Proposal: Let's not get #rekt - Workshop + documentation-driven Study Group

Genesis
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#1

coCrypting - Convivial Crypto Learning 1: Let’s not get #rekt

An experiment on Convivial Research for basic Crypto Funds Management

Token Requested: 1000 DAI + 500 DAI
Rep Requested: 0.40% per proposer (as suggested for such activities)
Online workshop to be scheduled up to a month from the proposal approval, documentation validation proposal up to a month from the workshop event.

overview

Since Alchemy main function is to allocate funds, learning more about fund management can be a great point for the efficiency of the DAO, and for pollinators looking to propose and deliver successfully while maintaining their gains fair.

Link to alchemy proposal
(legacy) Link to original proposal

problem statement

Description of the problem we’re trying to solve by doing this work.

Crypto markets have seen enormous fluctuations in short periods of time, and even though we want to be supportive of the technology and diversify our investments, the lack of knowledge on how to manage such funds can leave us in the great pool of frustration and anger, or inactivity and counter-productivity.

proposed work

High-level overview of what we’re building and why we think it will solve the problem.

  • 1-2h online workshop:
    • Invitations and provocations
    • Intro Convivial Research:
    • Intro Nomenclature - collaborative glossary
    • Intro Custody - wallets, keys and third parties
    • Intro Risk - assessment
    • Intro Accounting - tidying up
    • How to translate all this new info to a personal form they understand and can reuse
    • How to use this practically when Proposing, Redeeming, Staking
  • 2 weeks working group
    • investigate the topics discussed against each individual’s experience & research
    • curate and refine material gathered
    • consolidate results and build initial documentation from there
  • coCrypting documentation
    • offer multiple perspectives and insights based on many different sources for each topic
    • a go-to place for risk-concerned DAOcitizens

proposers

Pedro Parrachia is a long time pollinator and was part of the ATF. He is also part of the Economic Space Agency and have been #hodling crypto since 2016.

Jocelyn is the Genesis artist in residence. For this community, she’s successfully hosted and delivered The Musaeum of Unfinished Ideas workshop this spring, and The algorithm of donated dreams this summer.

goals

What are its intended direction, expected results and final objective

  • help better prepare stakeholders against crypto volatility and ambiguity
  • expand convivial research experiments
  • document both

metrics

The criteria that must be met in order to consider this project a success.

  • both old and new members participating
  • impact the way proposers plan their funds requests
  • serve as reference for future knowledge productions in the DAOsphere

scope

requirements

Current project requirements.

  • 1000 USD (now) + 500 USD (optional/exceptional)
  • at least 5 active participants
  • scheduling the workshop up to a month from proposal’s approval
  • validation of deliverable
  • participation prerequisites
    • Minimum Initial Glossary reading (pending)
    • Metamask basic experience
    • Account(s) in exchange(s) or other fiat on-ramps
    • willingness to learn and share their findings about multiple concepts, apps and models.

The extra 500 USD will be asked after delivering the workshop, it is intended as partial compensation for lost funds from a previous delivery by Jocelyn - The Algorithm of Donated Dreams (proposal; result). More about that episode here.

future work

Future requirements.

  • more convival learning experiments
  • quarterly updates to the documentation
  • Insertion of documentation in the onboarding guides and such

non-requirements

List anything that is out of scope.

  • trading strategies
  • personal strategies disclosure (remember, never dox yourself!)

value proposition

What are the identified needs, the pain points to which the solutions are being made?

For multiple times in the past, proposers faced unexpected or poorly prepared for situations where funds requested lost value to fiat currencies before or just after voting. Even though the cryptosphere is something new, risk management isn’t. Still, both aren’t accessible.

Changing that is hard but not unapproachable, which is why we are here: workshop → working group → documentation as architecture and strategy, scaffolding participatory knowledge production and weaponizing/memetizing the journey of reducing information asymmetries in this new and stranger-than-fiction landscape.

alternatives considered

List any alternatives considered to this approach. Explain why they weren’t used.

Manually picking one preexisting medium how-to article could help but none of them are comprehensive nor specific enough for our needs. Curating existing material and collectively adapting it to our needs seems like the best way to go.

participation segment

What is the target of our proposal? Who is it aimed at?

  1. The workshop is intended for anyone how is actively interested in the listed topics, from any background and any experience level above the minimum described here.
  2. the study group is intended for the workshop participants but also for those with previous experiences.
  3. the documentation is targeted for any and all crypto citizens, specially DAOcitizens and people earning cryptocurrencies. But also to anyone exposed or curious about practical aspects of exposure to cryptocurrencies.

journeys

How the workshop should work for various participants types.

participant type 1

Curious, active DAOcitizens will have 3 opportunities to learn how to understand their risk appetite and how to adjust their exposure when proposing:

  1. by attending the workshop and learning more about each topic context. 2) By engaging at any moment with the 2 weeks study group sessions and contributing with challenges and findings. And 3) by simply reading the final documentation.

participant type 2

While hodlers, voters and most importantly stakers will have lifetime access to the final documentation. Intended to be quickly translated to a personal form they can understand and reuse.

resources

All the folders that contain the deliverables and resources needed

Workshop report placeholder

Study Group resources placeholder

Documentation placeholder

related documents

Gdocs original proposal | Co-cryptoing cheap skeleton | Lame risk assessment gitbook chapter

Weekly Genesis Digests
Weekly Genesis Digests
coCrypting #1: getting our hands dirty
#2

Oh no! I forgot the memes!

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#3

I see this as a misuse of DAO funds.

While understanding how financial markets work – especially crypto markets – is useful, I consider it out of scope for GenDAO to directly finance this.

There are many educational resources already available online for this type of learning – example.

#4

Thanks for putting this together! I remember talking to you @parrachia about it months ago for the DAO workshops. Happy to see it structured. In my opinion would be very valuable to also bring up DAO budgeting into the research. I.e, how to plan proposals according to the available funds and avoid the DAO getting in debt, how to build proposals with detailed budgets etc.

1 Like
#5

Hey Livia, great idea. You can count on that!

1 Like
#6

Hey @papa_raw Just having information around is not enough and highly inefficient. We need actionable knowledge.

Multiple people have struggled with planning, requesting and managing funds from proposals. And how many people didn’t or won’t engage with proposing or staking because of this ambiguity as entry barrier.

This proposal is not an intro for the crypto market, like the video you mentioned. This is about learning how to use and understanding the risks of using of crypto-augmented governance - inside Alchy dapp, inside this DAO.

#7

Pat,
To Pedro’s last message, I am adding a personal direct call to empathy: what is your connection between downvoting and the higher aim of this DAO?

I want to encourage or ask that you see yourself as personally responsible of having an effect in people’s lives. I’m uncomfortable feeling like the result of someone pushing a button. We are in an experiment, it’s saddening that we choose to quiet others instead of supporting them, so I want to understand where you’re coming from personally, of course. You also matter to me as my fellow experimenter.

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#8

I stand by my position here – there’s many resources for the workshop as you’ve described it online. If these are the metrics for success…:

… then I’m not convinced this is money well spent. I don’t see old members getting value out of the agenda as described, and the way we ask for funding is a straightforward risk/reward calculation re: volatility (as previously mentioned). Furthermore, I don’t see this as a good use of funds when evaluating opportunity cost: we have proposers running an awesome DAO-to-DAO art experiment in Osaka, building a mobile interface, and speccing out an activism DAO. This proposed workshop, frankly, does not compare.

A good litmus test of whether an event, initiative, or workshop is worth funding is asking: would people pay for this if it was their money and not GenDAO’s resources? And I find for myself the answer here is no: assuming five participants, people would not pay 200+ DAI each for this workshop.

Like all things in life there are tradeoffs: I’m not here to quiet you (you are free to express your opinion and submit your proposal). But I am also here to point out that we can be smarter with our spending – and I do not consider this an appropriate use of funds.

2 Likes
#9

Pat, I can be clearer: I want to understand your feelings and personal perspective— beyond logical, as you’ve explained those super well.
As you’ve now seen the effect of your downvoting, I would like to know what you’re feeling in regards to that effect, and where your need to push down comes from… personally, inside.
@papa_raw

#10

Gotta say I disagree with this oversimplification, and even if it was that simple, how many ppl are fluent on that?

I think this underestimating of initiatives supporting the DAO’s metawork / unpaid labors (proposing & staking) is a serious issue to the future of the DAOsphere. Alchemy and other DAOstack solutions will never flourish if we don’t develop the necessary scaffolding for people to use them. Exposure to a nouveau financial asset class is a key part of it - and as such a key entry barrier.

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#11

BTW that’s an unfair comparative. The proposal accounts for “workshop → working group → documentation” and 5 participants are the minimum number just for the workshop.

#12

I rarely feel good about downvoting initiatives. I don’t feel good about this, but I feel it’s necessary, as I don’t see this as a good use of funds.

Thanks for asking.

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#13

So, I’m going to give my thoughts and observations on this subject:

Thoughts on the Proposal:

• The current proposal, from a risk/reward perspective is not a passable proposal.

• Retrieving the funds for the Joss incident is also not helping with the proposal offer. I have sympathy for what happened, as I too, have lost money due to misunderstandings of the technology/process/precision required to not make mistakes when operating within web3. It happens, learn from it, keep pushing for this research…but it should not be attached to a research proposal.

Thoughts on the interaction:

• Pat, you are in a difficult position because of how active you are in this community. From my limited perspective, you are GenDAO.

While I agree with you on this proposal, we should figure out a better communication process that prevents you from falling into the realm of possessing too much charismatic authority. (Perhaps more GenDAO members should at minimal, begin practicing in engaging the broader community when a proposal idea is introduced.)

• There IS an asymmetry of information, and we all sense that. From a users perspective, it is difficult to distinguish between the wants of GenDAO and the wants of DAOStack. When you reject a proposal written on an open forum, that view holds weight, and presents itself as the view of both GenDAO members and therefore, the DAOStack team.

Thoughts on the research:

• The pursuit of performing research (this being a continuation of the DAO Landscape research) is something that I believe should be valued by GenDAO.

The point being that, you have at your disposal a community willing to put forth the effort to help build the informational infrastructure necessary for DAO’s to succeed. If GenDAO/DAOStack members have a vision for this informational infrastructure, there is a group willing to listen and contribute.

• With that being said, I think it is important to educate each other on what a good research proposal looks like, how we derive value from that effort, and most importantly what knowledge do we desire most.

I, as well as many others, look forward to helping with any research/work that needs to be performed to help this community to become successful…and that means being hyper-aware of how we communicate with each other.

Learning how to have difficult conversations, and ridding ourselves of informational asymmetry are tough tasks, but they need to be done.

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#14

CARAMBOLA. It seems Pat had legitimate reasons for downvoting, and he is being shamed for downvoting. This kind of guilting other for their honest opinions strikes me as CARAMBULA. Pat was articulate, he did not say anything personal against any person here. I do not feel he was “quieting” anyone and it became personal when the thread started talking about having an effect on other people’s lives and shaming him for being influential. There is nothing wrong with being influential. I call CARAMBULA on Joss for implying that Pat is being irresponsible in any way, asking his "feelings’ on his effect on others, and on her for quieting his voice, rather than being able to accept these constructive criticisms. This isn’t a therapy session. It is an open debate and making people feel bad for disagreeing is completely inappropriate.

1 Like
#15

So this is a good point to make, and one I try to be sensitive to, and I think it’s worth declaring my role: I am the Communications Lead for DAOstack Technologies, and I am compensated to be an active influence that represents the interests of the project as a whole, that is, both DAOstack Tech and GenDAO. As has been stated in the past, these interests are one and the same, that is to advance the development of the DAOstack open-source technology, grow the GEN economy, and increase adoption of the DAOstack technology. I don’t know how much this relates to the proposal at hand, but I want my position and my aims to be as transparent as possible. If there is an observed charisma here, it’s hopefully due to me filling this role appropriately.

There’s two things I want to highlight as additional folks have joined the discussion:

  1. First, there is the identified conflict-of-interest between this proposal and the previous – I would advocate that generally we should avoid these sorts of riders – as you elegantly put:
  1. Second, as identified by @eric.arsenault there are more effective ways of solving the problem this research is trying to solve – that is, to “help better prepare stakeholders against crypto volatility and ambiguity,” such as by adding additional cues in the interface. If we do research, let it advance directly Alchemy’s UX, in alignment with product development needs – but even as I’m writing this I still find it hard to say “yes, this is within the scope of Genesis” – I don’t see why it’s our responsibility to educate on markets, except perhaps in regards to the GEN token and its relationship to the market:

From Disqus:

#16

Hi @natesuits ! Allow me to touch some of the issues you mentioned

  1. “Passability” - Even though this is a helpful statement, would you care to elaborate how could it become passable or at least why it isn’t?

  2. Extra funds - Just to make it clear, the idea is to have the extra funds request completely separated from this proposal. The idea here is emulate a “proof-of-work” from her part - working on mitigating the root causes of the trap she (and many of us) fell in.

  3. Soft reputation - Gotta say I completely agree with you here

  4. Info asymmetry - And here

  5. The research - Besides agreeing again about research, I’d like to say that our intention here is to go beyond that: a collective learning experience about a much need topic - crypto custody.

Back to 1) + some closing thoughts, allow me reframe the proposal structure here: a workshop for quick intro, a study group for learning deeper together, and a documentation consolidating shareable, actionable findings from both. A triple effort to improve the contributor experience of genDAO citizens. From this and previous perspectives, I struggle to understand what exactly makes this “not a passable proposal”.

#17

Oh and I think this proposal is facing what @ezra_w discussed here, where prediction deeply affects proposal passing chances. Which apparently is more of a bug/exploit than a feature - as it brings plutocratic issues with voting that projects like Aragon or even EOS are facing.

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Predictions Affecting Proposal Passing Chances
#18

I think you need to read this passage again – @Ezra was arguing that positive predictions increase the likelihood of a proposal being passed – not that negative predictions increase the likelihood of a proposal failing.

These two concepts aren’t one and the same: negative predictions can only win viz-a-viz positive predictions if the proposal ends up boosted or passes through an absolute majority; timeouts don’t pay out. It’s actually very hard to predict negatively: you’re either a) buying time with the notion that the DAO’s greater majority hasn’t yet chimed in and will or b) hoping that a relative majority will swing your way in the boosted period (that positive predictors have had a lapse of judgement).

You’re probably thinking of the “Joe Lubin” attack where somebody could theoretically stonewall a proposal in perpetuity – this is a legitimate attack vector, but the sums of GEN staked would need to be far higher than what we’re observing now.

2 Likes
#19

Good you bubbled this up as I think it’s an important topic… will add to the discussion in that thread when I get a minute.

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#20

I agree it’s ambiguous, but reading it again I still have the impression he mentions both throughout the post.

Here, a quote where he directly mentions predicting to keep a proposal non-boosted as an issue:

This striking difference means that if a staker can contribute significantly to a proposal becoming boosted or staying non-boosted, they are having a very strong, direct effect on that proposal’s passing chances.

Gotta say I do agree it’s hard to predict negatively, but maybe not that much for GEN whales. And I believe that the cost of this influence is not super important if the protocol simply allows for strong influence in the 1st place. Which I believe is the core concern there:

“Staking is not meant to have a strong influence on proposals passing” [Regardless of the cost]

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