Fukuoka DAO CAMP — Event Report
FUKUOKA DAO CAMP, an event focused on learning about DAO, was held in Fukuoka City, Fukuoka Prefecture on July 29th and 30th.
Fracton Ventures was commissioned by Fukuoka City to host this event. In this report, we will look back and discuss our thoughts on the event and the future prospects for the expansion of the Web3.0 community in Fukuoka City.
Transforming Fukuoka into a Web3.0 city
Our goal in holding this event was to expose more people in Fukuoka City to Web3.0, and to create momentum for Fukuoka City to become a Web3.0 hotspot through entrepreneurship and other activities. In addition, we also hoped that more people would learn about DAOs, contribute to DAOs, and start DAOs.
With this in mind, this DAO CAMP went a step beyond the preceding “Web3.0 Town Hall” event, where we invited industry leaders to share their insights on how to get people interested in Web3.0. DAO CAMP was held to provide participants with practical knowledge and ideas that will enable them to actually work in the Web3.0 ecosystem.
For this reason, DAO CAMP emphasized practice, incorporating a roughly 1:1 balance of lecture sections on Web3.0/DAOs and workshop sessions in the two-day program. Participants were exposed to existing DAO tools and came up with their own DAO action plans to solve problems during the workshop sessions.
Day 1: DAOs must have an issue or purpose
First, Yudai Suzuki, the co-founder of Fracton Ventures, explained the basics of Web3.0 and the history leading up to Web3.0.
Then he explained what DAOs are, what issues they can solve, and which DAOs are currently active, referring to Uniswap DAO and other DAOs as examples.
What we emphasized in this session, and in a broader sense throughout the program, was that DAOs are tools for solving problems and/or achieving objectives. The success of a DAO depends primarily on the discovery of high-quality problems and objectives. For example, protocol DAOs such as the Uniswap DAO were prepared because they are necessary for the decentralized maintenance and management of protocols, not the other way around. An NFT Collector DAO will likely be established with the objective of “collecting NFTs” first, and like-minded members gathered there.
Later, Toshihiko Kamei, the co-founder of Fracton Ventures, explained the future vision of DAO from the perspective of contributing to public goods.
Sota Watanabe from Astar Network: “Decentralization creates much more choices for people”
In the afternoon, Mr. Sota Watanabe, CEO of Astar Network and Founder of Startale Labs, took the stage as a special guest to talk about Astar Network’s vision and future roadmap.
During the Q&A session, participants asked many questions on a wide range of topics, including the future of Web3.0 in Japan. Some topics of the Q&A session include:
- What is the killer use case for Web3.0?
- What motivates Mr. Watanabe to promote Web3.0 for Japan?
- What are the future prospects for data portability in Web3.0?
More details can be found in Crypto Times’ event report:
https://crypto-times.jp/fukuoka-dao-camp-1st-day/
The last session of the first day was a brainstorming session where each person came up with an issue they wanted to solve with DAO and thought about what could be done. Ideas were categorized into four groups: “Social problems,” “Career,” “Web3.0 Business,” and “Local Communities”. With that, the first day concluded.
Day 2: What is DAO?
The second day continued from the first day, starting with group activities. As an icebreaker, members who were interested in the same theme discussed the issues they wanted to solve with each other again.
This approach is rooted in the idea mentioned earlier that “DAOs must have issues and objectives,” and before creating a DAO framework on-chain, we first clarified “what is the purpose of creating a DAO?” through lectures and group work.
Once the issues and objectives were clarified, we entered the technical workshop. With step by step support from Naka of Fracton Ventures, each member created a DAO framework using Aragon and OpenZepplin codebase on the testnet. They also issued tokens for voting and experienced for themselves what it means to create a DAO.
During the workshop, staff joined the group to help, and there were also other members who were supporting each other in creating the DAO framework. Many of the participants were from the business side, who are typically unfamiliar with the tech side of things, but with the aid of technically knowledgeable members, the group worked together to make good progress on the complex task of moving back and forth between Remix editor and OpenZeppelin.
The day progressed to the final workshop of the program. In this session, groups detailed their plans for setting up a DAO, the activities they’d undertake, and how they would engage society and the ecosystem in addressing the issues they identified at the start of the day. The results were presented to the whole group as representatives of each group. Fracton Ventures, together with Fukuoka City officials provided critiques and advice from the perspective of conducting such activities as DAO activities and in Fukuoka City.
Understanding DAO
At the end of the event, Yudai delivered a presentation. Using the Aragon framework discussed earlier in the workshop, we launched the Fukuoka Web3.0 DAO on the Polygon Mainnet, with event participants, Fracton members, and Fukuoka City officials as members. We had already created a Discord community before the event as a place for participants to communicate with each other.
We believe that both the off-chain community and the on-chain framework are essential components of a DAO. Lacking either of them, we would be “self-proclaimed DAOs”. In order to maintain and further strengthen the connections among the participants of this event, We envisioned the Discord server as a platform for daily exchanges and discussions and an on-chain voting module for community decision-making. After this, we immediately had participants submit a Proposal. Since every participant including ourselves has exactly the same amount of voting power within this DAO, we hope to continue to actively discuss and vote on the proposals.
Excitingly, our newly created DAO attracted the Aragon team’s attention and was highlighted in their weekly newsletter.
The future of Fukuoka City in alignment with Web3.0
The two-day DAO CAMP program concluded successfully. We garnered positive feedback from participants at the following social gatherings. Many expressed the program’s value and appreciated the networking opportunities with fellow Web 3.0 enthusiasts and Fukuoka City officials, which is supportive of such initiatives. We consider this as a significant accomplishment.
Yet, we are strongly aware that this is not the end, but rather the beginning.
First, let us talk about the Fukuoka Web3.0 DAO that was launched this time. This is now in a state where a place for discussion and implementation is in place. Some of the participants have already started working with others who were in the same group at the group work. And we hope that this will be a place where participants can find friends and start new initiatives together, dig deeper into Web3.0, and share knowledge as they explore entrepreneurship and contributions as contributors. We would be happy if the event could continue to be used as a place for participants to find friends and start new initiatives together.
In order to build on this momentum, we will continue to hold regular office hours in Discord as an opportunity to interact with each other and to provide support for those who are interested in starting new initiatives.
We will also continue to support those who are starting new initiatives. We found that there are many people in Fukuoka City who are interested in Web3.0 through the FUKUOKA DAO CAMP and the Web3.0 Town Hall that preceded it, and we were able to tell them what Web3.0 is and where they should start their activities in this area. However, we are still in the process of developing Web3.0.
However, we believe that we need to continue our efforts in order to make Web3.0 widely known to more people and to have them start their own businesses in the field of Web3.0 or join our ecosystem as contributors. We will make further efforts in the future by making good use of the framework of the Fukuoka Web3.0 DAO.
Fracton Ventures will remain engaged, and we’re determined to actively support the growth and development of the Web 3.0 community in Fukuoka. We’d also love to connect with anyone interested in fostering a vibrant Web 3.0 community. Feel free to reach out!
Author: Kento Teramoto
(Thanks to Ying)
