Web3 Education DAO by Wada

[GENERAL] Summarize your solution to the problem.

Build a Web3 Education DAO with Cardano’s ecosystem builders and thinkers to develop, modify and test DAO tools. This enables exponential community growth and showcase Cardano as a DAO go-to platform 

[GENERAL] Summarize your relevant experience.

Cardano-based community network of 25+ professionals focused on connecting the world to Africa using blockchain and AI. 20+ funded proposals with strong partnerships within the Catalyst ecosystem. A trusted source for both Africa-based projects and wider ecosystem contributions.

[GENERAL] Requested funds in USD.

[IMPACT] Please describe your proposed solution.

Summary:

The proposal seeks to build a DAO platform that will fund and scale education in Africa as a community building tool as well as recognize and incentivize individuals who add value to the DAO. This will be a phased rollout discovery journey and building with other ecosystem partners and collaborators to advance Cardano as secure, scalable and decentralizing DAO platform

Purpose of this proposal

From a human capital perspective, this is a DAO that is already building itself. WadaOrg currently consists of a core international oversight and local groups working to use blockchain to build inclusive systems in Africa and diaspora. This helps increase market share for the blockchain platforms and communities we work with. To date the Cardano community has been our main collaborator and sponsor and has helped us reach over 10,000+ people through our hybrid education and awareness events, targeted Catalyst onboarding programs, projects and social media channels. In return, we have helped to significantly grow the Cardano community in West and Central Africa. 

 To better organize and maintain this growth, this proposal aims to help build and incorporate known and emerging tools, standards and processes into a distributed governance or DAO model. The many components and complexities to building a truly decentralized governance model necessitates that this proposal focuses primarily on one of Wada’s key pillars; Education, which is our foundational community building and expansion tool.

How DAO Tools will Accelerate Community Growth, Retention and Value Addition

Education is a key inclusive tool for Africa’s young population in the emerging blockchain economy. https://africa.businessinsider.com/local/leaders/why-the-time-is-right-for-web3-in-africa-oped/enserll

WadaOrg has had significant success so far outreaching and onboarding into the Cardano community. 

Considering the expansion of our work, our current status quo will result in a centralized command and control behemoth with WadaOrg at the top where a relatively small group of people make decisions, drive growth and add value. The limitation of this model is that it does not scale well, has operational limitations and inhibits broad-based contribution and inclusion.

As we bring more people into the Wada and Cardano communities, we plan to ensure retention by providing defined web3 learning and training options and pathways according to learner needs and interests. For example, those interested in entrepreneurship or proposer assessment can get on the Catalyst onboarding pathway. There will be options for those who want to learn Plutus or similar programming courses, low code/no code learning options, NFT learning, Tokenomics and so on.

DAO tools will help to distribute governance 

• For educational outreach and onboarding. (This proposal)
• For curriculum development and content creation (Initial pieces in this proposal, then later stage enhancement)
• To source and manage broad base funding for education (Later stage addition)
• To align Incentives (Later stage addition)
• For reward contributors (Later stage addition)

Specific tools will include but will not be limited to:

• Organizing tools for educational outreach and onboarding (focus of this proposal)
• Content creation tools (selective focus of this proposal with future enhanced add-on)
• Identity, Records, and Credentialing tools (future add-on)
• Knowledge management tools (future add-on)
• Funding tools (future add-on)
• Contribution management and incentivization tools (future add-on)
• Documentation & archival tools (future add-on)

Organizing and basic education outreach content tools integration will be the main focus of this stage of the DAO platform build. A layered approach design will enable additional tool add-on

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

How our proposed solution addresses the Challenge 

This proposal will ensure the continued growth of the Cardano community in Africa through our ongoing education efforts whilst simultaneously collaborating with teams within and outside the ecosystem to build, adapt and test DAO tools on Cardano. This will not only accelerate community building but also show Cardano as a viable go to platform for building DAOs

Value Add

Our solution will demonstrate how to onboard, expand and scale Cardano's large and engaged community. Since the Cardano protocol distinguishes itself for being built with security, scalability and decentralization, DAOs offer the best option for effective community management at scale.

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

Risk and Mitigation

• Messaging & Engagement; A successful education DAO needs a vision that is well defined and communicated for optimal engagement of contributors and participants. We will work with Edify CoLab to do an investment/ impact valuation to facilitate buy in. https://cardano.ideascale.com/c/idea/422031

• DAO Appropriate Tools: Without effective tools to enable scalable educational outreach and onboarding, the DAOs foundational success will be hampered. Various DAO tools will be sourced, tested and if necessary modified to suit the specific needs of this DAO platform. 

• Community collaboration and partnerships: The strength of this DAO will be in the quality and breadth of ecosystem collaboration. This will be prioritized to mitigate risk 

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

Plan

If data is the new oil then human capital is the new gold. As economies go through rapid evolution, the necessity for adaptive education and training to meet ever emerging new demands will grow. Africa’s young and ‘hungry’ population is a latent resource ready to meet this need and a DAO model is the most versatile tool to allow this.

Our DAO will be the base for all of Wada’s and affiliate education and training services. The platform, when completed, will be a place. 

• To initiate educational onboarding, hackathons and outreach events (This is the focus of this phase of the proposal. Enhancements will be added after basic POC design)
• Where content creators meet learners
• For impact and charity organizations to provide scholarships and aid for their targeted demographic Example DirectED
• Individual or group backers can invest in star students. A mechanism can be set up to pay investors once students start earning. (This model has strong investor confidence as shown by Lamda raising $74million in equity in a series C round; https://tcrn.ch/3OSvlSj )
• For organizations to initiate employment on the platform through internship programs
• Formal & Informal targeted mentoring programs
• Where education providers can recruit students.

Platform Build

This will be a phased rollout discovery journey while building with other ecosystem partners and collaborators to advance Cardano as secure, scalable and decentralizing DAO platform. Genty will be leading the technical aspect of this build. He has completed the Plutus Pioneer Program is a regular contributor to Gimbalabs, an SPO and is a pleasant natural networker. He will work with other ecosystem developers to source, create and adapt DAO tools that fit our purposes

Sustainability, Tokenomics, Governance & Identity

• DAO platforms cannot be effectively built without governance and tokenomics considerations. Because education is an impact venture and the path to financial sustainability is not as clear-cut, the tokenomics model design will need to be novel .
• Additionally, a Web3 DAO with young Africans as the anticipated major demographic participants on the platform. The traditional route of buying tokens as a means to governance allocation will by default be financially exclusionary.
• We will therefore take a very measured approach to sustainability, tokenomics, governance & identity considerations. As a first step, we are engaging with Edify Impact CoLab to appropriately valuate this DAO to make it an attractive long-term investment option to allow the time and space to design inclusive tokenomics and governance options.

https://cardano.ideascale.com/c/idea/422031

Outputs for this phase of DAO build.

Week 1-6

• Scoping, Networking, identification and Outreach of potential DAO members, contributors and participants 

Week 7-24

•  5 regional events to reach at least 1000 new community members to enable appropriate design of the DAO tools  

Month 3-6

• Source, build or adapt tools for an initial basic Proof of Concept. The build will be a staged DAO platform rollout

Workload Management:

Wada runs several projects in parallel, aided by it's network and partners to deliver on multiple proposals. A new approach to managing proposal completion is to institute a dedicated project manager for each funded proposal, and ensure that each project manager does not have more than 3 funded proposals to deliver on at any time. 

[FEASIBILITY] Please provide a detailed budget breakdown.

Budget 75k

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

• Mercy - Coordination Lead @ Wada. Is the Funded Proposer's Rep on Catalyst Circle v3 and is keenly interested in governance, inclusion and community building. She has a combined 25+ years' experience in Project Management and Engagement (West Africa, Canada) Healthcare (UK, Canada) and brings a wealth of experience and passion to this project. Mercy is responsible for WADA coordination, and building partnerships.

• Frédéric Samvura (Genty) - Business Initiatives Lead @ Wada, DRC Coordinator @ Wada, Core Contributor @ Gimbalabs

M.A in Economics, experienced in banking and public policy. Completed the Plutus Pioneer and Atala Prism Pioneer Programs. Haskell and Plutus trainer in Wada and Gimbalabs Education programs, Smart Contract Developer and entrepreneur.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/fr%C3%A9d%C3%A9ric-samvura-907aa53b/

Steve Lockhart - Wada Advisor, Governance Advocate, Gimbalabs Group Member.

Steve is a Funded proposer, community builder, decentralization advocate, arborist, and dog owner who has been active in Catalyst since the beginning

+ Wada network and advisors - https://www.wada.org/about-us

Additional Talent Resource:

The success of making Cardano the go-to platform for easily built DAOs will take a lot of collaboration and leveraging of key partnerships within the Cardano ecosystem.

Wada is proud to have direct and indirect working relationships with the following community builders.

• Gimbalabs https://gimbalabs.com/gimbalgrid
• Swarm https://catalystswarm.com/
• Catalyst School https://thecatalyst.school/
• Edify Impact CoLab https://www.edifybusiness.co.uk/impact-colab
• Quality Assurance DAO https://quality-assurance-dao.gitbook.io/quality-assurance-dao/
• Littlefish Foundation https://docs.littlefish.foundation/
• Joget https://www.joget.org/

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

Difficult to say at this point. Wada will be working with Edify CoLabs to value this DAO platform for funding sustainability

[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?

Metrics used to track the success of this project will be as follows:

• Number of members, contributors and participants willing to engage in designing and participating on the DAO platform (simple counts).
• Number of regional education events held to test the DAO (simple counts)
• Ease of use and quality of DAO platform (user satisfaction surveys)
• Number of event attendees (simple counts)
• Percentage of attendees who access the DAO platform (percentage calculations)
• Percentage still on platform after 6 months (data analysis)
• Number of other community DAOs using or adapting our Web3 DAO Education tools after one year (tracking and counts)

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

The team sees success as an easily accessible web3 education and community growth DAO platform that is fit for purpose and serves as an example of what tools can be used to build other DAOs easily and quickly on the Cardano platform

[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 an entirely new Wada proposal although it builds on some of our previous successes.

This proposal is however linked to: https://cardano.ideascale.com/c/idea/422031

Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) Rating

SDG Goals

4 - Ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all

SDG Subgoals

4.3 - By 2030, ensure equal access for all women and men to affordable and quality technical, vocational and tertiary education, including university

Key Performance Indicator (KPI)

4.3.1 - Participation rate of youth and adults in formal and non-formal education and training in the previous 12 months, by sex