(Read the extended version further down)

1. Introducing Powerhouse, an SES Spin-off

As part of the roll-out of the Endgame plan, the MakerDAO Sustainable Ecosystem Scaling Core Unit (SES) is spinning off an independent Ecosystem Actor.

Part of the SES team will move on to create Powerhouse, a brand-new, independent Ecosystem Actor that will offer a number of products and services for decentralized operations, aimed at open organizations such as MakerDAO.

1. The Powerhouse team will use its extensive knowledge and experience from its SES and Maker Foundation days to contribute to the development of efficient and scalable decentralized organizations.

2. Powerhouse products and services will be offered not just to MakerDAO and its subDAOs, but to the wider industry.

2. Powerhouse Services Offering

1. Decentralized org design and business process analysis, designed to help organizations such as MakerDAO to build efficient and scalable decentralized operations.

2. Open-source software development of new modules for the Powerhouse decentralized operations platform. These modules implement best practices and maximize business process automation.

3. Operational support and coordination, helping contributor teams and external suppliers to coordinate finances, legal consulting, and taking care of administrative tasks that are difficult to automate.

3. Powerhouse Product Development

Powerhouse will develop and offer five open-source products, together comprising its decentralized operations platform:

1. Powerhouse Fusion, a public collaboration and transparency platform for the decentralized workforce, capital and work.

2. Powerhouse Connect, a private contributor tool for internal documents and communication, with end-to-end encryption and total control over data ownership.

3. Powerhouse Renown, a decentralized identity and reputation solution for pseudonymous contributors.

4. Powerhouse Switchboard, an open data API for business analysis, app integration, and AI automation.

5. Powerhouse Academy, an onboarding and education platform for contributors of open and decentralized organizations.

4. Endgame and the Universal DAO Toolkit

Next to the continued operational support, Powerhouse intends to help MakerDAO with the realization of its Endgame transition, in particular by building out the Universal DAO Toolkit.

1. The Maker Expenses Dashboard will be transitioned to Fusion, extended with additional modules covering not just finances, but contributor teams and roadmaps, milestones, and projects, as well as Atlas and the scope frameworks.

2. The Core Unit budgeting tool will be transitioned to the new Powerhouse Connect code base, resulting in a better user experience with an extended feature set.

3. The Expenses Dashboard API, the GraphQL API to be extended within the Powerhouse Switchboard architecture to the point where it covers all the MakerDAO operational data.

4. The Maker Academy staging version will be transitioned to a generalized Powerhouse Academy architecture and seamlessly integrated with the other Powerhouse products.

Other MakerDAO tooling such as the MIPs Portal, the MakerDAO Voting Portal and makerburn will be considered for integration where it makes sense.

5. Medium-term Roadmap

More concretely, the following modules are currently scheduled as part of the roadmap:

1. PEA -- Protocol Expense Accounting: on-chain data Reconciliation, delegates transparency reporting, legacy SPF finances, aggregated budget views, and a better expense reporting editor.

2. PBW -- Project-Based Workflows: roadmaps and progress reporting, project proposals, request for proposals, project budgets estimation and reporting.

3. EOS -- Endgame Operational Support: endgame transition module, reconfigured budgets and contributor teams, Atlas and the Scope Frameworks, Aligned Delegates and Voter Committees, Advisory Councils, and SubDAOs.

4. RF -- Resilience Fund Setup: claim procedure manual, Resilience Scope articles, proofs of eligibility (PoEs), tech committee agreement, and applicants onboarding.

6. Next Steps

1. An estimate and budget proposal will be detailed in a follow-up post.

2. We will reach out to the AVCs and provide the opportunity for live discussion and questions.

3. More details about the products and roadmap will be communicated in the coming weeks.

7. Contact/Follow Us

1. Website: https://www.powerhouse.inc/

2. Twitter: @PowerhouseDAO

3. Discord: Join our server

The Sustainable Ecosystem Scaling (SES) Core Unit was first ratified by MakerDAO governance more than two years ago, in May 2021. The mission of the core unit was to remove barriers between the decentralized workforce, capital, and work.

Since then, the SES team has helped with research and roll-out of the operational model for MakerDAO and its core units. It ran a grants and incubation program which coached and onboarded new core units into the DAO, and it has provided operational, financial and legal coordination and support work.

In the second half of 2022, the incubation program was wound down and the focus shifted towards the development of a platform for transparency reporting, next to the continued operational support.

📺 The history and future of decentralized operations at MakerDAO » (Devcon Bogota, Oct 2022)

📺 Deep-dive into the MakerDAO Expenses Dashboard » (Token Terminal, Apr 2023)

📰 Release Announcements of the Expenses Dashboard

1. Feb 2023 Forum Update (v0.6/v0.7)

2. Dec 2022 Forum Update (v0.5)

3. Nov 2022 Forum Update (v0.4)

1. Scaling up MakerDAO beyond the Dunbar Number (The DAOist, May 2022)

2. Introducing MakerDAO SES (Haus Party Podcast, July 2021)

📺 SES Youtube Channel » 📂 Archive APR-2021 -- SEP-2022 »

Visit the teaser website »

Following the ratification of the Endgame roadmap for MakerDAO, a number of the SES team members are moving on to create Powerhouse, an independent Ecosystem Actor.

The new Powerhouse team plans to use its extensive knowledge and experience from its SES and Maker Foundation days to contribute to the development of efficient and scalable decentralized organizations. It aims to work not just for MakerDAO and its subDAOs, but as a fully independent service provider for the wider industry.

As an Ecosystem Actor, Powerhouse will offer three categories of paid consultancy services. These services will span a variety of operational areas going from project management, to finances and transparency reporting, to legal-operational matters.

Open and decentralized organizations are an emerging paradigm that can be difficult to get right at first. MakerDAO has been one of the biggest pioneering experiments so far, achieving some successes but also laying bare the various challenges that these organizations may face.

• Powerhouse will work with the relevant stakeholders and draw from its experience at MakerDAO to help with the critical design choices that lead to successful, truly open and decentralized organizations.

• While governance is an important aspect, the focus will be on decentralized operations and the identification, analysis and automation of the business processes of the organization; aspects that have traditionally be ignored in the industry.

Software is a key factor that can easily determine the success or failure of open and decentralized organizations. To be successful, these organizations essentially need to trade traditional management oversight and extensive training programs with automated processes on their operational platform.

• Powerhouse strives to develop software that makes joining and contributing to a decentralized organization as easy as creating an Uber or Airbnb account.

• In tandem with its org design and business process analysis services, the Powerhouse team will customize existing open-source modules for its decentralized operations platform, or create entirely new ones tailored to the needs of its clients.

One of the challenges of decentralized organizations is that they can introduce a lot of inefficiencies by forcing the contributor teams to take care of operational overhead tasks outside of their core competencies.

For example, a product design team may see itself forced to take care of tasks ranging from legal research to payroll processing, which can easily distract them from their real job at which they excel: the creation of successful products.

• Powerhouse will offer operational support and coordination to contributor teams to take care of the overhead tasks that cannot be automated, especially in finances and legal.

• Powerhouse will maintain relationships with external service providers to effectively coordinate between them and the contributor teams.

• For organization-specific aspects such as quality control and financial auditing, Powerhouse will provide direct support if no suitable external provider can be found.

Throughout its engagement with MakerDAO and similar organizations, Powerhouse will develop a customizable, decentralized operations toolkit and offer it as an integrated solution to its clients.

The integrated platform will be comprised of five products, each with their own unique role in the decentralized operations area. A sneak peek of the envisioned features is given below.

All the products are developed as open-source software without licensing or subscription costs attached, other than for potential hosting and consultancy services.

• Decentralized operations platform with the organization’s contributor teams, roadmaps, finances, and auditing functions all in one place.

• Accessible to anyone from inside and outside the organization, on desktop computers and mobile devices.

• For MakerDAO, this product will come as a future evolution of expenses.makerdao.network that goes beyond finances to cover all operational aspects, customized to MakerDAO’s needs.

  • MakerDAO Atlas and scope alignment artifacts

  • Roadmaps, milestones, and project-based budgeting

  • Ecosystem actors and subDAOs

  • Deployed with MakerDAO branding and styling

• Private tool for contributors and teams to manage internal documents with full control over the data ownership. Available as stand-alone desktop application or in the cloud.

• Send and receive messages and documents between contributors, end-to-end encrypted and cryptographically signed with a pseudonymous identity. (Pending the outcome of our research, this feature will likely be built on top of the open-source Matrix messaging technology)

• Automate best-practice workflows with integrations, scripting, and AI assistants.

• Publish only what contributors want to share to Fusion, and decide if the data is synced automatically or requires user confirmation.

• Create a pseudonymous contributor identity, tethered to your Ethereum address.

• Build up reputation points in various professional fields by successfully delivering projects for MakerDAO and other open and decentralized organizations.

• Share your pseudonymous profile as a resume with organizations you want to work for, with cryptographic proof of your contributions attached.

• Define gamification rewards to incentivize value-aligned behavior within the organization, reducing the need for a management hierarchy.

• Get access to all the operational data of the open organization in one place. This includes all data from Fusion, Renown, and Academy, potentially extended with the data from other platforms.

• Create business intelligence insights, build new integrations with ecosystem apps, or automate processes with scripting and AI bots.

• For MakerDAO in particular, a powerful tool to expose the organization’s operational data for AI-assisted governance.

• Learn everything about contributing to open and decentralized organizations such as MakerDAO.

• Learn how to work and be compensated as an individual contributor, or how to run a contributor team.

• Bootstrap the reputation of your pseudonymous identity by becoming certified for the relevant skills in your professional area.

With its services offering and product development, Powerhouse plans to support MakerDAO in the endgame transition throughout 2023 and beyond.

Prominently featured in the Maker Atlas and its Scope Frameworks, the Universal DAO Toolkit is seen as a key component in the Endgame transition at MakerDAO. The Powerhouse team can be the primary partner to develop this toolkit and its various modules.

Productization of the existing MakerDAO tooling and prototypes

The Powerhouse team will extend and evolve existing MakerDAO tooling and prototypes into a comprehensive, high-quality software platform. The evolved architecture will share its code base with the general Powerhouse product offering, customized for MakerDAO’s unique needs.

This approach will save costs as MakerDAO will be able to use future modules developed for the wider industry of open and decentralized organizations, without continuing to bear the full cost of their development.

Mapping existing tools with future products

Existing tooling and prototypes that will be transitioned are the following:

• The Maker Expenses Dashboard, which will be extended with additional modules covering not just finances, but contributor teams and roadmaps, milestones, and projects as well.

• The Core Unit budgeting tool, which will be transitioned to the new Powerhouse Connect code base, resulting in a better user experience with an extended feature set.

• The Expenses Dashboard API, the GraphQL API to be extended within the Powerhouse Switchboard architecture to the point where it covers all the public MakerDAO operational data.

• The Maker Academy staging version, which will be transitioned to a generalized Powerhouse Academy architecture and seamlessly integrated with the other Powerhouse products.

In the process of this transition, other MakerDAO tooling such as the MIPs Portal, the MakerDAO Voting Portal and makerburn will be considered for integration or partial replacement where it makes sense. These integrations will be worked out with the relevant stakeholders, especially the Scope Facilitators and other Ecosystem Actors working in the same area.

The modules and features that are currently scheduled for development involve four major projects, which are listed below.

Note that this roadmap and its deliverables are a living work document that will be further refined throughout our interactions with the relevant stakeholders. The roadmap, deliverables, and progress reports will be available through Fusion. New, more specialized modules such as legal open-source tooling may be added in the future.

• PEA-01: On-chain Data Reconciliation – IN PROGRESS

• PEA-02: Delegates Transparency Reporting – DONE

• PEA-03: SPF Finances – IN PROGRESS

• PEA-04: Aggregated Budget Views – IN PROGRESS

• PEA-05: Better Expense Report Editor – IN PROGRESS

• PBW-01: Roadmaps and Progress Reporting – IN PROGRESS

• PBW-02: Project Proposals – TODO

• PBW-03: Request for Proposals – TODO

• PBW-04: Budget Estimation and Reporting – TODO

• EOS-01: Endgame Transition Module – IN PROGRESS

• EOS-02: Reconfigured Budgets and Contributor Teams – IN PROGRESS

• EOS-03: Atlas and the Scope Frameworks – IN PROGRESS

• EOS-04: Aligned Delegates and Voter Committees – TODO

• EOS-05: Advisory Councils – TODO

• EOS-06: SubDAOs – TODO

• RF-01: Claim Procedure Manual – DONE

• RF-02: Resilience Scope Articles – IN PROGRESS

• RF-03: Proofs of Eligibility – IN PROGRESS

• RF-04: Tech Committee Agreement – DONE

• RF-05: Delegates and Contributors Onboarding – TODO

• An estimate and budget proposal will be detailed in a follow-up post.

• We will reach out to the AVCs and provide the opportunity for live discussion and questions.

• More details about the products and roadmap will be communicated in the coming weeks.

We would love to hear from everyone with questions, comments and feedback. Feel free to reply to this forum thread, or join us through these links:

• Website: https://www.powerhouse.inc/

• Twitter: @PowerhouseDAO

• Discord: Join our server