DAOstack Pollinators Onboarding Guide

8 min readNov 26, 2018

TL;DR

Welcome! This is an onboarding guide for DAOstack Pollinators to help you get oriented and make your first steps in the Genesis DAO Pilots.

In this guide you can find information about:

What is a Pollinator and how to join
Onboarding onto Alchemy Earth & Metamask
You first proposal
Information for Open Source Developers
Information for Researchers
Further reading & links

First things first: if you have just arrived, watch our short video onboarding introduction, created by DAOstack Pollinator Felipe Duarte.

Want some REP? — Genesis Alpha Pollinator Onboarding Tutorial (DAOstack) by Felipe Duarte

What is a Pollinator and how do I become one?

Pollinators are the community of early adopters and advocates using Alchemy as part of the Genesis Alpha DAO. They hold reputation in the Genesis Alpha and are involved in things such as optimizing Alchemy’s effectiveness, user experience, doing research and experimentation on decentralized governance and launching their own projects. Genesis Alpha is the first DAO deployed using DAOstack. Its mission is to support the development of the DAOstack project and ecosystem and serve as a testing ground for early adopters to quickly iterate and improve Alchemy’s interface, protocol, reputation allocation, communication methods and human practices.

If you would like to become a Pollinator, send a request with information about yourself and why you would like to join to Erik Rodrigues (telegram: @eriktrodrigues, email: erik@daostack.io).

Graphic Facilitation from the How to DAO #2 event by DAOstack Pollinator Felipe Duarte

Become an active member of the Pollinator Community

Our community collaborates through a variety of tools, each of which has a specific purpose within the community and assists the process of coherence-building within the Genesis DAO. We invite you to join us on:

Weekly Call — Join our weekly Genesis calls to participate in the process of building a DAO, sync with the latest proposals on Alchemy and see what other Pollinators are contributing to the DAOstack ecosystem — Every Tuesday at 5pm-6pm CET / 11am-12pm EST / 4pm-5pm UTC, in this Zoom chatroom. You can also find notes about the previous calls, and future ones as well, in this folder.
Discord Server — To participate in our discussions and working groups, please join our Discord server.
Pollinators Group on Telegram — New to the group? Introduce yourself to the community, receive the latest updates on community meetings and general information from the staff and other pollinators in our chat room: https://t.me/joinchat/HfsmOEXV0YP6P5rGmRBaCQ

Also make sure to give a visit to the Genesis DAO Navigation Hub and browse an extensive gallery of resources, from active Working Groups in the DAO to proposal tracking and much more.

*Previous Pollinator and DAOstack team member Gareth Mensah explains Alchemy and the Genesis DAO to a new cohort of potential Pollinators.*

Technical Onboarding to Alchemy & Installing MetaMask

To participate in Genesis Alpha, members are required to access Alchemy, the first dApp built on the DAO stack, powered by the Holographic Consensus protocol (watch Matan’s 25 min presentation on the subject) to guarantee the DAO is both resilient and scalable. If you would like a more detailed explanation of how Alchemy works, check out the dApp tutorial waiting for you when you log in with your MetaMask account (see next step), or check out our guide to Alchemy on this intro article and our FAQ.

Here are the steps to follow to use Alchemy:

Download and install MetaMask. Doing so is simple; just follow the tutorial on the official website.
MetaMask will create a new wallet for you, but you can also then import existing ETH wallets. Make sure to save your seed phrase and password.
Now you will be able to load Alchemy and browse existing proposals.

Alchemy Earth is in Alpha and there might be some issues with Metamask. If you encounter a loading issue, we advise trying the following things:

(1) Try switching Metamask to the Kovan testnet and then back to the Mainnet

(2) Try reinstalling Metamask (but make sure you save your seed phrase!)

Bug testing is also being done, we kindly ask users to aggregate reports here.

*Proposals are evaluated by the Reputation holders of the DAO. Check our recent* *“How to Use Alchemy Earth”* *blog and find out how to submit your first proposal to the DAO.*

Making your first proposal: Acquiring Reputation and ETH for Gas

To become an active member of the DAO, you’ll need to submit a proposal via Alchemy to receive ‘reputation’, which represents voting power in the Genesis DAO. The amount we recommend asking for is 100 Rep along with 0.2 ETH to cover Ethereum transaction fees, which are required whenever you submit a new proposal, vote on an existing proposal, or stake GEN to boost a proposal.

Browse the list of approved proposals to see some examples of how other fellow Pollinators introduced themselves. You might consider including links to projects you’ve completed and what excites you about the decentralization movement. Read more about how to submit proposals in our FAQ.

Now that you’re in, share your thoughts on our collaboration environments, cast your narrative on what you think the DAO should aim for on the weekly meetings and start creating the future of organization with us.

“What proposals should I submit?”: Earn reputation and funds for developing the DAOstack ecosystem

The Genesis Alpha community of Pollinators and staff members have expressed their mastery of decentralized governance skills and creativity through a plethora of different proposals covering different segments of Genesis. Be it development work (Alchemy Explorer — Phase 1); storytelling (Vitalik gives…? Madscience Proposal) or governance (Trying out the Accountability Task Force) oriented, they all intend to enhance the effectiveness of Alchemy, the Genesis DAO, DAOstack community and its ecosystem. To hear some first hand opinions from DAOstack team members on what types of proposals they are excited about seeing, watch this video.

We recommend our Pollinators to set the ETH compensation for their work as if they were to offer their services normally, which means that work-type proposals should be priced at market rate. Reputation should also be asked in proportion to the efforts and outcomes of developing the work. The amount of Reputation one should ask for a proposal is up for the proposal submitter, though we recommend setting the reward in the range of 0–200 reputation points as it’s been the norm within Genesis Alpha so far, in any case the submitter is welcome to justify a higher bid for his proposal.

*Opensource hackers at the* *Bushwick Generator* *for a DAOstack hackathon.*

A word for Open-Source Developers

If you’re a coder looking to build on the DAO stack or deploy your own DAO, your best place to start is our Hacker’s Kit, inside of which we’ve provided an explanation of each layer of the DAO stack, as well as templates showcasing how DAOstack can be used to create various kind of DAOs. If you’re looking for a “Hello World for DAO” tutorial, you’ll want to jump into our starter example. If you’re looking for more fleshed-out templates, check out our Peepth DAO template or our DutchX template. Over time, we will add to the list of templates many other use cases displaying the potential of the DAO stack.

We’re actively looking to promote and sustain a vibrant community of open-source developers contributing to our growing DAO ecosystem. For anyone looking to contribute to any of the DAOstack repository, you are more than welcome to do so, as well as to submit a proposal or start a conversation on Discord. If you’re looking to submit a proposal, please follow our contribution guidelines and/or feel free to reach out to us via Discord.

A word for researchers on decentralized governance

The DAO(stack) Research Group is the beginning of a decentralized DAO(stack) research group, to be soon transitioned into a DAO itself. This is the place for anyone interested in protocol research and mechanism design for DAOstack and Holographic Consensus.

This group works jointly with the DAO Talk Forum, where the collaborative research takes place. Please refer to it for sharing scientific questions and answers for the benefit of everyone.

For more references regarding the work of the decentralized research team, take a look at the first Genesis protocol upgrade.

Everyone is warmly invited to take part in this work, and DAOstack is also offering generous bounties for contributions made to the protocol, particularly those that make it to implementation.

*Berlin Pollinators at “How to DAO,” the first ever event funded by the Genesis DAO.*

Local Chapters

Since our community is spread all over the world, we highly encourage and provide incentives for the creation of Local Chapters. Collaborate with other Pollinators from your region and activate meetups, workshops and satellite conferences to take the decentralized governance spirit to new audiences through real human-to-human encounters. The Genesis Alpha Community often funds on the ground activities to enable Pollinators to take initiative when there are local opportunities.

CuraçaoDAO: The Caribbean Blockchain Network conducted a research funded through Alchemy and concluded that a DAO in Curaçao could be very benefitial. Later on, CBW pollinators also funded a 2-day workshop through Alchemy to take the first steps forward creating a DAO.
bkDAO: Self-funding Brooklyn’s Civic Orgs — Join the DAO for Brooklyn’s civic organizations designed to create economies of scale in fundraising while distributing decision-making power across participants.

Check the introductory article to the new born bkDAO here.

Bounties

The Genesis DAO has created a number of bounties by approving proposals for the development of certain activities that improve the ecosystem, including:

Genesis Community Reports (1.5 ETH + ~0.3% of total DAO reputation for in-depth reports of the DAO’s current state and it’s trends): https://goo.gl/apB5sV
DAO Adoption Leads Bounty (up to 0.36 ETH for finding new pollinators): https://goo.gl/ZNycT9
Genesis Community Blog (0.4 ETH for sharing your experiences in a publication): https://goo.gl/C71oUQ
Rewarding Pollinator Participation with Reputation (weekly reputation rewards for participating in weekly calls and Discord discussion): https://goo.gl/CrVXui

For an updated list of active bounties, please refer to the monthly Genesis Alpha Proposal Reports and the Active Bounties section of the Genesis DAO Navigation Hub.

Welcome to our community

*DAOcast is a community-run podcast* *discussing decentralized governance. We welcome your unique voice to our ecosystem of creators and collaborators.*

On behalf of the DAOstack Community, I bid you welcome and hope to see you around and collaborating with us. In addition, here’s a list of useful information:

Doubts about the Pollinators Program? Message the Pollinators program coordinator.
Follow DAOstack on Medium, Twitter, or any of the other channels you’ll find on our website.
Part of an organization interested in creating a pilot DAO or building on DAOstack? Connect with us here.
Developer? Check out the DAOstack Github, or jump into the stack with our friendly Hacker’s Kit.

Also, take a look at our list of recommended readings and educational resources for a more in depth comprehension of decentralized governance in general and the DAOstack ecosystem: