Open Sourcing and Coordinating DAO Research for the Public Good by Connor Spelliscy

foreign [Music] ER spelsi and I'm the founder of the Dow research Collective and at the Dow research Collective we fund Aggregate and curate Dow research we're non-profit we also make that research searchable and we make it freely and publicly available to everyone forever as long as we continue to exist so please jump on and check it out a bit of my background I'm really a crypto researcher I focused on advocacy and Dows I've formerly started other nonprofits in the space including the blockchain association and the Canadian web free Council so a bit of advocacy which also comes into play as we run the Dow research Collective the presentation today is about open sourcing information for the public goods I think everyone here is probably sold on open sourcing information so I will like skip that part in favor of just talking about what we've done on the Dow side it's only seven minutes that we have here today so if there are two things that you could take away from this I'd love for you to think firstly if there's any way you want to be involved in what we do please come reach out to me afterwards and if you want to start your own research Collective be it in crypto or otherwise I'd be be very happy to chat about what we've done which is what I'm going to focus on today so how it all started well like really just all started because we realized crypto companies are spending way too much money on legal cost and we were thinking how can we make this more efficient we started tweeting about it had some phone calls and then we formed a non-profit so as a former lawyer I can let you in on a secret which is that law firms charge crypto companies over and over again for the exact same legal advice now some of you maybe have become aware of this but a law firm will draft a memo on something like nfts or Securities and then you as a client will approach them they will adjust that memo 10 or 20 and they'll sell it to you at the full price and you'll be paying tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars so obviously not really an efficient use of the community's money when we could be doing more collectively to take on that advice so in chatting with more Dow stakeholders realize that this phenomenon doesn't really just apply in legal of course right it also applies to so many other things in Dows treasury management Community taxation Dows are very very much as I'm sure you're all aware novel forms of organization and there's very limited precedent to allow for Dow stakeholders to know how to operate efficiently and so those stakeholders are now taking on a lot of responsibility and researching a ton of new things all by themselves I I know that a lot of devs have a lot of money but they have very limited resources and time is certainly very limited resources for that group if they are doing research that research is often siled in that particular community so the Dow community at large does not benefit from it so what we are really focusing on is getting Dows to pool that information at an early stage so as a community we can all rise up much more quickly and we can do this in one of two ways or a composition of the two ways which is you know if you're a dow or if you've done research in the space you can open source that research now or you can pool capital and buy research collectively which we can open source for the community to the benefit of all of us and to the big loss of the law firms so an easy example here right you have a number of dows that want to come together to get get information for instance on how to pay contributors they can go to a law firm you know Ave and compound could go to law firm separately or they could come together pool capital and buy advice from that law firm now there are some limitations here obviously some information is very sensitive it has to stay privileged and confidential or some information has to be tailored specific to the Dow but there is a ton of generic advice which we are constantly buying from these organizations and the same applies not just to law firms but also with respect to other research that we're buying really as a community so in building the research Collective step one was really identifying the problem right we have a very limited amount of resources and we want to make sure that we're spending those resources on getting for the Dow Community what they need most so in the summer of 2021 we hosted a virtual Dow Summit with the Stanford center for blockchain research and also bankless and really the focus of that Summit was what are the biggest issues in the space and how can we contribute to improving the space as much as possible with our limited resources we Then followed up on those events with an IRL event at devconnect and that at the start for the Stanford blockchain conference as well to really get a list together the things that are most important this is a really a very tiny sampling of it but um medigov in particular an organization we work with is currently building this incredible open problems in Dow science um I would guess you'd call it a paper and I'd really highly recommend you all check it out we're helping them out with that too uh step two so you know the problems you have to identify who is going to help you solve those problems which is a much harder thing to solve for so this is our list a great list of fellows that we have we were lucky enough to have a very strong Network in crypto but we realized we don't really have much of a network outside of crypto particularly on the academic side where we wanted to speak to a lot of experts in political science in governance in treasury management even who come from different fields but who would be really critical contributors to what we're doing in crypto so we spent a lot of Cycles reaching out to institutions we became much closer with Stanford and others and we now have a great group many of whom participate actively in editing and also drafting research for us um eventually we also partnered with Medigap and scurf to Fabulous organizations which are crypto native but much more deeply embedded in the academic spheres than we are so curation and distribution kind of the third step we realized okay well we can fund a lot of Novel research and that's great obviously we have limited capacity for doing so but there's also a lot of amazing research that's just out there already um so let's not duplicate it we realize that something we had to do was build a platform that highlighted quality research that was already out there in the community which people could check out and make it searchable right so that it didn't just disappear what happens so often in crypto is that someone will publish something amazing they'll put it on Twitter it'll exist in our minds for a couple of weeks maybe and then a week you know after that we can't search anymore we don't know where it is someone writes the exact same article a month later and the cycle continues with a lot of duplication and a lot of waste to avoid that duplication we set up this platform which is searchable we curate a list of resources that we think is really exceptional and we've opened it up for the community we've also written primers on kind of these core areas of functionality like legal entity structure advocacy decentralization Etc and can give you a quick primer on the subject matter and you could just double click to dive deeper when you want to learn something more about a particular topic so results um we can uh yeah so results how did it all work out we're happy with how it's going so far we can always approve of course like as a non-profit our thought is that our objective is really to help the community accelerate as quickly as possible and so in order to do that we obviously need to be interfacing with the community a lot to get a sense of what are the biggest problems for the community and so we had an anonymous survey done fairly recently and the results were a bit surprising you know people the second most common reason people use that research Collective was for research was to avoid duplication of their own research when they were starting and looking into a new area that they hadn't previously focused on but the uh the the most common reason they'd use it would actually be to find subject matter experts in particular Fields so we appreciate there's a huge Talent issue endows where we are doing things like setting up very complex governance systems often without any governance experts at the Dow right it could just be a collection of people of operators of developers who've done some research on governance but they won't give you for instance as good of advice as Andy Hall who's a professor at Stanford and governance and political science we'll just have a bit of a better sense of it so we see that as a huge need and something we're going to need to focus on going forward while also continuing to build up the platform and that's it so if you do have any questions about what we do or if you'd like to contribute your research or if you'd like to set up your own research Collective crypto or otherwise I'm super happy to chat about it so have a great conference and thanks for coming everyone