Governance Challenge Prize Pool (Metagov DAO)

Near Community and nodes
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By Joshua Tan (Metagovernance Project)

TLDR

Fund the prize pool for the upcoming Open Web Governance Challenge. This is a follow-up proposal to the approved Metagov <> NEAR partnership, and is related to the upcoming hackathon prize pool funding proposal. It may make sense to consider this proposal in the context of those other proposals.

Main link: challenge portal.

Team

  1. Lead: Joshua Tan @ Metagovernance Project, Oxford, and Stanford
  2. Primavera De Filippi @ Metagovernance Project, CNRS, and Harvard
  3. Miriam Ashton @ Metagovernance Project
  4. Eugene Leventhal @ CMU
  5. Ed Saperia @ London College of Political Technologists
  6. NEAR contact: James Waugh

Proposal

The governance challenge is an independent track in the 3-week Open Web Community & Creators Hackathon, a collaboration between NEAR, Metagov, Gitcoin, Dystopia Labs, and Createbase. The challenge is composed of (1) a governance hackathon with contents, events, and judging geared toward fostering new experiments with DAOs and blockchain governance and (2) an initial activation week centered around NEAR’s Sputnik DAO technology.

The governance hackathon will feature workshops, lectures, and trained geared toward fostering governance experiments along a range of suggested governance challenge areas co-designed by Metagov, NEAR, and other governance specialists. These challenge areas reflect important governance questions that NEAR is currently facing, from Rainbow Bridge governance to DAO-to-DAO contracts / interop to the management of the Community Fund itself. A preview of the event schedule and the challenge areas is online at the challenge portal.

$5,000 of the prize pool will be dedicated to governance projects, without condition. This accounts for the portion of the anticipated $10k hackathon prize pool open to protocol-agnostic projects (i.e. projects that don’t involve NEAR). This includes projects that address off-chain governance projects that may still be extremely relevant to NEAR (e.g. projects involving Discourse or Telegram).

$15,000 of the prize pool will be dedicated to governance projects submitted to the hackathon that involve a significant usage of NEAR; about $5,000 of the $15,000 will be reserved specifically for projects that directly use Sputnik DAO. All prizes will be allocated and distributed by the Metagov DAO according to criteria determined by Metagov and NEAR. A draft set of criteria is provided at https://metagov.github.io/open-web-challenge. (This is intended to fall under the original 100k NEAR “partners/celebs” portion of the hackathon prize pool.)

The Sputnik DAO activation week will feature events that specifically revolve around Sputnik DAO. It is intended to encourage ALL participants in the Open Web Community & Creators Hackathon (whether or not they intend to participate in the governance hackathon described above) to create a Sputnik DAO as part of their hackathon entry.

$5,000 of the prize pool will be dedicated to the Sputnik DAO activation week, and distributed during that first week. To qualify for a 30 NEAR payout, participants will have to register a Sputnik DAO for their project within the first week of the hackathon, have a council with their team as voting members, and submit a 500-word draft proposal to the Metagov DAO. We believe the initial activation week will be important in creating excitement and momentum for the overall hackathon.

Budget

$5,000 - unrestricted governance prize pool

$15,000 - NEAR-specific governance prize pool

$5,000 - Sputnik DAO prize pool

TOTAL: $25,000

Impact / ROI

As a whole, the challenge will

  1. Increase adoption of Sputnik DAOs
  2. Provide feedback and new use-cases for Sputnik DAOs and other DAO technologies on NEAR
  3. Grow the number of active NEAR users
  4. Connect NEAR to open web developers and specialists in blockchain/DAO governance
  5. Bootstrap experiments and research on decentralized governance, especially along challenge areas relevant to NEAR
  6. Generate and refine additional proposals to the NEAR grants program
  7. Lead to improvements in the operation of the Community Fund itself
  8. Provide a template for future hackathons & activations dedicated to DAOs and governance

A prize pool is a critical component of the upcoming challenge. A significant prize pool will directly increase participation, create excitement, and signify to the community NEAR’s commitment to governance.

Voting

One poll for Community Council members only and another poll that is open to everyone with trust_level_1 or above. Let us know any feedback!

Community Council Poll
  • Yes
  • No
  • Abstain
0 voters
Open Community Poll (min trust_level_1 required)
  • Yes
  • No
  • Abstain
0 voters

Voting and quorum* thresholds:

<$2K - 1X Yes - no min quorum
$2-10K - 2X Yes - no min quorum
$10-30K - 3X Yes - min quorum 4 of 7 - 4X members should vote in either direction
Above $30K requires Erik or Illia’s additional approval (Head of NF/Chairman of NFC)
Above $100K requires NEAR Foundation Council approval

*quorum defined as lowest number of member votes needed for the decision to be valid

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NaciĂłn Libertad - Author: sprintwithcarlos.near

Createbase Community Hackathon

Metagov Bounty Proposal

Living standard in third world countries has resulted in a massive loss of talent (brain drain) to countries able to guarantee better rule of law, security and democracy.

Nación Libertad is a “brain gain” community that support the transfer of know-how back to migrants’ home countries to improve their public good.

Since authoritarian regimes riddled with corruption, bigotry and censorship of dissent typically rule third world countries we have chose Web3 as a mean to secure the access of their citizens to the information produced and conveyed by our community members.

Also we have chose Web3 to allow anybody build their interface to the data stored at NEAR. We believe that by promoting protocol over platform, collaborative action and open participation will increase Protocols, not platforms: A Technological approach to free speech

Our main goals are:

  • Help local communities to organize and expose their needs and constraints to NaciĂłn Libertad innovators

  • Empower citizens to self-organize towards the solution of their needs

  • Increase awareness about the importance of collective action

Community members can select three different roles: advocates, innovators or organizers. Should you agitate, innovate or orchestrate

Action Plan

Prelaunch:

  1. Training campaign to explain Nación Libertad’s goal, its benefits

  2. Onboarding campaign in which we will explain and help them create their NEAR wallet. We will create a series of videos for this that will be distributed through our social media.

Trainings

Brief Drafting for advocates

For local communities we will create a video tutorial in which we will provide a standard process to gather their needs, to clearly explain them to the rest of community members, raise awareness and promote engagement.

Design Thinking for innovators

We will train innovators to adopt design thinking mindset and tools to empathize, define, ideate, prototype, test and implement solutions to local communities’ needs. We will use “The Field Guide to Human-Centered Design” by IDEO as reference.

Agile Training for orchestrators

We will train organizers in agile methodology, both Scrum and Kanban adapted to collaborative action usage.

Launch Event:

  • Online gathering in which local communities will share their needs to the community. We will provide them a presentation template to ensure consistency in the information shared with the rest of members of community

  • Solution presentation to the local community

  • Proposal items will be voted using the quaker consensus decision-making process

  • Once approved, local community will implement with the support of organizers

  • Every milestone will be shared with the all community

To organize communities we will promote the use of DAOs on the NEAR protocol, with a Quaker-based decision-making process instead of the current one (majority). Our goal is to create the contract that will rule these DAOs.

I have experience developing Solidity and Hyperledger smart contracts and currently I am on the NEAR developer certification. I have also developed training in several matters such as UX Research, Design Thinking, Blockchain and Innovation.

Since NaciĂłn Libertad is a global community, English and Spanish will be our two main languages, increasing the exposure of NEAR protocol to the Spanish Speaking world (442 million people )

Video

Presentation

Github submission

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Presentation

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Video demo

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Hey all!

How did the challenge go? Do you guys have any metrics to look back on?

I’m aware this is a little like digging up old threads but would be great to see an update on how this all went.

Oh, and if there’s already one then please do just ignore me and shoot me in the right direction :tada:

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Hey David! We didn’t publish metrics on our end, but I think Chloe + James may have collected some for the hackathon as a whole. I was really pleased by the projects we saw, and I think several are continuing on in NEAR. You can see the final announcements at the governance challenge website: Open Web Governance Challenge | Build better communities

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Great stuff, thanks a mil!