Hedgey RPGF grants final project updates

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Tell us about yourself, what you are building, and why you chose to work on it.

gm guys! I’m Jaris James, the founder of daospace and a dedicated DAO enthusiast, my path from seeking financial freedom through active involvement in DAOs, led me to create daospace. The catalyst was my ongoing role as a delegate at the Rari Foundation, where I saw firsthand the challenge of needing to rebuild one’s reputation with each new DAO endeavor. The idea for daospace came from the desire to allow DAO contributors to seamlessly bring their reputations and achievements with them across communities, making their contributions easily verifiable in a trustless manner. Aimed at addressing the fragmentation in the DAO space, this platform is designed to recognize the efforts of contributors in the web3 space, while increasing discoverability for members with high reputations, to bring more lucrative opportunities to them.

Brian Adam (Sixty) is the daospace project manager and co-founder. He has been an active DAO participant in DAO governance for the past 3 years and has been part of DAOs like Index Coop, Prime DAO, Push DAO, and more. His experience in governance has allowed us to highlight many of the inefficiencies and shortcomings in the operations of DAOs.

How has the last month been? What did you learn? How has your idea evolved?

The last month has been very productive. We scraped over 300,000 total forum posts from 100 DAOs within the Ethereum ecosystem and stored them in an SQLite database, which will soon be migrated to Ceramic via OrbisDB, in order to have an open and composable database, which will function sort of like an Etherscan for DAO reputation. We also shipped an algorithm that distributes points to DAO contributors based on the level of engagement they received on the forum, in order to identify the members that brought the most value to the DAO throughout its existence, but can be filtered by various timeframes as well.

I learned how to push code to GitHub and much more about cloud computing since our net big rock is to automate the entire scraping operation, to scrape Discourse at scale. I learned how to create a Docker image during this time to push the scrapers to GitHub, so we can create an SDL file, which will be utilized on Akash Network, one of the primary platforms for decentralized, peer-to-peer cloud computing to handle all the scraping. We’ll be using Akash for fine-tuning the open source LLM, Mistral 7B to create a custom AI model from the 300k+ forum posts in our database, so our users can communicate with it, like Chat GPT, but this AI model would be tailored made to understand the DAO space and all the accompanying nuances.

Our idea for the point system evolved from a simple logic document to creating a fully functional algorithm, available on GitHub. This algorithm allowed us to identify the top 5 contributors to the Optimism forum based on engagement. We have listed them in order of activity below:

  1. Gonna.eth: 12490 points
    (Topic Likes): 373
    (Regular Post Likes): 1082
    (Aligned Topic Replies): 374
    Aligned Regular Post Replies): 99

  2. Michael: 12023 points
    (Topic Likes): 586
    (Regular Post Likes): 711
    (Aligned Topic Replies): 268
    (Aligned Regular Post Replies): 46

  3. 0xJohn: 11533 points
    (Topic Likes): 206
    (Regular Post Likes): 53
    (Aligned Topic Replies): 471
    (Aligned Regular Post Replies): 0

  • 0xJohn is currently ranked this high because of this one viral post, that received 599 replies.

  1. ben-chain: 11076 points
    (Topic Likes): 527
    (Regular Post Likes): 204
    (Aligned Topic Replies): 279
    (Aligned Regular Post Replies): 11

  2. jackanorak: 9906 points
    (Topic Likes): 269
    (Regular Post Likes): 1194
    (Aligned Topic Replies): 288
    (Aligned Regular Post Replies): 131

Note: These are only top contributors in terms of forum activity and engagement. This is not the only metric that makes someone a valuable contributor but we had to start somewhere.

What does the product/idea look like today? Share videos, images, demos, and anything else that helps people see what you are working on.

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Here’s the current state of daospace outlined in our Backdrop V3 submission videos:
Backdrop Launch Video

The UI currently has a functional search engine. You can perform any query, and if it was mentioned within the 300k+ forum posts stored in our database it will be displayed on the front end. We also made the interaction buttons such as “Likes” and “Replies” functional, so once clicked, it reveals the members that engaged with the post. We’re in the process of creating a public front end that will allow anyone to access data from all of the DAOs discourse forums on our platform.

We also have our algorithm that ranks contributors and provides points based on forum activity.

Tell us about any traction/adoption you’ve had over the last month.

We had the pleasure of presenting our project to the Rari Foundation. They would like to use our point system for their Delegate Incentive Program, to provide more context about all delegates, so large token holders can make an informed decision on who they would like to delegate to since we can provide even more information about them beyond their forum activity score, we’ll be able to highlight the top keywords associated with them, and most engaged topics, for example, but the data to present is ultimately up to the Rari Foundation. They also asked if we could showcase Tally data, so I built a Tally scraper from scratch as well. Here’s an image of the Tally data stored in our SQLite database:

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We will also be working with the OrbisDB team, to migrate our database to Ceramic. They have great interest in the data sets we are currently working on, and they believe it is valuable data to be stored in an open and decentralized manner.

Is your product Optimism/Superchain native and will it continue to be?

Our product intends to distribute achievement badges on-chain, these badges will be NFTs that will live on Optimism. Contributors will be able to connect their wallet address to daospace which will allow them to link their address to all the Discourse accounts they own.

daospace also plans to focus on onboarding all the DAOs built on the Optimism Superchain, allowing all contributors in the OP ecosystem to benefit from the use of daospace.

How will your product/idea move the Optimism ecosystem forward?

We will allow under-recognized contributors in the OP DAO, and DAOs built on Optimism to have greater visibility, and since we’re providing context about each member, we can provide much more information about current delegates, so large token holders can make a much more informed decision on who they would like to delegate to. This will provide an extra dimension of information to delegators, who can choose delegates based on merit instead of popularity.

Another way we intend on moving the Optimism ecosystem forward is by creating a custom AI model, with all the data from the Optimism forum. We can use this model to summarize proposals, and assist in automating governance by applying alignment scores to topics/proposals posted on the forum, based on the values of the DAO, and explain why it gave this score. This will allow for the original poster to make edits, and tailor their post, so it aligns well with the DAO to speed up the governance process for all involved. Community feedback is still crucial, but at least the back and forth between the proposal author and core members of the DAO can be greatly reduced, while receiving more aligned proposals, which are better suited for the DAO.

Also, Pre-token teams can identify the most active OP DAO members, and decide to include the top X members for airdrops, to incentivize them to become active participants in their DAO governance as well, and vice versa, if Optimism decides to do a future airdrop, they can identify the top members of other DAOs such as ENS, Rocket Pool, Aave, etc, based on forum activity, and airdrop $OP tokens to them so that they can become active within governance at Optimism as well.

What’s the big vision of your product/idea beyond what it is today?

The vision for daospace is to become the coordination layer of the DAO space, ultimately replacing Discourse and Discord as the standard for DAO contribution. We believe that DAO contributors should always have something to show for all their contributions in the space. If a DAO happens to shut down, and no longer continue their Discourse subscription, then all the data shouldn’t be lost, which is what happened to Gro Protocol (their forum has been shut down).

If DAO contribution, such as forum participation was stored on a Ceramic powered database, then the data will always be open, and owned by the contributors, as is the case with daospace. DAOs also don’t have to start over from scratch when it comes to using daospace as their native forum since we already scraped all their posts along with each metric, which will be displayed on our platform, it will be a seamless transition, and they’ll be able to link all their forum accounts to one wallet address, eliminating the need for creating a new discourse account over and over again each time they join a new DAO.

If you win, how will you use the funding?

Funding received from this program will be used to decentralize the data on daospace, build a custom AI using DAO data, and fund the design and development costs of the platform. A list of some of our immediate priorities are listed below:

  • Data Migration from MySQL to an open decentralized database on Ceramic via Orbis DB so the raw data can be publicly viewable.
  • Build an automated solution to scrape DAO data at scale on top of the decentralized cloud computing protocol Akash Network.
  • Create a custom AI model by fine-tuning Mistral 7B with our dataset. This open-source AI model trained with rich DAO data will allow for concise proposal summaries, assistance with proposal creation, friend suggestions, and BD automation.
  • Onboard a full-time designer to ensure daospace stands out visually and has an aesthetically pleasing UI/UX.
  • Onboard extra developers to daospace (Full Stack developer and a Smart Contract engineer).
  • Fill in any extra gaps in talent (e.g Business Development, Growth and Marketing etc.)

If you win, what are you focused on over the next three months? What do you want to accomplish?

What we will focus on in the next three months will be similar to the uses of funding highlighted above :point_up_2:. This includes but is not limited to:

  1. Pull additional data from all the DAOs that are currently built on top of the OP ecosystem / Superchain.
  2. Migrate the database to Ceramic, and acquire a Ceramic Node to make the data in our database publicly available and composable, allowing the contributors to own their forum data.
  3. Automate the scraping operation, by setting up the scrapers on Akash, so we can pull real-time data from all the DAOs in our database.
  4. Fine-tune the search functionality, and add advanced search methods, such as filters to be applied to the search bar.
  5. Onboard a designer to design and enhance daospace brand assets, and create the UI / UX elements to create an aesthetically pleasing front-end.
  6. Create the AI model, by fine-tuning Mistral 7B with our dataset on every forum post ever made by all the DAOs we have in our database.

Share links to any updates, forum posts, tweets, etc. that document your active work over the last month.

Share any links to your website, socials, etc.

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