#DappCon22 : Day 3 - The Potential For Contribution-Based Governance, Stefen Deleveaux

Transcript

good morning everyone welcome to day three of dapcon and this is our governance track and this morning we have Stefan De La Vu from govern with a talk entitled the potential for contribution-based governance [Applause] gmgm good morning everyone it's early so talking about the potential for contribution-based governance and ideas around governance and well and basically how contribution management can actually get us to this point so I'm Stefan delavoe head over growth at govern uh govern is basically a a

platform that allows Dow contributors to easily record and actually own their own contributions and we'll get into that in a bit so first of all I want to bring up this question of how do we generally think about Dows that's going back to basics going back to First principles what are the mental models that we use when we're talking about dials when we're discussing dials when we're telling other people about Dows and that question goes into it kind of drives how we think about how these mental models dictate and drive the conversations around doubt governance and how we think about doubt governance for example if we think of if we consider Dallas to be companies or similar to companies we're going to even unconsciously think about Dow governance similar to how we

think about company governance or corporate governance if we think about dials closer to networks we're going to ask questions and think about how networks emerge how they evolve and how they're kind of governed in a sense if you think about Dallas's co-ops any kind of Cooperative we're going to think more about what that means what Cooperative government governance looks like how it's evolved this idea of like one person one vote things around that and it's real and these kind of mental models these conversations are really important to how we view the entire Dow space in general so I do want to give a quick call back to last year to Kia's prehistory of Dao's article which was extremely validating for the idea of the

mental model of Dallas's co-ops as well as Dallas's networks and guilds and the ecosystem in general but it was extremely validating for me as someone who studied worker cooperatives in the past and when they came into the Dallas race I already had this mental model of Dallas as co-ops or at least very similar co-ops um I want to talk a bit about the current conversations around Dallas uh these days where there is a heavy focus on these ideas around token governance obviously uh uh vitalikus wrote about written about the the sub-optimal nature of token weighted governance which is

how most Dallas operate today and the fact that they lead to plutocracy and all kinds of other issues and of course after the d-soc paper there's a lot of conversation and focus on uh Soul bound tokens and what that means for governance and whether we should all kind of migrate to using that and these are actually important conversations but I think we do need to start stepping back and focus a bit less on the style of tokens that we're using or the type of tokens that we're using and just focus on a bit more on the experimentations around governance Styles themselves what kind of style do we want for governance how do we think about governance what do we what do we really want to create at the end of the day we're rebuilding towards

uh unfortunately the the uh can't we can't play gifts but um I think most of you are devs here so I'm sure many of you remember the Steve bomber talk at Microsoft the uh developers developers Developers developers developers and it was it's one of my favorite talks because it's hilarious but at the same time it was actually a really great call to action uh to say that if we want what we're doing to flourish if we want it to be sustainable in the long run we have to focus on the Developers we have to focus on empowering them including them and making sure they're involve so they can just build what they need to build on our systems at the end

of the day and I think this is what the Dow space needs to be doing for contributors where especially given the question of how should we involve all these different stakeholders because of course there's there are multiple but when it comes to governance who should we be involving the most in governance and also who should we who should be benefiting the most from this governance and of course that should be contributors because they are the building blocks of Dao's and the focus of what we're doing should be focused on focus on contributors contributors contributors and someone you may ask why why a contributors so important compared to other stakeholders other funders Etc

this this quote from Lincoln is one I I've always liked and it's basically labor is prior to an independent of capital capital is only the fruit of Labor and can never have existed if labor had not first existed labor is the superior of capital deserves much the higher consideration and even in that's something I I think is true and even in this space where we can kind of create tokens out of thin air create Capital out of thin air it still goes back to labor at the end of the day and labor has to actually drive drive this and push this and if you can have a you can have a dow with the treasury of a billion dollars but if you have no contributors to actually use that and drive that then your Dow isn't going to be very impactful at the end of the day

if we want to create this this idea of Dows that are Dows and gov and DOW governance that's focus on the contributors doubts that create impact based around contributors and contributions what are the obstacles to actually create this what do we have to do to create this this idea of more contribution-based governance and maybe even The elusive one person one vote that we see in co-ops first thing civil resistance is hard we can't ever get to the site ideal of you know one person one vote if we don't even know who one person is we don't know what's going on or whether someone is actually uh represented by 10 wallets Etc

and obviously this is a very hard problem to solve uh there are multiple projects working on this but of course there's still issues and questions around usability scalability and things of that nature it's going to take a long time to get to that point where we can even really say we've created simple resistance and it's also it's just really hard to track what works being done most dials people have no idea what's going on uh contributors don't really know or understand what other contributors are doing even let's say Dow quarantines for example they may not know what other what contributors are doing until a bit further down the line when things are you know starting to Blossom out of the work that's being done and of course there are a lot of Doubt a

lot of tools a lot of tools Dallas are using now to try to correct this problem a lot of dows are using bony boards which are okay in certain contexts but they're inefficient in some ways and you can't really run an entire organization based off base just off bodyboards and also you'd be surprised to see a lot of dollars are just core teams using Excel spreadsheets to actually track the contributions that are happening and to be honest this is not the future of work it doesn't represent the future of work and if our doubts just turn out to be Excel spreadsheets then we might as well pack up now because that we're not going to create the future out of that and the third thing is there's no real

taxonomy for contributions now if you have two contributors for example imagine you have two contributors in a dow working on the same project they finish the project they report it back they start talking about it but the the ways that both contributors actually talk about the project and talk about what's happening could be completely different they can use completely different words it could be used completely different explanations and that just creates chaos at the end of the day because now the question comes in terms of reward and compensation and what we do next and we don't really understand maybe just as other contributors or the core team or whoever what's actually happening because we're using completely different lingo completely different language and completely different ways to talk about it

so of course these are a lot of problems what is the solution for that we think contribution management paves the way for contribution-based governance we think contribution management actually solves these problems a contribution management is what govern does mainly and I'll show you a little bit of what it potentially looks like so of course this is just uh one of the main pages of govern you go on you record your contributions quite simple you have the name of the contribution um we just kind of explain what it is you can't see here but you can also there's also a details section where you can kind of go into it a bit more explain exactly what's going on in further detail

also so that other people who will other contributors core team or whoever can actually explain can understand a bit more and kind of build this uh build more ideas around what's happening you also have activity type or contribution type where and this is interesting because this can actually be preset by a Dao for example where whatever contributions are typically happening in general in and out or what the Dow considers to be what their needs are the most or what's most valuable to them they can preset and you can have this kind of uh list of things that you can choose from based on what contributions you're doing and at the same time a dow can just you know a single dial contributor can add their

own contribution type and when they push it up this can actually create or open the door to create conversation around okay well what's this you're working on is as necessary for us is this valuable for us maybe we hadn't thought about this before and you start to build this convergence between let's say the core team for example and the individual contributor and over time this builds a flywheel where the Dow itself is expanding and understanding more about what's happening within the Dow and what's important and what's most valuable for the Dow and that goes back to the whole taxonomy question as well as you know if there's a if it's written if the contribution was written or the work done was written for example a project

for example you can post the URL you can post a proof and you can also add the date and then when you add the contribution uh and also you can assign it or attribute it to a specific dial you can also attribute it to multiple dials which I think is is really important for the future the fact that so many people are contributing to multiple dials or let's say You're Building this kind of you're working on nostalted out collaboration the work you're doing isn't just useful for when Dallas useful for two and at the same time we also want to push this idea and the fact that your own contributions can may be useful for one dial but in a sense it's also useful for many and what you're doing in terms of work isn't

just useful for one dial it actually is useful and expands the entire ecosystem this is just what you know a record of your contributions can look like you can be dated you can actually have separated between you just have it at for your own record and you can also mint it on chain and we do that with gnosis chain so that you always have this record and you always own this record at the end of the day and and the idea is basically that if you own this record no matter where you go no matter what dials you contribute to or join you can always have this record with you this is also contribution types which again goes back to the taxonomy question where you can see and also the dial can see what kind of contributions happen

the most in your dial if if demos are happening you can kind of uh experiment and figure out where should we go next with this what should we add what kind of what kind of other contributions can we do what's actually again what's really necessary and what's really needed for our dows and this is an important point the attest station so me if I'm recording my contributions and I put it out to the up to the Dow there's always a question of was this actually done what and did you report this or or record this correctly so instead of you know a core team or core contributor having to go down and double check and make sure things happen you can have let's say you did a project

with a number of I mean sorry a number of other contributors those other contributors can go and attest and talk and and record that yes this we're we're validating that this actually happened and that kind of eases pressure off the core team themselves and it also creates more bonds between the contributors and it doesn't really add just adds a layer another layer of verification and validation at the end of the day so now we have this idea of contributor ownership we also have this idea of uh validation and verification so that's just a quick run through um but what happens when dials use contribution management going back to the problems we expressed

earlier server resistance is hard and obviously we are not solving for civil resistance but with this kind of system with this kind of management tool you can reduce the need for it because now we're we're focusing a lot more on what's happening in real time we are converging and verifying and validating now it's hard to track what works is being done solved we're tracking the work and the fact that there's no taxonomy for contributions well we're actually creating this taxonomy in real time and of course that's a long-term process but it flows and it evolves and it expands uh as an entire Dao so let's imagine you're using this in your Dow which is great but now think about what

happens when multiple dials are using this or even the entire ecosystem is using this now it's not just you know contributors within a Dao and one solo Dao working and you know another dial is using it and working the silo what we're doing now is we're creating an entire contribution graph where we can actually see and the entire space can have an overview of what work is actually being done within a dial how what work is actually being done in the entire Dao ecosystem and with that we can find you know areas of potential collaboration I'll give a quick example uh we work very extensively with boys club shout out to them amazing team but what happens when we're not just

working with a boys club we're working with shifai we're working with surge working with blue Dao and now we have all these dials that are focused on women bringing women into the space onboarding women into the space they can now find points of collaboration they can find points of uh overlap they can basically use the contributions the work that's being done on the ground to form together to work together more find more points to collaborate and then that drives impact and that increases impact and that expands impact impact in a way that just wasn't truly possible before and all this is this is not top down this is bottom up this is all individual points of work and we're all expanding

the doubt ecosystem through our individual work through our individual layer and a little chaotic but um and this contribution graph ends up serving as an entire contribution layer that basically undergirds the entire space now for example there are there are a lot of great projects excellent projects working on value Frameworks reputation points for compensation and all these are extremely necessary if we really want dials to be the future of work and if we really want um contributors to be able to be properly compensated be properly rewarded work in ways uh where they you know maybe get access to certain things

as necessary but at the end of the day all of this needs to be undergirded by this contribution layer because that is the the main point of interaction that is the work that's being done at the end of the day and all this is possible because with the beauty of composability we can interact and integrate with all these different platforms and make sure that the reputation and the compensation and everything that's happening is directly connected to this contribution layer and is direct is directly connected to all the work that's being done and recorded by contributors so then we can actually build this thriving and healthy Dow ecosystem based off of our labor rather than just our capital

and at the end of the day this basically creates the potential for contribution-based governance and potentially even though this this Co-op ideal of one person one vote so join us as we build the contribution layer for daos thank you thank you Stefan for your contribution today and we have a few minutes for uh q a um hey everyone so this was a really

good presentation and I appreciate like the different model and the contribution um just in the interest of time I just wanted to ask specifically how do you how how do you solve for collusion detection inside of your um in uh government yeah that's something we think a lot about the potential for collusion the potential for bribes which happen in any kind of system um and a lot of that does come back down to the attestation on the attestation layer where and this also interacts with like reputation systems for example where someone with a higher level of reputation within a dow if they attest to the work that you're you're done it

seemed it seemed to be more trusted now of course that can still read some kind of collusion and that's really up to the Dow at the end of the day which which we kind of we don't want to make decisions for the dollars you want we want the Dallas to make decisions for themselves uh an example we like to think about a lot is let's say you record a contribution and then you build like a thousand Bots to go and attest to the work that you've done now it's a little chaotic right but at the end of the day you can the Dow itself can base um this question on okay who is actually attesting to the work that's done how many people in a certain maybe Guild or a pod or a squad however you interact with it who are these people are these

people that directly work with the contributor are these people from another you know squad for example is a someone from core team and obviously this isn't perfect in terms of uh there will always be the potential for collusion we don't completely eliminate that but with this attestation layer it makes that harder and then given you know interactions with reputation system so we can actually build penalties for collusion once they're found out I think it's in the same direction um I saw that you have addresses there on the on the screen and that you have like kind of real names so what are you tracking are you are you are people

going into the account by using their real name or whatever handle or are they using their addresses to contribute that's a good question uh so those were mainly examples like demo examples but you mainly interact with your your wallet so really if you if you choose your name that's up to you foreign population doesn't need to be completely unchanged the whole process I can see is basically of chain I mean you could just like plug metamasking to like let's call

it jira for example and basically get the thing done faster I'm using the same principle of like a settlement layer unit computational which is like of chain I mean what would be uh the feasibility of such a tool in you of building something which is completely new because I would it would be easier to get like the whole uh devoil you just like you know log in with metamask into jira and Confluence and just you know start pushing things the organizational structure is already here the processors are already done can you uh can you repeat that last one just oh I mean the processes and the organizational structures like using like atlassian is already set up I mean just using a a plug-in for example a

metamask plugin right you could just get this whole contribution layer like really sped up you know because at the end of a div a dial doesn't need a whole entry tool you know it just needs the confirmation of a settlement to be Unchained and you could just use a whole existing mechanism that has already been used inside the broader industry and just use that and then you know settle uh all the data and all the proof and everything on the chain yeah that's interesting um I don't really have a great answer for that but at the end of the day there's multiple ways that we're looking at it where one a lot of this is really about building this kind of emergent uh bottom-up style of governance in terms of how the contributors interact with

the dowels themselves and at the end of the day I mean you mentioned on chain like it that's really and we're talking to people about verifiable credentials for example so it doesn't have to be on chain if it doesn't want but it's really up to you as an individual I think that's it for our time uh thank you so much Stefan