Hello World, We’re Moonshot Collective
Moonshot Collective is the prototyping workstream in GitcoinDAO, lead by Gitcoin founder Kevin Owocki, and Austin Griffith of BuidlGuidl and the Ethereum Foundation. We are a group of builders and web3 community members who are creating decentralized coordination tools. Our hope is these tools will be used to help GitcoinDAO fulfill its mission to build and fund the open web.
What is a coordination tool? What is a DAO workstream? What is the open web and why do we want to fund it? We’re here to answer these questions and more.
It’s all coordination. Always has been.
Let’s start with the 20,000 foot view. Humans must work together in order to survive and thrive. We have global challenges, but if we can apply our combined knowledge and skillsets we are well positioned to meet them. However, we’re spread out across oceans and national boundaries. We speak different languages and grow up in different cultures — how do we overcome to unite and work together in harmony?
Our differences are not just obstacles. They also provide the richness of our individual experiences and the diversity of our thoughts. They lead to diversity of interests that then manifests into unique knowledge and skill. Each one of us takes our own path through life which supplies us with one-of-a-kind learning opportunities. From these we each gain unique perspectives. This diversity of knowledge, skill, and perspective is our strength as a human race, but often comes at the cost of our ability to coordinate.
With different cultures, languages, and values, how do we all work together as one? The answer is we use tools, specifically coordination tools. We use them to help us communicate, trade, manage projects, confirm reputation, and more. In the old world, pre-web3, those tools were controlled by centralized third parties, and if you didn’t trust the third parties, you couldn’t use them to coordinate with people you didn’t know.
This is the miracle of Ethereum and web3. At its core Ethereum is a decentralized source of truth. It shows us the state of an environment at a particular time. Once it’s locked in, the past state of that environment cannot be changed — not by anyone. Thus everyone everywhere can confidently use it as truth. We no longer need third parties to verify it for us. Ethereum, as a source of truth, is the foundation for the decentralized coordination tools we at Moonshot Collective are building.
The open web is the open road.
The open web is a digital public good. Public goods are things we all consume and benefit from but they don’t always fit within voluntary economic models. In the physical world, public goods are things like clean air, water, and roads. We all need them, but they suffer from the freeloader problem. You cannot stop people from using public goods, but it’s difficult to ensure everyone pays for them without using force.
Digital public goods are open source technologies, and they suffer from the same problem as physical public goods. We all benefit tremendously from them — it’s what the internet and decentralized coordination tools are built with, but there isn’t a strong incentive structure in place to reward people for creating and maintaining them.
That’s why Gitcoin was created in the first place; to build and fund the open web — these crucial tools of human coordination that bridge us across cultural boundaries. And to better fulfill that mission, Gitcoin decentralized itself into GitcoinDAO and further into project-specific workstreams within the DAO.
Moonshot Collective is a GitcoinDAO workstream, and our mandate is prototyping coordination tools — but not run-of-the mill tech mind you. No no, it’s the cutting edge shit. It’s the tech that might not make it, but every once in a moonshot has the chance to change the trajectory of the human race.
We’re launching into the DAO future
We work in seasons where primary missions are attempted. For example now in Season One we’re prioritizing Recruiter.Party, which is a decentralized version of LinkedIn Recruiter. We’re building it so professionals looking for work benefit financially from the personal information they wish to share.
Past projects include GreatestLARP.com, which is an ongoing, multi-level, worldwide coordination game to slay Moloch while raising funds for public goods.
Concurrent to major DAO-funded projects, Moonshot devs have championed and finished other coordination tools like Tip.Party used for rewarding event attendees, and Quadratic Diplomacy used to democratically distribute budgets to contributors.
Take a look at our project board to see the queue, and if you’re interested in learning more about Moonshot Collective projects past and present, check out our Dogfooding videos on YouTube.
We prototype coordination tools for GitcoinDAO.
Would you like to join us? Stop by GitcoinDAO Discord and wave hello. Here’s a link to everywhere you can find us.
Cheers!
