The first edition of this series, “Tokens of Wisdom,” features my favorite moments with friends who shared their personal journeys innovating at the frontier of DAOs and web3.

Today I bring you the second edition of “Tokens of Wisdom”- a collection of insights from Collab.Land’s BAU on DAOs.

Parker Jay-Pachirat

In episode seven, I welcome Parke Jay-Pachirat, Founding Member at BoysClub and Investment team contributor at fintech.io.

Over the course of 2022, Parker has been researching the DAO tooling landscape to pinpoint the optimal approach to building a DAO.

Parker’s thesis is:

“you can not create the DAO container first and then find a community to put inside of it, instead, you should have a community that would benefit from the DAO structure.”She argues the biggest problems that DAOs face today are low participation, low engagement, and contributor burnout.

Parker goes on to say, “if you start with participants that are forced to be there or are not intrinsically motivated to participate, then the inherent problems of low engagement and burnout will arise.”

I hope you enjoyed my episode with Parker. If you would like to give it a listen or share it with your friends, follow this link: Episode 7 of BAU on DAOs w/ Parker Jay-Pachirat!

PETH

In episode eight, I welcome PETH, Founder of MetaGame, a massive online coordination game for onboarding and educating both users and builders to web3.

PETH’s background is in gaming, game theoretical design, community building and organization design. He is often called on as the resident philosopher in web3, where he is continually shedding wisdom on those he touches.

In this episode, PETH talks about his journey coming into web3 and explains why web3 offers the perfect blend between coordination game design and token incentives to engage stakeholders in a community.

PETH plays  a pertinent role in the web3 community; He contributes to compelling educational initiatives that support the adoption of web3 tools through MetaGame.

This episode unfortunately was not recorded, so if you want to check out more or chat with PETH, find your way into the MetaGame!

Isaac Patka

In episode nine, I welcome Isaac Patka, Founder of Logos, DAO standards supporter at DAOstar one, co-conspirator helping build the Zodiac module, and builder-of-all-things-DAOs.

Alongside sharing his personal journey into the DAO space, Isaac offers listeners a wealth of knowledge on best practices in DAO governance, decentralization, and security.

My favorite Isaac quote is when he shares what keeps him motivated to contribute in the web3 and DAO space:

“My core driver is individual autonomy, or making it so that no one feels like they are stuck or unable to do the thing that they really care about.”

Isaac goes on to explain how individual autonomy translates into DAOs, saying, “we are creating systems that allow people to have very low to no exit costs, which ultimately results in more freedom for contributors and changes how DAOs are governed and managed.”

If you want to hear more on what Isaac has to share, Check out Episode 9 of BAU on DAOs w/ Isaac Patka!

Joshua Lapidus

In Episode 10, I welcome Joshua Lapidus, Founding steward of Opolis and SporkDAO, Public Goods supporter and Co-Creator of RainbowRolls & Public Nouns.

Joshua’s journey is unique and fascinating to me because he came from a background in rideshare and not the tech industry. After diving into crypto, he learned about a protocol called Chaser, which was focused on disintermediating the ride-sharing economy using its own native token (ERC-20). After contributing at Chaser for a bit, Joshua joined Consensys Academy in their blockchain fundamentals course which prepared him for a career in web3.

Joshua’s path into web3 solidified at ETHDenver 2020. There, he came in touch with a number of projects that he would later join and contribute to, including DAOhaus, RaidGuild, Peeps.Democracy, and DefiSignalsDAO (DSD).

My favorite quote from this episode is when Joshua talks about the “Moloch” meme,

“I think the biggest paradigm shift for me was going from the biggest DAO or Moloch skeptic, to being one of the people who talks about Moloch DAOs the most.”

If you want to hear more on what Joshua has to share, Check out Episode 10 of BAU on DAOs w/ Joshua Lapidus!

UI369

In Episode 11, I welcome UI369, early contributor to Holocracy One and core team member at DAOhaus.

UI offers an invaluable look into the DAO space as a personal coach, teacher, and facilitator. He is passionate about creating explicit power structures with code, a stark contrast to traditional companies that operate and mostly rely on implicit power structures.

My favorite quote from my conversation with UI369 is when we are talking about the distinctions between DAOs and traditional modes of organizing with respect to power structures.

UI369 says,

“a human system does not do anything unless everybody playing understands the system and plays by the rules.”

He goes on to say that, “Code enforces itself. So with DAOs, what you have are people who have agreed to operate within some unbreakable rules. Right now in DAOs, it is a minority subset of the total structure that is encoded in smart contracts, but it touches two important areas, finance (having a shared bank account) and governance (mostly limited to financial transactions), but you are starting to see some expansion in governance to cover more of the domains that are possible within governance

Good DAO Technology provides a lot of explicit structure right off the bat. It really lowers the bar.”

If you want to hear more on what UI369 has to share, Check out Episode 11 of BAU on DAOs w/ UI369!

Dianna Chen

Episode 12 features Dianna Chen, founder & host of Rehashweb3. Diana contributes to various DAOs including paperclipDAO, ink_dao, and rehashDAO.

Dianna brought an array of insights to our conversation around how DAOs can manifest and organize around shared purpose. We talked about decentralized social media and how it may act as a catalyst for user adoption.

My favorite quote from Dianna is her empirical observation that crypto is too detached from reality, stating,

“I'm surrounded by people who are so in touch with the Earth that we live on and have such a different perspective on what life is, in the sense that they try to optimize for what they actually enjoy doing in life. Not only do they have hobbies, which a lot of people in crypto do not, but they optimize their life around those hobbies and they see work as the means to be able to do more of that hobby.”

Dianna is delightful. If you want to hear more on what Dianna has to say, listen back to Episode 12 of BAU on DAOs w/ Dianna Chen!

Thank you so much for reading and listening! If you enjoyed my learnings from guests, please collect, retweet, and follow along with "Tokens of Wisdom" the official companion to Collab.Land’s "BAU on DAOs.”

Welcome to Building in Public, in this 3-part series, I take you through Collab.Land’s journey building the Zodiac bot module, a new tool that extends Discord-based voting to execute transactions on-chain over a Gnosis Safe. 

We are building the Zodiac Bot Module in collaboration with RaidGuild to provide TalentDAO, and eventually the wider web3 ecosystem, with a simple yet extensible governance framework that can be deployed right within your community’s Discord server.

For part 1, we are looking at the key players that make up the collaboration and why Collab.Land is building this tool. Part 2 will focus on the opportunity created by this nimble governance framework, along with the challenges and pain points faced in bringing this new product to market. And in part 3 we will show the Zodiac bot module in action, demonstrating how a variety of crypto native communities will be able to leverage this new tool to meet their own demands.

Purpose and Values 🌟

Collab.Land strives to meet the demands of the community and aims to push the web3 ecosystem forward. Collab.Land does not currently charge communities for access, and above all, we hold ourselves to the highest standards when it comes to privacy and member data.

Collab.Land provides members with the best possible solutions to reduce coordination costs and increase trust among tokenized-communities.

Let’s share how we got here today!

Coordination As Performance Art 🤝

At MCON2 (MetaCartel Conference) in September of 2022, Collab.Land facilitated a collaboration with multiple project teams: Orange Protocol, Sobol, and Hats Protocol; a showcase for how we can meaningfully integrate our tooling to help MetaCartel go fast, together.

The tweets below explain the collaboration in detail.

1. Thread 1 - MCON2

2. Thread 2 - MCON2

Nimble Off-Chain Governance with Verifiable Credentials 🪪

Before MCON, Collab.Land created a dynamic off-chain governance tool enabling members with token-granted access to a Discord channel to create and vote on proposals earning them Verifiable Credentials (VCreds). 

VCreds are issued to members upon proposal creation, upvote/downvote, and proposal result. This feature upgrade will enable communities to assign reputation and track participation directly based on their off-chain governance interactions.

This means that in-Discord voting generates a measurable reputation for community members that they can take with them!

This new tool has attracted a great deal of interest from DAO and NFT communities, offering members a more friendly and streamlined way of participating in DAO governance.

Inviting Collaboration 🤝

Coming out of MCON, Saulthorin, who is an alumni of Bankless Academy and Founder of TalentDAO, wrote a tweet thread calling out to Collab.Land, writing, “Collab.Land is a standard” for token-gating access for Discord communities, yet she claims there is more to Collab.Land than meets the eye.

In her tweet, Saulthorin argues, “Collab.Land can extend off-chain governance to automatically execute real world on-chain transactions through a Gnosis Safe (multi-sig), doing so by building atop the Zodiac framework created by Gnosis Guild.”

Saulthorin’s suggestion was met with positive feedback from members of the community. The reinforcement was a strong signal that Collab.Land might drive value to the ecosystem by building this tool that enables automatic on-chain transacting through a Gnosis Safe, building on top of Collab.Land’s simple Discord governance feature. TalentDAO is a scientific research DAO and they will be the first DAO to integrate the Zodiac bot module. 

If you want to learn more about TalentDAO, see their Manifesto!

Simple Governance ⏩ Automatic governance execution with the Zodiac Bot Module 🗳️💰

What next? 

Collab.Land and TalentDAO came together to determine what the Zodiac implementation would look like. By adopting this tooling, TalentDAO will set an example so other communities can use their model, helping them structure minimum-viable governance through Discord.

Collab.Land submitted a consultation to RaidGuild, a full-stack design and dev service DAO, to discuss the requirements and begin speccing out the work to bring the Zodiac Module to life.

With the help of Collab.Land, RaidGuild members coalesced into a small group to outline the deliverables and requirements for the Zodiac Bot Module. RaidGuild members drafted the smart contract spec and came together to formulate a grant proposal, funded by the premier grant giving DAO in web3, MetaCartel. The MetaCartel Forum has the grant proposal, you can read about the details and the deliverables associated with the Collab.Land Zodiac Bot Module there.

To ensure the Zodiac Module would benefit the ecosystem as a whole, MetaCartel offered that the final product (Zodiac contracts) be open-sourced so that other communities can modify the tool to fit their own needs.

Why Build the Zodiac Bot Module? 🤔

Collab.Land fuels tokenized-communities and empowers members with robust tooling that cuts coordination costs and increases trust between stakeholders.

The Zodiac Bot Module is:

• a reflection of our mission

• a testament to our commitment to building in public

• a minimum-viable governance framework combining off-chain voting with on-chain transacting

• an example of how we collaborate 🤝

We are building the Zodiac Bot Module with RaidGuild to provide TalentDAO, and eventually the wider web3 ecosystem, with a simple yet extensible governance framework that can be deployed directly within your Discord server.

Collab.Land strives to enable communities with the tooling that is best suited for achieving their collective mission; the Collab.Land Zodiac Bot Module will be made available to all Collab.Land communities in the future.

Stay tuned for parts 2 and 3 of this series, “Building in Public: The Collab.Land Zodiac Bot Module.” Part 2 confronts the challenges we met along the way and elaborates on the coordination effort to bring the Zodiac Bot Module to all Collab.Land communities.

About Collab.Land

Supporting 41k+ tokenized-communities on Discord and telegram, Collab.Land fuels and empowers collaboration with robust tooling that cuts coordination costs and increases trust between stakeholders.

If you’d like to collaborate, connect with us on Twitter!

Listen 🔊 to The Integration Situation with Otterspace & bDAO on Twitter Spaces!

Overview:

Collab.Land is provisioning token-granted access and offering role composition using Otterspace badges together with token-requirements defined by banklessDAO for Season 6 membership.

We are excited to have Otterspace & banklessDAO as a part of our community of communities!

Background:

Starting in August, banklessDAO (bDAO) member, 0xJustice from the Governance Solutions Engineers (GSE), wrote a proposal to utilize Otterspace’s flexible protocol for configuring and issuing auto-expiring badges (NFTs) for managing ongoing membership & participation in banklessDAO.

You can read the full proposal details here.

3-months later, in November 2022, bDAO reached quorum on the final proposal spec to run the Otterspace pilot with Collab.Land for Season 6 of the DAO.

Roles & requirements BDAO has instrumented for Token-Granted Access:

1. L1 HODLr: 35k BANK

2. Otterspace Season 6 Participant

3. L2 Otterspace Badge

4. @level1 = role 1 + role 2

5. @level2 = role 3 + role 4

Brief Example:

@level2 discord role access will require that members hold:

• A Level 2 Otterspace Badge AND

• An unexpired Season Participant Badge AND

• Maintain the 35K BANK threshold of an @level1.

What we Learned Together?

“There are these beautiful ethos aligned, roll up shirt sleeves and build things, tooling providers out there, and I think that Otterspace and Collab.Land exemplify this.” - Bpetes from bDAO

This collaboration is by and large a demonstration of what protocols can do to compose their tools together in meaningful ways, giving projects and communities the ability to offer their members a more tailored experience when on/off-boarding.

There are a number of takeaways that we were left with following this integration between bDAO, Otterspace, and Collab.Land, including:

1. Increased alignment between the organizations involved

2. Invaluable product feedback

3. New Features & functionality within Otterspace and Collab.Land

From the integration with Otterspace, Collab.Land discovered a new property.

Now admins can configure token-granted access based on a JSONata expression using a metadata value, this way community admins can utilize tokens with an expiry to provision access to a role based on token metadata.

What’s Next?

We will watch this integration closely as we head into the new year. The Integration Situation alluded to the extensibility of these protocols and how we can work together to offer even more functionality for our members in the future. Instead of complicating things, we agreed to minimize overhead of our integrations by limiting ourselves to developing one solution at a time.

About the projects:

Collab.Land fuels tokenized-communities and empowers users with robust tooling that cuts coordination costs and increases trust between stakeholders. Supporting 41k+k discord and telegram communities, Collab.Land increases trust and empowers collaboration. If you’ like to learn more, follow us on twitter  https://twitter.com/Collab_Land_ or visit our website https://collab.land

BanklessDAO is a community of passionate Web3 thought-leaders who aim to educate new users, produce written and audio media, build DAO tooling, provide consulting services, develop Web3 scholarship, and create a social and creative home base for anyone in Web3. We're so much more than a social DAO—we're a shipping, building, and innovating DAO. https://www.bankless.community/

Kicking off Season 1 of BAU on DAOs has been an absolute thrill! Few things are more satisfying than bringing in friends and experts from across the DAO space and exploring their personal journeys together.

So instead of letting all the morsels of wisdom wash away, I will be documenting my favorite pieces from each episode and sharing them with you here in this new series: Tokens of Wisdom.

James Young.

In our very first episode, I welcome James Young, Co-founder and CEO of Abridged, makers of Collab.Land. If that’s not enough, James is one of the original summoners of both Moloch DAO & MetaCartel from 2018 and 2019 respectively.

James is brilliant. On DAOs, he offers a holistic yet pragmatic viewpoint on how DAOs are different from traditional modes of human organization.

James shares a story from the early days of MetaCartel when immediately after the DAO was launched, members of the community met IRL to write the “Community First Manifesto” to memorialize the organization's mission, values, and objectives. 

James’s thesis is that DAOs should not start by focusing on solving the technical mechanics of how they organize, but first as James puts it,

“You should focus on the people that you are starting with, ideally you want to start it with people that you really trust.” James eloquently notes that “DAOs move at the speed of trust,” and that for a DAO to overcome its challenges, it needs a foundation of trust to fall back on in difficult times. 

Want to know more? Listen or share it with your friends: Episode 1 of BAU on DAOs w/ James Young!

Elco.

In episode two, I welcome Elco, Founder of TheDAOist and Creator of the DAO Canvas.

Elco offers listeners an array of perspectives and hot takes. While he doesn’t personally like to define DAOs, he offers a solid critique and exposes some of the nuances that will make you think twice before starting a DAO yourself.

In my favorite segment, Elco says “the key indicator of success in DAOs is people who disagree intensely in a way that leads to constructive results.” He goes on to say, “there is an intensity to the fray that sharpens perception, strategy, mindset, and points of view” that lead to progress in how the DAO coordinates itself. 

Want to know more? Listen here Episode 2 of BAU on DAOs w/ Elco!

Ann Willmott.

Episode three features powerhouse Ann Willmott, Founder of Rabbit Hole Network and contributor to Meta Gamma Delta and MolochDAO’s Really Boring Guild.

Ann is incredibly compassionate and it shows! She thoughtfully shares her story of transition into web3 from a career in media that will inspire those waiting to dive in.

In my conversation with Ann, the following moment stands out “One of the things I visualized was…I want to marry what I love and am passionate about with what I get paid to do.” DAOs may be that path that brings us a step closer to the world we want to create. It was for Ann!

Thank you to Ann for driving value to the wider web3 ecosystem through her advocacy and education around web3 technology. To learn more about Ann, see Episode 3 of BAU on DAOs w/ Ann Willmott!

Dekan Brown.

In episode four, I’m joined by Dekan Brown, Summoner of RaidGuild and DAOhaus.

Not to pick favorites, but Dekan is one of my web3 idols and we had a blast. He’s even keeled, insightful, and embodies the spirit of a unicorn - magical and iconic!

Dekan starts our time together strong by explaining the Moloch meme that took hold after the Moloch DAO white paper in 2019 and originates in Scott Alexander’s essay “Meditations on Moloch.”

Then Dekan and I get deep about the “God of Coordination Failure,” and how our lack of awareness continues to perpetuate age-old issues of climate catastrophe, war, famine, hunger, and other anthropogenic societal failures. 

Another highlight is Dekan’s dive into the “ragequit” meme -  its origin, what it is, and why it’s important. So much to learn from Dekan. You won’t want to miss it:  Episode 4 of BAU on DAOs w/ Dekan Brown!

Jordan Lesich.

In episode five, we meet Jordan Lesich, developer and core contributor at DAOhaus.

Jord offers a hands-on primer to DAOs and chats about many of the tools available. He says that with clear purpose and direction, DAOs can leverage what’s already available and we get to hear more about what he’s putting together at DAOhaus with their SDK and component library. 

If you have a project that you want to turn into a DAO, DAOhaus might just be the place for you to go and build. You can find Jordan in the DAOhaus discord or on Twitter.

This episode was not recorded. 

Abbey Titcomb.

In episode six, we meet Abbey Titcomb, core contributor at Radicle.

Abbey contributes a ton to open source and shares her compelling experience building community in web3 and DAOs at Radicle.

My favorite takeaway is when we are talking about "Anti-Competition" and anti-competitive forces, and Abbey says "the point is that you have anti-competitive forces that are trying to consolidate you, extract from you, and capture you, and the way to remain resilient to that capture AKA ensuring your long term sustainability, is to increase competition, increase diversity, and support emergence, and open source is a perfect example of this. And that's the end goal, to ensure there is more innovation in the System. You have to ensure that you're not being captured by anti-competitive forces."

Abbey is a rockstar, listen back to Episode 6 of BAU on DAOs w/ Abbey Titcomb for the full scoop and be sure to make note of Abbey's book recommendations on building open source!

Thank you so much for reading and listening! If you enjoyed my learnings from guests, please like, retweet, and follow along with "Tokens of Wisdom" the official companion to Collab.Lands’ "BAU on DAOs.”