Retreat 2022 Impressions

owocki · February 23, 2022, 2:35pm

Hey all,

Each workstream was invited to send a handful of people to this event, and we did various activities together (meals, trainings, some social events).

I wanted to invite anyone who came to this event to share their impressions or learnings from the event here - so they can scale outwards.

Disclaimer: This post is for informative purposes only and is not financial advice. This post reflects my personal views, not a decision or commitment by Gitcoin governance. Forward-looking items in it are targets, not commitments. The information in these posts is subject to change as we continue learning. This post may contain estimates, may contain errors, and is provided on a best-effort basis. DYOR, do not make any financial decisions based on these posts.

owocki · February 23, 2022, 3:59pm

A few more insights from todays convos

Perfect Not be the Enemy of Good

Many people at the retreat confided in me that they felt like sometimes their work needed to be perfect.

One thing I feel strongly culturally is that we can’t let perfect be the enemy of good.. I’m a big fan of doing pareto optimal work where you get to 80% of the outcome with 20% of the effort.

Stable and Variable Funding

When designing for knowledge worker compensation, stable funding and variable funding are complementary. Stable funding allows contributors to pay their rent, maintain a lifestyle, and thrive. Variable funding ties their incentives to everyone elses .

Local Optima Vs Global Optima

Much of the tradeoff space in DAOs is a tradeoff between local optimals and global optima. Knowing when to descend the local optima to get to the higher global optima is an art.

This excellent post by Chris Dixon goes into this in depth: Climbing the wrong hill — cdixon

Supporting Each Other

I think we all learned this retreat that we have more support on things we are weak on that we thought. For example, I’m bad at people stuff, Kyle is good at it - so he augments me in that way. The more generalizable form of this: I’m bad at X, person Y is good at it, so they augment my workflow.

Not being afraid to ask when you dont know

I think its important to build a culture of questioning what we dont know. Where people aren’t afraid to ask. I have the privilege of being able to have a front row seat to this project for the last 5 years, and not everyone has that privilege (in fact, 99.9% of people dont). So building culture where people can show up and not know and have that be okay is how we build learning into our culture.

Disclaimer: This post is for informative purposes only and is not financial advice. This post reflects my personal views, not a decision or commitment by Gitcoin governance. Forward-looking items in it are targets, not commitments. The information in these posts is subject to change as we continue learning. This post may contain estimates, may contain errors, and is provided on a best-effort basis. DYOR, do not make any financial decisions based on these posts.

seanmac · February 23, 2022, 5:09pm

Super helpful observations. Just a note that we launched/announced Aqueduct and our partnership with Tally at Schelling Point this year. Twitter thread here with links to our blog post: https://twitter.com/gitcoin/status/1494467687161942016?s=21

We also created a press release for this and submitted it to the event in advance but did not see coverage.

Additionally, we reminded our Twitter audience of our upcoming grants round, including ecosystem & cause round participants, during the week but this was not incorporated in the event.

As several of us discussed during the event, it would be super helpful for us to be more persona / action-oriented during future events. For example, we could have cards with QR codes for each of the following that are linked to customized landing pages with contact aliases):

Grant funders (our b2c, broadest audience)
Grant creators
Bounty hunters/hackers
DAO/product/project partnerships (our B2B audience)

Finally, we have been discussing how we can improve coordination between marketing sub-teams, especially across workstreams/orgs. The current plan is for MMM to scale specialized marketing functions to facilitate this.

owocki · February 23, 2022, 8:02pm

more brain droppings from ppl this morning:

Different workstreams have different ways they translate goals into outcomes into work and back again. It would be neat to show & tell + cross pollinate them.

ImpactDAO Cartographry handbook could be a solid follow up to the green pill book. Green Pill book = vision. ImpactDAO Map = a list of ImpactDAOs + what impact they’re having = a tangible complement to the vision book.

There s a sense of “ok were all on this ship togoether, but where is the ship going?” coming out of the retreat and our 2022 goals. Would be cool to see roadmapping sessions done across the DAO to continue the momentum + build a syntheisis.

As opposed to a geth client, which can hold all of the same state as other geth clients, each “node” in a DAO has different skills, ambitions, time constraints, communication styles, history, etc. Because of this, its just very hard (costly)? to decentralize (make antifragile) things we work on.

A great commentary on this came out of our convos this morning. Geth has light speed sync, Humans have mirror neurons, spindle neurals, and shared culture.

The hyptothesis is that spending time togethr means syncing our nervous systems, creating learning, culture, and shared psycological safety. A place where we can be honest and tell each other the truth. The core nugget here is if we take the time to get to know each other and trust each other, it will pay massive dividends.

There was some talk about the dark side of coordination. We should explore the attributes of things like wars, cults, corporations + where they went wrong. (I have a sense that it has to do with coercion & lack of consent).

There was some great discussion on indivdiualism and collectivism - specifically the nationalist arbitrage game that corporations have been playing in order to not pay their taxes in any specific jurisdiction. If there was a global coordination substrate for funding public goods, would they contribute to that?

There was some talk about whether top down authoritarian societies create a pushing back by people reflexively or not.

We discussed the tradeoffs of framing the Gitcoin mission around public goods or human thriving. Perhaps we should revisit our mission & values every 6 months to make sure they stay current to our evolving values?

We discussed how to do benefits like workers comip and maternity leave in a DAO native era. This is not just theoretical for GitcoinDAO, and maybe interesting ideas were bubbling up.

Disclaimer: This post is for informative purposes only and is not financial advice. This post reflects my personal views, not a decision or commitment by Gitcoin governance. Forward-looking items in it are targets, not commitments. The information in these posts is subject to change as we continue learning. This post may contain estimates, may contain errors, and is provided on a best-effort basis. DYOR, do not make any financial decisions based on these posts.