Collab Tools for Community DAOs

Good DAOing is hard. Community intentions easily run at cross-purposes, and defining collective actions can be extremely challenging. Having access to effective tooling may help, but not without a wide array of good social protocols for advancing collaboration, shared understanding, conflict resolution, preference signalling, and more.

High hopes abound for DAO's, but without effective and ongoing collaboration, people can be shoehorned into a technical "solution" that doesn't meet their needs. Through the curation and sharing of collaborative frameworks and techniques, communities can benefit from various collaboration tools to conduct the practices of eliciting, ordering, and formulating needed proposals, plans and organizational actions.

We have developed a partner relationship with "HYPE Innovation", who provide an Innovation Management Platform designed specifically for flexible decentralized collaboration at massive scale. This platform is much more suitable for effective community collaboration than IdeaScale. We will use it as a tool for engaging with some of Cardano's communities centering on our core question: Which practices and processes create the possibilities for efficient collaborations and effective execution?

We aim to deliver the results of our research and collaborative process directly back to the communities we are working with, as well as to the Catalyst community at large (Swarm and After Town Hall sessions). We'll capture these video sessions and related knowledge resources in open source Gitbook form. As a result, we seek to create long-term value for today's DAOing community… and tomorrow's.

Communities we are prepared to engage with include:

• Catalyst Swarm
• International Association for Community Development
• ADAO
• Secret Decks
• Commons Stack
• BeanChain / Cooperate.Network
• Gimbalabs

Dan Kimball is a serial tech entrepreneur with 40 years in developing tech products and companies and co-founder of an active EOSIO community governed DAO project www.freeos.io & www.freedao.io.

Our growing team includes decades of technology experience including Cardano development. https://www.linkedin.com/in/danvancekimball/

Christopher Casillas: Nonprofit co-founder and leader who helped shape culture and business development processes as an early employee of a tech startup, turned billion dollar company. https://www.linkedin.com/in/chriscasillas/

Evan Carr: Experienced leader in sales, marketing, and facilitation for multi-billion dollar SaaS companies and startups.

Randall Harmon has 30 years experience in software development and enjoys most the regenerative nature of truly collaborative teamwork. He is a veteran of Catalyst Swarm and a core team member at Gimbalabs. https://www.linkedin.com/in/randall-harmon-aa52765/

We are seeking one additional team member, from a timezone that can bridge between eastern and western hemispheres, with passion and experience in collaboration and community governance.

Several professionals and leading organizations are joining as partners with deep experience in relevant domains:

Paul Lachapelle is a former president of the Int'l Association for Community Development (currently advising the UN and aid agencies on best practices for community development). We've learned more than we realize from their historical research. Paul has a deep interest in engaging his community in discussions on the connections between communities, collaborations, governance, and the retention of endogenous value within communities.

Dennis Rivers - MA Interpersonal CommunicationsConsummate Activist and Earth Citizen - Expert in Communications Training; Co-Founder of Humap a Person Planet Process collaborative framework for collective action. Author of 7 Challenges Workbook with multi-millions of copies distributed by UN and non-profits for communications Training Web & Book designer and programmer.

Gene Bazan Ph.D. - Founder - Applied Heuristics AssociatesProfessor of City and Regional Planning at 3 universities US & abroad. 30yrs environmental, civic, governmental and business organizations on board and staff development. Created the Center for Sustainability at PennState. Applied Heuristics Associates designs collaborative games and systems for Community Engaged Planning.

Jerome Kelsey - Founder — FreeDAO.ioBrings 20 years of systems and software design, and lead game design. A proponent of free and open societies, direct democracy, gift economies and systems design, Jerome founded FreeDAO as an unstoppable service to bring new tools that can enhance human freedoms.

Impact

# of open source DAO related knowledge products made available

# of interviews with knowledgeable community members

# of new techniques adopted by participating communities

Reported effectiveness of collaborative techniques employed

Testimonials from community leaders/members for inclusion in the Commons library

Communities will be attracted to DAOing on Cardano because of the breadth and depth of tools and frameworks available to them for realizing their highest collaborative potential.

Cardano DAO's will set the web3 standard by upleveling first principle capabilities of human cooperation and collaboration.

Cardano DAO's collaborate better because of access to good practices for producing shared intentions, understanding, language, and heuristics.

Members of Cardano DAO's have easy access to knowledge resources and therefore enjoy greater participation in meaningful community decision making.

In future funding rounds, we aim to continue these collaborations and develop useful products honoring the knowledge and practices we are researching, developing, re-sharing and capturing. For a bigger-picture context on this larger vision, see supporting material to follow.

12 Week Budget

• Innovation management system Scoping, Design, and Configuration - 60 hours
• Design of collaborative sessions - 60 hours
• 5 Communities Sessions 2x/month for 3 months - 150 hours
• 2 people at each session including prep
• Weekly Facilitation and Management of innovation process - 120 hours
• 5 people at each session across 12 weeks
• Weekly Internal Coordination Syncs - 120 hours
• 5 people at each session across 12 weeks
• Ongoing prep and internal collaboration - 60 hours
• Innovation Management System Performance Reporting - 40 hours
• Good Practices and Heuristics Community Roadshow - 12 hours
• Open Source Knowledge Library Tech Design and Setup - 36 hours
• Knowledge Library resourcing and curation- 52 hours
• Producing Knowledge Products (Guides, Maps, Graphics) - 40 hours

Total Hours: 750

Rate: $100

Total Budget Requested: $75,000

Milestones and Timetable

Our plan is to initiate our collaborative work in the first quarter of 2022, independent of Catalyst funding. Our deliverables would

Initial engagement with selected communities

Innovation management system deployed

Consultation with collaborative methods experts (ongoing)

Knowledge management system deployed

Presentations in community forums about conclusions and findings

Knowledge products produced and published

Success after:

3 months

• Collaboration Plaform Launched
• Engagement with Cardano Communities

6 Months

• Design Requirements
• Collaboration Heuristics Library
• Collaboration Knowledge Library

12 Months

• Integrated Collaborations
• Regular Community engagement in collaboration Platform

Resources:

Beyond the contributors already mentioned above, we expect to have good access to a number of communities within and beyond Cardano. We have existing relationships to additional communities to collaborate with, in case any of the mentioned communities may disengage.

Risks and Challenges:

Reliance on external software. However, as previously noted, Hype Innovation is a platform trusted by the largest companies in the world with high reliability and uptime expectations. Also, the team at HYPE has strong interest in our partnership.

Community engagement could be lower than expected. Although referenced communities are currently engaged in preparation, we also have relationships with additional communities to use as contingencies.

Overview

We propose a renewed exploration of Governance using a better collaboration platform around our core question of "What is Community DAO Governance?" This starts with a new Idea & Innovation Management Platform provided by our partner "HYPE Innovation". Unlike IdeaScale, it is designed specifically for flexible decentralized collaboration at massive scale. Using this software, this Social Experiment will engage Communities in various Campaigns around our core question. We will engage with Catalyst, Gimbalabs, IACD, in various innovation campaigns to define, implement and test it's applicability for Community DAO Governance. Given our familiarity with Collaboration Environments and Community Governance we anticipate success with this experiment, and the eventual establishment of a platform for Community DAO Governance.

- Fund 7. Stage 1 Ideation: Community DAO Collaborative Governance.

With the success, we anticipate expansion of this project…

- Fund 8. Stage 2 Solution Design: for a Community DAO platform.

- Fund 9. Stage 3 Implementation: of a first Community DAO platform

Stage 1 Ideation:

In order to test the collaboration platform we plan the following

4 Question Campaigns to engage with Catalyst, and other communities, on:

• Collaboration Methods for establishing Shared Meanings and Ideas
• Refining and Consolidating these Ideas into votable proposals.
• Arriving at Community agreements.
• Evolving a collaborative platform in service of Community Empowerment.

Our hypothesis is, Current State-of-the-art collaborative platforms for Ideation and Innovation have gone a long way toward formulating Community DAO Governance. Taking them to the next level is a worthy goal. A core of this experiment is in sharing the outcome of our work so Cardano can make use of it…. We believe with success, this experiment can be scaled up to construct a tool for Community DAO Governance and perhaps improve upon the current Catalyst protocol. Exploratory research is crucial for the advancement of science. Crucial too for Catalyzing Cooperation.

Evolving an Existing Collaborative Platform

We have established an active partnership with HYPE Innovation, a provider of world class Innovation Management platforms. It has been proven by many corporate clients such as UNICEF, and IDEO.com a global design and innovation company. The unique HYPE innovation platform is directed at maximizing Collaboration between members. It's design is not dependent on Hierarchy, as are competitors (such as IdeaScale) in Innovation & Idea Management Software. While designed for use by membership communities, it does not yet provide features designed for use by DAO's.

Our partnership is to provide the research in building collaborative structures and DAO use cases. And to define the processes ultimately needed to create tools for the generation of DAO smart contracts. We are working with them to effectively evolve its functionality and design a user environment, with heuristic tools and games, intended to build consensus around the intentions of a community. This is a perfect opportunity for Cardano to establish and refine a Collaborative platform for Community DAO's. As well as a good test for establishing a collaboration environment for the CARDANO community.

A Social Experiment on Community DAO's

Intentions Come Before Action

The concept "DAO" starts with Community, and communities start with People.

Organizations exist for a purpose: To gather & coordinate people for maximizing collaboration.

For organizations to be productive, they need to arrive at the shared meaning and alignment necessary for collaborative action.

Our Proposal is to establish an environment for collaboration to arrive at consensus around community intentions. Intentions are the precise formal shared agreements ultimately needed to programmatically create the smart contracts for any Community DAO. This consensus is facilitated through the creation of heuristic tools designed to arrive at shared meaning and collective alignment. Simple but structured dialogue between members can help to capture group intentions and understanding without tedious group conversations.

Our Team & Collaborative Partners bring together deep knowledge, and global experience.

• Design of Heuristic Tools
• Collaborative Innovation Platforms
• Tokenomics & Gaming
• Active DAO Communities
• Community Development Advisors
• Tech Entrepreneurship

Items A and B below define Two different types of collaboration. Because everything is created twice. First in our minds, and then in the world. DAO's are NOT "Self-Governing". They only provide the means to automate the methodology a community defines for it's governance.

A To define our Intentions

B To coordinate our collective Actions

This needs to be structured around:

Deciding what to Do

Doing what we Decide

Humans always need be involved. A DAO's role is simply to facilitate the process of collaboration.

First, by helping to formulate a consensus of Intentions, for how we want to govern ourselves within the community.

Next, by agreeing upon and facilitating our collective Actions, according to those intentions.

Collaborative DAO Governance.

Autocratic DAO's simply tell us what to do. But Democratic "Community DAO's" first need to understand the members intentions then help to coordinate community actions to achieve them. Most DAOs that exist today begin with the wrong design principle. Emerging from crypto-currency, they mostly end up just managing money and members, not assisting communities. These crypto-currency DAO's are good for managing DeFi projects, but they are not the design solutions we need for example, Community Development in Africa. The core inspiration of the Cardano ecosystem requires DAOs to specifically be designed to for Community Development.

Our approach to Community DAO's insist that Community Intentions come first. If DAO's are to become viable tools for change in the world. We need to have DAO's designed to capture and facilitate the intentions of the community.

We're focused on establishing a platform for creating a DAO based Community Governance over 3 stages.

Stage 1 INNOVATION - To prototype, test, validate, and derive the features/requirements for a flexible Community Collaboration Platform. To design the Heuristic tools, dialogue methods, and engaging games to capture community intentions. To engage communities in using the platform to evaluate its design. It's ultimate intention is to become a collaboration interface leading to the building of templates for Community DAO's Smart contracts. Designed also to define community actions, it will also ultimately serve to coordinate the collective actions that the DAO members choose to take.

Stage 2 SYSTEMS DESIGN - To architect, from the Innovation in Stage 1, the systems, tools, and integrations required to create full featured Community Governed DAO's. (Funds 8 & 9)

Stage 3 IMPLEMENTATION - To implement the systems architecture resulting from Stages 2 to produce an operating platform for creating community DAO's and coordinating community actions within the DAO's. (Funds 9 & 10)

DEFINING INTENTIONS: A core problem for DAO's today, and in the future, is how to derive the collective community intentions in order to define a unique, effective, and fair governance. Now that we can implement digital cooperative organizations of nearly any size, the memberships of those organizations need new democratic ways to clarify their their intentions. And ways to coordinate, implement and measure their collective actions.

Community DAO's especially need to start with a human perspective and end up with DAO templates and customized parameters to implement DAO smart contracts.

A MATTER OF SCALE: Humans have never really had the experience nor potential for collective decision making and collective actions on such a massive scale.

Effective cooperative communities in the past have consisted mainly of collaborations of ten's and sometimes hundreds of individuals. Corporations, and Governments, have implemented hierarchical and autocratic control systems exhibiting success with coordinating hundreds of thousands people. But often with problems of efficiency, fairness, and inequities of power and personal agency.

OLD SCHOOL GOVERNANCE: Autocracies and Representative Democracies have demonstrated their flaws historically and continue to show their weakness primarily in the form of unjust distribution of power. They are failing to deliver fair democratic coordination "of by and for the people"….

Collective Democratic Governance is an essential problem to be solved to accelerate and expand the power of human coordination on a massive new scale. Our partner Freeos.io is using "Qualified Demarchy" to allows for the delegation of knowledge based voting to a qualified pools or group of domain experts. Random selection of members from these pools for casting of votes prevents the collusion that often accompanies representative democracies.

GLOBAL POTENTIAL REQUIRES HUMAN DESIGN: We now have the potential for coordination on a global scale but until we have an effective collective governance methodology, there will persist confusion and even chaos in formulating any effective collective human action with DAO's. We need collaborative tools at a human scale and within a familiar environment for people to define their intentions and convert them into the smart contracts that DAO's necessary to accelerate human coordination.

DIRECT DEMOCRACY: There are many voting and governance methods that a community might choose for their approach. For example, FreeDAO defines "Qualified Demarchy" as governance method closest to Direct Democracy. (see Medium articles by J.Kelsey) We need to facilitate dialogs and creative engagement to capture the decisions made in communities. Only then can we use them for taking actions and building a communities future. There are many governance, systems, methods, and processes that work. Which ones depend upon community culture.

COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT: We are focusing this proposal on defining community governance for empowering DAO's to protect their "Endogenous" value. This is the internal or intrinsic value generated and preserved in the service of community development. Success in Development involves monitoring of metrics and parameters of Community health and strength.

To increase our understanding of the foundation of health and strength of Community Development we have partnered with the International Association for Community Development - IACD, this is a global association of advisors to organizations like UNICEF and United Way, which has, since 1953, studied and published articles about what enables and enhances the Development of Communities. They conduct research and publish studies, for example, on how Community Currencies work best to enable community development in practical ways.

COLLABORATION ENVIRONMENT: Using current best practices, We will install a "State-of-the-Art" collaborative innovation management platform from HYPE innovation. This will be the core information management tool for defining a collaborative governance with involvement from communities that have experience with community governance. We plan to ideate a governance methods that can be changed by an evolving membership. A community's governance needs the ability to change to reflect the community centric needs in DAO's of any size.

To In order to validate the design elements needed for adaptive methods of governance, we are inviting participation of key membership organizations to contribute to our DAO governance collaboration. This will of course start with and iterate with the Cardano Community. We have also established ties with some other organizations who have agreed to be involved in studying, implementing and establishing DAO's for Community Development and who understand the importance of coordinated action and effective development of large populations around the "of, by, and for the people" principle.

Developing this new kind of governance will include validation of the academic work that has been happening for years in the study of Community Development and Community Currencies. The International Association for Community Development (IACD ) now acts as an advisor to the UN and aid agencies on best practices for community development. They will be among the communities participating in our collaboration. We've learned more than we realize from their historical research. This can be applied to the design of community development with DAO governance. There are also great experiments going on within the block-chain world for how to develop DAO governance. Validation of those governance mechanisms is lacking. And organizing an effort to collect best practices is an important long term goal.

We have already partnered with prominent DAO communities and academic groups who have key experience with community development and existing DAO's. They are deeply interested in participating in both the definition and eventual implementation and active use of the solutions that we develop.

Input - Activities - Output - Outcome - Impact.

The potential we see is to establish a practical and active collaboration to define a general purpose DAO Governance Platform. Initiated by and in the Cardano Community, (with invited contributions from other DAO interested communities) this active online collaboration intends to define the essence of a DAO Governance system for DAO's on Cardano and other blockchain platforms.

INPUT People, Facilities, Time, and Money for this project is detailed in this section over a 3 month period we will pay our staff for Time and Materials. It will not include payments to Partners such as Hype, FreeDAO, IACD, et all. The value they gain from the in Our Engagement with Communities to facilitate the ideation of governance Staff over 3 month with expenditures for Time and Materials. The collaboration from multiple communities actively engaged or interested in the creation of DAO's. It is structured as a proven and effective way to capture and organize the knowledge of these communities around their vision DAO governance. (See section Inputs)

ACTIVITIES in this project are by the members participating in our existing online innovation management platform designed to ideate and consolidate the essentials of DAO Governance. The software system itself has been designed to ultimately evolve into a platform specifically designed for the governance of DAO's .

OUTPUT of this project is a distillation of the best current thinking from qualified individuals on the requirements for structured DAO governance.

OUTCOME will be a foundation for structured modifications to be made to the innovation management platform to meet the structured requirements defined as necessary for DAO governance.

IMPACT of this project would ultimately be to supply a universal tool for the creation of Communities organized as DAO's in an online platform designed to generate Smart Contracts for the DAO.

Key Development Partners

• HYPE Innovation https://www.hypeinnovation.com/en/        "Innovation Management Platforms" have proven themselves over many years in corporate settings that coordinate thousands of people using collective knowledge power to formulate solutions to significant problems. Redirecting this methodology to the solution the social problems of governance seems to be an instant win. We have established collaboration with this leading Innovation Management Platform provider. HYPE has applied innovation management at a large scale effectively for major corporations in product development as well as the United Nations in UNICEF development programs. OpenIDEO… etc….etc…

• Freeos - FreeDAO https://freeos.io/ https://www.freedao.io/

• Commons Stack - Token Engineering Commons

KEY Collaborating PARTNERS:

• IACD - Intl Association for Community Development
• UNICEF - Community Development
• DAO Communities we Plan to engage:
• Freeos.io - Establishing Community Development Currency
• The Commons Stack - DAO Deep experience in Ethereum DAO's
• IACD - International Association for Community Development
• United Nations - UNICEF - Real World Community Development
• FUSE Network - Community Currency Platform - Mark Smargon
• Dfinity Internet Computer - Decentralized Internet Platform
• Bank-less DAO - Prominent DAO in the Etherium Crypto Community
• Grassroots Economics - Africa Centric Communities - Will Ruddick

https://vimeo.com/?embedded=true&source=vimeo_logo&owner=136561422