Governance Co-Laboratory

Low-stakes laboratory to experiment with novel organizational structures and processes, free from highly technical considerations.

Engaged community member, retro organizer / facilitator
Catalyst SWARM
Econ/game theory/tokenomics

Background:
This is a companion proposal to Catalyst Catapult. Funding here will allow us to dedicate additional time and resources to exploring governance ideas, in addition to the core mission of delivering guided onboarding experiences. With funding from this proposal, we anticipate that Catapult could grow into a full-fledged DAO within the next 2-4 funds. Please note that our work will continue regardless of funding on EITHER proposal! Funds will simply allow us to expand capacity and accelerate our efforts.
https://cardano.ideascale.com/a/dtd/Catalyst-Catapult/350704-48088

Catalyst Catapult: A Dual Mandate
Deliver high-quality, conversational onboarding experiences at scale through a loosely connected network of professional facilitators, leveraging repeatable yet flexible processes

Explore novel organizational and decision-making patterns to enable a self-sustaining onboarding ecosystem driven by incentivized stewardship, reporting results to the community and formalizing the most promising experiments in the governance design of Catapult.

(This proposal focuses on #2)

An Onboarding DAO: Do We Even Need That?
No - and that's precisely the point. By narrowing our scope to a largely non-technical problem, we allow ourselves to be laser-focused on the most critical questions and challenges facing Distributed Autonomous Organizations (DAOs).

How might we thoughtfully design our cryptoeconomic systems to fairly compensate contributions, to encourage inclusive participation, and to democratically manage decision-making?

How might we integrate cooperation and compassion with our protocols and processes?

How might we navigate unforeseen events and exploits, like those that ended TheDAO and crippled Steemit?

All of these and more remain relevant in the context of onboarding. Catapult aims to serve as a testing ground for exploring such questions, while building an engine to consistently and reliably launch teams and individuals to success in Catalyst.

We intend to work closely with other community members and proposers to inform the governance experiments undertaken. With the results of these experiments, we hope to provide the building blocks for future decision-making tools and frameworks, while minimizing the risks associated with experimentation.

In practice, this might look like facilitated conversations with the community to identify and discuss problems, research solutions, model solutions and experiment with social games, and compiling / reporting results to the community. If there are promising results, we'll experiment with it in the onboarding collective's organizational structure. If it passes stress test there, we can find devs to zip it on chain and share findings with other distributed governance efforts like the NFT-DAO, etc.

Early FocusAs mentioned, we intend to work with other projects to identify the areas of greatest need. To begin, we'll focus on two areas of need already identified within the community, 1) continuous, collaborative curation of onboarding materials, and 2) compensation frameworks to track and reward meaningful contributions. These initial efforts will also include creating the relationships and space required to share findings with the broader community.