NEAR faces every growing need of relatively small groups of people that work close together on a specific mission.
Small groups of people linked together with common idea or mission can do great deal of things in the modern world. And especially it’s true in the blockchain space, where all the resources are open and available to anyone to leverage.
We have started Sputnik DAO to help facilitate this. Initial design just allowed anyone to apply for fund distribution and a council of users to decide on these proposals.
At the same time, when newcomers observe an ecosystem of dozens or even hundreds of groups, they will feel lost.
Imagine there are 100s of Sputnik DAOs or Guilds with their own purposes. Even though there probably a DAO for new person to work with - there is no good way to find it out.
Same as people don’t know what they can help with, until they get more into the ecosystem.
One of the biggest improvement in discovery for Open Source was the Github. It created both platform to find projects and also understand their state.
Separately, people who are working on things related to the DAO, will want to be associated with some set of DAOs even if they are not part of the council. They want to track what is going there, be part of social channels and potentially participate in the discussion. Similar how guidls have facilitators and members, it make sense that DAOs have members that are non-voting or voting in polls and other non monetary decisions.
DAO Hub
DAO Hub is an idea for such discovery place in DAO ecosystem.
DAO Hub provides a place to search and read about DAOs purpose and council members. Additional information like forum post or member’s profile can be pulled in.
DAO Hub is a place where anyone can leave request (payout) or a bounty (request for work) with only specifying what’s its related to (set of tags). Council members of participating DAOs then would pick up these requests that match their mission and fund them.
DAO Hub should provide visibility across all of the bounties in the participating DAOs. Allwoing newcomers to find interesting work they can dive in. E.g. what Bounty Network was offering.
Important part is that DAO Hub offers on-ramp for new users that don’t have NEAR account yet.
In the future more social features can migrate into hub from Forum and Telegram where they are now by interoperating with these systems.
Sputnik DAO v2
Additionally, Sputnik DAO itself gets set of improvements:
- Ability to fund bounties (requests for work done). Each Sputnik DAO will have list of funded bounties.
- New request type to execute arbitrary function call. Allows to participate in other applications, DAOs or multisigs. This also allwos to do pay outs in other tokens.
- Communicate with DAO Hub - accept requests or push it back if council didn’t end up accepting it.
- Extending policy to have roles. Instead of each council member be the same, some accounts (users or other DAOs) can have a different role (like “faciliator”) which have permissions for some actions on their own. For example, “faciliator” role can move tasks back to the Hub or accepting some small amount requests, etc.
- Create a $TOKEN inside a DAO and allow to manage it. Given there are roles, in the policy some decisions can also depend on the token amount instead of pure council count.
- Polls, allowing to collect information from both council and token holders. This is similar to what snapshot offering, but on-chain.
Tracking feature list here: v2 release feature set · Issue #4 · near-daos/sputnik-dao-contract · GitHub
Putting it all together
All this together allows to create a mesh of DAOs that are working together, while making it more discoverable.
Common pool of tasks and proposals creates a one-stop place to start your work in the ecosystem.
Allowing Sputnik DAO to become a member of other DAOs allows to create an hierarchical structure, where a Developer DAO council is actually a set of other more specific DAOs. They can just distribute and fund tasks between them.
Also this way a single DAO can be member of few other DAOs.
Creating more robust policy allows to select subset of people who will be more active in the DAOs lifecycle and only need to pull in others for more high impact decisions.
Having a token per DAO unlocks a bunch of social token features, like incentivizing people for operations, token based voting on some decisions, raising money by selling token and more.