transparent Ledger nature of Eth lets people trying to sneak money around get caught.

What happens to hackers who get caught? (esp in the u.s)

How do Blockchain-based government systems implement accountability?

U.S Gov is confiscating stolen money but they don’t seem to be giving it back to the victims of the theft.

LEO token has been used to pay people back before.

In an ideal future (100 years ish) what does the justice system look like?

Hard to tell, we’re still in the Wild West (yee haw)

How would Blockchain-based courts work?

Governments will have increasing surveillance powers

Citizens should have symmetric data access as governments

Justice systems have: presumption of innocence, presenting of evidence, jury voting

How to do voting using blockchain?

Blockchain tools make voting possible through tokenizing voice — making distributing, decentralized governance far easier to do

Blockchain does not exist in a vacuum. Biotech, AI, and other techs make centralized power more achievable which contesting with the decentralizing power of Blockchain.

Could AI be used as part of the justice system?

Presumed innocence is a quality we’d like to preserve

KERNEL - Vivek Singh https://kernel.community/en/

Vivek is among the earliest members of gitcoin. KERNEL is a web3 university (currently on block/cohort 5)

Excited for schelling point :slightly_smiling_face:

Currently in week 0 of block 5. 400 people!

KERNEL block is a long introduction from you and to you.

Q: How do you build close-knit communities like KERNEL?

A: Recognizing through a person the realization of a way of life.

Environment that can bring together people from very different backgrounds; olympic athletes, engineers, poets, finance

Create space for people to get to know each other. Ask questions, share personal stories.

Vivek ended up attending 4 weddings from the people met during a ‘Titans’ class!

Realized there was a requirement for Open Source, Peer-to-Peer education in Web3

Q: What tactics can community-builders use?

A: College provides an agnostic, open, safe area for exploration. This is rarely found outside the college environment.

University endowments are a close corollary to crypto treasuries. They share that they have a public focus and mandate.

Tactics for community-building include recreating this type of exploratory environment.

Realizing there are many ways to be together, many ways to care for each other.

KERNEL has many event types which provide structure so people can explore within a boundary and feel safe but leaving people plenty of room to self-explore and follow their interests. Emphasis on long-term relationships rather than momentary connection.

Q: How is Block 5 going?

A: Kickoff on Friday before Week 0 followed by orientation events.

Thursday firesides provide time to go through the syllabus.

Upcoming guest: former bitcoin magazine writer

Q: What are ways people can get involved with Kernel?

A: Entire syllabus available on the site! Site: https://kernel.community/en/

Some firesides will be live-streamed on Twitter: tomorrow! Vitalik will be there discussing Soulbound! Twitter: https://twitter.com/KERNEL0x

Soulbound is about legitimacy, trust, and web3 patterns. Vitalik’s blog: https://vitalik.ca/general/2022/01/26/soulbound.html

Firesides occur 11 AM EST Thursdays, live-streamed sometimes

Upcoming announcement between Gitcoin and Kernel!?

““Embed our values into our money” — Kevin Owocki” — Vivek Singh

DAO Vibes discusses values and stories that shape the ecosystem.

https://gov.gitcoin.co/t/the-great-bear-the-great-reset-the-great-revival/9855

Core gitcoin story told on governance forum.

First Gitcoin Grants Round: January/Feb 2019 during the great bear. Had been focused on bounties before. Kevin wanted to make something similar to Patreon where open source project contributors could post about their project and find support from the whole community. A recent paper by Vitalik and others had called out open source funding as something that had historically been lacking. Gitcoin found great projects to make grant submissions including Uniswap, Optimism (which have grown a lot!). All are celebrating progress together.

Grantees wanted to interact with funders and engage them.

At the time didn’t know if projects could even convince funders to donate to them or if projects wanted to take money. As more projects received funding, that snowballed into more and more projects and funding. Grants Funding are a mechanism to allow for the manifestation of the collective intelligence or egregore.

Projects which started small early with quadratic funding have grown to be big, important parts of the ecosystem. (Yearn, Prysm, Uniswap, ZK Podcast, Ethers.js). Receiving funding causes a change in the project contributors who feel supported that people are looking at them and their work.

Long, winding path for gitcoin grants: shoutout to the people who made it possible!

Learned that showing quadratic funding math to the user (around r3) was a great mechanism to promote donations as having impact.

Before this, was uncommon for maintainers to ask for funds to sustain their work

Ethereum Foundation was one of the only funders at the beginning of this, now there are soooo many more

2/2 DAO Vibezzz Topics:

Should Gitcoin fund Digital Public Goods or all Public Goods? And To what extent do we build within & for the realms we are close to (digital ones)?

  • Have funded digital public goods. Wanting to move towards all Public Goods

How do we define Public Goods in a way that doesn’t feel like an economic lecture? https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/public-goods/

  • all the things we wish the government succeeded at/provided but doesn’t
  • talking about the specifics: clean air, roads, education

Social Capitalism was supposed to step up where governments fail, but we’re still waiting for that

How do we bake public goods values INTO web3

Are the biggest incentives financial? What are our other incentives in life?

  • Makes Loie think of Ouroboros bc if we had a world where needs were provided as public goods, we wouldn’t need financial incentives
  • Lani: this is why I’m here. Everything could change if needs were covered
  • Nathan Schneider says that because we can program values into money, the hyper-capitalism criticism isn’t so relevant because the financial element then EQUALS the public goods element (bc value of public goods is programmed into the money theoretically)
  • Matthew Effect: The rich get richer, famous get more famous. But we can build systems that subvert this.
  • Imagine wright brothers thinking bc there’s gravity we shouldn’t try to build a flying device. Instead they built against it - created a local equilibria that subverts gravity

What’s our opportunity or responsibility to have 3D public goods people to be building the tech, if we are expanding our use case to those types of public goods?

  • Lani: PrimeDAO projects, grants working on enviro project
  • But what about builders not users?
  • Audrey Tang (digital minister of Taiwan): “My existence is not to become a minister for a certain group, nor to broadcast government propaganda. Instead, it is to become a “channel” to allow greater combinations of intelligence and strength to come together.”
  • Is Gitcoin communication technology then? No, coordination :wink:
  • Gitcoin is the road to solarpunk, and helping avoid hyperfinancialization
  • What if we don’t avoid hyperfinancialization/hypercapitalism, but accept it/assume it and trim it like a bonsai tree?
  • 4 Cs of partnering Pyramid, bottom to top Maslow style: Communication, Commitment, Coordination, Collaboration

1/25 DAO Vibezzz

Bull market vs bear market values (it seems like we’re switching from bull to bear)

  • 2014/15 bear market was worse bc you didn’t know if it would ever come back, government completely shutting down the industry was still a possibility at that point
  • Values of bear:
    • edgewalkers of society are prioritized (sex workers drug dealers poker players activists etc)
    • proactively inclusive
  • Values of bull:
    • $$$

Important to be thinking about: Firing yourself from roles as you scale / decentralizing over time/ not claiming power for powers sake.

  • frogmonkee who just stepped down from bankless weighs in
    • Purposely left a vacuum BECAUSE saw that there were valuable convos going on around it already & trusted it would be carried fwd
  • In order for the thing to live on, you have to pass the baton. The thing you are working on is bigger than yourself. - Sean
  • There’s a difference between founding and leading - parenting vs caregiving - different reqs for detaching yourself
  • ^ this draws Satoshi into the convo! Ultimate example of a founder/parent fully stepping away
    • interacted with very early adopters, pushed updates, communicated about the plans, when wikileaks started accepting bitcoin satoshi dipped, one of their last posts was about kicking the hornets nest too early
    • Vitalik contributes to research and thought leading but has no formal control, is explicit that his opinion should be weighed equally to others

Decentralization

  • Niches are the new nation states: Public Goods, Sewing, or Keanu Reeves
  • Lindy effect is a way of creating legitimacy
  • Do we have a duty to continue to serve the founding user base of crypto? (many criminalized and financially excluded populations)
    • Duty as an industry maybe not, but feel a personal conviction - brent
    • Open access is a value of the space we need to preserve
    • If we build right, it’ll be none of our business what ppl use it for
    • Beware Bank Accounts getting shut down

1/19 DAO Vibezzz

Why does decentralization of our product hosting matter?

Gitcoin is a governance tool disguised as a crowdfunding tool

Don’t want to be accused of fudging the grant matching numbers - which is totally possible if the grants platform is centralized

Darth Owocki

  • A shorthand for the idea that because even good leaders (Anakin or owocki) can turn evil, we need a system in place which can not be evil.

Is it important to decentralize private goods too?

Decentralisation of human systems is harder/different than technical systems. it works v easily for protocols but less clear for human systems in which the nodes (ppl) all have diff skills

Moxie SA: https://moxie.org/2022/01/07/web3-first-impressions.html

When does a platform/product become so successful/needed that it can compromise on UX or other things to go closer to values?

  • Back in web2 dating app days, had board on the left and users on the right, board saying “turn on revenue now” asking for an extraction model that completely disservices users. When Owocki moved on from that project vowed to never let those 2 groups be so separate in their members & interests.

Remember ‘The Wire’ - HBO show where all actors start off trying to improve the system, but it ends where it started

Fiduciary duty - it means more and more with no ceiling right? a duty to do THE MOST possible for infinite expansion of profits for shareholders?

  • If that’s true, can it situates us on a human value index of growth mindset? are we trying to be THE BEST or are we trying to serve a certain purpose and once we reach that, sit steady & maintain?

Beware ‘Climbing the Wrong Hill’

OHM

  • 3,3 meme comes from the coordinate, coordinate payoff matrix (game theory/prisoners dilemma)
  • static incentivization doesn’t work - irina
  • What values does this shine a light on that we want in gitcoin?
    • Transparency - notice ahead of time of major actions
    • Coordination value is good, but how do we set it up so it’s not taunting ppl to not coordinate?
    • Cults are coordination, how do we coordinate without giving up our agency
    • Simulation - strong engineering principles
    • Schelling Point means coordination without communication
    • A campfire is an example of coordination without communication
  • Ben - causes concern for KlimaDAO bc they were a fork of OHM, it’s the same economic theory beneath it

1/12 DAO Vibezzz

Drivers vs Barriers

Driver: So much utility of eth now

Barrier: Aligning incentives is hard. Perhaps it’s just that currency design has happened behind closed doors in the past.

  • Barrier/Macro trend to aligning incentives that is hard to get away from: distribution/accumulation of wealth
  • Creatives are often slashed first in times of economic lows
  • Hux thinks institutions will buy dips, thus we won’t have a bear market anything like we’ve seen before. For this reason, institutions being involved benefits individuals
    • Internet of shit, lol, Extractive of humans
  • Equal value to different stakeholders. Meeting ppl where they are, not politicizing where they come from - Irina
    • ^ This ALIGNS OUR INCENTIVES, since we all have the same perspective on being a stakeholder
  • Demand Generation as a marketing strategy - does crypto space have this or no?
  • Scarcity in the digital world is so different than the physical world
  • Troop of baboons working together daily to find food etc, have to decide without language and agree on the destination AND the path to get there
  • Ants have dance offs
    • All the dance-off convo reminds me that a value of this space is FUN
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