Designing a DevDAO with Radicle

Transcript

hi everybody i'm gonna get started um welcome to my talk uh i'm going to be talking about designing dev dao's this interesting little meme that i'll be talking about today with uh radical um and kind of talking a little bit about the future of open source so my name is abby that's my twitter handle abby underscore takecom um i'm the head of the community and governance team at radical which is a peer-to-peer stack for code collaboration i'm also on the council of the foundation the radical foundation and also of the optimism foundation so i'm doing a lot of governance these days um and right now i spend most of my time on radicals so before i tell you about what

we're doing at radical i kind of just wanted to give you a little overview of what we're talking about today so i'm going to be talking about this term that i've been trying to meme to life called devdao um i'm going to tell you a little bit about how you can build dev taos with radicals so with the radical stack and then i'm actually going to focus a lot on the work that i've been doing at radical over the last couple of months which is designing radical itself as a dev down which is why this is in the governance track so this isn't a great talk because i've been working a lot but this is kind of the first time that we're like talking about this publicly so hopefully it's slightly interesting to everybody um so before getting into uh what i mean by designing radical as a

devdao we can kind of talk about what a devdao is so a dao to do that we should probably talk about what a dao is um so daos are obviously decentralized organizations um but they are often based on code and they have these like unique programmable capabilities that allow them to dissolve and merge to any degree of like composability that you can envision and so often they take use these things that we call tokens and have these qualities of distributed or decentralized ownership trustless governance often on chain often in permissionless environments um and programmable incentives um basically giving us a way to disrupt all traditional notions of ownership um and

use them to design our own incentive models um and that kind of bruises like little potion um this little doubt potion um but so if we think of what um so basically like that's a very esoteric way i think of describing what a dao is but when you think of what a dao is in practice it's actually just like internet communities with assets that they can use to fund different things and so with this definition we can actually define devdows a little bit more specifically as a community that uses distributed ownership trustless governance and programmable incentives to coordinate the maintenance and development of open source software so that's the definition that i'm using today to describe dev dows and basically again in practice it kind

of just looks like a group of developers that coordinate around a set of github repos probably with a discord server um and a gnosis safe and that's kind of like the baseline i guess like brew your own deb dao and basically this allows development teams to um you know design new ways to like maintain and develop open source software often with funding built in which basically is kind of you know re-envisioning the whole open source sustainability issue um so it combines what the project needs with what the individual wants um to focus on more permissionless contribution um i have a note here that says the best dev teams and taos will work like open source which is really funny i don't remember writing that um so with a

radical um which is um the project that i work for radical is um basically um a decentralized stack for collaboration so radical itself is a stack for building dev dows and so what we do with that is um well yeah i should go through this so radical is basically like a stack for decentralized collaboration um it's many things it's secure and unsensible code infrastructure so things like peer-to-peer code hosting decentralized collaboration tools that allow you to use you know do everything that you do on github just in an experience that's built on protocols not platforms it also allows collective code governance because we employ like

sovereign developer identities instead of github accounts you have cryptographic keys that you can attest to your ethereum identities which give you the ability to kind of like run around web3 with this developer identity um similar to you know how you wield your github handle or profile and it also has new ways to earn money for open source um and so funding foss and using cryptonating funding tools for foss is like also in the radical mandate and we have like a lot of tools that we've been building to support that so it's basically like a decentralized stack for collaboration it's built for dev taos um it was started because we have this belief that our dependence on centrally hosted platforms and corporations for the distribution of like critical open

source infrastructure is inherently unsustainable regardless of web 3 just in general this is our belief and so we believe that free and open source software and web 3 especially needs resilient collaboration infrastructure to be built on if we truly want it to challenge the traditional institutions that govern our day-to-day life and so i'll wrap it up on what radical is but this is where you can start using radicals so radical.network is our web client this allows you to kind of this is like your github parody experience it allows you to um share host publish your get repos on a peer to peer network access them get clone we have prs dropping here soon we're going to have issues and so this is kind of like the

way to interact with radical from the browser and then we have drip sat network which is our crypto native funding tool that we built for foss and for creators in general which allows um it's basically like a streaming protocol that allows you to accept funds redirect them into different places and so this is also like a really cool tool to use so i blew right through that because again i want to focus on how we're designing ourselves as a dev tao instead of what radical is but if you're interested in using radical um for your dow or your project just find me after and i can kind of like walk you through all of the amazing things you can do with it so yeah so today what i wanted to talk about was how we're designing radical as

um its own dev down and so this uh kind of spurs from this other belief that we have so in addition to believing that our dependence on centrally hosted platforms and corporations is inherently unsustainable we also believe that the future of open source is self-sustaining community owned and governed decentralized organizations and the reason is because open source communities are like the og daos they've been experimenting with governance and decentralization way before the dow even got hacked um and because at their core they're the most og form of common space peer production the term was actually coined to describe the phenomenon that was open source software um and so as this quote

describes like open source software is not just a technical form of development it's not a development only a development style it's an inherent network of interacting socio-technical processes um that where they're all intertwined they're dependent they're co-evolving and they're inseparable in performance um because open source communities are incredibly social as they are technical um and so this like multi-dimensional aspect um is why you know they're treated you know as a phenomenon and there's cultural significance to the development of free software um and not just technical so um for more on this theory i would also have these cute little qr codes that maybe you can scan if you can zoom in far enough

but i did this talk at eat denver which was like way more theory driven about this and so you can kind of go check it out but it's basically like how to design um regenerative open systems and so uh like i spoke about how we could have this unique opportunity to use daos and different crypto primitives to design regenerative open source ecosystems because we have this ability to distribute ownership um and community enact change within a dow via governance which means that we have like new opportunities um for creating positive some games oh i wasn't showing this this is a yeah this is a really esoteric flowchart that i walk through in the presentation i would watch it it makes it make sense um but basically the the theory is that we have like more potential to build

design positive some games which then um also allow us to create new behaviors within um ecosystems that because individuals have the ability to influence and enact change and reap benefit from the organization so that's like what that post is about um and i would go do that because that kind of contextualizes a lot of the stuff that i'm going to be talking about but so basically radical from its inception was always envisioned as this new kind of open source project one that's built governed and financed via the internet and so throughout the last year we've throughout the last two years actually we've been uh deploying the technical economic and social

foundations that are like necessary um to achieve this vision and so this is i have this discourse post this presentation is actually just my discourse posts in slide form um and so this one uh this has always been the vision of radical and it speaks to kind of again our theory behind like what we think the future of open source is um and so we've started on the path of designing radical to be a truly open source community-led and self-sustaining network for uh software collaboration um a dev dow in every way and so that's kind of like the thesis that has been driving um this huge chunk of work which we've been calling our transition to the dow so up until

2021 core development for the project had been coordinated via mnatic which is a venture funded berlin base ganbiha that mandate was to make decentralized code collaboration a reality by contributing to the development of these open source primitives like radical um and the original os coin which is like the first one of the first names for our funding tools um but so in february 2021 which is like time is not real anymore so that was like a year ago a year and a half ago right um we launched rad which is our native governance token and with that not only did we decentralize the network by basically you know creating a dow instantiating a

um on-chain treasury that's governed by token holders um but we actually dissolved mnatic we dissolved the entire company and we transitioned all of our contributors and our core teams to the radical foundation um which is a swiss non-profit entity created to support the decentralization of the radical network and the development of free and open source tooling so that was like this huge huge step that was super important towards like the technical and economic decentralization of radical um control of the project smart contracts were decentralized among the radical community um the radical treasury was established and holding over 50 of rad token supply the treasury is publicly managed and can fund the

project into perpetuity um and so in practice um you know we've always envisioned um this treasury funding the maintenance and development and growth of the radical ecosystem far into the future and so now we've been engaging in this like social transition and laying the social scaffolding we need to truly design radical as you know this self-sustaining community-led network for code collaboration and so that's kind of what we've started doing today which is transitioning from the radical foundation to the radical dao to fully realize our original vision just checking on time maybe i have enough time to talk about

all this but so basically what does this transition mean in practice it means that the radical dow will facilitate and manage all core development work of the radical project it will set and coordinate a project-wide strategy somehow it will manage the budget for radical-wide development and operations and ecosystem funding and it will onboard an off-board core teams so manage the actual like funding and defunding of these projects so what does success look like for this transition success is if we can continue to decentralize decision-making power throughout the dow to enable all of these responsibilities if we can fund and coordinate all radical core work via the dow via the treasury

reduce the capacity of the foundation so it's very limited and only for necessary real world interactions and that the treasury assets can sustain the growth of the project in the long term and so what are our goals with this well the goal is to in this process not only you know build and design a dow that can do all these things and the processes around it but to distribute influence and ownership in a way that truly represents a decentralized and fair organization reduce our dependencies and our power pools and actually design a dow that is technically politically and socially resilient to secure the future of this open source public good that we're developing which is our decentralized uh collaboration stack and

obviously long-term sustainability so how do we actually build a self-sustaining dao is a question so um my work has been trying to project manage this whole thing and so we have these four work streams that we set that'll blow through because i really don't have a lot of time or design distribution of influence and ownership and re-evaluation of our dow tooling so the org design is obviously like developing the organizational structure to make this dao a reality so it can do all the things that it says it does our core teams become self-managed entities that are funded directly via the treasury distribution of influence um designing and implementing a strategy for distribution distributing non-financialized governing power within the radical ecosystem super important token voting isn't forever and so we want to be introducing more um equitable

forms of influence distribution which in the network distribution of ownership because token words rewards are a great incentive mechanism so devising and implementing an active strategy for distributing token remorse among network stakeholders and finally doing an audit of our governance tooling stack so um all of this is in this discourse post the next phase of the radical dao where we kind of like lay out all this um and everything's in process we're also planning on dog fooding a ton of a radical tech including this cute little nifty thing that's yet to be launched called work streams um and the goal is to basically create this like ever flowing regenerative open source garden where um you know everything is community land governed and self-sustaining and that's the radical vision and i wanted to let you all know

that we're working towards that today so hopefully in a year this will be a whole debrief on how that went so um this is our dev dao you can check us out in discord um again in february we'll be talking about this again and seeing how it went um and until then you can follow us on twitter and join our discord thank you [Applause] i don't think i have time for questions right okay i'll be around you