ADAO: Comprehensive DAO's Course

[GENERAL] Summarize your solution to the problem.

Build a comprehensive course about DAOs and provide educational resources.

[GENERAL] Summarize your relevant experience.

ADAO comprises 11 Working Groups developing in a decentralized, community-driven way since November of 2021.

The Blockchain Learning Center(BLC) is working towards developing educational resources that can be used to help bring people into the blockchain space.

[IMPACT] Please describe your proposed solution.

Work with ADAO and other prominent DAOs within the Cardano ecosystem to craft an exhaustive course on DAOs whose target audience will be those at the beginner and intermediate levels of learning. Videos, infographics, presentations, articles, and other educational resources will be created and used to compose the course. The resources created will also be deliverables on their own and should be useful for anyone trying to effectively teach others about DAOs. The course content and resources created will be made available free of charge to the community.

The content created may be used by many DAOs within the Cardano ecosystem as examples and help to promote those communities to the students taking this course. We want to highlight the productive and positive culture created by the DAO work environment and teach the cultural benefits of such a system for its participants.

We believe DAOs, in conjunction with blockchain technology, will change the way we organize in the future and the way we think about companies, clubs and organizations. We also believe Cardano is uniquely designed to benefit DAO structure. By creating educational content about DAOs, we can make a positive impact on the Cardano ecosystem by increasing adoption of our blockchain.

The course and all materials will be made available in English and Spanish.

[IMPACT] Please describe how your proposed solution will address the Challenge that you have submitted it in.

By creating an approachable and comprehensive course, infographics, and articles in multiple languages we can make sure that as many people as possible see the ocean of benefits that come with participation in a DAO. We’re passionate about the culture and the alternative work model that DAOs present. By gathering industry leaders and creating quality, educational content, we hope to share our passion for DAOs with the Cardano community.

[IMPACT] What are the main risks that could prevent you from delivering the project successfully and please explain how you will mitigate each risk?

The main challenge will be producing content that is well received by community members of diverse learning styles, language and culture. We will work closely with the community to test and revise content until learning experiences are optimized. Our process includes creating content and obtaining feedback to determine it's efficacy. This will ultimately lead to the creation of high quality, educational content.

[FEASIBILITY] Please provide a detailed plan, including timeline and key milestones for delivering your proposal.

We’ll be producing a series of educational content on DAOs (Videos, infographics, presentations, articles) tying into the Cardano DAO ecosystem. These resources will be used to create a course about DAO’s that will serve as an entry point for those getting into the blockchain space as well as those that are already here and want to learn more about how DAO’s work. 

Step one: Gathering our Resources

We’ll be inviting members of DAO’s, blockchain experts, and other interested parties to participate in the assembly of this course and the resources we’ll be developing for it. We’ll also be gathering examples of these tools being used effectively in our ecosystem and other ecosystems. By rooting the concepts surrounding DAO’s in real world case studies we can make sure that our education is relatable and useful. 

Step Two: Making a Plan

With the help of the Blockchain Learning Center and the many educators that are already present within the ADAO community we’re putting together a strong outline for the course using well established methodology within the education community. 

Initial Objectives

Learners should be able to:

1. Describe the organizational and governance structures of DAOs.

2. Distinguish governance protocols from human-layer governance procedures.

3. Describe custody solutions.

4. Given a DAO, produce an analytical chart describing governance, custody, and voting protocols.

5. Evaluate alternative governance and voting strategies, including legal interfaces.

6. Create a new DAO implementing an arbitrary set of protocols which support a given intent for a community.

Rough Draft Topics:

1. What is a DAO?

2. Governance

  1. Tokens

  2. Algorithms

  3. Humans

  4. Models (working groups, etc.)

  5. Constitutional revision provisions

3. Protocol design

  1. Smart contracts (incl. languages)

  2. ZK

4. Custody

  1. Single-holder, multi-sig, etc.

5. Governance theory

6. Legal forms & interfaces

  1. LLCs, cooperatives, etc.

7. Case studies

  1. The DAO, MakerDAO, etc.

Step Three: Create the Content

Once the outline is completed and we feel that it’s comprehensive enough to cover the full scope of the DAO’s course we can move on to the content of the course. 

The basic structure that we’re using to build this course is:

Topics: A subject we’re trying to teach

• Lessons: Teaches a part of the topic / where the content lives

We’ve been working towards designing some best practices for building courses like this in a group so that this process can be repeatable and so that we make sure to use the time of all parties involved efficiently. 

Building the content for each topic

1. Create objectives for the topic
2. Make assessments for the objectives
3. Create lessons that satisfy the Objectives
4. Create the content for each lesson
5. Review what we’ve made to make sure it satisfies the objectives

After completing this checklist for each topic we should have all the videos, infographics, and text that we need to build out the course ready! This is a big step and where most of the time in the project will be spent. 

Step Four: Delivering the Course and Content!

This is the fun part! Now that we’ve got everything made we can assemble the course and make all the individual assets developed available! 

We’ll be assembling the course in the Blockchain Learning Center’s LMS(https://blockchainlearning.center/). It will be listed as a course here and will be freely available to anyone that wants to take it! 

There will also be a wealth of assets in the form of infographics, videos, and more that will be available on youtube, publicly accessible albums, and as articles. It’s our commitment to make sure that all resources developed are distributed in whichever manner makes them most usable to the Cardano community!

[FEASIBILITY] Please provide a detailed budget breakdown.

Graphic Designer for course graphics / infographics 

• $30 / hour
• 100 hours
• Total: $3,000

Video Production / Video Editing

• $60 / hour
• 80 hours
• Total: $4,800

Research 

• $20 / hour
• 70 hours
• Total: $1,400

Content Planning/educational content developer

• $30 / hour
• 80 hours
• Total: $2,400

Tools

• Canva: $120(up to 5 users)
• Miro: $200
• Loom: $240(for 4 users)

Total for Proposal

$12,160

[FEASIBILITY] Please provide details of the people who will work on the project.

ADAO is made up of a wide variety of talented individuals that will be able to build and maintain this DAO content. The education workgroup within ADAO will help oversee this project. The work group currently collaborating on this content includes a diverse group of individuals with experience in education in many settings from universities to healthcare.

theadao.io

@ADAOcommunity

discord.gg/NMzHKgREtq

Blockchain Learning Center is made up of talented individuals that are making all blockchain education and learning materials their mission.

David Baxter

Senior Frontend Developer, Founder of Blockchain Learning Center / Beanchain

[FEASIBILITY] If you are funded, will you return to Catalyst in a later round for further funding? Please explain why / why not.

We don't anticipate needing to request more funding for this particular purpose. We may want to work on other topics and create more courses that could help the Cardano and Blockchain community though. We may come back with ideas for those courses and request funding!

[FEASIBILITY] Are you or any member of your team working on any other proposals in this Fund9?

[FEASIBILITY] Are you or your team working on any other proposals from previous Funds?

[AUDITABILITY] Please describe what you will measure to track your project's progress, and how will you measure these?

We plan to measure the number of education modules, number of module participants, and the number of infographics and videos produced. We will also plan to gather information on the efficacy of the courses with a post-course survey. This information will be used to further refine the content for maximum impact.

Our teams have already begun working on the development of this course and we have set a time frame of 5 months to complete the project and deliver it to the community. Based on our work to date and the detailed plan above, we are confident we can meet this deadline.

[AUDITABILITY] What does success for this project look like?

This project will be considered successful when we have completed a comprehensive course that is effective in teaching beginning and intermediate students about DAOs. We will have created high-quality deliverables that could be used by anyone in the community for educational purposes. The content will be easy to access, relatable, and delivered in multiple languages to reduce as many barriers as possible.

Our team believes this will be of great value to the Cardano blockchain because an increase in DAO education and participation will lead to greater adoption of Cardano. The Cardano blockchain is uniquely suited to host DAOs and can become the industry leader in this sector.

[AUDITABILITY] Please provide information on whether this proposal is a continuation of a previously funded project in Catalyst or an entirely new one.

This is not a continuation of another proposal