The growth of the Gitcoin system is divided into three stages: stable governance, expanded influence, and unaffected by scale.
Original title: ” DAOrayaki｜GitcoinDAO group thinking is on the rise “
Written by: Kevin Owocki, Gitcoin CEO and Chief Robotics Expert Translator: Shawn@DAOrayaki
Group thinking
What is the most important? Mission first.
What is really important to the Gitcoin community? By doing less, doing important things, and achieving the ultimate in important things, we can create greater impact.
As the mission of Gitcoin says-build and fund digital public products; support open source and an open economy.
This raises the question: if we want to expand our ability to achieve our mission, what is really necessary?
I am happy to share my views. Please note that these are just my opinions, and I am just a node of the Gitcoin DAO network.
Three problems to be optimized
As an engineer, I spend a lot of time on optimization problems. In computer science and economics, the optimization problem is how to find the best solution from all feasible solutions. This is a process of traversing the design space to find the global maximum.
I think that by optimizing the following three issues, Gitcoin/GitcoinDAO can focus on achieving its mission.
Ecosystem impact
How much positive impact did we have on the ecosystem?
How many developers do we support? How many developers have we helped find new income, learning and connection opportunities in the open Internet? How many developers have resigned from the company to engage in open source development? How many people remain in the ecosystem because of the support of Gitcoin?
This effect is like a funnel, as shown below.
How many developers can we look for new opportunities?
How many developers can we help choose the opportunity that suits them?
How do we help funders find developers? How do we help developers find funding sources?
How do we integrate developers into the ecosystem to have a positive impact?
Once developers make money in the ecosystem, how do we retain them?
interconnection
I firmly believe that everything is collaboration. As human beings, we are interconnected and interdependent in order to survive. How to better adjust incentive measures? How to deepen collaboration capabilities? I believe that as long as we solve this problem, we will approach the mission of Gitcoin step by step.
In order to adjust incentives and really deepen the impact of Gitcoin on the ecosystem, I envisioned a DAO composed of many DAOs-a mesh network of interconnected projects. This DAO composed of DAOs will collaborate deeply in software/culture, and may even exchange governance rights with each other.
The Gitcoin core team currently focuses on the two main functions of project donations and hackathons, and other functions are handed over to DAOs to implement.
Decentralized
After the release of Gitcoin in 2017, we have been focusing on our core mission. We didn’t follow the trend at the time, wasting energy to write lengthy white papers and conduct ICOs. I am very proud of this.
Because of the focus of the past few years, Gitcoin has had a lot of positive impacts on the world. At EthCC (Ethereum Community Conference), at least 20 geeks came over to shake hands with me, “Hey, Gitcoin helped me, it’s great”. This feeling is wonderful. Gitcoin has done a great job. It has helped provide 26 million US dollars in funding to OSS developers around the world.
However, during 2017-2020, Gitcoin was operated in a “centralized way”, and we did not focus on decentralization.
Given that Gitcoin has achieved phased results, we now have to start thinking about governance. We hope to follow industry best practices.
Anti-fragility-if one day I am hit by a bus, can the influence and mission of Gitcoin continue?
Trustworthy and neutral-Are Gitcoin’s software and governance systems trustworthy and neutral, and are these mechanisms fair to all parties?
Now the answers to these questions are no. So I believe it is time for decentralized governance to make Gitcoin more neutral and anti-fragile.
This means finding practical and compliant ways to decentralize network governance, network computing, network development, and network economy.
How to achieve the three optimizations
Network effect
I very much believe in the role of network effects. The more funders in the Gitcoin network, the more community members benefit. The more community members in the Gitcoin network, the more the funders benefit.
As this flywheel spins, we can have greater impact, more data, and more compliance.
Activity
By holding hackathons, incubators, and a round of project donations, we have succeeded in getting more people to use Gitcoin. Each product (1) solves a problem for network participants, (2) supports our core mission in its own way. They are integrated, so that community members and funders have at least one opportunity to participate in Gitcoin in depth every quarter.
Now, Gitcoin organizes these events in a centralized manner, but in the future, these events can be held through DAO.
Governance
In the past 2-3 months, we launched the DAO, and a group of new leaders have emerged in the DAO ecosystem. These leaders have gained the governance power of the network and laid the ethical foundation for how to make decisions (supporting our common mission).
Gitcoin chose to delegate the governance power of the platform to the DAO, which will fully empower the community to govern itself.
Our goal is to break away from the extraction network built in web2. Facebook, Uber, and Upwork worked very hard to attract users in the early days. Once users were unable to leave due to network effects, they began to squeeze the value of users.
By building a user-managed DAO, we can break this squeeze mode. At GitcoinDAO, we hope to attract members and empower them so that everyone can become bigger, faster, and better together, so as to benefit the world.
DAO workflow
GitcoinDAO has launched several workflows, each of which is spontaneously proposed by community members, and each workflow focuses on its own goals.
Decentralized Gitcoin-A group of developers focused on decentralized Gitcoin software stack. They applied for donations.
Moon Landing Program-a group of developers focused on providing rapid prototyping software tools for DAOs and ecosystems.
Anti-fraud-A group of community members focus on preventing fraud in secondary financing.
Community Representative-This group focuses on managing GitcoinDAO end-to-end.
Public Goods Funding/Treasury Management-Workflow focuses on future missions.
Decentralized memes, merchandise and marketing workflows.
The structure of these workflows is as follows:
In the past 3 months, through the operation of these workflows, we have begun to see the emergence of a new way of software development.
The first (and most important) product built by GitcoinDAO is dGrants-a decentralized version of Gitcoin donations (Grants).
These products are built through DAO and are no longer based on centralized management. They are developed based on the following principles:
Simple-do one thing with one product, do it well.
Anti-fragility-As long as a decentralized product has good documentation, the community can operate on its own without the need for a core team.
Modularity-easy unix-style interoperability between products.
The products developed in the “decentralized way” are very different from the products developed in the “centralized way” (Gitcoin during 2017-2021). The latter has the following disadvantages:
I realized in the second quarter of 2021 that Gitcoin will not be able to continue to grow if software is developed in this “centralized way”. Our progress is too slow and the overhead is too high. We need a new way of software development, a new collaboration mechanism. We need to build DAOs in a simple, modular, and anti-fragile way. The moon landing plan and decentralized Gitcoin workflow came into being.
I think the cool thing about building software this way is scalability. After the moon landing plan, we have seen the rise of 5 new projects, each of which uses its own decentralized and modular approach to solve the problems in GitcoinDAO.
dKudos, dQuests-the decentralized version of the two functions of Gitcoins thank you card and Q&A.
NFT Dance Off-A tokenized competition project to finance public goods.
Quadratic Trust-a project that uses quadratic financing, where the funds are the user’s social capital, not financial capital.
dPopp-Decentralized anti-sybil attack aggregator.
Quadratic Diplomacy-P2p tool for mutual donations between communities.
If Gitcoin exchanges governance rights with other projects in the ecosystem, I think the GitcoinDAO model (DAO composed of DAOs) can be further expanded to enhance the interconnection between Gitcoin and the ecosystem.
route map
” Rome was not built in a day”.
The same goes for decentralized Gitcoin. It will take time to implement it. There will be setbacks, there will be breakthroughs. There will be tears of sorrow and tears of joy. In the end, we will win, because our mission is worth all these efforts.
The growth I envision is roughly divided into the following stages:
Phase 1-Stable governance
Phase 2-Expanding influence & expanding scale
Phase 3-Become fully anti-fragile & unaffected by scale
I will work with community representatives in the ecosystem to define the specific details of each stage.
Vision
Large-scale experiment of quadratic financing
Quadratic financing is the core of our mission.
Gitcoin is one of the largest quadratic financing experiments in the world.
The developer funnel of the web3 ecosystem
Gitcoin will form a huge developer funnel for the web3 ecosystem, where developers gather.
Funding open source software
Open source software projects often do not have a business model, and software engineers are reluctant to engage in open source software development.
Gitcoin can provide tens of thousands of software engineers with the ability to work for the open Internet.
“After DeFi, what’s next for web3” story
Public product financing may be one of the biggest applications of Ethereum. After all, we have programmable funds and we value public goods. Can’t we build an economic system for financing public goods?
Gitcoin participates in improving the network effect of the web3 social circle
One of the reasons why Web3 applications cannot impact web2 is the network effect of the latter.
There are so many drivers on Uber, so many white-collar workers on Linkedin, and so many people watching on Facebook. Without the network of these people, what is the point of the web3 solution.
However, with the introduction of decentralized reputation tools such as Ceramic Network and SpruceID, this situation may change.
For the first time in history, user identities can be transmitted across networks. You can transfer your identity from one web3 dApp to another web3 dApp.
Gitcoin needs a decentralized database anyway, so why don’t we start the web3 social network? Of course, under the premise of complying with the privacy policy.
Resolve all collaboration failures
- Collaboration failure is the most important unresolved problem
The “deep reason” behind our web3 community members participating in the web3 space is the failure of collaboration (such as insufficient funds for open source software).
- Web3 is very powerful
Web3 provides a brand new tool for us to establish a collaboration mechanism.
- Software is eating the world. We will ride the wind and waves.
In the era of “software is eating the world”, solving software-based collaboration problems is the starting point for us to start solving global collaboration problems. If we can solve the problem of collaboration failure in the software ecosystem, we can create a model for the rest of the world to reinvent public product financing, thereby creating motivation for solving various collaboration problems.
- We start with solving “Web3 collaboration failure”
How to solve the software-based collaboration problem, the following is a possible vision:
GItcoinDAO is building a generator-a function capable of producing other functions-for solving collaboration problems.
The development of GitcoinDAO benefited from the first two collaboration tools-“donations” and “hackathons.”
The end result is a DAO composed of many DAOs. The interconnection structure of the DAO has consistent incentives and dozens of collaboration tools, which can enhance the collaboration between different DAOs and the collaboration within the DAO.
Moon landing plan
Our idea is to create collaborative tools to accelerate GitcoinDAO, other DAOs, and the entire space-and at the same time guide more outstanding developers into Gitcoin.
More than 100 active developers of the Moon Landing Program have launched more than 10 projects in a decentralized manner. We are moving each of these items through an iterative loop of hypothesis => experiment => result => learning (repeat if it succeeds, otherwise close it).
In this process, GitcoinDAO brings capital, talents and ideas to the desktop. And is using Austin Griffith’s Scaffold.eth to ensure that rapid prototyping is really fast!
Now Gitcoin is famous for Gitcoin donations (Grants), which is based on a very powerful collaboration mechanism: quadratic financing. However, what if we not only build a “one” collaboration mechanism, but build a general mechanism generator that serves “all” collaborations! ! ! If GitcoinDAO can successfully become the Schelling point for developers of all types of collaboration tools, then we can help solve some of the systemic collaboration problems that plague the world.
A United Nations in the era of encryption
Of all the visions, this idea is the least clear. I propose it only to stimulate discussion.
“The United Nations in the age of encryption” may seem out of reach and a bit silly, but it is a completely simulated way of thinking about the problem space. After all, we no longer call cars “modern carriages.” All this leads to a new question: “What is the diplomacy of 2021+?”. After all, the United Nations was established in the early to mid-1900s, and diplomacy in the industrial age is very different from diplomacy in the information age.
If we really believe that everything is collaboration, then we have reason to believe that there will be a “Schelling point”-a common ground where participants in different ecosystems can gather together, engage in diplomacy and collaborate deeply with each other.
Meta universe’s experimental community
Meta universe is a vision rooted in the hearts of all Web3.0 enthusiasts. Web3 is at the forefront. Developers, capital, and creativity will gather in Gitoin to create the future together.
Looking forward to the next 20 years, Gitcoin hopes to become the open source accelerator of Metaverse, where the latest technology, the latest collaboration tools, and the latest art will be produced.
