DAO Governance Design Jam | Devcon Bogotá

foreign [Music] wow this is crazy we were not expecting this many people in the room so that's uh that's really cool but that's also going to be a challenge because we're going to do a workshop and workshopping is pretty difficult with more than 100 people but we're gonna pull it off thanks for being here my name is Dennis this is my colleague Thiago we are with maker Dao and I'm not going to talk much about what we do because we don't have time for that [Music] um we are here today to solve some Dow governance challenges that are real so like we selected four challenges from friends from the web free space that are dealing with some problems um and we're going to try and find some some inspiration for that and another goal is to get some of you more familiar with uh design thinking methodologies because it's a really powerful way of innovating we actually did a workshop at devconnect earlier this year in Amsterdam and that was like a different Workshop it was like a fully fledged design Sprint with a small group um that's what we had in mind for today but we actually uh yeah we decided to switch it up a little bit um a little bit of context a design Sprint is usually like a workshop quite an intense Workshop multiple days small team where you basically um you innovate and you you validate ideas so you create a concept and validate it without actually building anything like without writing a single line of code and I think that's uh something that um yeah the notion of innovating without building is something that we should embrace as a space so for those who haven't heard about design thinking design Sprint this might be a good first experience for you um what we're going to do today we have one hour and 40 minutes and we're going to guide you through a very intense process at the time is our biggest enemy today we're going to do Divergent and convergent thinking so basically initially we're going to do a brain dump um where we try and get as much feedback and no ideas and inspiration um on the table as possible and then we're going to do a voting exercise to create some kind of abstraction and then we're going to do that again but then for creating a solution um the agenda is um we have four challenge owners from various doubts in a room they're going to take five minutes to present their um their Challenge and give some context and then we're basically going to break up some of the tables in this room are going to be focusing on those challenges um so we're going to do some kind of the information if you don't feel like actively participating that's completely fine I mean that's actually welcome because we have way too many people so if you just want to listen in no hard feelings if you just want to listen in and just walk around please feel free to do so if you want to commit to participating please participate and be here for the full two hours um yeah this is what I just mentioned let's just uh have a look at the challenges and then we're going to do uh yeah then we're going to switch to the ideation process and I'd like to welcome uh Shelby and Abby from the radical team hi guys my name is Abby nice to meet you um I'm the head of community and governance at radical and I sit on the board of the radical foundation for those who don't know radical radical is basically a protocol ecosystem that's based building decentralized collaboration tools for developers building decentralized Technologies um and so like the tldr is decentralized GitHub but it's a lot more things than that as well and so radical has been on a journey for the last year or two and we've been slowly progressively decentralizing um uh in our efforts to become like a truly open source uh free and open source self-sustaining Community owned and operated free and open source project for an open source I said twice but you get the picture and so over the last year two years we made a successful transition from a startup to a foundation and we launched our governance token rad and we became a Dao but if everybody here is has experience with Dows you know that becoming a Dao it doesn't just happen when you technically decentralize there's a lot of social and political decentralization that comes along with that so now we're on our next chapter the first of many which is furthering our transition to the Dao by dissolving our foundation Council which currently manages all of our project development our core teams that are contributing to maintaining the radical stack and replacing that with decentralized entities that our contributors run and operate themselves and restructuring our governance process along the way there's a lot more of this on discourse if you want to learn more at radical.community but basically our goal is to create a decentralized organization that can manage all of our project development within the Dow without relying on the intermediary of a foundation Council and in that process uh Stuart the emergence of other organizations within the radical dial ecosystem by Distributing ownership influence and supporting you know the generation of more decentralized governed entities that all are Steward and funded by our radical treasury wow okay so that's the transition so our challenge um which is something that we've been thinking about in this transition we have four work streams right one is the actual org design so how do you actually build an organization for our contributors to participate in the second is dowtooling what are the best tools that we can be using to actually you know Steward this decentralization process and then the last two are what we're going to be talking about today which is a distribution of ownership and the distribution of influence so I think everybody knows that token voting governance govern Dows are pretty plutocratic right now if not entirely plutocratic including radical and we're trying to change that so first we're trying to distribute ownership in a way that better supports the transition of our project to something more member-based more um with highly diverse stakeholder governance um that's not plutocratic has more fair and Equitable qualities and can better support the long-term sustainability of the project but we think that that's not possible without actually introducing a non-financialized governance layer which we call influence so our challenge is about how do we effectively distribute influence and ownership as separate financialized governing power which is tokens and non-financialized power which is who knows what um and how do we distribute that amongst active contributors of the Dow to better support the transition of our governed instructor to something static and plutocratic to something Dynamic and member-based and more fair and Equitable so cool thanks so Shelby is right here so we'll be walking around with our Challenge and you can ask us any questions along the way thanks that's over three minutes that's really impressive you can tell that she's done this before thanks a lot Abby um it's important that you take note of the challenges because the idea is that every table picks a challenge to focus on and then some of you that might be interested in actively participating that you really focus on that challenge so keep that in mind next up we have uh Peyton from maker Dao um yeah let's see let's see we have a lot of problems at maker Dao a lot of challenges that can be solved so let's hand it over to Peyton hi uh my name is Peyton I go by Pros 11 online and I am one of makers governance facilitators uh yeah you might have heard a maker you've probably heard of die I bet in this room we're probably batting better than average uh but I guess our problem with with governance right uh you'll you'll hear about it in tweets you'll see about it in news articles uh but it has to happen all the time right whether someone's watching or or I guess whether Everyone's Watching or just a few people are watching uh governance is there governance is a risk that kind of transitions into the workforce which is this whole separate thing that intertwines with governance and is a part of it yet uh is entirely separate as well so you might have read the articles of maker you might have seen uh some bits of runes grand plan or seen banteg tweet about how dye's gonna lose its Peg or what have you but uh basically uh fundamentally I would like to argue that the problem that roon is pitching to try to solve is how might we reallocate the workforce to be more efficient and I don't think this is a problem that you have to be at the size of make it out to encounter I think it's fundamentally a problem of scaling every Dao starts out with this really awesome problem which is we have a very cool solution and not enough people know about it so what do you do you start ramping up you start bringing people into the workforce and giving them jobs making them contributors having them uh you know one way or another uh be a part of your ecosystem and before too long you realize okay well maybe our problem isn't that we don't have enough people who know about our system now maybe our problem is that the way we have organized in in an alternative structure right that uh typically bucks hierarchy and and doesn't have a lot of direct reporting how do we take that and actually make sure that we are getting the value of all the talented individuals that have joined uh organization so when I like to approach this problem I I think it's important to think about two sides because it's really obvious from the downside why you might want a more efficient Workforce right just like every corporation wants to squeeze out the most profit your doubt is going to want to take a look at your Workforce and say all right how can we get these people uh to to reach their potential and to give that value to us but you also have to think about it from the worker side workers endows are incredibly autonomous right the if they don't want to be there they'll find something else to do there's plenty of money in the web through ecosystem and uh yeah if you're not thinking about them when you're trying to solve this problem you're you're going to fall short so I want to put in a little plug about burnout because I think that's a problem with with tech with uh Dows with our industry at Large uh but Studies have shown that like the key thing you can do to prevent burnout with an organization is to make sure people feel valued to make sure that their work is being appreciated and the only way that people are going to appreciate their work is if they feel like they are making an impact so the challenge is as you grow as you scale how do you make sure that the talent you have is being properly utilized because whether it's a treasury or intellectual property if you have a resource and you're not constantly checking in making sure that you're getting the most out of it you're going to lose efficiency you're going to lose the battle's entropy and uh you know a Dao can die many Dows have died I would not like to be one of them and I would certainly not like to be the governor's facilitator if the Tao were to die so maybe you can help me today and we can think about how can we make our Workforce reallocation be the most efficient way keeping in mind that there are two distinct sides we need to think about the worker and the Dow itself thanks thank you very much Peyton that was really good if there's anyone at maker who is in in sync in tune with what's happening at the Dao it's Peyton so if you can if any of you can somehow give some kind of inspiration or New Perspective on this problem that could be really actually really impactful because there's actually a lot of maker people in the room so I hope you can contribute to this challenge that we're facing moving on to the third challenge which is uh brought forward by zaku from coordinate to everybody so I am indeed Zach from coordinate and for those that don't know coordinate it's actually a tool to help employees feel or employees to uh yeah exactly uh good thing I didn't say that to help contributors to a dow feel more appreciated and also compensated so quickly the way that coordinate works is um in a circle of contributors they all have a hundred give tokens and you can give to other people according to the value that you've seen them add over some period of time and then whatever percentage of the total amount of give tokens you get you get that percentage of the budget right so instead of saying here's our budget for coordinators it's a hundred thousand and I'm the the people Ops person and I choose you get this much and this much you put the whole pile in the middle of a table and people basically allocate it to each other in a decentralized way um and so the idea is is to get closer to Value n equals value out right those contributors that are just like really crushing it and everyone's really appreciating here's your chance to appreciate them with payment and also write notes to them and tell them about why you appreciate what they're doing and then it creates this social graph so everyone can see who's adding value and what they're doing so it also helps a lot with sense making in the Dow that said um so my previous company this is the way that we paid each other for like all seven years and we always said that the conversation is actually more valuable than the allocation itself because as we were paying each other we were like here's what you did was awesome here's what you could do better at coordinate one of the challenges that we have is that you have this distribution and so everyone's and it's all transparent and you can see like oh wow Sally got this much and wait why did she get that much more than me and why did Steve get this much to Camille and wait what's what's going on right um and and so the sense making part and really understanding especially like as a dialect what do we value is this person getting more because they're more public in their role or is it because what they're doing is super valuable like are we allocating according to what we really think is in line with the mission that we're trying to achieve and so the question really is like how do we asynchronously do sense making because it's just not practical to say we're going to have our coordinate retro and all 40 people are going to meet and on zoom we're all going to talk about what happened we are doing lots of MVPs with like small groups and pulse surveys and things like this but there's a lot of issues in Dallas when they get sensitive and you know if you just start writing on Discord like that encourages a very certain kind of conversation it's obviously like we are not evolved to be text-based communicators all most of our communication is non-verbal and now we're trying to do this through screens around really sensitive topics especially in coordinates case around like compensation which gets into how people feel valued and you know these are like really hot topics and there's a lot more I'm sure in in all the Dows you're a part of and so how can we address these really sensitive and nuanced topics and do sense making in an asynchronous decentralized way um you know obviously like coming together as a team is the best way but that's not usually possible um so yeah this is the sticky problem that that we're going to be talking about thanks Zach interesting stuff and I think for some of us we can relate so yeah let's move on to the fourth challenge uh posed by Patricia from Euler Finance I always said Euler Finance but it's actually Euler so I've heard so yeah let's give her a hand and let's hear what she has to say [Applause] hey guys so yeah I'm from Euler Finance it's pronounced as Euler this is not called Yola it's it's wrong so our protocol that nobody even knows how to pronounce the name and that kind of reflects the the governor's problems we're currently facing which is like low Community engagement because the product itself is less well known and at the same time it's highly technical so oil of Finance is uh learning empowering protocol so you can think of us as a similar to Ave but way more complex with a way more functionality building and the code is just like extremely difficult to understand for average technical person um so the problem we're currently facing is basically uh like we launched around around like uh November last year so right before like everything crashed basically and we did the token launch about uh in in my um that was like when the market was like pretty bad and we didn't do uh public Token Lounge with like the token sales with services so from that side it's like there's very little people to be fair that I have vested interest within the protocol and a lot of the technical people were trying to onboard right now they do not have a vested interest within the protocol they do not have the token at the same time the thing we have is the governance is like we're trying to have the governance to decide on the parameters of the protocols such as like learning and borrowing factors we thought that would be the best way to decentralize the protocol to make it really permissionless learning and boring and listening for us as to be clusters however no what we realized is that not everyone have that knowledge to be calculating classical factors a lot of people within our community that are most active have very little tokens at the same time do not have the knowledge to be calculating those risk parameters I do not have the knowledge to be participating within the in the discussion so that's like the main problem we're facing is that where we we're trying to lead the governance to be like and what the governance is currently at um so the problem that was like I'm presenting today uh the problem that I'm trying to ask you all to contribute and help you to solve is how can we solve uh the community engagement problem within a highly technical protocol Community uh the thing about Euler as a protocol a baby protocol has a baby governance everything is very primitive the very little uh people have vested interests and people like outside of the community or even within the community cannot even pronounce the name of the protocol so that's a problem we're currently facing and I think it's a problem that exists across a lot of like other technical protocols identify protocols and I think it's something that in general how do we encourage people that currently do not have the knowledge to be participating at the same time encourage those who have the knowledge to be participating in the governance and be contributing so awesome thank you Patricia cool so as I said we have four really uh we have real governance challenges that we're gonna that we're gonna focus on today um what we had in mind is that every table can pick their own uh challenge but maybe we need to do it a bit smarter because we only have a bunch of facilitators and we can't really have them walk around the whole room so I'm just going to macgy for this if I have the Mandate I would say I'm just going to point out a few tables and a number and if you really want to join a particular Challenge and you can just move to the table with otherwise I would suggest you just stay where you are and try to share your input the whole goal is to cross-pollinate right I think you all have different perspectives different uh uh work experience and I'm really curious what's going to come out of that so what I'm going to do is I'm going to assign these four tables so this row to the reticle challenge because we have two radical facilitators I think they can handle this this row of four tables then we have um these three I would say I would assign them to Patricia so this this and this so that is Challenge number four and that is Challenge number uh uh one sorry yeah okay and then we have one two three four that's maker one two three four so you're going to be talking about uh the Second Challenge and then we have one two three that's going to be coordinate does it make sense do you all know which challenge you you uh you're assigned with your table and again if you really want to join a particular challenge feel free to move around and try and organize I'm going to give you a few minutes for it in the meantime I'm just going to continue talking just to explain what we have in mind um once again we have an ideation um process that we're going to guide you through we have a bunch of uh materials on your table and you're going to need that to do the ideation let's take two minutes to organize yourselves and then we're gonna just continue all right everyone we're at time and I just want to make sure that we're not mixing up stuff so I'm can I have everyone's attention please time is at the essence thank you very much I'm going to walk past each of the table and I want you to shout which Challenge number you are working on just to make sure we're on the same page three two one three two one three two one okay this is all radical three two one four so you are uh Euler finance and that one also okay so we actually have two tables Euler Finance right because these what are you working on two that's maker right and you maker maker and maker and over there three and three okay so we actually have two tables for Zach two tables for Patricia we have three tables for Payton for maker and we have four tables for a reticle that's correct right awesome then I think we're ready to go we're going to have the inner facilitators right the challenge owners they're going to be at your tables and they're going to be available for uh helping with the ideation because we actually briefed them a little bit but also to give more Challenge on the on the yeah more context about the challenge um I'm going to hand the mic over to my colleague Thiago and we're going to talk about the ideation uh practices please uh please pay attention because yeah we're gonna have to do this asynchronously now so let's get it Thiago all right so this is the fun part brainstorming uh just a bit of recap so you're gonna follow this process of Divergent and conversion ticking so first we come you come up with as many ideas as possible literally open your brain then you're gonna have one one voting process called democracy so you need to select the most likable ideas uh then you so this this will be around the opportunity area and then we're gonna do this loop again diverging but hopefully come up already with more craft solution and we're gonna convert again using the Democracy hopefully find a solution that we are all happy with in within your table um so we a lot of people we move around so maybe just take five minutes to introduce yourself you don't need to tell the story of our life just your name where you work and why you join this Workshop just take five minutes to within your group introduce yourself give a little round one minute per each just real quick yeah now now so now just within your group just give a round of introductions that's it then then we'll then we'll move on just make sure we know each other we get along hope everyone know each other now a bit a bit better within your group uh we're gonna start the first exercise uh yeah so so this is just a quick way to download your brains to brain them uh it's a conversation starter uh so the first exercise uh there are blank sheets on your table uh please just use one or two divide into three columns and then write I like I wish and I wonder uh and there we will everyone will be putting posters on each column so in the I like colon so this will be uh something that inspires you something that is you already know these are resistance existing Solutions uh yeah so just some references on the I wish uh yeah so based on this existing Solutions maybe there's something that could be improved uh maybe there are new features that you thought out so that will be on the I wish kotlin and then finally we have the I wonder colon so this will be solutions that don't exist just yet so be more your future Vision you can free your brain a bit more uh maybe you wonder if this is feasible this be possible maybe you'll do a bit of reflection about any unintended consequences um yeah so it's more the future scenarios um again so three columns I like I wish I wonder one or two blank sheets per per table you you so you're going to give ourselves uh eight minutes for this exercise now do it introspectively in silence unless you want to explain what you mean or someone don't understand explain to your table um yeah so let's uh let's get started eight minutes good luck I still wear a lot of talking I really suggest doing it in silence respect the process my friends stick to the process the purpose is to just get a download of everyone's brain based on their perspective and their experience stop talking start writing make sure to add them to the sheets immediately so you prevent people from writing down duplicates the goal is to get as many Post-its on that sheet per table so write them down put them on the sheet and we're going to do a voting exercise per table afterwards we are almost at half time maybe there's anything in particular like something that you know of some experience that is quite unique to you that might be a source of inspiration for the others on your table all right I see many Post-its on the table too many too much information to download in those brains I can see all right all right so don't worry it's not a we don't need Perfection we just need some uh we just just needed some information to get the conversation started uh now of course I'm sure there are different uh Solutions on the table so you need to align our brains within their own groups so where this system it's called dot democracy uh so do democracy is just a way to help you votes on the most likable items that you have on the table just just find some alignment within your home group so you'll have five minutes and now you are short on Sharpies but uh yeah share share your pens around use your pens to to place three dots uh three dots per person and per colon on your on your most likable items um and there are maybe there are similar items try to Cluster them a little bit um and uh yeah see what's the the spirit in your table let's see what uh what your what your group like the most so let's um yeah let's take five minutes to vote again three three dots per person per per colon okay everyone please make sure that you just look at what's on the table and place those dots we're going to do discussion afterwards we have five minutes remember no cheating three dots per person per column you can put multiple dots on one item if you'd like we have about two minutes remaining make sure you use your votes we want to have a nice heat map of where the most interesting opportunity areas are Let's uh last 20 seconds so for now the goal is just to make sure you have an alignment within your table in terms of opportunity area you'll have time to do this for the discussion all right all right I know I know you're ready ahead of the game into the discussion part so that's good uh so just make sure you look again to the postage you have on the table make sure you look at the find the hit map you you find the ones that the ones with the most dots um and again this is not to come up with the solution just yet try to focus on the opportunity areas for the time being so let's uh let's give us 8 minutes just to find the right opportunity area so just to clarify you don't need to look at all the postage just look at the Post-its with the most dots those those are the ones we are converging at the moment so to look at the possibility of the most dots those those are the ones where your brain should be focused on and for now it's just opportunity areas we'll have another session based on Solutions alright folks we have about five minutes left and the aim is that after five minutes within your table you have a good sense of where the opportunity is so just have a bunch of Post-its that are your favorites that's super important all right last one more minute for the to find the right opportunity area try to converge in one just one single opportunity area again rely on your facilitators they are the governance experts they know the challenge mode more than anyone foreign I know most of you are freestyling going with your home methods and that's totally fine but uh I mean this is also a good one so it's called uh Crazy Eights so basically yeah you uh So based on the opportunity area that your table selected uh we're gonna come up with we call it crazy eight Solutions so you can either draw or or write whatever is easy for you to to to depict the solution so this is more a concept creation um you can go a bit uh wildly nonsense but uh we are trying to diverge as much as possible but again focus on the challenge focus on the opportunity area try to stick to one meet one minute uh per post it one idea per post it and since we are many groups maybe try to come up have a two two sheets on the table uh try to have a two crazy eight sheets on the table and again we're gonna have uh eight minutes for each for for this exercise um yeah let's get started yeah maybe just to clarify because everyone can we have attention here please Crazy Eights hey hello thank you very much Crazy Eights is a bit of an abstract one so you need to understand it well it's also the most fun one and the idea is that you make a sketch of your idea it can be like a drawing it can be a diagram it has to fit on a Post-It so it has to be really succinct and you're actually going to make eight very rapid iterations so we're going to do very strict time keeping after one minute you you leave that posted alone you move on to the next one so each table only has about two or three of those sheets so we actually need two or three people on the table to step forward maybe someone who's good at drawing because this requires some drawing skills and when everyone's ready probably in like two minutes or so make sure you make some room on your table get the drawers prepared and then we're going to do eight short cycles of one minute where you just draw and you iterate on one idea and of course the idea is that you use all of the previous stuff as inspiration for this single solution that you're going to draw let's take two minutes to get organized and then we're actually going to start with the one minute cycle so let's get ready another good thing to know the nice thing about Crazy Eights is it excavates your subconscious to to participate in the in the creative process so really trust that just pick something if you're not sure yet just pick something and just go for it let's just create a solution so to clarify every minute you make a new version of the same idea so you basically have eight versions of the same idea all right everyone attention please where are we are about to start so um once again I hope you're ready we're going to start the timer in a few seconds we need if you need a few more minutes I think okay okay I think we should just start let's just go for it make sure that every sheet has one person who's going to make the drawings you pick one idea that you're going to try and explain in a drawing and you just use one of the boxes to try and draw it and you have one minute to do so after one minute you move on to the next box and you try again and you have eight versions of the same drawing basically we are going to start the timer in three two one start drawing it can be a user interface it can be a drawing it can be a diagram as long as it explains the solution that your work that you've been working on 10 seconds remaining for the first drawing I'll leave you to it keep going in a few minutes we'll move on to a discussion all right everyone Let's uh let's do a quick pause here so we are uh nearing the end of the workshop and the idea is that you still have some time you have eight minutes in total to prepare Your solution and and your explanation to other tables so in short in eight minutes I'm going to ask each of the tables to share your biggest takeaway or like the tldr or maybe anything that you're struggling with just try and give some kind of abstract of the value that you've been creating and try to share it with another table I'll give you eight minutes to prepare that and now we still have some time to cross pollinate between the tables good luck all right everyone Let's uh take a moment here let's take a moment here Please assign one person on your table that's going to uh to do the talking and the idea is if it's correct each table has been assigned another table that they're going to talk to and you're just going to explain what you came up with it can be a tldr of your ID it can be the main takeaway it could also be if you've been struggling just share that the main challenges that you run into assign one person and then we're going to take time to explain it to the other table uh let's go lovely people we're going to be kicked out in one minute so I'd like to ask you to wrap up make sure you hand your final drawing to the challenge owner so they can make a picture of it and most importantly don't forget to Mint your paw up by scanning the QR code dear friends we're gonna be kicked out thank you very much for your energy for your participation Round of Applause you've been fantastic I hope we're gonna find some gems in the output we'll figure it out over the next few hours thanks a lot don't forget your bow app and have a great conference