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Gitcoin CEO: GitcoinDAO's groupthink is on the rise

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This article systematically expounds Kevin Owocki's thinking on the past, present and future of GitcoinDAO.

Original title: "The Gitcoin/GitcoinDAO Egregore is Emerging"

Original author: Kevin Owocki , Gitcoin CEO and Chief Robotics

Original compilation: DAORAYAKI

This article systematically expounds Kevin Owocki Reflections on the past, present, and future of GitcoinDAO.

Article guide:

Group thinking
Three major problems that need to be optimized
Interconnection
Decentralization
How to achieve three major optimizations
Network effects
Governance
DAO Workflow
Roadmap
Vision

1. Group thinking

What is most important? Mission first.

What really matters to the Gitcoin community? By doing less, doing what's important, and doing what's important to the extreme, we can create a bigger impact.

As stated in Gitcoin's mission - to build and fund digital public goods; to support open source and the open economy.

This begs the question: what is really essential if we want to expand our ability to achieve our mission?

I am happy to share my opinion. Please note these are just my opinions, and I'm just a node of the Gitcoin DAO network.

2. Three major problems that need to be optimized

As an engineer, I am optimizing A lot of time was spent on the problem. In computer science and economics, an optimization problem is how to find the best solution among all feasible solutions. This is a process of finding the global maximum by traversing the design space.

I think that by optimizing the following three major issues, Gitcoin/GitcoinDAO can focus on achieving its mission.

Ecosystem impact

How much positive impact have we had on the ecosystem?

How many developers do we support? How many developers have we helped find new revenue, learning and connection opportunities in the open internet? How many developers quit their corporate jobs to pursue open source development? How many people stay in the ecosystem because of Gitcoin support?

This influence is like a funnel, as shown below.

How many developers can we find new opportunities for?
How many developers can we help choose the right opportunity for them?
How do we help funders find developers? And how do we help developers find funders?
How can we bring developers into the ecosystem to have a positive impact?
How do we keep developers once they make money in the ecosystem?

Interconnection

I firmly believe that everything is collaboration. As humans, we are interconnected and interdependent in order to survive. How can incentives be better aligned? How to deepen collaboration ability? I believe that as long as we solve this problem, we will be one step closer to realizing the mission of Gitcoin.

In order to align incentives and really deepen Gitcoin's impact on the ecosystem, I envision a DAO of many DAOs - a network of interconnected projects composed of mesh networks. This DAO composed of DAOs will collaborate deeply in terms of software/culture, and may even exchange governance rights with each other.

The Gitcoin core team is currently focusing on the two main functions of project donation and hackathon, and other functions are handed over to each DAO to realize.

Decentralization

Since the release of Gitcoin in 2017, we have been focusing on our core mission. We didn’t just follow the crowd and waste energy writing lengthy white papers and doing ICOs. I am very proud of this.

Because of the focus of the past few years, Gitcoin has had a lot of positive impact on the world. At EthCC (Ethereum Community Conference), at least 20 geeks came up to me and shook my hand, "Hey, Gitcoin helped me, awesome". It's a great feeling. Gitcoin has done a great job helping to provide $26 million in funding to OSS developers around the world.

However, during 2017-2020, Gitcoin operates in a "centralized way", and we did not focus on decentralization.

Given that Gitcoin has achieved initial results, we now have to start thinking about governance. We want to follow industry best practices.

Anti-fragility - if one day I get hit by a bus, can Gitcoin’s influence and mission still last?
Trusted Neutrality - Are Gitcoin's software and governance systems trustworthy and neutral, and are these mechanisms fair to all parties?

Now the answer to these questions is no. So I believe it is time for decentralized governance to make Gitcoin more neutral and anti-fragile.

This means finding practical, compliant ways to decentralize network governance, network computing, network development, and network economics.

3. How to achieve three major optimization

Network effects

I really believe in network effects. The more funders there are in the Gitcoin network, the more community members benefit. The more community members there are in the Gitcoin network, the more benefit backers have.

As this flywheel spins, we are able to have greater impact, more data, and become more compliant.

Events

Through hackathons, incubators, and rounds of project donations, we have managed to get more people to use Gitcoin. Each product (1) solves a problem for network participants and (2) supports our core mission in its own way. Together, they give community members and backers the opportunity to get deeply involved with Gitcoin at least once a quarter.

Currently, Gitcoin organizes these activities in a centralized manner, but in the future these activities can be held through DAO.

Governance

In the past 2-3 months, we launched the DAO, and a number of new leader. These leaders gain governance over the network and also lay the ethical foundation for how decisions are made in support of our shared mission.

Gitcoin has chosen to delegate the governance of the platform to the DAO, which will fully empower the community to govern itself.

Our goal is to move away from the extractive web built in web2. Facebook, Uber, and Upwork all worked very hard to attract users in the early days, and once users couldn't leave due to network effects, they began to extract value from users.

By building a DAO that is managed by users, we can break this extractive model. At GitcoinDAO, we want to attract members, empower them, and together become bigger, faster, and better for the benefit of the world.

DAO workflow

GitcoinDAO has launched several workflows, each of which is proposed by community members spontaneously, and each workflow Focus on your goals.

Decentralized Gitcoin - A group of developers focused on the decentralized Gitcoin software stack. They applied for donations.
Moonshot Project - A group of developers focused on providing rapid prototyping software tools for DAOs and ecosystems.
Anti-Fraud - A group of community members focused on preventing fraud in quadratic financing.
Community Representatives - This group is focused on end-to-end governance of GitcoinDAO.
Public Goods Funding/Treasury Management - Workflow focused on future missions.
Decentralized meme, merch, and marketing workflows.

These workflows are structured as follows:

Over the past 3 months, through the operation of these workflows, we have begun to see a whole new kind of software development way appeared.

The first (and most important) product GitcoinDAO built was dGrants - a decentralized version of Gitcoin donations (Grants).

These products are built through DAO, no longer based on centralized management. They are developed based on the following principles:

Simplicity - One product does one thing and does it well.
Anti-fragility - As long as the decentralized product has good documentation, the community can operate by itself, no core team is required.
Modularity - easy unix-style interoperability between products.

A product developed in a "decentralized way" is very different from a product developed in a "centralized way" (Gitcoin in 2017-2021). The latter has the following disadvantages:

monolithic
not forkable
difficult Maintenance
Management/maintenance costs are high

I realized in the second quarter of 2021 that in this "centralized way" Gitcoin will not be able to continue to grow without developing software. Our progress is too slow and the overhead is too high. We need a new way of software development, a new collaboration mechanism. We need to build DAOs in a simple, modular, antifragile way. Moonshots and decentralized Gitcoin workflows were born.

I think the cool thing about building software this way is scalability. After the moonshots, we saw the rise of 5 new projects, each with their own decentralized, modular approach to solving problems in GitcoinDAO.

dKudos, dQuests - Decentralized versions of Gitcoins Thank You Cards, Questions and Answers.
NFT Dance Off - A tokenized competition for financing public goods.
Quadratic Trust - A project that utilizes quadratic financing, where the funds are the social capital of the user, rather than financial capital.
dPopp - Decentralized sybil-proof aggregator.
Quadratic Diplomacy - a p2p tool for mutual donations between communities.

If Gitcoin exchanges governance rights with other projects in the ecosystem, I think the GitcoinDAO model (DAOs of DAOs) can be further expanded to enhance the interconnection between Gitcoin and the ecosystem.

4. Roadmap

"Rome was not built in a day".

The same goes for decentralized Gitcoin. It will take time to realize it. There will be setbacks and there will be breakthroughs. There will be tears of sorrow and there will be tears of joy. In the end, we will prevail because our mission is worth all the effort.

The growth I envision can be roughly divided into the following stages:

Phase 1 - Stable Governance< /li>
Phase 2 - Grow impact & Scale up
Phase 3 - Become fully antifragile & unaffected by scale

I The specifics of each phase will be defined with community representatives within the ecosystem.

5. Vision

A large-scale experiment of quadratic financing

Quadratic financing is at the heart of our mission.

Gitcoin is one of the largest quadratic funding experiments in the world.

The developer funnel of the web3 ecosystem

Gitcoin will form a huge web3 ecosystem The developer funnel where developers converge.

Funding open source software

Open source software projects often have no business model, and software engineers are reluctant to engage in Open source software development.

Gitcoin can give tens of thousands of software engineers the ability to work for the open internet.

The story of "After DeFi, what's the next step for web3"

Public product financing Possibly one of the biggest applications of Ethereum. After all we have programmable money and we value public goods, can't we build economies that finance public goods?

Gitcoin participates in enhancing the network effect of the web3 social circle

Web3 applications cannot impact web2 yet One of the reasons is the network effect of the latter.

There are so many drivers on Uber, so many white-collar workers on LinkedIn, so many people watching on Facebook. What's the point of web3 solutions without a network of these people.

However, this may change with the introduction of decentralized reputation tools like Ceramic Network and SpruceID.

For the first time in history, user identities can be transferred across networks. You can transfer your identity from one web3 dApp to another web3 dApp.

Gitcoin needs a decentralized database anyway, so why don't we start a web3 social network? Of course, under the premise of complying with the privacy policy.

Resolve all collaboration failures

Collaboration failures are the most important unresolved issues

The "deeper reason" behind why our web3 community members participate in the web3 space is due to collaboration failures (e.g. insufficient funding for open source software).

Web3 is very powerful

Web3 provides us with a new tool for establishing a collaborative mechanism.

Software is eating the world. We will ride the waves.

In the era of "software is eating the world", solving software-based collaboration problems is the starting point for us to start solving global collaboration problems. If we can address the failure of collaboration within software ecosystems, we can create a model for the rest of the world to reinvent public goods financing, creating momentum for solving a variety of collaboration problems.

We start by solving "Web3 collaboration failure"

How to solve software-based collaboration problems, the following is One possible vision:

I> GItcoinDAO is building a generator - a function capable of generating other functions - for solving collaborative problems.

II> The development of GitcoinDAO benefited from the first two collaborative tools - "Donation" and "Hackathon".

The end result is a DAO of many DAOs, an interconnected structure of DAOs with consistent incentives and dozens of collaboration tools that enhance the Collaboration and collaboration within the DAO.

Moon Shot

The idea is to create collaborative tools to speed up GitcoinDAO, other DAOs and the space as a whole - while bootstrapping more talented developers into Gitcoin.

More than 100 active developers of the Moonshot Project have launched more than 10 projects in a decentralized way. We are moving each of these items through an iterative loop of Hypothesis => Experiment => Outcome => Learned (repeat if successful, otherwise close it).

In the process, GitcoinDAO brings capital, talent, and ideas to the table. And are utilizing Austin Griffith's Scaffold.eth to ensure rapid prototyping is really fast!

Gitcoin is now known as Gitcoin Grants, which is based on a very powerful collaboration mechanism: quadratic financing. But what if you don't just build "one" collaboration mechanism, but a general mechanism generator that serves "all" collaborations! ! ! If GitcoinDAO can succeed in being the "Schelling point" for developers of all types of collaboration tools, then we can help solve some of the systemic collaboration problems plaguing the world.

A United Nations in the Age of Encryption

Among all the visions, this idea is the least clearly. I bring it up just to stimulate discussion.

"The United Nations in the age of encryption" This seems far-fetched and a bit silly, but it is a completely analog way of thinking about the problem space . After all, we don't call cars "modern wagons" anymore. This all begs new questions: "What is diplomacy in 2021+?". After all, the United Nations was established in the early to mid-1900s, and diplomacy in the industrial age was very different from diplomacy in the information age.

If we really believe that everything is collaboration, then we have reason to believe that there will be a "Schelling point" point) - a common point where different ecosystem participants can come together, engage in diplomacy and collaborate deeply with each other.

Experimental Community of the Metaverse

Metaverse is the vision rooted in the hearts of all web3.0 enthusiasts. Web3 is at the forefront. Developers, capital, and creativity will all gather in Gitoin to create the future together.< /p>

Looking forward to the next 20 years, Gitcoin hopes to become an open source accelerator of the metaverse, where the latest technology, the latest collaboration tools, and the latest art will be produced.