GenDAO Fast Track Onboarding

#1

Note: the essence of this thread was already shared on the “Genesis DAO Community” Telegram chat, I am only sharing this here so it can easily be referenced & we can discuss further ideas.

In short: the image below is something you can send to anyone who wants to join the Genesis DAO in the shortest possible amount of time.

typical-onboarding-proposal_03
typical-onboarding-proposal_03.jpg1127×752 247 KB

Long story

I wanted to experience onboarding a friend in order to experiment with a sort of “Fast Track Onboarding” process: for those who want to join as fast as possible. So I took a screenshot of the form when you submit your first proposal (the “Signup Proposal” as I call it, or the “Reputation Request Propoal” as the Genesis DAO community calls it), with each field pre-filled & added notes for each field so that one can simply adapt as needed.

This means that you can simply send this screenshot to whoever wants to join & say “go to Alchemy’s Genesis DAO page, click on “new proposal” & fill the form as indicated in the screenshot”.

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#2

This is a valuable resource! Thanks for putting it together.

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#3

Onboarding Research

What are your thoughts around the “asking for rep” culture?
A few points to consider are:

  • Scalability
  • value proposition - is this aligned with the contribution reward?
  • Engagement - Does this practice incentive engagement?

What are other thoughts?

Onboarding research survey-
It won’t take more than 5 min: :space_invader:
https://forms.gle/zZdaNPcHps264MSC6

How can we build a welcoming, informative and intuitive process in a collaborative way?

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#4

The “asking for Rep” to sign up is sort of unintuitive imo. That said, once one understand the logic behind it then it totally makes sense. Is this something we want to change? Or is this actually something that we should keep to make sure people understand that “Rep matters” from day 1?

  • Scalibility: as I said above, I think it’s unintuitive. So probably doesn’t scale unless you can remove the “human onboarding process” by having some automated tool that replaces that work.
  • Value proposition: I think it’s fine, the requested Rep is low & the educational reward (understand that “Rep matters”) is high
  • Engagement: I don’t think so. It’s still very unclear for most DAO members on how they earn more Rep, i.e. there is a “default Rep” allocated to anyone submitting a proposal that passes & only few people know this. I want to avoid this on PolkaDAO that’s why I started this thread All you need to know about Rep (Reputation)

The most important part imo: we may want to think about onboarding “beyond sign ups” & have a process to make sure people who registered (got Rep) submit at least 1 or 2 proposals after that.

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#5

@liviade thanks for posting here!

For product metrics, the “Pirate Metrics Framework” may be useful:

  • Acquisition - Sign up, complete profile / proposal to join
  • Activation - make 2 proposals
  • Retention - participate in DAO once per week for 4 weeks
  • Referral - invite others
  • Revenue - you might redefine this as long term stickiness, maybe 6 months of retention or active participation

This was designed for paying SaaS products so isn’t quite right, but does give us a funnel and forces us to define what goals we want.

For acquisition — this is a very high bar already. You are right @AdrienDLT that beyond acquisition is important. So we need to think about what acquisition leads to successful activation.

eg can we have simple proposals / missions that anyone can complete as proposal 1, and then proposal 2 is custom?

In open source projects, there are labels for “good first issue”, and we might have a proposal bank with these ideas.

Some anecdotal evidence from me: I signed up a long time ago after going to Token Engineering meetup in Berlin.

I never went back because I didn’t get an email or other notification to remember to come back.

So, my hypothesis is that some amount of email notifications about activity would help.

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#6

Thanks for the inputs! @AdrienDLT @boris
My concern with asking for rep as a first proposal is that we are basing the approval on “who you are” rather than “how you are contributing”.

Perhaps there are other ways to lower the barrier of entry and still connect that with some type of contribution to the DAO, like your suggested Boris. I’m afraid the importance of reputation gets diluted if all you have to do is to ask for it to get in.

#7

Totally.

Yes. I like the “email channel”, it gives a chance for people to go back to it at a later stage, etc. But others may prefer other channels (reminder through alchemy, telegram, etc). I suspect that’s a topic that deserves its own thread/discussion.

Note that I’m already working on this “activation” phase by trying to activate some of the many members I onboarded (maybe 10 members by now). I do this via private chat, emails & such. It’s personalized & does not scale though, unless we could reward people doing such work, and why not?

That’s a very good point. We could have a google spreadsheet that list some of these 1st tasks.

We are still having a lot of topics uncovered though (as in, where no proposal was done yet) so a guideline I give for the 1st proposals a member submit is: keep your proposal small enough (max 15h or work) & the requested fund low enough (max 300 DAI).

Well that’s exactly the point: avoid Sybil attacks by identifying each member. As in, there isn’t such thing as “hey sorry you can’t be part of GenDAO because we don’t like your profile”. Unless we can plug in to 3rd party Web3 services that does job for us, then we’re stuck with that solution for now I suppose (unless I’m missing something).

You can do that, but then you fit 2 goals into 1 proposal: prove your identity + do a task. If one fails, the other is tied to it. Which is ok but kind of annoying. A proposal can take as little as 6 days to pass (if boosted) so I wouldn’t bother with that risk.

#8

If the Identity verification was mandatory by the protocol before submitting a proposal this could be fixed. Plus, that never happened before “sorry you can’t be a part of the DAO” but it would be harder to ensure that won’t happen once the DAO scales.

#9

Some thoughts on this subject:

I do agree that this is a significant obstacle.

From my understanding the issue is not so much concerned with making sure there is a human on the other side, but rather concerned with limiting the powers that are granted through the distribution of Rep. In particular, voting.

With an automated system that grants Rep for onboarding, we can add new members through a simple one-click application process.

However, there would need to be a strict framework of limitations and obligations:

(1) Defining the minimum amount of Rep necessary to meaningfully contribute to the DAO.

(2) Limiting X amount of Rep that can be distributed to Y amount of new members within Z amount of time. (Maybe only allow at most 5 new members a month. This parameter can be altered through proposal? Have an application wait-list?)

(3) Have an active slashing system that takes away Rep from users, who, after being admitted, fail to contribute in a meaningful way. (Perhaps creating a mandatory slashing proposal for new-users to be voted on by the community after Z amount of time.)

(4) Create work for new members to contribute toward. (A to-do list that contains a myriad of tasks such as writing articles, creating memes, participating in an active WG or helping further the work of other DAO’s in the ecosystem, all of which grants new users a sense of ownership within the DAO).

An automated system that contains the incentives to participate, the consequences of non-participation, and a process for sustained and incremental growth will be vital for scaling DAO’s.

I think the creation of such a system is extremely important, and should be prioritized by the current GenDAO members.

#I believe that (4) is a critical link to creating decentralized cohesion. It’s one of the reasons why Ethereum has become the platform it is.

Almost every successful Blockchain protocol has a decentralized community that contributes toward its success. For those that don’t contribute, they immediately seek another community to join.

A byproduct of decentralization is that of granting the end-user with the mobility to move from one community to another (shifting attention).

The ability to “move across” various protocols (as well as DAO’s) results in communities whose demographics are constantly changing as new concentrations of unique individuals with different incentives begin contributing to the efforts of that community; this evolution of decentralized demographics within a community has the potential to create instability and limit the cohesion of a projects purpose, direction, and culture.

Ethereum has done a great job with creating ‘work’ for the members of their community, and has incentivized that participation through the funding of projects and enabling collaboration among the many groups building on top of the protocol. These methods of cohesion (creating meaningful work) need to be defined if the DAOStack protocol (and the DAO’s within) hope to create a thriving cohesive community that contributes toward the original vision for this project.

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#10

I’m personally not a big fan of automating the rep allocation at this stage.

In terms of whether or not we should give new members rep, the main discussion has been around whether or not we should require a valuable contribution to Genesis before handing out rep to them.

My personal opinion on this is: YES, we should require some value-add, although we should ensure the barrier is a low one (for example by providing “Good First Issue” as @boris suggested) .

The main reason why I believe we should move in this direction is because a) it ensures we have a small filter on the members joining Genesis, b) it sets the right culture in motion: you contribute, you get Rep, c) it will decrease noise in the DAO (since most proposals are rep related)

-Eric

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#11

Agreed. That’d actually be very nice if included.

I feel like we’re hitting the endless topic of DIDs and there is only so much we can do considering our positions. As in, we might want to pick easier battles & short term solutions (i.e. have a dedicated scheme for signup proposals).

Apart from that last remark on implementation timeframe, I’m totally supporting a solution that lowers the barrier of entry, whichever it is.

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#12

A while ago, @Stratis and I brainstormed on how to implement his “quest giver” idea or something similar to it to onboard new members providing a support system from active rep holders. That’ s how the onboarding working group started. But unfortunately there wasn’t enough engagement, perhaps because the structure needs to be more detailed and have a step-by-step approved via proposal. This was the idea: https://docs.google.com/document/d/18LKXxglefAAQb_M7IbcTwMpmnMWlEvmTxJhpVjFhnPI/edit

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#13

I actually think requiring people to add value to the DAO before getting rep is very simple / short term - it is 100% through soft governance, without any changes needed.

Personally I would lean more on the “let’s experiment” side of things - and at least try making this change to see what we get.

#14

I agree with being experimental and think that’s what we are trying to do. But requiring people to add value to the DAO “outside” of the DAO, and then asking them to make a rep proposal sounds redudant to me. Is there a benefit from having a two step process in your opinion?

#15

I like this idea. I believe that adding value to the DAO before getting rep or requesting rep before adding value is kinda like the chicken and the egg problem. So I think that a onboarding process might be more effective than a one step thing. It could even be gamified in some way to make more engaging.