Project name :
Entangled Optimism micro-DAOs. Iteration 1: Babel m-DAO
Author name and contact info
Discord: TheDoctor#9791 | Telegram: @ateneo1 (Other OP collective members may join and participate from the beginning)
I understand that I will be required to provide additional KYC information to the Optimism Foundation to receive this grant: Yes, and to any OP collective member who wants to check.
L2 recipient address : TBD
Which Voting Cycle are you applying for? :Phase 1 - Cycle 10
Which sub-committee should review your proposal? Growth experiment grants
Project description
Creation of micro-DAOS (sized and budget limited) based on simple goals proposed by the OP community. Each m-DAO will focus on a particular experiment, and they will be entangled by OP glue.
This will help us to onboard users into the governance and it will be a cheap and easy way to start with community-driven experiments that cannot be designed from the OP top-down governance work. OP constitution says: āThe Collective will undertake a series of governance experiments. These experiments should help the Collective understand the balance and power dynamics within its ecosystem, and allow the Collective to define itself, evolve, and grow iteratively over time.ā
In a complex human system, there is no other way to find solutions to better governance than trying out-of-the-box thinking. Prove micro-projects and natural selection will do their magic. The optimism collective goal is unique, but wonāt be possible without this bottom-up work.
As @katie pointed me in the previous draft, this idea itās similar to the MetaDao concept from the end-game approved by maker DAO you can check it here (I didnāt know about it, and I add a great idea from Ron to minimize friction) :
The difference is that MAKER is a huge giant DAO and we are still in an early phase. Thatās why we can do it this way and MAKER needs to coordinate a huge infrastructure and hire fiat professionals that perhaps donāt get what this world is about. I wonder what Rune Christensen thinks about this proposal (we can ask him).
Traditional democracy discourages people from voting in many ways:
- Their vote is a drop in the ocean, they donāt feel the impact of the decision, so they are not taking deep thought into it and end up voting for more superficial reasons (if they vote at all).
- They vote for an entire program for people who are not even forced to follow that program.
We will be able to test a layered/clustered governance structure built from the bottom in a game theoretical way that avoids malicious agents and guarantees decentralization. The general goal is a hierarchical and decentralized model that resists attacks allowing information to flow from the lower layers of the hierarchy. In this way, the information travels from the bottom up, but it does not do it in a way that can brake system stability or expose our work for other agents to take advantage of (it could be close to the fuzzy antifragile concept popularized by Taleb).
Project links:
Additional team member info
I really need you here
Please link to any previous projects the team has meaningfully contributed to:
I have been experimenting with DAOs for more than a year in a fair way and learning so much about them. I had some previous experience with experimental economics and my fields of interest are complex systems, game theory, and behavioral economics. I am a Ph.D. holder with a strong academic background in Applied Mathematics, Quantitative Economics, and Psychology. Author and co-author of several scientific papers, some of them in JCR-indexed journals, and I have done being an outsider of the current fiat academic institutions.
Relevant usage metrics N/A
Competitors, peers, or similar projects
There are many peers and decentralized projects ongoing or outdated. It is hard to know of them because such truly decentralized projects do not spend on marketing or attract users with false promises. They grow slowly and isolated from one another. Most of them will not survive by themselves, others are already gone. But those ideas, that knowledge, and that people are still alive. They are not competitors, but they can be future optimistic collective members. I will name some of them:
Decentralized Science Communities: Scholars looking for a new paradigm of science. Fair and economic and politically unbiased. They are working in creating a new paradigm where scholars do not depend on the political decisions of institutions or publishers:
Pro-community projects /ONGs/Activistic
We can curate data from sites like:
Bitcoin community projects like Bitcoin Beach.
ONGs and activistic movements are formed by people who believe in social impact causes but are trapped in an ideological systemic trap that make them forget the final goal wasting all energy in friction. Our work here will need them to create a new paradigm solving (or significantly reducing) these issues.
Liquid Democracy communities Some liquid democracy parties gained government representation. There is much work done for these people and much value can be added to this ecosystem.
Is/will this project be open-sourced? Absolutely open, but with a layered structure that allows the flux of information to be public when is secured enough to prevent the malicious agents from taking profit from the OP collective work.
Optimism native? Optimistic conceived, more than native.
Date of deployment/expected deployment on Optimism: As soon as possible
Ecosystem Value Proposition :
OP Constitutionās guiding principles say: āInfluence in governance must extend beyond financial stake to value humanhood and intelligent lifeā. DeFi is a revolution that has brought too much attention and value to this ecosystem, we need to take that impulse and go beyond. The community is talking about DAOs being the new revolution, but the complexity of such systems is keeping people out of this. Media show crypto as a scam when the scammers are the same agents coming from the fiat system and taking advantage of peopleās ignorance. Those who are trained in this technology, know that this tech will bring more transparency and security to the world. We are testing complex tools with users that are not well-trained.
While Optimism is experimenting with new governance that may help to solve these problems (for companies, nonprofits, cities, or states). We lack motivated people to participate in OP governance. They need more help to do it and feel that this is not another crypto project to pump and dump. We could have millions of users on our quest, but we donāt know anything about them. They all have too much to share, but they donāt know we care.
How the m-DAO project can solve this:
- A m-DAO allows any user to interact with a community of a size so they could get to know each other in a deeper way and promote good and meaningful work. **
- Any user could share their preferences, information, and concerns and vote on some decisions to broadcast to others m-DAO or upper governance levels
- Natural selection: Some m-DAOs wonāt work, and some others will and will merge or transfer more value to the ecosystem.
- m-DAOs can provide community-aligned incentives for quality participation. Quality doesnāt mean peopleās characteristics. Everyone has value to apport to the community, they just need to find a place where they are motivated to share that value. Instead of people looking for an airdrop, we will have people participating in some m-DAO they have an interest in, knowing that they will be fairly valued for their contribution.
**Some anthropological and evolutionist theory claims that humans are tailored to interact with a limited number of people (around 150), but at the same time can believe in something greater and coordinate in millions to fight for it. These human characteristics make us vulnerable to manipulation by powered agents. Leaders spread hate and conflict to make their communities strong. We count on people from different countries, cultures, etc. and we need to start breaking those barriers and building this new paradigm over a global pro-humanity idea promoting pure human values that transcend any social, cultural, or ideological imposition.
So, with this proposal we are going to train a bring new users from different cultures, backgrounds, and all kinds of diversity that could work together in this cause. Enemies are not other L2, other blockchain projects (the ones sharing decentralized values), or even governments. The only enemy is the systemic loop we all are inside, and it is very difficult to go solo against it.
We all going to make it: (3,3) Olympusās proposal failed because the incentive of people was run with the money before the bubble explode. Optimism is about using iterations and creating community trust for people to learn that cooperation is better for everyone and sustainable in the long run. We only need to do it and go together, and there is no other way that real game-theoretical mechanism that we need to find: from top to bottom as OP foundation and collective members are working now, but in the opposite direction is essential.
What is the problem statement this proposal hopes to solve for the Optimism ecosystem?
We lack active participation in governance as well as more project aligned with OP ecosystem and values. We need to motivate small OP holders to participate in governance and bring new users motivated to work in a way that their interests will be aligned with our values.
DAOS require a high attention demand to get. Many crypto users misinterpret the DAO concept due to the misuse of the name in the ecosystem. In addition, 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. As a result, the community misses out on the indispensable inputs of culturally diverse views.
Finally, a decentralized community cannot be created without the majority of people outside this technology, so it is necessary to invite them to participate. There is a lot of value hidden there and it takes a lot of legwork to extract it.
How does your proposal offer a value proposition solving the above problem?
By offering OP holders to use their OP to participate from a m-DAO, gaining more OP as they get the governance value. This may be unlikely for this user to sell OP rather than keep participating and extracting value from real-world making OP economics sustainable.
By promoting multilanguage m-DAO, based on special interest and using human and AI translation assistance.
By welcoming new users in a more personalized way and guiding them toward a proper m-DAO. By looking for motivated people from non-crypto communities and guiding them in the ecosystem.
And by creating some symbiotic relations with other communities outside OP.
Has your project previously applied for an OP grant? No
Number of OP tokens requested: 5000 OP for iteration 1
Did the project apply for or receive OP tokens through the Foundation Partner Fund?: No
If OP tokens were requested from the Foundation Partner Fund, what was the amount? N/A
How much will your project match in co-incentives? All of it
Proposal for token distribution: For babel m-DAO we can experiment with 5000 Babel tokens minted in OP (only for governance with no liquidity) that will be backed by 1 OP each. Babel m-DAO members can decide to keep holding their m-DAO token (which will be valued at 1 OP + the value of being a member of the m-DAO) or to burn it for the OP value and be out of the m-DAO.
Please provide any additional information that will facilitate accountability:
OP tokens will be held in a wallet delegated to the delegate chosen by the m-DAO. Babel token distribution will be distributed periodically between participants according to their contribution and with the approval of some third party chosen by the subcommittee. Further information on the Babel m-DAO launch will be posted soon in a new Thread where the community and participants will give their feedback.
The purpose of this Babel-DAO is to start a community experiment and be the seed for other m-DAOs having these strengths:
- Forming a group including diverse people will reduce the possibility of collusion (we will 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, thatās 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.
Thanks for reading
modular governance experiments.