The Potential for Contribution-Based Governance

oh you know you could just say hi present yourself and just go on because I mean yeah and you're the last person now [Music] [Applause] what's up y'all [Music] [Applause] yeah so we're gonna talk about a little uh contribution-based governance here [Applause] all right okay and how contribute the idea of contribution management actually creates the potential for this I hope you all can hear me I know it's kind of loud but we'll make it work so hi I'm Stefan I'm head of growth at govern we do a lot of fun stuff there and we're good we're gonna talk a lot about um what does it mean to have contribution-based governance so let's start from Back to Basics so how do we generally think about dials meaning what mental models do we usually use for it basically what that means is if you think of Dao's as you know closer to companies you're going to think about uh are you going to refer to maybe corporate governance to try to figure out how you should be running things if you think of them as you know closer to co-ops you're going to think more about you're going to refer to how co-ops have done things how worker co-ops have been what they've done in different countries Etc or even you know just general autonomous communities that have existed uh throughout history right so basically the mental models you use for Dao's dictate how you actually think about doubt governance why is this important uh I don't know how many of you have read a prehistory of Dallas by KIA Cooter it's one of my favorite Dow reads probably in my opinion one of the most important in the space I'll lead this up for a second it's it's a must read for sure but for me when I came into this to when I got introduced to Dallas when I started thinking about it to me it always made sense that they were close to cooperatives and that thus they should be governed close to how cooperatives are governed um and the the article also talks about a lot about co-ops but also a lot about just alternative structures in general and I think we need to think about we need to think a lot more about different styles of governance in general and different and alternative models for it now there's been a lot of conversation over the years it's progressed really well about moving beyond token weighted governance moving beyond governance where the people with the most money can actually uh what people with the most money make the decisions so a lot of talk has been about you know how do we move past this how do we make uh more Alternative forms how do we do more experimentation on governance itself and how do we enable these things at the same time so and we'll we'll dive more a bit more into that later so um I don't remember I don't know how many of you remember this talk by Steve bomber from Microsoft the developers developers developers developers which is honestly one of my favorite talks not just because it's hilarious but also because it was actually a really great call to action for Microsoft to say okay for the future of Microsoft for you know for us to flourish we need to surface and focus on developers we need to make sure we're building not just for them but also with them as much as possible making sure that you know we're targeting them in all of our decision making making sure that their needs are their needs are effective uh and their needs are look uh looked out for so I actually think we need to be doing this in Dallas as well but focus on contributors so I'm not going to come up here and say contributors contributors contributors contributors contributors contributors yeah but basically we need to be making within the Dow ecosystem we need to be making sure that contributors are the focus and that we're enabling them in everything that we do whether you have a core team whether you have admins it doesn't matter it's making sure that contributors are making sure that every decision that happens in Dallas are focused on contributors that they benefit from it and not only that they're benefiting from it but also that contributors are part of the decision making as much as possible but of course we need to make sure that the governance style allows for that enables that so to be honest a lot of people when I talk about this a lot of people ask me why they say oh well capital is actually maybe the best type of coordination um I'm gonna I know this is kind of a political statement but I'm going to take a quote from Lincoln uh it's actually one of my favorite quotes it's basically that labor is prior to an independent of capital capital is only the fruit of Labor and can never have existed if labor had not first existed labor is the superior of capital and deserve much the higher consideration what does that mean um just again that we need to be surfacing the work and focusing on the work as much as possible and to be honest even well yeah and then capital is the result of Labor the labor comes first even in this space where we literally create Capital out of thin air through tokens you could have a doubt you could start it down it could have a billion dollars in the treasury and if you have no contributors to actually do anything with it nothing happens so at the end of the day no matter what labor is what is driving capital so if we want to build this kind of ecosystem in the ecosystem where the contributors and the people who are doing the work are actually centered we need we need to get past a few obstacles first how do we actually make this happen so what are some I'm gonna Surface three obstacles that everyone in the Dow space understands civil resistance is hard we all know this uh especially when you're dealing with tokens you have no idea if a token is owned by one person or 20 people or you could have one wallet uh that maybe people are running through it doesn't really matter um this is one of the hardest things in the space right now you have a lot of people working on it shout out to get coin that's doing a lot um in that space the second thing it's so hard to track what work is actually being done the number one thing that always comes up when I talk to Dallas is and people who work in Dallas no one knows what's going on bottom line dollars are extremely chaotic and in the most extreme way possible so honestly um which you which you typically have is like either you know someone that someone does something someone does a task someone does some kind of work they don't say that they did it so no one knows it was done and then someone else comes up and tries to do the same thing and now you're just duplicating efforts it's very inefficient it's very problematic or you have the opposite where someone says they're going to do something and they never actually do it and you don't find out until like weeks or a month later and now everything is behind so this is one of the biggest problems and of course A lot of people are working on solving them a lot of Dallas currently use Bounty systems which are effective in certain contexts but overall it doesn't you can't really you can't really build an effective Community with just Bounty systems right and the other thing is that Bounty systems are very top down it's very much focused on maybe one person or maybe like the core team saying we want this and this and this go do it and then people do it which takes away the autonomy of Dallas to begin with which takes away the idea of people coming in and contributing and growing with the Dow itself as a community and the other thing is a lot of dials are still using spreadsheets to manage and track the work that's being done which if that's the future of work we might as well pack it in because we failed basically so there's still so much that that's still a huge issue that's coming up and the third thing there's no taxonomy for contributions what does that mean it basically means that you can have two people working on the same thing or a group of people working on the same project for example or working on very similar things but when it's done and it's submitted and people are talking about it I could say you know I did ABC you could have done the same thing but you might call it one two three there's no real coordination or or maybe even standardization of that so the question the question is really and I'm going to go a little bit more into taxonomy a little later but the problem is basically that there's no there's no taxonomy and there's no um real way for people to come to us uh one point so so I'm just looking at my time here so yeah at govern we believe that contribution management is the key that it paves the way for not only solving those problems not only solving those problems but also for bringing out contribution-based governance and I'm gonna I'll just run really quickly through what we're building and this is actually this is I have a few old screenshots we've updated the UI quite a bit but this is all the fundamentals and basically all this is very simple a contributor comes on to govern records what they did you know you put the name of what you did you maybe upload proof via a link or an attachment if necessary it has the date and then you just add it very quickly um we also have the category which I'll explain a bit more as well but and then you know when you've done that over time you create this base basically this list of the of the the activities that you've done the contributions that you've done as well as the categories of those activities and of course you can mint them on chain just to have that as well and we're going to focus on a lot of other ways to interact with that as well but going back to the category so this is actually something that's really interesting um when you have not just the work that the records of the work that was done but also the categories of the work it means two things one you as a contributor can see over time um how you're working the things that you're doing but also the types of work and also for your Dao it's actually it actually makes it very effective to coordinate because after you know people are submitting their contributions after people are doing work over time you can actually see actually let me give you a quick preview here you can actually see what's uh what people are doing within your Dow over time the types of work that you're doing which actually makes it one very easy for you know when you're onboarding new people they always say oh I don't really know what to do um I don't really know how to start and maybe maybe like the core team or whoever's you know doing things doesn't really know where to put people either but when you have the categories of work that people are doing you can easily see okay there's a lot of things happening over here a lot of things getting done over here not so much happening over here maybe we can put them we can shift and channel them over here where to fill in some gaps or to start them off you can put them over here to like get comfortable get used to different things uh but let me go back a sec and it also just actually allows you to build out the culture of your Dao as well because if you can see you because through the categories you can see like what do people in the Dow like to do what do people focus on how is that shifted over time where where can where can we take this where can we go with this um and of course you may ask okay if people are recording their own stuff servicing their own work what if someone lies what if someone says they did something that they didn't do well we have attestations for that which are basically uh adding a level of verification validation just so that okay if I said I did this and then you know two other contributors can attest to it then you know it adds that level of validation and you could use you could even say oh well we need these particular people to validate it every time it's super flexible um and honestly I think sorry about that uh but when you actually use contribution management it kind of solves these issues right so the problem with several resistance obviously we're not creating several resistance itself but we're reducing the need for it because if you're simply rewarding the work that was done you're rewarding the work that was done directly so you don't have to worry about oh how many people are over here it's just you you reward the work directly uh the work is tracked bottom line simple easy effective and again the idea of um not not having a taxonomy for contributions you can actually create that taxonomy in real time and this honestly we could do a whole we could do a whole talk just on taxonomies we actually have like our research team is actually fully focused on this idea of taxonomy uh but basically what what gets really interesting with that is that you know when Dao start when people first launch a Dao maybe you only need a few things to happen so you can actually preset uh specific categories of work that you expect your contributors to do but at the same time and especially as things go along as more people join as more things happen your contributors can actually create their own category to say okay I actually think this type of work will be very valuable for this though um and they'll put it in the same way they they record their other contributions and they submit it and that actually creates a conversation around basically a proposal really of hey what does everyone think and whether it's like the core team making decision hopefully it's ever like as many people as possible involved in that process but yeah it creates this idea of I can actually as an individual contribute contributor push this proposal of work or of a type of or this type of work um that we can do and then that creates a conversation around it and of course it can either be accepted or rejected but even if it's rejected it's created this important conversation and it's done it's done it in a way where you don't have to go and fill out a whole proposal you're proposaling it through the work that you're doing which is just makes it much more intuitive much more effective and it wastes less time basically so let's backtrack gonna backtrack a little bit here slides a little wonky sorry about that um but yeah let's talk about Dow tools for a second so I'm sure most of you know and are familiar with uh most if not all of these tools and I didn't put them in any particular order it's just like kind of put them together in terms of either focus on reputation or value or value Frameworks so the first thing about dial tooling why are we even here so honestly no no matter what anyone says and if someone says this like you know better but basically no that there is no one tool to rule them all um there is no one Dow tool that everyone can only use and that's like the only solution right the the point of all this is to get away from monoliths to get away from wall Gardens to get to get away from close ecosystems what where what Dow tools are building and what we all should be focused on is this idea of a stack right where you're used where you're filling out your Dow stack with different layers of different tools now those tools may change depending on who you are what your community needs what you know phase you are in your community's uh growth but at the end of the day there should be you know a number of different tools that you're using together and on the on the on what we should be doing as dial tools as well is one making sure we're working together and collaborating together to making sure it's as easy as possible for dials to use these tools within in a stock to make sure and not real that that means you know more documentation more um more content together more collab more collaborative content things like that and of course more Integrations this is web3 we have choice we have composability let's make it work now to explain what this is I have a few minutes left um yeah so reputation and value frame rates are things that are very important for Dows this is this is uh the fact that we have teams focus on this is extremely important of course reputation is something that everyone's talking about now which is amazing to see value frames are key because how are people getting paid how do we figure out how to compensate people that comes from like all that comes from these layers and what we can do with these Dow tools is put them together so what does it mean to have a contribution layer so government at government we're actually creating a contribution graph out of all the contributions that are happening in real time and that itself serves as a contribution layer that actually enhances and supercharges um the other layers so what does that mean if you if you're taking you know if you're building reputation through uh one particular tool if you're building value Frameworks through one particular tool if you start with a conscious if you start with a base layer of contributions that pushes up and it it basically enhances how the other tools are operating so say for example how are we building reputation if you start directly from the contributions that makes them much easier to create a reputation out of it if you start with contributions that makes it easier to build value Frameworks from there because you have this layer that's already built for you basically so when you combine these together you can basically you can supercharge your Dow and your doubt stack because you're focusing not on not on maybe one tool but you're focused on focusing on the layers themselves and again when you put the layers together it not only more effectively solves the problems that um that I mentioned earlier but it also paves the way for this idea of contribution-based governance because when you are using it when you're using these tools in a certain way when you're starting with the contribution layer then you can build governance out of it and you can there's so many things you can do it enables a lot of different use cases whether it's you know memberships identity and reputation compensate compensation voting it doesn't really matter like all of these different uh layers can be added to by starting with a contribution layer so this is where we're building come join us come play around with our with our tool govern.app super easy and come supercharge your Dells foreign [Music]