Almost without exception, DAO operators tell us that a flexible working environment with contributors is great:

• Less of a need to run long recruiting processes to find value-aligned contributors

• Easy to scale both up and down as DAO objectives change

• Prioritize work output versus core team time input

However, as in all nascent work & technology paradigms, there are several things that make this way of working hard to implement:

1. It’s hard to have both bottoms-up autonomous workflows AND to get people to consistently work on useful stuff rather than what they feel like

2. It’s hard to know who’s the right person for the job

3. Dealing with onboarding & applications from outside contributors can be a mess

During the last months, we’ve been developing and refining ways to be able to actively work with contributors while minimizing the above pain points. We call it role-based workflows.

Role-based workflows

What is a role? While it certainly differs between DAOs & servers, one common interpretation is that it’s something that gives various levels of access to do things, without an obligation to do so.

Despite the often well-founded criticism of Discord, the thing they really excelled at is granular role-based access control. Whilst you can self-select to certain Discord roles in some servers, in most cases Roles are accumulated stamps of approval that you receive over time as you prove yourself to be trustworthy and competent.

If role-gating is the way DAO contributors are accumulating local reputation and access to their Discord server, why wouldn’t that be the way it’s structured in their work management tooling as well?

Enter - Dework Role Gating

In Dework it’s possible to granularly define which roles that grant you certain work access. Work is broken down into Projects and Tasks. You can very granularly control who should get access to what work by using Roles.

A key to using Roles is to make them granular and ranked.

Granular: A role should be precise enough to accurately describe the specific skill in question. ‘Product’ for instance would be too broad - it is better to have ‘design’, ‘product manager’ or ‘frontend dev’.

Ranked: When working with contributors, the concept of gradual reputation building is key. If you’re not precise about how much you can trust a contributor, you’ll end up getting burned by giving too much responsibility too soon. The DAOs that succeed tend to be very clear about the roles - eg Dev L2, Community L3, SmartContracts L1, and so on.

Having this setup allows us and many DAOs on Dework to easily create tasks, bounties & projects, gate them to the appropriate level, and allow contributors with those levels to easily and autonomously claim those workflows and start working on them, without an intermediary.

Usually, the recommended approach is to set it up so that if you have a role, you’ll be able to claim directly. But if you don’t have the role - you can still apply:

For someone that doesn't have either the Core Team or Dev L3 roles, this is what the bounty looks like:

Whereas if you do have the role, you’re not shown the “I’m interested” button for applications, instead you can just claim it:

Now, how can you progressively step up your ranks? The answer isn’t straightforward, because usually, the process through which you acquire a role and what it actually entails is far from transparent. At least until recently! Using Dework Role Center you can easily get an overview of which roles are available in a DAO, what they entail, and how to get one:

Through the role center, contributors get a clear picture of the role, and you can allow eg applications to the role through a Typeform.

Soon to come: the ability to set quantitative rules for how contributors can acquire/unlock roles - eg the Dev L2 role could have a rule to be automatically handed to someone after successfully completing 10 Dev L1 tasks. This would be done in collaboration with Guild.xyz, which will allow us to create and gate by roles based on several on and off-chain conditions, like one's level of Twitter engagement, Github activity, for how long you've been a token holder, etc.

Tying back into the problems we touched on initially, and how it changes using Role gating:

We’re not claiming that this approach will remove all headaches when it comes to working with contributors, but it’s a clear improvement on the status quo. After all, there is no ‘Lean Startup’ doctrine of best practices yet for DAOs working with contributors - hopefully, this guide can serve as a chapter in that book when it’s finally written.

We’ll be writing more about how roles ties into compensation in the future. If you’re interested make sure to follow!

The road ahead:

• Globally recognizable roles (global guilds?)

  • Many resource guilds act as ‘talent pools’ to staff their projects. Because of that, the contributors vetting process is performed over and over again in many DAOs. This could potentially be standardized..

• Vision alignment

  • Proficiency is only one part of the equation. In many situations, being aligned with the DAO is just as valuable as being great at what you do. How can vision alignment be represented through roles?

• Combining multiple roles

  • Ex: proficiency role from guild X + vision alignment role from DAO Y = role Z

• You tell us! DM us on twitter or discord

• 🔄 Notion Bounty Sync

• 🖼 Improved in-app Notifications

🔄 Notion Bounty Sync

You can now connect a Dework Space to a Notion board in order to sync Bounties! Doing so will automatically add a “Setup bounty” button to your Notion tasks and you will be able to use that button to very easily create Bounties out of these tasks.

Once a bounty has been created in Dework, its amount and details will also be reflected in Notion.

You will be able to use this new integration by going to a Space’s Settings → Notion Integration.

🖼 Improved in-app Notifications

We’re making some updates to in-app notifications

• You will now be able to quickly access your notifications by clicking the bell icon at the bottom of the sidebar

• We’ve updated the notifications design to make them more readable

• 🖼 Profile’s Featured Work

• 🔔 Open Bounties Notifications

🖼 Profile’s Featured Work

It’s now very easy to showcase work you’ve done outside of Dework directly on your profile. We’ve added a new “Featured Work” section where you can highlight any kind of project, including already completed Dework tasks.

Also released as part of this update, a better way to navigate a contributor’s tasks history…

…and a new Review section to highlight reviews received!

🔔 Open Bounties Notifications

It’s now possible to get alerted via Discord DMs when a new bounty is posted by an organization you follow. To start with, this will be limited to a weekly recap of new open bounties. In the future, we will send a message right when a new bounty is posted.

To enable Discord DMs notifications, follow an organization and click “Enable Notifications”!

New this week:

• 🎖 Dework Native Roles!

🎖 Dework Native Roles!

You can now create Roles from Dework directly. In addition to being able to import existing Roles from Discord, it’s now also possible to create Dework specific roles. You can then use these roles to gate Tasks and Projects, just like with any other role!

To create a new role, simply click “New role” in the Roles select or go to your Organization’s Settings and to the “Roles” tab.

TLDR;

• 📍 Project Milestones

• 📥 New Discord integration: Activity Feed

• ⛩ Utopia Integration

📍 Project Milestones

You can now highlight important phases of your project by creating Milestones. These milestones will then appear on your project’s Overview page.

To create a Milestone, simply add a “milestone” tag to a task.

Tip: you can do milestone-based funding by adding a bounty to these milestones!

📥 New Discord integration: Activity Feed

In order to make sure your entire community can follow Projects and Guilds updates, you can now enable this new Discord integration to send a message in a channel when a new Activity Feed update is posted in Dework.

⛩ Utopia Integration

In case you missed it: we now have an integration with Utopia! When adding a payment method in Dework, you can select Utopia to directly pay bounties there!

TLDR;

• 💬 Task Comments - they’re finally here!

• 🎨 Roles Page V2 - share more information about your roles

💬 Task Comments

You can now leave comments on all tasks!

For a long time, we’ve relied only on Discord threads to communicate about tasks. While we still believe Discord threads are a great way to have more focused discussions, we see comments as this higher-level communication channel that will make it easier for contributors to get in touch with task reviewers.

🎨 Roles Page V2

It’s now possible to add more information on the roles you feature on Dework. This includes:

• Skills

• Compensation Rate

• Commitment

Roles also now have a dedicated page that you can easily share with your community.

Coming soon: a much easier way for contributors to find out about your open roles 👀

TLDR:

• 🌐 Hubs - introducing a home for leading web3 ecosystems

• ⚡️ Open Grants - web3’s best grants programs in one place

🌐 Hubs

Today, we’re introducing the DeSci Hub, the very first Dework Hub. The ambition with Hubs is to link different projects and organizations from a common ecosystem and provide an easy way for anyone to find opportunities to contribute.

Earlier this week, we launched the DeSci Hub in partnership with leading DeSci organizations such as VitaDAO, PsyDAO, LabDAO and ResearchHub. Visit the hub on Dework now:

https://app.dework.xyz/hubs/desci

💡 We don’t plan to stop here and have many new Hubs coming in the next few weeks. What Hub would you like to see on Dework? Let us know in Discord!

⚡️ Open Grants

You can now browse and filter web3’s top grants programs and apply directly from Dework. Grants are ideal for getting funding for a project you’re currently building or simply finding an idea for something to work on next.

Are you a grants provider and want to be featured? Reach out to us on Discord!

• 📈 Project activity feed

• 📖 Space overview

• 🔓 Improved task permissions

📈 Project activity feed

It’s now possible to share progress updates and context in the project activity feed. For example, grantees can use this to share updates on their work instead of emailing the grant manager. This makes it easier for new contributors to get up to speed and for the community to following along.

📖 Space overview

When creating a project or space, there’s now a new tab “Overview”. This is a place where contributors go to get context on a project. You can write a description, show start/end date, who’s leading and contributing to the project, and more!

🔓 Improved task permissions

The task permission form has been revamped. It is now possible to restrict both who can apply and who can claim tasks at the same time. Hopefully this will also make the different ways of gating access to tasks more clear!

• 🗂 Nested workspaces

• 🚀 Updated space/project/section creation

• ✅ Rich task link previews in task descriptions

🗂 Nested workspaces

Before Dework had Spaces, that contained Projects, that contained Tasks. This structure doesn’t always make sense. We have now moved over Projects to be nested Spaces. Right now only one level of nesting is supported, but soon it will be possible to nest multiple levels deep. This allows you to both use Dework for a single project, as well as for a bigger DAO that requires more structure.

🚀 Updated space/project/section creation

Create a Space, Project or Section from the new “Create” button in the sidebar or DAO overview. Spaces are containers to organize and categorize work. Projects are used to manage tasks that are part of a larger goal, and can be shown in the Roadmap we released last week.

✅ Rich task link previews in task descriptions

When pasting a link to another Dework task, it will show a rich preview

• 🗺 Roadmap - a timeline for your projects

• 🧬 Multi-token bounties

🗺 Roadmap

The Roadmap makes it possible to create a high-level timeline of your organisation’s projects. To enable the Roadmap, go to your organisation’s settings and under “General”, click “Enable Project Roadmap”.

🧬 Multi-token bounties

You can now create multi-token bounties. This way, you can create bounties that are e.g 80% USDC and 20% your native DAO token. When adding a bounty, simply click “Add another” to add another token.

TLDR;

• ⚡️ “Open to bids” bounties

• 🤑 Suggestions Tipping: reward contributors after accepting a suggestion

• 📦 Tasks Grid layout

• 📄 Suggestions templates

⚡️ “Open to bids” bounties

Don't have a fixed bounty in mind? By marking a task open for bids, contributors can enter what bounty they would want when applying to the task.

🤑 Community Suggestions Tipping

When accepting high-quality suggestions, you can now easily reward contributors by adding a tip. This will create automatically create a bounty subtask that can be paid like any normal bounty.

📦 Tasks Grid layout

We’re introducing a new task style: Grid. The Grid layout makes it easier to navigate tasks in a Bounty/Grants board setup. You can change a View’s layout in the View settings (purple button next to the View name)

📄 Community Suggestions templates

You can now create Community Suggestions templates. Views will also be automatically created based on these templates.

TLDR;

• 🍿 Roles page: allow contributors to apply to roles directly from Dework

• 🤖 New Discord Integration: send a message when a Community Suggestion is created

• 📝 Submission & Application Form Templates

• 🔗 Application Form External link

🍿 Roles page

Role-gating has been a very popular feature from the start in Dework. We also often hear contributors asking how to get certain roles when they see that a task is role-gated. This is why we’re introducing the Roles page today: a page where you can showcase all your roles and how contributors can get them.

Now, when a task is role-gated and the role in question is featured in the Roles page, we will provide a link to the Roles page on the task itself. The goal is to create a frictionless experience where any new contributor can easily find their way to their first contribution.

🤖 New Discord Integration

We’re releasing a new Discord integration to stay up to date with new Community Suggestions posted on your Dework board. After enabling this integration, the Dework bot will automatically send a message when a new Community Suggestion is created. It’s also pretty easy for anyone to upvote it from Discord directly by just clicking the Upvote button 📈 We’d like to take the occasion to thank everyone who’s been actively submitting suggestions to our board, and more specifically Neo#5554 and 0x.knight#4565!

📝 Submission & Application Form Templates

It’s now possible to create a custom template for a task’s Submission or Application form. This new option is available in the Permissions settings when creating a task.

🔗 Application Form External link

For grants specifically, it’s sometimes necessary to have a more advanced process to manage applications. We’re making it possible to link a task’s “I’m interested” button to any external link. Airtable form, Google Form, Notion forms, anything! Contributors who then click the button will be redirected to that link.

TLDR;

• 🏰 Role-Gated Applications: restrict who can apply to a task based on Discord Roles

• 🔖 Bookmark Tasks: save interesting bounties for later

• 💥 Convert task to Project: create a project from a task

• 👶 Set parent task: transform any task into the subtask of another task

🏰 Role-Gated Applications

As part of a task’s Permissions, you can now decide to only open applications to contributors with certain Discord Roles

🔖 Bookmark Tasks

When viewing a task, you can now click the Bookmark icon to bookmark it. Bookmarked tasks will then appear in the “Bookmarks” section of the home page.

💥 Convert task to Project

It’s now possible to create a new project directly from an existing task. Subtasks will become normal tasks in the project and task assignee(s) and reviewer(s) will get the “Manage project” permission.

👶 Set parent task

After clicking a task detail’s action icon (top right corner), you will now find an option to transform the task into the subtask of another task.

• 🌎 Spaces! Sections are getting replaced with Spaces and it’s possible to create Projects inside Spaces

• 📓 Archive Projects

• 💡 Global Community Suggestions Board

• 🔥 Task Views icons

🌎 Spaces and Projects

We’re changing what things are called in Dework slightly:

• What used to be Projects are now called Spaces

• You can create Projects inside Spaces. This is a new type of Projects, different from old Projects (now called Spaces). Further down the road we will add features around roadmaps, timelines, etc for these projects.

• Sections have been disabled for new organizations as we now recommend to use Spaces instead

Why are we making this change?

• Sections have mainly been used to group Projects based on a common property. For instance, many of you have been using Sections to group Projects by Guild, Working group, Pod, etc…

• However, Sections don’t scale well for this use case so we made some changes to better support this workflow. You can see Spaces as Sections 2.0.

Important: If you’re currently using Sections and would like to transform them into Spaces while keeping their child Projects, please DM jala#2022 on Discord and we can do this automatically for you.

To create a Project within a Space, click on the “+” icon next to a Space’s name in the sidebar.

📓 Archive Projects

It’s now possible to Archive Projects (the new type of Projects, which now exist inside Spaces). To Archive a project, click on the three dots icon next to its name in the Sidebar. Archived projects will appear in a separate section in your Space.

💡 Global Community Suggestions Board

There is now a “Community Suggestions” tab at the organization level where you can keep track of all Suggestions posted in any Space of your DAO.

Coming next: alerts when new suggestions are posted, UI redesign and improvements to the Discord integration!

🔥 Task View Icons

It’s now possible to add emojis as icons for your Task Views.

Coming next: Projects icons!

• 🎨 New Task modal design

• 📝 Task templates

• 🏎 Bug fixes and performance improvements

🎨 New Task modal design

We made changes to the task modal design to make it easier to quickly find relevant information. Task permissions, bounty, skills and due date will now appear right under the task name. The sidebar is also collapsable so that you can hide secondary properties and focus on the task content when needed. We’re still iterating on this so feel free to drop your feedback in our Discord server!

📝 Task Templates

You can now create task templates from a project’s settings. When creating a task, you can select one of these templates to prefill all task fields. Coming soon: Community Suggestions & Project Templates!

🏎 Bug fixes and performance improvements

You might have experienced some difficulties accessing Dework at some point during the last week. Really sorry about that! 🙇 We’ve been working hard to find and fix a bunch of bugs and now these problems have been solved.

TLDR;

• Workspace Combined Board

• Bounty request: when applying to a task, it’s now possible for contributors to request a bounty to complete the task

• New Discord Integrations: Community Suggestions Board

• Github Integration Update: only sync issues with a specific label

Bounty requests

As part of their application, contributors will now be able to indicate how much they’d like to get for completing a certain task. See “Request funding” option

New Discord Integration: Community Suggestions Board

This is the first wave of a series of major improvements we’re preparing for Community Suggestions. If you have thoughts on how we could make Community Suggestions better, feel free to message us on Discord (or post a Suggestion on our Dework board 😉 )

Community Suggestions Board

If you want to have a global view of all your community suggestions and make it easier for your community to find them, you can enable the Community Suggestions Board integration. A single message will be posted and automatically updated when new suggestions are added or updated. Here, we recommended restricting sending messages in the channel where this integration lives so that the board remains the only message message in the channel.

Workspace Combined Board

We’re working on a big update to help you organize your projects more effectively and make your organization home page easier to navigate. We’re building Workspaces so that you can use them as homes for your guilds, teams, pods, etc. To create a Workspace, click the “Create Workspace” button on the DAO home page

1. Workspaces now have their own dedicated space where you can see all ongoing projects (and more very soon!)

2. Workspaces now have their own Combined Boards which combine all tasks from the different projects existing in a Workspace (shoutout to LabDAO for sharing their great ideas on that part!)

Github Integration: Only sync issues with specific labels

For bigger Github repo, you might not always want to sync all issues to Dework. When adding a repo, you can select which labels should be sync:

(Note: if your repos are already connected, you will need to disconnect/reconnect to enable this)

There's one clear problem though: DAOs lack good tooling for managing & organizing autonomous work at scale.

There are four main categories of bottlenecks DAOs run into:

1. They can’t use traditional project management tools like Jira or Linear since:

   • They are pay-per-seat, which isn’t viable for DAOs where tens of thousands of people want visibility and might contribute. 

   • Their permission system isn’t granular enough - simply being either a ‘member’ or an ‘admin’ doesn’t suffice when working with tens of thousands of DAO members and hundreds of contributors. Each person has varying amounts of commitments, work history, skin in the game and trust.

2. Many contributors are part of several DAOs at once, but each new DAO has no way of knowing what you’ve worked on before. There’s no good way to build up a clear work profile when contributing, especially in a world where LinkedIn is shunned. 

3. The community surrounding DAOs want more visibility into the work of the core team and contributors, as they often lack transparency on the day-to-day progress. Insiders are often the only ones kept in the loop on completed and upcoming tasks & projects, creating disjointed understandings of progress in the community. 

4. Because of the lack of transparency in the current tooling, it’s especially hard for new contributors to get up to speed and know where to start contributing, especially if you’re contributing to several DAOs

That’s why we started Dework. We’ve set out to build a Web3-native collaboration tool where DAOs can overcome these problems and manage tasks and bounties in an open workspace, seamlessly handle internal and external work, and allow contributors to find new projects. 

Some of the things Dework allows DAOs to do:

• Create granular permission controls using your current server’s Discord roles

• Have one place to manage all workflows, both for ‘internal teams’ and for current and new contributors

• Get a clear picture of who’s doing what in your DAO and gamify the experience using our contributor leaderboard

• Batch-pay your bounties through the Gnosis Safe integration

• Deep sync with Github & Discord

Since our launch, we’ve become one of the largest task & bounty platforms for DAOs, used by organizations such as OpenDAO, AragonDAO, CityDAO, ShapeshiftDAO, PolygonDAO and New Order DAO, with more than 18,000 created tasks & bounties and 11,000 signed up users.

Today, we’re thrilled to announce that we’ve raised a $5M seed round led by Paradigm and Pace Capital, with additional participation from Balaji Srinivasan, Polygon founder Sandeep Nailwal and more. These investors have worked alongside founders in scaling Web3 companies and we couldn’t be more excited to partner with them for our next phase of growth.

We believe that the world is headed toward a decentralized workforce, where workers have more autonomy and transparency in their work. With this funding, we plan to grow and invest even more actively into putting out even more bounties for ourselves, encouraging even more contributors to help build Dework using Dework. 

Come join us on our mission. For more information, join our Discord and follow us on Twitter to stay updated. 

TLDR;

• In-app notifications: see a chronological list of updates to tasks you’re reviewing, assigned to or have applied to

• Subtask improvements: expand subtasks to get a better overview of bigger tasks/epics

• Task feed: find new tasks matching your skills in the organizations you follow

Changelog

In-app notifications

Subtask improvements

Expand tasks in the board or list to dive down into subtasks and their status. This makes it easier to manage slightly bigger tasks and bounties within Dework

Navigating with keyboard shortcuts: cmd+k / ctrl+k

For all you keyboard shortcut maximalists out there, you can now navigate through Dework using the cmd+k shortcut, similar to Discord and many other apps.** **

Task feed

A list of tasks matching your skills in the organizations you follow

Discord thread emoji prefix

With the Dework Discord integration, you can get threads to discuss tasks and bounties. Now those threads will show an emoji indicating the status of the task