Aragon DAO Consultants; Negative tokens?; "Paying it Forward"?

People,

While I was waiting for someone to respond to this:

It occured to me it would be much nicer and faster for my learning process if I could pay a consultant to join me in a Jitsi video meet, share my desktop with them and have them talk me through how to do some particular procedure or other - I think most people learn faster by being shown how to do something by other people - when they can ask questions etc rather than following written instructions. So a YouTube video is better than written instructions but not as good as an interactive session with a real person. Then I thought of this topic:

and it occurred to me that as we develop a list of volunteer or paid consultants from people like me who want to become technically competent enough to then go on and act as a consultant to the next generation of Aragon users, that it would be good, if instead of actual financial transactions, that “trainee” consultants could build up a “debt” of negative tokens or something that are then paid off as they, in turn, then help other people get up to speed. It would be effectively “paying it forward” - and might allow faster technical development for a larger number of would-be consultants?

If this doesn’t make sense but sounds interesting, I can develop the idea a bit more . .

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Hey @philiprhoades just spotted this post and coincidentally we over at RaidGuild are in the early stages pf developing this service, our membership includes Aragon, Moloch, Colony, and DAOstack core team so we feel we are uniquely positioned to offer this service. Would love to have you collaborate with us on this and potentially offer more domain expertise from the Aragon side if that’s something you’re interested in. Perhaps even consider joining the Guild to work on other Aragon related things :eagle:

Jump in our Discord https://discord.gg/YVn3wrV and ping me @Yalor cheers :beers:

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What do you mean by “negative tokens”? :smiley:

@Yalor How interesting. I received a community grant from Aragon to research the viability of DAO Consultants, which would enable paid consulting opportunities for assisting with setting up Aragon DAOs, including post-DAO professional support.

Initially, I was open to exploring whether DAO Consultants should offer services related to not only Aragon DAO formation but also the use of other DAO platforms, especially if another type of platform offered a better fit in a specific client’s situation. I was thinking along the lines of interest-alignment mechanisms to ensure ANT holders and Aragon Network would still benefit if DAO Consultants pursued an Aragon-agnostic approach. But I was informed by the Aragon team to focus DAO Consultants on solely helping with Aragon DAOs (and not competing platforms), so it’s interesting that you say that Aragon “core team” members have joined RaidGuild, which sounds like it provides consulting services regardless of the type of DAO platform that is used.

How are these “core team” members from Aragon, Moloch, Colony, and DAOstack avoiding an appearance of conflict-of-interest in joining RaidGuild?

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Does competition really matter? I think Aragon can be better described as public good than for-profit enterprise (and I really hope it will not devolve into it).

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I’m not aware what a “community grant” is, does this mean ANT token holders voted on an amount to allocate for this work or is it similar to the Nest grant program where a group of core Aragon folks approved your research ?

This is our first priority with doing consultations, we think there are many benefits between all the DAO frameworks and don’t view thing’s as “competition” even though most our membership are Moloch developers. Since RaidGuild is a development DAO firstly it’s in our interest to bring the clients the best solution for their use-case.

IMO this approach might not serve the most use-cases of DAO adoption. Competition between framework is very Apple VS Microsoft and won’t really serve the users in the end. It might even negativily effect the state of adoption. So I’m interested in seeing if this perspective might be shifted towards one more of cooperation and shared resources :handshake:

I believe that our membership are naturally aligned with a cooperative frame of mind, we are DAO neutral, ETH loyalists lol. Being that we have members from all DAO’s it’s more of a cultural learning experience for all of us, as well as a way to connect with other talented devs who like to jam on Web3 projects.

Come and join us, let’s work together on adoption :metal:t3:

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The Community Funding DAO allows ANT holders to allocate capital towards projects that support ANT and/or the Aragon ecosystem. You can learn more about the process here.

:crossed_swords: :eagle: :hot_pepper: :octopus: :robot: :lion: :japanese_ogre: :ant: :crossed_swords:

I think an interesting approach would be a work token on a bonding curve backed by ANT.

Basically a group of consultants can pool their time, and then convert that time into a token that represents it. Since ANT is a store of value asset correlated to the DAO economy (because it provides services to DAOs) using ANT as collateral for such bonding curve could make sense.

As there’s more and more demand for the consultants, their token price would go up. If they help build meaningful DAOs, then ANT would go up too, making the consultants’ token further appreciate.

@Yalor @Amazongirl what do you guys think about that approach?

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Aragon token holders financially supported Aragon to build out Aragon Network’s ecosystem. They didn’t contribute towards DAOstack, Colony, etc. for building out their ecosystems and supporting the value of their tokens.

This doesn’t take away from the public good concept at all. Aragon’s tools are open source and available to all.

If Aragon/Aragon team members are going to be plugging other DAO platforms, then I suppose it’s OK as long as the community is OK with it, there is full disclosure, and value accrues directly to Aragon and its tokens regardless of which DAO platform ends up getting the client.

@luis I love this idea! I am still studying about bonding curves!

I’m going to think about this a little further, see if I can add anything. :smiley: My wifi is super slow right now.

@Yalor Please know that I’m not dissing your idea at all. :smiley: I intuitively thought from the beginning that as a consultant, you should be prepared to offer your client the best solution, regardless of the platform. This is especially true if it is going to be a longer-term client engagement.

My comments are influenced by my background and having witnessed some colleagues be terminated from very senior positions at companies because of non-disclosures of situations involving potential self-dealing and conflicts of interest. These issues are taken very seriously in the traditional world.

I realize in the world of DAOs, people can just be anonymous and operate under an avatar, so maybe we will have to come up with some new standards as we go along. But there still needs to be a baseline or some type of algorithm where value is accruing to the organizations, token holders, and other stakeholders where interests are properly aligned and there are no hidden conflicts.

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So probably you would like to participate in this event :upside_down_face:

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Very interesting! Although I have been tracking Aragon from the beginning, I am only just starting to make progress myself (too many balls in the air as usual . . ) but I will have a closer look at RG.

Will do!

My thinking is something like an honour system with tokens:

  • Someone / a consultant does phone / video support for someone else at a particular rate - proportional to experience / expertise - say 1, 2 or 3 newly minted tokens per minute
  • The supported person receives these tokens, being “Paid Forward” by the consultant ( Pay It Forward (film) - Wikipedia )
  • The receiver of the support and the paid-forward tokens then has an honour-obligation to pay the value forward to someone else in support and passing on some or all of the tokens - reducing their own “debt”

I don’t know if this makes sense but I can elaborate more on it if you like . .

No offense taken, we at RaidGuild are only interested in spreading adoption of DAO’S and finding the best solutions for clients. We are not paid or supported by any large token bank, our members actually pay to join the DAO :money_mouth_face: so there would essentially be no benefit to trying to force a certain toolset on a client.

I would encourage you to pursue a membership with us https://raidguild.org/join where you might have a better shot at understanding DAO’s in the wild and start to think about them as interoperable parts of a larger system (Ethereum) would be glad to see someone with a solid business acumen jam on this DAO consultation idea with our team.

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This is quote an interesting idea, we could definitely use something like this since we’re constantly taking spec calls with clients and only a % of them follow through.

Might act as a filter for “serious” clients to schedule consultations. How do you see the token distribution mechanics being setup ? Something like Sablier ?

I think it sounds great for Aragon specific consultants, but not so much towards a diversity of DAO’s. The idea of having the token value tied to ANT or ETH for that matter is not exactly reassuring :grimacing: guessing something like this would need to be subsidized by ANT holders to get started.

We’ve been exploring the idea of pooling the personal tokens of each member in a group into a bond that would then reflect the value of each Individual in the group. Kind of like a token set.

What would be REALLY cool is if buying non voting shares actually bought and minted new ptokens from all of the member’s curves and wrapped them in a single token, kind of like iearn.finance, where one could deposit a single asset (say DAI) and receive a pool token that represents a split of all the ptokens that the receiver could maintain their portfolio through.

This would stabilize the value of the token that represents the groups time, and it would encourage the group to only draft the highest value contributers.

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@burrrata Hi! I sent you a message on KeyBase. :smiley:

Wow…will check it out!

Update…just registered! Are you attending on June 4?

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Exactly - accepting PIF (Pay It Forward) tokens implies accepting an obligation for the future to repay the support the person has received to the next generation of adopters. I will have a look at Sablier.

Actually, I was just thinking that there is no reason why this PIF token needs to be restricted to a particular DAO or even any particular type of support - I have Open Source support debts to repay since the 70s and although I have done what I can to support OS in return, a formalised token arrangement might be a good social mechanism to have.

Something like this would also be a good entry mechanism for newbies getting started with ETH and Crypto in general - setting up the account etc implies a certain amount of commitment - although there would be no legal enforcement and it would remain an honour- based system, there is is still the psychological impact of the commitment and the public record of the tokens . .