Recapping the 1st Phase of Signal DAO 📡 & Looking Forward to Future Experiments
The mobile DAO experience proved to significantly increase voter participation.
Background
Signal DAO is a reputation-based, non-monetary signaling experiment for
- Entrepreneurs to propose a project idea to the community and signal interest in receiving funding
- The community to signal usefulness to the best project ideas by voting for them
The past two weeks has been all about crushing bugs and on-boarding new members. Since inception on the 24th of January, the Signal DAO has amassed 101 active members, 17 project proposals, and 146 votes.
Purpose
The team at Abridged see DAOs as the social networking layer for Web 3. Similar to the way blogging and instant messages advanced social communications from email, DAOs advance the function pioneered by Bitcoin to not only send money P2P but form groups to make decisions about how that money is spent.
“Democracy has been fundamentally broken for a while. At least as a way to govern large groups. We don’t have a clear successor to it, but we need to stop being nostalgic about the past and experiment with new models.” Luis Cuende
While the promise for democratic fund management permeates blockchain zeitgeist, a thorn in the side of these new systems revolves around voter participation. Today, participation often falls at less than 5% in Aragon, DAOstack, and MakerDAO, and hits less than 1% on average across the Moloch ecosystem. This challenged created the inspiration for DAO Ops.
DAO Ops defined: DAO Ops is a set of practices that aims to systematize the management of DAO functions and reduce human coordination costs associated with resource allocation, decision-making processes, and membership administration.
Our main hypothesis for Signal DAO: chat-based notifications and voting access will increase voter participation and decrease information asymmetry.
Recap and Metrics
This short experiment made it extremely clear that chat-based systems like Signal DAO solve for ease of on-boarding and voter apathy in blockchain-based organizations.
Despite the voting period for Signal DAO being 168x shorter than the period for Moloch and MetaCartel DAO, Signal DAO members are 11x more likely to vote than are members of the current Moloch ecosystem.
Design and Implementation
As members of the MetaCartel and builders of the original Moloch DAO, we used this framework for the initial DAO Ops product integration.
A primary goal set prior to launch was to onboard 50 members into the DAO. We decided to set the voting period to a short 1 hr in order to optimize for quick user interaction.
While the novelty of SignalDAO on the surface is the interface, the way we created the product is where much of the magic lies.
We used Airtable as a database to cache, listen to events, and submit forms, and built the backend using an MVP version of the Abridged visual development environment.
While DAO Ops is the pilot application created with this stack, we plan to continue integrating with a variety of smart contracts to create a robust and easy to use visual development environment for rapid product iteration.
DAO Ops and Beyond!
“The kind of paradigm shift I’m interested in with DAOs is that instead of teams raising money, you have ideas raising money. Then teams can compete for which team can spend the money to implement the idea most effectively.” Vitalik Buterin
While not perfect, the Signal DAO serves an important purpose as a pilot chat-based DAO integration.
Members still submit proposals with a wide variety of engaging ideas from interest bearing “Supercharged” NFTs, to Gas-less Mosendo, to a Gamer Collective DAO. We hope this can continue to be a testbed for sharing ideas with a group of highly engaged crypto folks.
Our team feels excited by all who joined to participate in this pilot experiment to understand the viability of utilizing a mobile chat interface for web3 functionality and hope to find similar support as we build into the future!
Thanks to the MetaCartel DAO 🌶️ for the ETH and social signaling that helped propel this first piece of the DAO Ops system.
Want more?
For full details on how to participate in Signal DAO, check out our guide!
Want to experiment with this kind of chatbot flow for your own project or community? Have comments or questions on DAO Ops? Reach out through one of these channels:
Abridged website: https://www.abridged.io
Abridged Twitter: https://twitter.com/abridged_io
Abridged Telegram community: https://t.me/joinchat/GzdYLUQYAN5ALnGTXmqUcg
Best of Abridged Newsletter: https://abridged.substack.com
