Project title: ALAS DAO
Alas DAO will be the driving force and governance structure to achieve our goal:
Attracting donors with innovative technology and social-educational drives.
Project DAO : Metagov DAO , Alas DAO
Project members
- Torsten Goerke (kn00t.near)
- Fernando Bravo (fbravo.near)
DAOs as a mechanism for community driven learning (Eugene Leventhal)
Background: Open Guitar
OpenGuitar is a social-educational project to promote computer science learning through an open-source experimental classical guitar, which can be assembled in small workshops. The main focus group for the guitar will be novice, hobbyist, and semi-professional musicians. These groups include the largest percentage of musicians, and generally have a greater amount of disposable income. We additionally want to appeal to an environmental-conscious consumer group, looking to find alternative products which are not produced in an environmentally harming manner. We estimate that the younger, more mobile consumers will be interested in the light-weight design, high transportability and digital output features of the instrument. Another interesting target group are technology-enthusiasts and musicians producing technology-derived music, which will be particularly apt at realizing the full potential of the plugged acoustic instrument and the digital connection with a phone or computer, enabling mobile recording and real-time sound streaming.
About us
We are Fernando Bravo, a cognitive neuroscientist working on music technology and Torsten Goerke, a technologist working on research data infrastructure.
We are both guitar players and joined forces to empower music educators all over the world by making high quality instruments available to them for teaching music students.
“I would love to give a guitar to an educator without any costs if I can be sure the instrument is used in a useful way. I would be happy to leave it with an music teacher if she promises to give one or two lectures per month to children living in their area.” – Fernando Bravo
Alas Pathways
“Pushing our self past our boundaries of limitation and extreme, sometimes to something that knocks off our comfort zone, it creates new neuro pathways with our brain, we become smarter, wiser, more clarity, our life becomes more fulfilling. Only because we have a totally new experience. We get a new brain with that. Neuroplasticity”
― Angie Karan
To get started Alas DAO will pave two pathways, one for guitar builders and one for guitar players.
Builders pathway
Goal: Compensate for materials cost. We will provide a complete set of parts to build-your-own open guitar for people donating over 500 Euros (~100N).
The instrument building process is designed as an engaging and creative activity, which teaches a wide range of skills, from 3D design and hands-on woodworking to computer aided manufacturing (CAM), sensor-robotics and computer programming with a focus on
the elemental math behind digital signal processing.
Phase 1: Hackathon where educators and students build their own instrument. Attendance will be proven by “Alas Builders 2021” badge, based on NFT (see below). After this phase some dozen of OGs will be in circulation, we will move to phase 2.
Phase 2: OpenGuitar works to provide an education ‘bundle’ in STEM subjects (science, technology, engineering, math) through the construction, manipulation and playing of a musical instrument. The core concept underlying the OpenGuitar is that, although it can work as a normal piezo driven nylon-string guitar, to get the best sound out of it, one needs to plug it
into a computer. The OpenGuitar is equipped with an electronic pickup system that allows the connection with specialised computer software, which in turn enables a broad spectrum of sound and music making capabilities.
Requested fund for Phase 1 is 100 NEAR. For Phase 2 we request a budget of 1000 NEAR that we will split into separate chunks. Proposals will be governed by Alas DAO and than submitted to the Fund DAO.
Players pathway
Phase 1 Goal: Raise incentive money for educators.
OG’s will be given to (friendly) educators. Altruists fund OG’s. Educators teach Students. Once we have reached a funding cap for 3 OG’s we move to Phase 2.
Phase 2 Goal: Teach & Learn
OG’s will be given to (potentially untrusted) educators. OG’s treated are as “common goods”. Educators risk losing stake on OG’s misuse.
Requested funds for Phase 1 is 200 NEAR per OG we ship to educators arround the world. After completion of Phase 2 Alas DAO will be self-sustainable.
Roadmap
A tentative roadmap for Alas DAO including badges, on-ramp from fiat, geo anchoring, data unions, staking and some more ideas on NFTs is in the works.
Links : Open Guitar, Slides
