[Grant Application] DAOmocracy

Project Name: DAOmocracy

Description: a DAO governance dapp for decision-making by random delegations with rewards for finding consensus

Vision: empowering, engaging, and harmonious DAO governance

Problems:

  • Individuals want to be involved in DAO governance, but the number of decisions and amount of information is overwhelming.
  • Low voter participation leaves collective intelligence potential untapped while creating the potential for abuses by the controlling group.
  • Control, campaigning, and personalities impact DAO governance more than the collective interest.

Solution: DAOmocracy is the blockchain implementation of sortition plus a Schelling point for DAO governance.

Sortition is a system of governance by random representatives. It trusts that every individual can think critically and make decisions for the collective benefit. Better than dictatorship, it decentralizes and equally empowers. Better than democracy, it rotates responsibility such that decisions are truly representative and individually manageable. Better than elected representation, it keeps decisions about issues rather than abstracting to personalities.

DAOmocracy rewards on the Schelling point of consensus. With random delegation only, the voter calculation of certain time and critical thinking cost with uncertain benefit remains. With a consensus reward only, extractive participation is encouraged. The Schelling point emerges with the combination of these mechanisms because the delegates are a subset of the DAO and unknown to each other. They are challenged to cast an informed vote based on what they all know they all have - the proposal, the forum, and a stake in the common good.

Validation: DAOmocracy won a bounty at EthDenver and HackFS. Here is the latest demo.

Team:

  • Melissa Pfeifer: a believer in the power of DAOs to make the world a better place; experience in engineering, development, design, data science, project management, and communication
  • Michael Gallegos: devoted follower of his curiosities; a software engineer and Web3 developer with industry experience
  • Scott Auriat: fascinated by the ability of institutions to coordinate positive-sum interactions between people and incentivize the discovery of transformative technologies; holds a Ph.D. in economics with a focus on economic growth

Grant Amount Requested: $8,000

  • $3,500 to Melissa for one month of development
  • $3,500 to Michael for one month of development
  • $1,000 to Scott for economics and outreach

Additional Resources:

How did we hear about this program? talentDAO newsletter

Thanks for the opportunity!