Cofund - Grant Management on NEAR

[Phil]

Hello frens,

We would like to introduce our Cofund Grant Management project to the NEAR community.

Overview

Cofund’s goal is to provide DAOs and web3 projects the tools to reduce friction during the whole lifecycle of the grant-funding process. By that, we allow DAOs to focus on their core business while sustainably growing their ecosystem through grants. Our MVP leverages Superfluid to create programmable payment streams, which are linked to grant milestones. Today, we learned about https://www.roke.to/ which we will integrate to allow grant payment streaming on NEAR.

Today we presented our results from Token Engineering Academy “DAO Reward System” study group. Please find our presentation below.

Cofund @ NEAR

Who we are

Davide Crapis, PhD, Operations Research at Colombia University, M.Sc. Economics. Former data scientist at Lyft.
Twitter: DavideCrapis

Hamid Bagheri, PhD, Computer Science at Iowa State University. Created a specialized programming language to analyze biological data.
Twitter: hamid58b

Joe Nisbett, M.Sc. Landscape Architecture and M.Sc. Community Planning at Auburn University. Working as UX Designer and digital marketeer.
Twitter: joe_nisbett_

Philipp Kothe, B.Sc. Management at International School of Management, product designer in web3 since 2019. Created SmartAid, a tokenized donation platform, The R-Archive, an immutable archive documenting the legacy of the stateless Rohingya people. Token lead @ MOBIX.Ai, a micromobility marketplace.
Twitter: philkk777

What’s next

We are looking forward to diving into the NEAR ecosystem and learn more about the challenges grant giving entities encounter during their work. We are excited to helping these organizations in accomplishing the important mission of web3. Namely, the creation of an open, decentralized world, in which individuals can come together to create, capture and share value, aligned with their values and passion.

Socials:

Twitter: Cofund_

[jlwaugh]

Hey Phil!

Thanks for sharing your awesome proposal. I’m really grateful for all the work you have done to help NEAR. Took the liberty of moving your post into the #community:dao category. Your team could join and get involved on the Astro platform, and of course, we can discuss off-chain, here on the forum.

You might also connect with community leaders on Telegram:

Community DAO

I think one issue NEAR encounters all the time is discombobulation. That suggests we are overly focused on the plurality of communities, and we may need to unite our grant-giving DAOs under a specific roof. I’ll highlight recent discussion about a House of Guilds:

House of Guilds: a new funding mechanism for Guilds

This post introduces a new funding mechanism for Guilds. As chronear posted, we’re all hoping to help the Guilds program thrive on its own and without any NF direct support. There are really 2 major categories necessary to do so - Funding - how do Guilds get paid for doing good work? Operations - how do Guilds get onboarded and supported through their journey via technology, legal support, payments support, etc? DAOs often get pretty bogged down in reactive decision-making and, tbh, it’s of…

I’ve compiled a list of relevant forum posts here:

community | wiki

What are you hoping to learn about challenges of grant-giving entities in the NEAR ecosystem? Any ideas or questions? Perhaps you might support NEAR Foundation Grants program? I’m wondering if your team would like to engage further in exploring DAOstats.io and / or experiments via Community DAO.

NEAR Community DAO

Evolving the v1 Community Squad DAO This collaborative forum thread is for strategic planning as we introduce our new approach to Community Fund governance. Our vision is to enable more communities to build trust and responsibly distribute funds in order to develop and grow the NEAR ecosystem. Background 172 million NEAR tokens were allocated to community grants / programs in the initial block: [image] On behalf of stakeholders, a Community Council was established to decide which funding…

More info about Community DAO groups will be shared this week

[akrtws_TE-Academy]

Super happy to see this proposal - as being one of the results of the #OpenScience Program we’ve been running earlier this year with the support of NEAR!

Governauts Rewards Systems Research Initiative

Hi everyone, I’m Angela, founder of Token Engineering Academy. TE Academy is the first educational institution for this crypto-native new engineering field. Since July 2020, more than 700 students from 21 timezones participated in our programs. I’d like to propose a collaboration with NEAR! In November 2021, we’ll kick-off a community research initiative on Rewards Systems. The goal is to bring together 20-30 researchers from various backgrounds to work on Rewards Systems for DAOs. The work w…

@Phil and team delivered a great analysis of DAO grants challenges and Cofund grant payment streaming is made for solving many of these.
Highly recommend to get in touch and discuss how Cofund can help your DAO/grant giving entity prosper!

Also many thanks @jlwaugh for this awesome compilation of resources!

[Phil]

Hi @jlwaugh, thanks a lot for these links.
Happy to be a part of the Community DAO TG. We will check the house of guilds post. We are hoping to learn more about where grant giving entities face their core bottlenecks to offer a tool for them to work more efficiently and increase the impact of grants. Yes, we are in conversation with NEAR Foundation, however, I completely agree with that grants should to be decentralized and given out by specialized DAOs in order to scale.

Looking forward to the information on Community DAO groups.

[dcrapis]

Update: we synced with James and joined the CommunityDAO after delving deeper into some of the conversations linked above on evolutions of the Guild program and related community funding.