I am a UX researcher looking into the tooling that DAOs use for operations and decision making. Specifically, looking into what DAOs love about Discourse (the forum of choice) and what could be improved.
I have created a small discord group here to help me collect information from any volunteers who would be happy to help. Questions will be usually quick and short, and if we do any long form interviews, incentivize them in appreciation of the feedback.
The end goal is to provide better tooling to DAOs, but this can only be achieved by talking to them. If the Optimism community is willing to help, join, please feel free to jump in and say hello.
There is only one channel there General, since we want to keep comms simple.
Whatever you can do to get users off discord, a closed source spyware mismash of unmoderation, nonresponse, no SEO, and chaos, the better. Better tooling for DAOs is getting back to The DAO and give people actual open, autonomous controls over their own DAOs, not just āI trust you devsā thing but a āI agree to this contractā thing. No DAO not even this one is anywhere near actually decentralized, most DAO participants these days seem to be spineless spectators that do whatever the biggest whale on twitter and whatever an official ādevloperā or rando on the discord tells them to since they do not have the slightest clue what they are actually voting on, what any code is doing or where the value they put into the DAO is actually going beneath the surface of public announcements, and are only in the game because they are trying to profit. Optimism has a better structure than most DAOs but wherever you see people trying to get absolutely everyone on board, thatās where you know they must be using monetary dangling fruit to get people in the door.
There are actual decentralized networks out there for hosting content and maybe doing the same for DAO forums would be an interesting thing to do.
AI integration with discourse could be helpful. A lot of rules and new stuff happened on this forum last year and if you want to get immediately involved as a new user, you need to spend about a week reading to understand where the help is needed. Anything that lowers that learning curve is beneficial. Lots of new users come with their production ideas, and sometimes they dare to create a post that gets lost because itās not properly oriented (not everyone knows what a mission request is what template to use, or where to post it and the approval you need to get to a vote). The lack of engagement from the community undermines the proposerās morality who usually lose interest in participating when they donāt feel they are being heard (read).
General, since we want to keep comms simple.