Babel will be a m-DAO (if you join me) asking for a tiny grant on this proposal:
I will open soon a new thread with the DAO launch details.
Governance in DAOS requires high attention demand. For a non-native English speaker, the demand is higher, and some members of the OP community are out of governance because of the language barrier (also because they don’t hold many tokens and is not worth the effort to understand the whole ecosystem). As a result, the community misses out on the indispensable inputs of culturally diverse views.
Proposal (I’d include here your ideas if I get some feedback)
Objective:
To create some groups of interest where we can have some people sharing a particular interest in some project (especially showing how decentralized governance can be implemented in real life). If some of these groups succeed, the main identity of this group won’t be nationality, being highly educated, etc. They will be just Optimism citizens.
Why is this a good idea?
Forming a group including diverse people spontaneously will reduce the possibility of collusion (we can explore some conditions to minimize the risk).
The middleman is one of the main problems the world experiment. People tend to think in In-group and out-group terms, and they are easy targets for their own fellow citizens, that’s why there is a point for an Optimism citizenship, where the information flows properly. A diverse group can control in a better way for bad actors. Since the projects are created from scratch (no matter how tiny would be) we could implement experimental methods to assure cleanness.
How to Start?
Babel channel in the official Discord? People can post in their own language (and they or others can post the automatic translation that can be corrected for other bilingual people, so the message is more likely to be understood)
Good! In my case, I use a translator to understand the text, but. I have great difficulty in writing my own articles. It would be nice if we could create categories for each country’s language, discussion each other, and share what we understand.
Starting out with a small diverse group is a good idea, however cross cultural communication is difficult given that the average person is not well equipped with ‘non-violent’ communication and the language adds an extra layer of complication. Instead of a wide mix, how about identifying top ‘x’ language groups and incentivising governance between them?
Are you on the official Discord? There are some channels in other languages, but they’re like independent bubbles. That’s why I’d love some Babel channel incentivating people to participate in the governance directly.
Thanks for the support. Let’s act as a community! At least with some tiny thing. Not necessary to spend a lot of time.
You’re totally right and is not easy to do this sharing language, an extra barrier can be a confusion factor. But taking this into account from the beginning might help. Besides that, we could do this 10 times in the same way and have 10 different outcomes. So it might be worth to try, no much cost is required. The idea of natural selection is there…
About the top x languages… Not sure if that would be some kind of discrimination. The main thing is to be clear that is an experiment and that we are not asking for funds for ourselves, is kind of “altruistic”, although if you participate in a successful experiment, sure you’ll have benefits: learning or even economics (but those benefits must come from the real-life economy, that’s what an ecosystem like this needs to be sustainable in the long term).
Anytime I see a writing in a different language, I try to use the translators, technology has came a great way and you can more or less understand what is the person trying to tell you and its quick as well.
Thanks for the support. Nice job. Sure you are learning much of your data.
This particular idea was at first inviting diverse people to participate in a group to explore some real use OP cases. If some people show real interest, those are people likely to be sharing OP values, and we’d be building something finally beyond self-interest.
I quote one answer I got when I share this in a particular non-English community:
“Don’t talk nonsense… My biggest concern right now is the airdrop quest that ended a few days ago.” Not OP values haha
Yeah, AI translation is improving a lot, and for sure better tools are coming soon.
…
Thanks to the 5 discord users giving kind feedback.
Thanks to them I edit and clarify that the idea is to add a babel channel to the other 13 languages so anyone can speak as they want and interact with others about ideas for OP in the real world and how it would be a truly global OP citizenship
Great idea! I beleive DAOs have a huge bariers and one of them is definetly the language barier. I would be happy to be part of this as much as i can do.
“good idea! As a non-native English speaker, it is not always easy to stay focused on details in articles and suggestions in the forum. I think this is an obstacle for DAO and governance. I will be happy to help.”
Sure, there is a huge bias. I was reading on the official discord about a Japanese hackathon project, and I checked it and translate some proposals, and I just realized that since most Asian cultures are predominantly collectivistic in nature, they might be more prepared to think as a part of an Optimistic city. How can we miss that?
In my case, as an EU citizen, I feel we are a great project that is failing because we are isolated countries with different languages and there is no mechanism for European citizens to engage in global projects. There are no borders, but there is a huge barrier. Is Optimism to follow the EU example?
As a first step How about suggesting the Discord babel channel on the “other languages” part? I think there are many people landing on discord and never showing up on discourse (which is perfect to work with your a and b suggestions)
About a. Identify folks with common values
As you said: cross-cultural communication is difficult. I am familiar with the work of Martin Seligman (one of the most prestigious psychologists alive) and Christopher Peterson (IMHO he was leading this research and his premature passing was a misfortune for humanity). They presented a measure of humanist ideals/values/virtues no matter the culture or time:
I quote from Wikipedia :
The organization of the six virtues and 24 strengths is as follows:
Wisdom and Knowledge: creativity, curiosity, open-mindedness, love of learning, perspective
Courage: bravery, persistence, integrity, zest
Humanity: love, kindness, social intelligence
Justice: teamwork, fairness, leadership
Temperance: forgiveness and mercy, humility, prudence, self control
Transcendence: appreciation of beauty and excellence, gratitude, hope, humor, spirituality
I took the test a few years ago, is it free and available in many languages:
You just need to take into account the top 5 and then work and explore the “superhuman powers” you have and maybe you didn’t know. There is research about how acting and using those values make you happier and helps to sort the difficulties.
b. Inspire them to take action?
The point is: inviting people to do the test can be a nice exercise to explore multicultural values and brainstorm how to put them in service of helping yourself and others.
@hait@John1989@goluis@Tervelix@mattlight are you on the discord official channel? If you are maybe you can support the suggestion I just made for point 1 (to add a babel channel) and spread the word between your language communities.
Anytime I see a writing in a different language, I try to use the translators, technology has came a great way and you can more or less understand what is the person trying to tell you and its quick as well.