Proposal: Research DAOs

Near Community and nodes
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Coordinating Explorations of the Most Important Questions

This forum topic delves into a complex idea, referred to as multi-DAOs. However, my intention really is to propose a simply better approach to solving problems together as an ecosystem.

Summary

We are introducing a new kind of DAO vertical, which operates in a different way. Rather than having one council redistributing funds to a whole category of DAOs, there is hopefully a good balance of powers between various DAOs involved.

This multi-DAO experiment is about coordinating valuable “Research DAOs” for NEAR.

Our goals are informed by the Governauts community, a cross-organizational collaboration, including the Token Engineering Commons / TE Academy, Ocean Protocol, Gitcoin, The DAOist, Gnosis, and dozens of collaborators exploring ways to successfully incentivize progress.

Learn more by attending the DAO Rewards Systems Assemblage!

https://twitter.com/tokengineering/status/1468234791606796295?s=20

About Research DAO

Purpose

Many participants in the NEAR ecosystem are conducting valuable studies of interesting topics and crucial questions. We should legitimize research DAOs and help them find support in our ecosystems and coordinate opportunities to share knowledge.

Vision

We are building capacity to support researchers who answer complex questions that help our ecosystem stay ahead of the game. The initial multi-DAO structure can be pluralized as the overall community of researchers evolves ~ part of the beauty of this approach is how any DAO can be a member of another DAO.

Mission

Learn from researchers who are interested in creating DAOs on Astro and facilitate participation via the multi-DAO group membership. Explore ways to incentivize scientific work that informs engineering and cultural development in our community.

Objectives

The main goal is to support impactful research with DAOs, and specifically, to grow membership of a single multi-DAO of DAOs focused on research.

POTENTIAL FOCUS AREAS
“Tokenomic Systems”

  • Crypto Economics & Game Theory
  • Social & Cultural Sciences
  • Computer Science + Cryptography
  • Cyber-Physical Systems
  • Artificial Intelligence
  • Governance / Political Science
  • Philosophy, Law & Ethics
  • Operations Research
  • Psychology & Decision Science

tecommons
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Key Results

First and foremost, we are looking for interesting questions that lead to quality research output. That means trustworthy results, which could inform development of something useful or helpful to participants in the NEAR ecosystem.

North Stars:

  • number of DAOs in the Research DAO
  • activity / engagement of those DAOs
  • connections made between DAOs
  • great questions with thoughtful answers
  • academic journal publications / contributions

Partnerships?

Milestones

Q4: Multi-DAO Group Formed by Council

Q1: Phase 3 of Governauts Research Collaboration

Q2: New Research Contributors → Focus Areas Defined

Q3: Multidisciplinary Conference and Publication

  • Governauts Review 2022 Ecosystem & Community DAO Experiments

Q4: Submit Proposal to Upgrade Ecosystem DAO(s)

Essentially, the adaptive accountability enabled through flexible multi-DAO governance makes it possible to decide how NEAR should actually decide together as a community.

Potential Collaborations

The strategy of this particular initiative would be to daomonstrate the usability and impact of DAOs on NEAR, while deliberately onboarding academic researchers who are looking for grants. Of course, we should prioritize identifying the most important questions that could inform ecosystem development.

We know interesting research DAOs have already started…

Governauts

Our community of intrepid explorers has been coordinating adventures into specific topics and questions that involve DAO Rewards Systems. This initial research group is related to the Governauts Research DAO because our efforts are supporting development of a reward system for any Research DAOs on NEAR.

ResearchHub

This open science community recently started to aggregate content in various hubs (although it is branded as ResearchHub with a universal token for its reward system). We are using Astro DAO to facilitate participatory action research, as our Multi-DAO research community evolves.

Digital Public Goods Alliance

The mission of the DPG Alliance is to “accelerate the attainment of the sustainable development goals in low- and middle-income countries by facilitating the discovery, development, use of, and investment in digital public goods.”

Multi-DAO GitHub

This collaboration involves testing the limits of DAOs on NEAR. We are conducting research into best practices for Astro users experimenting with custom configurations and the capabilities.

NEAR Data Guild

Obviously, data is needed for all kinds of research! NEAR Data Guild aims to support anyone who is answering questions or creating solutions with NEAR data.

NEAR University

Education DAOs are potentially related to such ideas, and thanks to the NEAR Education Team, there is amazing work being done to train developers and other potential contributors. How might objectives and key results involving Research DAOs might be aligned with our common educational requirements and goals.

https://near.university

Questions?

Why create a Research DAO?

Aside from using proposals to transfer funds, creating your own representation of membership on the Astro platform will enable us to include your DAO in a group of curated Research DAOs. This could help your team find resources, build connections, explore questions, and search for the most important answers.

How to create and operate a Research DAO on Astro?

This can be a question that we answer together as the Governauts community, as we reflect on the v1 Sputnik DAO experiments and coordinate further development of Astro. Now that v2 Sputnik DAOs can do anything on NEAR as groups, you may explore other kinds of decisions, besides just payouts, executed by DAOs.

Research DAOs give a meaningful, productive structure to all open science communities, facilitating efficient cross-pollinations to drive progress with strategic FunctionCall proposals, i.e. actions. Furthermore, intentionally adding members to specific groups can be a legitimate purpose for a DAO.

Why Multi-DAO Governance?

Currently, a few DAOs on NEAR leverage different groups to enable role-specific permissions with configurable voting policies. However, these groups do not have their own accounts, so they are not really independent from each other. Multi-DAO structures and processes will provide a more balanced approach to decentralized governance, focused on diversity, inclusion, transparency, pluralism, and collaboration.

Ultimately, we aim to build solutions fairly, responsibly, and wisely!

Thanks for Reading

Your feedback is much appreciated :slightly_smiling_face:

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Thank you for putting this together @jlwaugh - excited to see the MultiDAO idea taking shape and excited for the potential symbiosis with Research DAOs. Count me in, happy to assist wherever possible!

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Specially happy to see all these being considered important to the growth of the ecosystem.

Great proposal @jlwaugh

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My reason for joining this MultiDAO is to answer the question: “Has research become permissioned despite #OpenScience #OpenSource etc.?” I believe this initiative and DAO2DAO reputation systems can turn the research landscape into resilient communities of researchers. Really happy to join and experiment!

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I am super interested in a METADAO made of Academic DAOs.

I am a PhD Philosopher, University Professor, and Researcher, and I coordinate a project with more than 40 PhD Philosophers. I think we can come to the blockchain and build our projects on it.

Not just philosophers, but each academic area.

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@jlwaugh I was thinking about some rules for us to stablish some acceptable DAOs to enter Research group:

  • It must be made mainly of academics,
  • There must be at least 1 PhD as a council member,
  • All dao members must be identifiable by an academic curriculum
  • The DAO must have an academic intention of developing research, teaching or extension activities of its own area and publish the products on NEAR blockchain. Near can also be used in alternative ways, not foreseen.
  • As different from the other groups and verticals, our Academic Vertical (nowadays called “Research” group on Community DAO) does not intend to be a Creative Vertical, neither a Marketing one, nor an Educational one, in the sense of Near University. We are different because we want to be a vertical to fund the research, teaching and extension projects in all academic areas, to spread NEAR inside universities and other academic institutions.
  • This vertical should contain 1 DAO of each academic area.
  • To enter the Academic Vertical a DAO must be from a new area that is recognized for the other DAOs from the vertical as an undergraduation area (so the undergraduation Philosophy is acceptable, but not the postgraduation Philosophy of Mathematics to be a generic DAO under NEAR). Recognition is given by vote, by the Academic DAOs. {Here I dont know what is NEAR’s intention. Is it good that the Academic Guilds spread, or is it better that we have a more strict control over it?}
  • Maybe we could spread NEAR, if we use ASTRODAO to make daos from university courses (for example, my co-workers professors and me) to do payments to students for done tasks inside the university, like scholarships, or bounties for the production of a university product registered in the blockchain. Maybe professors could use NFT marketplaces for the students to have profiles and mint their work there. These course DAOs would ask resources for the larger DAO from their area, which from its turn, would ask resources for the vertical. The vertical would be composed of all Academic DAOs, and would accept or reject a resource request, that would be given by NEAR.
  • Kinds of funding must reflect the 3 main academic areas: research, teaching and extension. Extension is taking the university to outside the university, to the community. All areas must have the web 3 as a background structure.

About partnership:

We have an academic journal that we are thinking in stop editing because we lack funding to go on. It is called Investigação Filosófica, and it has many years, since 2010, but it is linked to a university since 2018. I am also partner from @jsc2022.near, Prof. Dr. Juliano do Carmo, who is an editor in a university publisher, UFPel. We can bring many interesting books to the blockchain, and many interesting projects.

I think connection between the academic DAOs will take some time, given it takes some time in reality too.

I think the number of DAOs would be the number of major academic undergraduation areas, from start. If it goes right, we can expand to postgrad areas and get to more specialization. This is about Academic DAOs, but I think there must be course DAOs for the Academic DAOs to fund. At the begining, we can start with a smaller structure, with Academic DAOs funding people, but it would be nice if Academic DAOs funds academic courses and academic courses funded people, or if there were both options for Academic DAOs: to fund people or course DAOs.

It would be nice if everything registered on the blockchain would be open access, as it is funded by NEAR.

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I think this link is worthy to see. An interesting foundation for grants to science.

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Thank you very much for sharing these useful criteria for membership in our Community DAO Research Group. Join the discussion via Telegram.

My feedback in response to specific points:

:rocket: :rocket: :rocket:

I think having a plethora of research DAOs involved would be great! Just need to keep it relatively balanced to avoid going too deep or wide.

That’s a legit credential ~ definitely adds a kind of subjective weight to that group.

Do you have a list of academic areas to reference?

Where can I find out more about this practice in the context of academia?

Let’s experiment with both?

Overall, it is really inspiring, and I’m excited to support!

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I thought it was a common practice around the world, but at least in Brazil, all university professors must act inside these 3 main areas. We must teach, research and make extension projects.

Let me see if I find some link talking about it.

But look:

https://www.scielo.br/j/rlae/a/3LXPvJgkhhjpt7L9jGPydRs/

There is here also, but it seems a different meaning from the one I brought:

https://www.hr.uillinois.edu/policy/compliance_toolkit/teaching__research__or_extension_positions

“No Brasil, a extensão é um dos pilares do ensino superior, conjuntamente com o ensino e a pesquisa, no chamado tripé educacional, conforme dispõe o artigo 207, caput , da Constituição Federal[4]. Deve ser valorizada, portanto, por ser uma forma de interação entre a população e a universidade. Ela passa a ser uma atividade com carga horária obrigatória de 10% a partir de 2018 nos cursos de graduação, conforme dispõe o artigo 11 da resolução Nº7 do Conselho Nacional de Extensão[5], sendo pouco difundida entre as universidades privadas, mas bastante tradicional nas universidades públicas.”

Translation by google translator:

“In Brazil, extension is one of the pillars of higher education, together with teaching and research, in the so-called educational tripod, as provided for in article 207, caput, of the Federal Constitution[4]. It should be valued, therefore, as a form of interaction between the population and the university. It becomes an activity with a mandatory workload of 10% from 2018 onwards in undergraduate courses, as provided for in article 11 of resolution No. in public universities.”

WIKI Source in Portuguese:

Maybe extension as taking to the community the results of the science production is not so international as I thought, but it is something Brazilian, from the Constitution, but it is really interesting for us to consider extension as a pillar of Academic development: part of it must return to society in some way. Together with research and teaching.

@jlwaugh

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Maybe something like this list to start? (We need people from these areas tho)

  • Philosophy (later split in sub-areas: logic, epistemology, metaphysics etc)
  • Architecture and urbanism (split in interior design, urbanism etc)
  • Law (split in national law, international law etc)
  • Journalism
  • Arts (split in sculture, painting etc)
  • Engineering (later split in civil, electric etc)
  • Letters (later split in ancient, literature etc)
  • Management and Administration
  • Environmental Sciences
  • Visual arts
  • Nursing
  • Medicine
  • Biological Sciences
  • Computer science
  • Social Sciences (later split in anthropology, archeology etc)
  • Pharmacy
  • Pedagogy
  • Physics
  • History
  • International Relations (split in international politics etc)
  • Physiotherapy
  • Geography
  • Design
  • Math
  • Theater
  • Cinema
  • Chemistry
  • Psychology

This is the begining of a list I have in mind. But more general areas should be added, I think. I just got the ones I have in my university, but there are major universitiesw with more main areas.

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I think that more than subjective weight. It brings people that will take responsibility for the projects, people that want their name associated with nice projects, because we have to build a curriculum. And there is also the experience that PhD researchers or professors bring to the group. Many of them (like me) are used to ask for funds, make reports and such. So it will be easy to show how things work on NEAR.

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About the academic journal that my study group coordinate:

https://periodicos.unifap.br/index.php/investigacaofilosofica/index

About the university publisher that is my partner and publish academic books on philosophy (from the Federal University of Pelotas, in Portuguese: Universidade Federal de Pelotas):

Here, in the last link, there is the series I am coordinating with 40 PhD Philosophers. Just click at Série Investigação Filosófica.

JUST ADDED THIS PART, @jlwaugh

YES!!! Let’s do it! How should we proceed? Should I build a course DAO for the professors from my course? And should they build projects to students in order to give them the tokens for done tasks? Or should we think about the tasks that would allow to students to get tokens?

I think that maybe we can start with The Philosophers DAO as an Academic DAO, given I am near finishing the first funding proposal, and this DAO would give funds to academic projects from individual researchers/professors and projects from course daos (projects from course daos intend to give funds to students). Than maybe the members of this academic dao can develop each one a course dao in its own university, and we can proceed from there. What do you think?

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