Funding proposal: How to DAO Course

I’ve been running successful 4-week courses The Promise of Decentralisation and Introduction to Crypto & DeFi and co-facilitating a 7-week course Tools for the Regenerative Renaissance, all of which include material on DAOs/DAOHaus (you can check out the notes from the Promise of Decentralisation course here and feedback from past courses at the bottom of this page).

I’m up for taking the lead on a 4-week course which would involve various guest speakers from the UberHaus community to educate people about DAOs. Goals of the course would be something like:

  • Participants get a good understand of DAOs and DAOhaus
  • Participants create DAOhaus DAOs for their project/community and apply to UberHaus
  • Delegates from each DAO go on to become enthusiastic members of UberHaus

Some possible course titles: ‘How to DAO’, ‘The Tao of DAOs’, ‘Just DAO It’

‘Education mining’

Borrowing the model we used for the Tools for the Regenerative Renaissance course funded by SEEDS, it would be great to make the course ‘better-than-free’ via a grant from UberHaus:

  • People apply to join, demonstrating their desire to learn
  • Of those that apply, 100 participants are selected
  • Participants pay a small registration fee in HAUS (~$20)
  • There are a few assignments thoughout the course. If participants successfully complete all assignments, they receive a reward in HAUS (~$100)

Think of it as ‘Education mining’ :slight_smile:

Budget

Draft budget here.

Course rewards: 100 participants × 5 HAUS = 500 HAUS
Content preparation: 40 HAUS/session × 4 sessions = 160 HAUS
Content facilitation: 40 HAUS/session × 4 sessions = 160 HAUS
Expert guest honorariums: 80 HAUS
Contribution to the Dandelion platform (application/ticketing platform allowing payments in HAUS directly to the UberHaus DAO): 10 HAUS
Course administration: 40 HAUS

Total: 950 HAUS (~$19,000)

~100 HAUS (~$2000) will be paid in registration fees that will go straight back to the UberHaus DAO.

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This is fantastic and hugely needed! I very much support this general idea.

I have a few questions about this specific proposal:

  1. The net cost is 850 HAUS, which means the cost to UberHaus of eDAOcating one person is 8.5 HAUS (currently ~ $160). That may well be worth it, but it does sound a touch high to be sustainable over the long run. Assuming the course is successful, how much of the cost could be amortized over future iterations of the course, or where could other cost savings be found?
  2. Maybe a related question is what is the lifetime value of a new DAOhaus “user”? If we can establish that it’s clearly higher than $160, then question 1 becomes moot.
  3. Would it make sense to request only the net cost (850 HAUS) and use the registration fees to (partially) fund the course rewards rather than sending them back to the DAO?
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Totally agree that the answer to 1 depends on 2 :slight_smile: And I think the answer to 2 depends on DAOhaus’s (future) revenue model which I’m not familiar with – can anyone educate me?

On 3, yep, sure, this would be fine with me.

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I love the idea, yet I don’t understand the “why” what are these people supposed to go on to do afterwards ?

Do we expect these people to go and become contributors to DAOhaus or other DAO’s after they graduate ?

Do we expect people to acquire HAUS to pay for this program ? , isn’t that putting the cart before the horse ( people need to understand xDai and bridging to get HAUS but you can’t teach them until they register ) just my thinking out loud :thinking:

Overall I think paying for people to join the DAO ecosystem is a bit unsustainable and these funds might be a better allocated somewhere else.

In my opinion it actually works better to require people to pay for things, vs subsidizing it for them. People don’t value free things as much as something they have paid to attend.

So perhaps we could do something like, funds raised for this program via charging attendees could be matched by a grant from UBERhaus up to 500 HAUS or something, with a success bonus of 100 Haus for every 25 participants that complete the program.

That way it is more performance based and the DAO is not out of pocket for something that has not proven any value “yet”

what are these people supposed to go on to do afterwards? Do we expect these people to go and become contributors to DAOhaus or other DAO’s after they graduate ?

I believe this set out in the goals?

  • Participants create DAOhaus DAOs for their project/community and apply to UberHaus
  • Delegates from each DAO go on to become enthusiastic members of UberHaus

Do we expect people to acquire HAUS to pay for this program ? , isn’t that putting the cart before the horse ( people need to understand xDai and bridging to get HAUS but you can’t teach them until they register ) just my thinking out loud :thinking:

In my experience it’s not hard to get people to install Metamask, get some xDai from http://ramp.network/ and swap into another token on Honeyswap, and this part can act as a kind of test of people’s commitment to the course, which is a good thing. In any case this part is optional, people could just pay in fiat, or have the option of fiat or HAUS.

Overall I think paying for people to join the DAO ecosystem is a bit unsustainable and these funds might be a better allocated somewhere else.

Whether it’s sustainable or not depends, as @spencer points out, on “the lifetime value of a new DAOhaus “user””. If each new user contributes more than $160 of value to DAOhaus, then it’s not a cost, it’s an investment. In my previous post I asked for more information on DAOhaus’ revenue model so we can get a better hold on this – for example, are we anticipating charging a fee to run DAOs? Or perhaps taking a small % of tributes?

Also, might we want to place a value on educating people about DAOs, even if they end up using a different DAO platform? Let’s remember that in most countries in the world, school is free (and in many countries university is too) because of the positive externalities of education.

In my opinion it actually works better to require people to pay for things, vs subsidizing it for them. People don’t value free things as much as something they have paid to attend.

I agree that paying for things can motivate people to commit - that’s exactly why there’s an initial small registration fee. In my experience, also being able to advertise that participants will be rewarded for completing a course like this is a great way of getting attention for the course/org and generates a huge amount of goodwill. That’s lost if we’re simply charging a full fee without rewards.

Thanks for your comments!

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Hello!
I am Tools for the Regenerative Renaissance´s (TRR) DAOs delegate and thus, attended TRR course co-organised by Stephen.

Something Stephen did not mention yet is the possibility to include an incentive to tackle this concern: in TRR among the requirements to graduate and thus, get the reward (in that case Seeds), participants could choose to become SEEDS ambassadors. Same could be done here: in order to graduate participants may have to create a DAO and to become delegates.

I agree with @spencer question #2. Don´t know if SEEDS proposals are analysed this way but we could get some info from them on this.

I would also like to know about DAOhaus´s revenue model :slight_smile:

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The revenue model isn’t formalized for DAOhaus, but that brings me to the next thought. I don’t know what the overlap between DAOhaus and UBERhaus is, like should this be a funding proposal for DAohaus instead of UBERhaus ?

I would probably defer to @vengist.ethor @dekan to set the record straight before moving forward, about rev models and the DAOs various delineations.

I really like this. Interesting education model and worth experimenting with.

The notes from other courses seem thorough, researched well and presented nicely.

I would like to know how the education content developed is released, like is it open under a creative commons?

As this relates to daohaus I could actually see things like this going into a ‘service’ boost category we have been talking about. Like if a dao offers a service, people could signup for it directly through the daohaus platform. kind of like a dao craigslist.

And as this relates to uberhaus, I see this as a general education initiative, around eth and daos and the dao ecosystem. Which is much needed in the space and if a few people come out of it with a better understanding of decentralization it’s a win and great for us as a group in general.

Thanks @dekan.eth. So far the notes for my past courses haven’t been properly released (beyond simply being in public Google Docs), but I’d be very happy for the notes for this course to be Creative Commons.

Do you have any more information/thoughts on DAOhaus’ revenue model and how it links to this proposal?

@dekan.eth do you think this should be funded by HausDAO or UberHaus? I think it makes most sense to do a grant through UberHaus for this.

Agreed.

Apologies for my delay in response to @stephenreid.eth’s and @mettodo’s questions about revenue models. I’ll share my current thoughts on this topic, but please note that my thoughts on this are evolving and they do not necessarily represent the views of other DAOhaus/UberHaus contributors.

The DAOhaus ecosystem is an emergent economy of, by, and for DAOs. The size of that economy can be measured by the Gross DAOmestic Product (DAOhaus GDP), which includes value flows from:

  • Products and services provided to DAOs (e.g. boosts that DAOs use to improve how they run such as the Superfluid boost, WrapNZap, and PoolParty minions)
  • Products and services provided by DAOs (e.g. Raid Guild, LexDAO, Daostillery, Boost Foundry, etc.)

The DAOhaus GDP will increase along with the following:

  • more DAOs using DAOhaus
  • more of the above products and services being offered and consumed
  • more value flowing through the average DAO

The larger the DAOhaus GDP grows, the more value DAOhaus itself can potentially “capture” as revenue. The best way to make that happen, IMO, is to have as much of the economic activity as possible flow through the Boost Marketplace (a new feature the hausDAO team is working on to facilitate the buying and selling of boosts). That includes boosts as we think of them today (basically plug-ins to the DAOhaus app). And it should also include things that we don’t typically think of strictly as boosts today: services such as dev, legal, marketing/PR, community management, education, etc.

If that happens, then some small portion of all those value flows could go to DAOhaus as revenue. A good analogy is uniswap, where LPs earn fees, but there is a protocol parameter that allocations a portion (currently set to 0) of those fees to uniswap itself. Similarly, boost providers on DAOhaus could earn fees by selling their boosts, with a portion of those fees going to DAOhaus.

Within this framework, we can think about the expected LTV of a new DAOhaus user as proportional to the expected DAOhaus GDP per capita discounted over ~10 years. Hard to say what that value is, but I think there’s a decent bet its above $160.

:100:

Offering this course from the boost marketplace would be a great way to dogfood the idea.

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Was that really necessary?

Omg hahaha I’m so sorry! That was supposed to be the start of a sentence “Assuming we decide its worth it overall” (or similar; key point is that I stopped in the middle of typing “Assuming” because started thinking about how to contribute to that assumption in the second part of the post.

My fault! I’ve edited my post to remove the offending half-word.

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I just tried to submit a Superfluid proposal but ran into a bug (https://discord.com/channels/709210493549674598/735524730328711188/851152278864789545).

Turns out the proposal needs to be submitted by the one actual member of the UberHaus DAO (0x15ab). I’ve sent @dekan.eth the details and the proposal should be up soon for 170 HAUS/month for 5 months, total 850 HAUS.

I’d be very happy for the course to feature in the boost marketplace, though I don’t think it’s essential for this first run. Maybe someone who’s been more involved with boosts can get in touch to say more about what this would require/involve?

Grateful for all the engagement on this and excited to prepare and deliver an excellent course! :sparkles:

Timeline from here–

end of June: proposal passes (hopefully!)
July: content prep
August: inviting guest experts and spreading the word
September/October: course takes place
November: review and payment of course rewards

Hey @stephenreid.eth ! Very cool initiative.

I especially like the idea of education mining, and paying users to learn to use products/services. Much alignment there. To Yalor’s question, you mentioned the goals:

Participants create DAOhaus DAOs for their project/community and apply to UberHaus

Extending Yalor’s concern, we should make an effort to ensure that participants are people that actually want to create a DAO (as opposed to doing the course mainly because there’s $80 as prize). I realize the application and selection process will aid, but do you expect demand from actual DAO enthusiasts to be at this 100-people level? My main thought here is that I have no idea how big is the audience for a product like this. How many people have requested to join your web3-related courses?

More specifically on the course itself, you mention a 4-week course and 4x sessions in the budget. Am I right to assume it would be 1-session per week? How long would each session be?

My gut feeling is this initiative would benefit DAOhaus the most if we could figure out how to scale the course in future iterations, so it would need minimal or more efficient human-hours to repeat (reducing cost per student). Would be cool if Autopia DAO became an onboarding channel for web2 people onto the DAOhaus platform (or a new DAO created for this purpose).

If you created this course as you proposed, would you be getting other cashflows from it? e.g.: would it be sold in a proprietary site or online marketplace? I’m assuming not since Creative Commons was endorsed, but just to be clear.

Overall, excellent proposal. I believe that DAOhaus is poised to be an important piece of a “DAO future”, and ways to educate, engage, and bring in people from outside the web3 ecosystem is something I generally support.

Looking forward to your responses, and sorry for the long text :grimacing:
-Lucas

Extending Yalor’s concern, we should make an effort to ensure that participants are people that actually want to create a DAO (as opposed to doing the course mainly because there’s $80 as prize). I realize the application and selection process will aid, but do you expect demand from actual DAO enthusiasts to be at this 100-people level? My main thought here is that I have no idea how big is the audience for a product like this. How many people have requested to join your web3-related courses?

I have had 500 people take relevant courses I’ve facilitated or co-facilitated since November 2020. I’m confident at least 10% will apply for this which is already 50 strong candidates before we do any advertising.

More specifically on the course itself, you mention a 4-week course and 4x sessions in the budget. Am I right to assume it would be 1-session per week? How long would each session be?

Yep, 1 session/week, 2 hours per session.

My gut feeling is this initiative would benefit DAOhaus the most if we could figure out how to scale the course in future iterations, so it would need minimal or more efficient human-hours to repeat (reducing cost per student). Would be cool if Autopia DAO became an onboarding channel for web2 people onto the DAOhaus platform (or a new DAO created for this purpose).

One potential follow-up would be an video-on-demand course, once we’re confident in the content, perhaps with meet-ups for everyone who has studied it each month/quarter. However in my experience most students learn much more effectively through live sessions. We could potentially the two in parallel in the future.

If you created this course as you proposed, would you be getting other cashflows from it? e.g.: would it be sold in a proprietary site or online marketplace? I’m assuming not since Creative Commons was endorsed, but just to be clear.

No, no other cashflows.

Overall, excellent proposal. I believe that DAOhaus is poised to be an important piece of a “DAO future”, and ways to educate, engage, and bring in people from outside the web3 ecosystem is something I generally support.

Thanks for your comments!

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We could potentially the two in parallel in the future.

We could potentially offer the two in parallel in the future.

Delighted to see this proposal passed. I will get to work on a draft syllabus and share it here for comments over the next couple of weeks.

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Here’s the first draft of a syllabus, comments welcome! https://hackmd.io/@stephenreid321/Hyv-kUc2_

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