A New Vision for Codeless Conduct: Seeding the next wave of Service DAOs

Nichanan Kesonpat

Published in

Codeless Conduct

6 min readMay 25, 2022

At the first edition of Codeless Conduct in December 2021:

We’ve had 46 submissions across 300 participants
Distributed 39 bounties and $20k in prizes

In February, we scaled the hackathon to

2 weeks
620 submissions across 1200 participants
42 bounties and $40k in prizes
Experimented with quadratic voting as a judging mechanism for open track bounties.

Top submissions include:

Since then, we’ve been taking some time to strategise on where we want Codeless Conduct to go and refine our thinking on what to expect next.

Observations & Learnings

Well-designed bounties help bring teams together by capping the scope of the work first, but help get an idea of bigger challenges to tackle together. Many bounties (and thus submissions) in our previous editions were small in scope, resulting in one-time contributions with no clear path for individuals to scale their involvement and ownership in the project they submitted work for. For instance, participants who worked on CryptoVoxels builds for Zesty in the first edition are now hungry for more client-side work in the space.
Skill-based guilds were underutilised as a way to connect people with the same skill sets to work on a bigger project together. Codeless Conduct is different from other hackathons in that we are not trying to attract new projects per se, but rather practitioners with skill sets that can perform verticalised services for existing protocols. Instead of a monolithic team formation process, we can leverage these guilds so individuals can meet others who share their field and interests.
Feedback and sponsor engagement throughout the work period greatly improves submission quality. Participants actively sought feedback and found community input valuable for their future work even if they were ineligible for prizes.

While Codeless Conduct has achieved a level of success in getting no-code contributions for projects and bridging individuals into longer-term career opportunities in the industry, we are now in a position to direct our experience and community to seed organizations that can produce work that will really move the needle for projects.

A New Vision for Codeless Conduct:
Seeding the next wave of Service DAOs

Service DAOs are organizations that aggregate high-quality practitioners under one community to provide services to third parties (engineering, audit, design, legal, research, treasury management, etc.) in exchange for project ownership. As Service DAOs build up demand for their services, they will accumulate ownership with the protocols they work with, further aligning incentives between them.

Why Service DAOs?

DAOs in general have proliferated in the past few years thanks to the lowered cost of capital and talent aggregation. Individuals with shared goals and values can spin up on-chain treasuries to begin iterating on their vision right away.

Codeless Conduct’s new direction is a bet that permissionless innovation will surface organizations that are better at attracting and retaining talent to drive bigger results in the long term. In the context of Service DAOs over traditional services providers, contributors have:

1. Direct Ownership of the Organization

Service DAO contributors get both a share of the value they create per client and a share of the organization as a whole. Ownership fundamentally changes the relationship individuals have with the organization by aligning incentives between themselves and their clients.

2. Open Contribution Culture with Programmatic Rewards

High-value contributions — not credentials — are what qualifies individuals to work on an account for a Service DAO. The community itself has a say over reputation systems and compensation structures such that rewards are transparent and even automated.

3. A Cryptonative Understanding of the Problems Unique to web3 Protocols

We foresee a large portion of demand for Service DAOs coming from other cryptonative organizations, whose needs will be unique to the industry and therefore best served by fellow DAOs. This can come in the form of governance challenges, token design, community strategy to name a few. As Service DAOs accrue experience in tackling these challenges across multiple protocols, they will gain higher relevant context that will position them better to solve these problems than traditional organizations.

That being said, Service DAOs are still in their nascent stage with operational challenges to overcome. From interviews with Service DAOs and individual contributors, we have identified some common challenges facing both groups:

The immediate goals for Codeless Conduct will be to address some of the biggest pain points above. Specifically, incubating web3 talent and acting as a hub for Service DAOs and independent contributors to find each other:

🤝 CONNECT independent contributors with fellow practitioners in their field and Service DAOs in the realms of community, data/analytics, design, governance, marketing, and tokenomics.
🎓 EDUCATE new web3 contributors about general DAO bootstrapping and operations, what it takes to be a independent worker in crypto, resources available, and how their existing skills can be leveraged in the industry.
🚀 ACCELERATE experimentation in the operating models of Service DAOs.

What changes?

The new vision for Codeless Conduct is not a 180-pivot from what we have executed towards so far. Rather, it helped define immediate actionable goals for the hackathon series to become a structured funnel contributors into organizations that are better positioned to serve the industry in the long term.

Bounty Scope. Bounties will be larger in scope and designed to take longer, tackled by multiple individuals with a specific expertise.
Teams form from Guilds. Teams will be formed from the existing guilds created during previous editions (tokenomics, design, marketing, data/analytics, community, and governance).
More emphasis on DAO Ops / Service DAO Mentorship. Educational content and workshops will be designed to be helpful for the bounties specifically, and will include speakers from existing Service DAOs as well as successful DAO summoners and operators. Codeless Conduct will serve as a talent hub for participating Service DAOs.
More Emphasis on Submission Feedback. After the winner announcement, there will be dedicated time for all participants to showcase their work to their specific guilds. It is helpful for those tackling the same problems to see how others have differed in their approach to solving it.

What’s in it for participants

Learn from mentors who are leaders in their field in web3, as well as existing DAO operators and community builders.
Hear from existing Service DAOs to get up to speed on the current challenges and opportunities, and get an opportunity to work with them.
Become familiar with the standard of work needed to succeed as an independent contributor in the industry.

We will have mentors present on topics such as:

Why DAO’s — Unpack the benefits, the workflow, pay structure, tools, in existing DAOs (Track agnostic)
Freelance 101 — Independent DAO contributors presenting how they run their personal business, price work, find clients, etc. (Track agnostic)
Web3 Upskilling — Hear from current contributors in the fields of community, data/analytics, design, governance, marketing, and tokenomics. (Track specific)
“See it, be it” — Full time DAO-contributors talks and AMA’s about their career path from traditional organizations or freelancing to DAOs (Track specific)
…and more

👇🏼 Get involved

If you’re an individual looking to meet fellow experts in your field and work on bounties, sign up to participate in the upcoming edition.
If you’re a Service DAO looking to submit a bounty, support the event, or present your organization, sign up to get involved using this form.
Join our community Discord to jam on existing problems you see in the space
Follow along with updates about the next edition on Twitter!