The Builder Collective

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Hey Everyone

This is WIP cooperative (DAO) we are piloting and wanted to get the Cartels :hot_pepper: feedback and hopeful collaboration. Been talking to a few people in Metacartel about this already and got some great responses.

It was one of the guys here in Metacartel who asked me why Iā€™m doing it alone. I didnā€™t think I was doing it alone, but clearly I was. This contradicts wanting to take this far. :smiley:

TL:DR: revenue generating cooperative (DAO) that runs hackathons. The more you participate and contribute, the more voting power you have within the system to vote on hackathon winners, decide profit allocation, and general DAO decisions. Check out the Builder cooperative website for more info

The Builder Collective

Decentralized Digital cooperative run by a community of developers, designers, and other hackers that own and operate an online hackathon platform and innovation lab. Think of it like a cooperatively-owned dev shop.

Sponsors come in and create hacking ā€œcompetitionsā€ in the platform with a prize pool, from which the cooperative takes a fee. The hackers build ideas and projects based on the competition guidelines, just like in a hackathon, and then select the best submissions to win money from the prize pool. The sponsor also has influence but the key idea here is that the cooperative provides both services: building lots of innovative ideas and selecting the best ones for the sponsorā€™s purposes.

This can work because, if balanced properly, the hackers with the largest ownership shares in the cooperative have a strong incentive to give prizes to the actual best projects, since they gain from the cooperative long-term success.

The cooperative would need to award ownership stake to participants carefully and share some revenue proportionally with all owners.

Why would a developer participate?
First off, they can get money and notoriety for winning competitions! Beyond that, theyā€™ll gain ownership of the platform, giving them long-term stability if the idea works well, and theyā€™ll get the freedom to express themselves in their hacks, something we donā€™t get much in our existing work lives.

Why would a company sponsor?
innovation focused development is difficult in organizations. This allow for direct fund deployment to the team doing the work, with no middlemen and in a fully transparent process.

The upcoming event is SoS Hackathon With CryptoChicks. Developing a Post COVID19 startup competition. There are several hundred registrations and people from all over the world. Vitalik and Ben Goertzel will be speaking at the opening ceremony about what they think is the future post COVID changes. Come and join, participate, contribute!

The platform is essentially open and anyone can propose a ā€œCompetitionā€ and a budget, if the DAO approves the ā€œhackathon opens upā€

What I am using for this:

Competition contract (Best M of N). This is a process allows for additional decision making to the Yes/No proposal process in the form of picking the Best N submissions.
Step 1: Does the DAO want to run this competition with said parameters? if DAO votes yes:
Step 2: Open up a competition with the said parameters (In addition to the funds allocated)

  • Number of winners (eg. 4)
  • Distribution to those winners (eg, 30,30,20,20 or 25,25,25,25, has to equal 100)
  • Number of times a DAO member can vote
  • Submission start time
  • Submission End time + Voting start time
  • End time, which resolves

DAOstack

  • Running on DAOstack DAO, (hurr durr politics: :rage:). This enables the Competition contract, various onboarding possibilities, and other interesting stuff.
    I think this can be a great way for MetaCartel and DAOstack to collaborate - MetaStack! (Credit goes to @JamesW)

SourceCred and other Discord ranking bots

  • The goal is to create a ranking of participation inside the Discord server, and give those who contribute more in these social channels, more voting rights in the DAO.

Abstracting the blockchain

  • xDAI - POA network so transactions wonā€™t cost $0.50
  • Tor.us - MPC using oAuth (google, fb, discord, etc)
  • Biconomy for gasless transactions

To finish it up, I think this is a great collaboration opportunity, it will be very hard to pick this up without a meaningful community, and well, this is really the forte of this community. Another possibility I see is the direct continuation of Dragon quest, giving those who participated some voting power the builder collective.

Ok no more shilling, Iā€™m on tg theeylon if you got any questions, this is the Discord server for the project: https://discord.gg/fUaPeuz.

Feel free to give feedback, tell me Iā€™m an idiot, or get on a call with me so we can smoke a spliff together :herb:

2 Likes
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I like the idea, inject a little token voting into a devpost alternative almost? I would focus on how to make your hackathons special. I dont want to participant in a hackathon where the main prize is voting in future ones. How can you consistently get big sponsors? will you use gitcoin?

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yo @joseph thanks for the feedback.

I may need to clarify, the main prize of winning a hackathon is still the main prize pool, few winners, the regular hackathon stuff. The difference here is that

  1. itā€™s not only the sponsors who pick the winners, the community also has a say and
  2. virtual hackathons (not bounties) are difficult on the engagement side, the hypothesis here is that if you align the incentives of all those who participate you can increase engagement.

With physical hackathons canceled I think weā€™re missing a key ingredient in the innovative core of the ecosystem, we canā€™t recreate the sleep deprivation but the goal is to create a virtual competition to push new ideas in.

Getting sponsors is personally a tricky part because I just donā€™t know how to do it, I hope thereā€™s a compelling value proposition to fund an organization that is run by those who contribute the most to it + it might reflect on the result and products shipped. I would love to collaborate with Gitcoin, thereā€™s talk ongoing about this!

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If I understand correctly (and please correct me if Iā€™m wrong) the goal is to create a DAO that runs hackathon type events/challenges, where winners of said challenges earn DAO shares that can be redeemed for a portion of the DAOā€™s assets, and where capital contributors support this process by sponsoring bounties and/or the DAO itself?

If so, thatā€™s awesome and seems like a really cool hybrid between a DAOified dev shop and a DAOified event. That being said, if the same people who build stuff are judging their own work and awarding themselves rewards based on that work things are going to get awkward fast. Would highly recommend separating those who want money from those who allocate money.

A few questions:

  • Would it be possible to allow sponsors to retain the ability to make judgement calls on how to award the bounties they fund?
  • Does the DAO award membership shares for all bounty winners, and if so, is that a fixed rate of 1 share per winner or is the amount awarded based on the discretion of DAO members?
  • The competition contract sounds interesting. Where can one explore said M of N contract as well as how the DAO creates/votes on these things?
  • How does the DAO mint tokens based on SourceCred scores? Whatā€™s the process and policy for that?
  • @Yalor what was the biggest draw for sponsors to support Dragon Quest?
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The main draw was us lol

The Cartel has a great reputation for doing impactful things inside the ETH ecosystem so sponsors were all but happy to support this event. Plus the fact that all the bounty money went right to the buidlers and not to the organizers.

I personally reached out to most of the sponsors of the event and helped them find hackers that could work on their projects, if we had more active mentor types to make connections between hackers and orgs Iā€™m certain we would have had a higher rate of bounty completion, still I think it was around 70% in the end.

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Apologies, I missed the notifications from these!
Your summary is pretty spot on @burrrata I may use it :smiley:

Would it be possible to allow sponsors to retain the ability to make judgement calls on how to award the bounties they fund?
Yes! so I donā€™t believe it will start fully ā€œdecentralized decision makingā€, what we will do it allow the sponsor to decide how much of the voting power they want and how much to leave to the community (like 50%/50%)
Does the DAO award membership shares for all bounty winners, and if so, is that a fixed rate of 1 share per winner or is the amount awarded based on the discretion of DAO members?
Voting power (membership) given to winners will be decided by DAO members, this is also true for other things, like call attendance, support, general work for the DAO, and other things for which the DAO can decide how ownership to give

The competition contract sounds interesting. Where can one explore said M of N contract as well as how the DAO creates/votes on these things?
This would be a good intro - https://daotalk.org/t/contribution-reward-ext/1111, Also feel free to reach out :slight_smile:

How does the DAO mint tokens based on SourceCred scores? Whatā€™s the process and policy for that?
Right now itā€™s simply a ā€œwet oracleā€ service aka me minting reputation to everyone

Thanks!

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