What does working in a Dao look like?
A Job without A Boss
Mwaa Joseph (twitter, github) is a blockchain developer from LeapDao team in Kenya, Africa. In this issue, he shared his experience working in a DAO (decentralized autonomous organization).
Where are you based and what’s the local crypto community look like?
Mwaa: I am based in Kenya the heart of East Africa. The crypto community is actively growing each year. There are a few established blockchain accelerators that have promoted more talks and short courses for wider community. Government is actively supporting non-crypto blockchain solutions and this year we had 2 blockchain companies accepted to the regulatory sandbox. I would say community is still pretty much developer composed, ideally 40% developers, 30% traders and rest mainly businesses.
When and how did you get into crypto?
Mwaa: My background is mainly web-development, using Laravel (Php) + Vue (Js), and I am an active contributor to the laravel community. Got introduced to bitcoin back in 2012 but only dove into crypto space in 2016 during the launch of Maid Safe. I felt that the safe network offered a platform that resonated with my projects at that time on digital identities and safe guarding them. Over the years got to explore different blockchain technologies such as EOS only to fallback to EVM because of the maturity in the ecosystem.
What’s the most interesting thing about blockchain that make you wanted to work in the sector? Anything you dislike?
Mwaa: I got interested in blockchain because of data immutability. Simply the ability to get rid of man in the middle processes is attractive in that it saves on costs and time. Like a service provider getting full payment amount for their services without extra bank fees.
I dislike that tokens and token economics have come to overshadow much of the functionality that blockchain space can offer. Not to mention a few bad projects that create scam tokens.
What blockchain use scenario are you especially looking forward to see?
Mwaa: Super interested in end-to-end supply chains. Not the huge volumes that some projects will boast about. Rather tracing the full path of item from factory to consumer. Like members of a grassroots community choosing to save costs pay a factory directly for goods. Storage and transport become add-on services for those interested.
The DAO Life
LeapDAO is an open community operating on Holacracy. How do you guys work together and what are the advantages and disadvantages of this mode compare to the traditional corporate system?
Mwaa: LeapDAO has been a wonderful discovery for me this year: it is very different from other teams in so many ways. Its openness in information sharing and operations drew me in to be part of the DAO. In its simplest form, Holacracy means there is no one boss or hierarchical structure of managers. Each member is driven to take up roles that benefit the DAO as a whole and are answerable to themselves. This promotes a sense of passion in the team and you get to shape direction of your interests based on the roles you hold. Its always exciting to listen in on calls from the more experienced members and get to hear about different passions.
The DAO is open to anyone who shares a common interest in scaling technologies and the work we do. Team is pretty much self-driven and you get to interact with different people who champion different technologies every day.
So, everything is based on bounties?
Mwaa: Yes bounties are the norm when it comes to assigning rewards. The bounties are open to everyone and once in a while you would see external developers who contributed to such bounties become members of the DAO. There is more teamwork in the bounty system than you would think. Each bounty requires 3 roles.
- Gardener — does research and is responsible of ensuring the bounty contains all the necessary details before its available to be worked on
- Worker — responsible for implementation
- Reviewer — reviews the submission of the worker to be in line with task details
All great projects start with a passionate member who makes a pitch about the project to DAO for resource allocation. Once approved project gets a roadmap and any member of the DAO can take on the role of gardener to propose bounties that fall in-line with the projects road map. Bounties are subjected to approval process where members can object to them if tasks don’t align with project requirements. This ensures proper utilization of resources as expected from any team
LeapDAO has around 120 people with active daily members at 24 and 19 are programmers.
Can you give us an example of how to start a project in LeapDao?
Mwaa: Recently we received a grant from Nervos Foundation for building a layer 2 framework. Johann is the co-author of the grant proposal. He introduced the team to Nervos at the beginning of the year and built the general interest around the Nervos Positioning Paper.
Nervos UTXO model shares a lot of similarity with LeapDAO’s implementation of Plasma. This created interest in evaluation of what could have been done better on the plasma network and what Nervos had to offer. This comparison solidified the interest within the team where Nervos’ type script = bytecode in the first input of a spending condition for the plasma network.
The integration of the NervosDAO directly into the Nervos Network was interesting. If DeFI solutions such as using secondary issuance of CKB tokens from NervosDAO as one of the incentives for validators of the sidechain, this could be integrated directly into the network then the possibilities for Nervos Network must be vast.
I remember we did several call discussions before choosing Off-chain Scaling through Layer 2 as the what we wanted to focus on.
Read more about the grant process here.
