Launch of Diamond DAO Research Lab on Anonymity

Moloch Rises
#1

Description

Diamond DAO will kick off a series of interdisciplinary research labs to foster coordinated exploration of critical topics in Web3. The topic of the first season is Anonymity.

With the open ethos of web3 guiding development of new tools, communities, and companies the previous business models of personal data collection and monetization by centralized services is due for an update. While infrastructure is being developed to create open identities, open data, and linked personas - e.g. Ceramic, 3box, BrightID, for example - what kind of privacy and access to personal info do web3 users want to allow?

Diamond DAO is requesting funds to launch our first season research initiative focused on issues of privacy, data access, sharing, and open standards, and release a guidebook to the community of web3 developers and creators so that our ecosystem can be built with appropriate privacy in mind.

Value created

  • Investigate the effects anonymity has on lived experiences, enabling us to build technology that humans can use sustainably.
  • Unblock diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives by contributing to a new safe data use policy for Web3.
  • Generate a wellspring of open source content & reports to serve all kinds of creators.
  • Get more disciplines engaged in evolving Web3 & DAOs

Manifesto/Vision

The Diamond DAO research lab draws on diverse perspectives and interdisciplinary expertise to advance knowledge of relevant topics in Web3. Content produced by the labs will be vivid and interdisciplinary. Live seminars, essays, blog posts, quantitative reports and artwork are examples of acceptable formats. Diamond DAO will provide access to our Mirror for publications, Discord for hosting talks, Chainverse data lab for creating & launching surveys, and our community DAO for distributing rewards to all participants.

Open source research. Although, these labs will have access to data and diagnostic tools through Diamond DAO, the labs are not meant to serve Diamond DAO’s product development cycle. The public content produced is meant to inspire and inform creators across Web3.

Problem

Anonymity is embedded in the technological architecture & social ethos of blockchain. Blockchain-assisted governance allows people to conduct significant portions of their lives among virtual networks where they can choose to remain partially or totally anonymous. Without revealing their name or face a person can: collaborate on a team, form a friendship, earn wages, gain political influence, purchase a property, or earn a promotion.

Although many activities are technically possible to carry out unidentified, total anonymity isn’t always very functional when people try to work together. For DAOists, as for all humans, the most essential coordination tool is trust. Building trust means to knowing who a person is.

With the absence of conventional identifiers in web3, new tools to automatically track contributor actions and create a form of synthetic reputation have emerged to fill the gap in knowing someone personally. Reputation points can even be mapped to frameworks and help us determine the amount of pay or access a person can receive. We expect more innovation, like synthetic trust, that relies on profiling anonymous users by tracking behavior to continue. The tension between the value of anonymity and an open persona results in a lack of guidance from the community on data privacy in web3.

Solution

By co-sponsoring open source research on this area, we can work together to inform current & future DAO tools and recipes. We propose a diverse interdisciplinary task force to tackle the topic of anonymity from within the DAO space and beyond. We have pre-established working relationships with qualified individuals, to assist with this research and content production from inside the DAO space and beyond. Our task force will include data scientists, social scientists, blockchain academics, product designers, public policy makers, community designers, artists, team leads, and regular DAO contributors.

Product Features

Research deliverables

  • Bi-weekly live interviews with speakers from our anonymity task force, recorded and distributed as a podcast.
  • Monthly Mirror report rounding up key interview highlights from the month and sharing program progress.
  • The creation of a public survey asking DAO contributors how anonymity impacts them and what they hope to see moving forward.
  • Original art investigating the performance of identity in Web3.

Diamond DAO product features

While this research will take place independently from Diamond DAO’s product development process, the results of our research will inform the design of Diamond DAO’s planned polling and survey features.

  • Enable community managers to administer surveys to DAO members through survey component that can be configured to accept community and member privacy/anonymity preferences
  • Create survey templates for community managers to collect information on sensitive demographic characteristics
  • Communicate aggregated survey metrics relevant to understanding community health to users interested in DAOs, community managers, and investors

Validation

Through this diversity research, participants in diversity workshops found that unresolved issues around anonymity and privacy were a key driver for lack of diversity in DAOs.

ETH Denver chose Diamond DAO to help guide applicants towards relevant conference events by analyzing their wallet activity; Diamond DAO is also advising ETH Denver on best practices for soliciting wallet and sensitive demographic information from applicants.

Progress

  • October 2021 - Designing DAOs for Diversity Workshop launched with support of Jovian Network and MetaGammaDelta.
  • November 2021 - Infrastructure for virtual research lab established - Designed and implemented a contributor activation process, bounty board, and contributor guidelines for efficient intake of new members as research contributors.
  • November 2021 - Diamond DAO allocated 9000 wxDAI in December to activate our Research function and fund contributors for UX and manual research bounties.

Differentiation

Diamond DAO’s structure is unique. While we are a product DAO we do maintain a dedicated and independent research function, focused on publishing research as a public good to the Web3 community. As a result, we can accelerate and enrich our research by leveraging data from our products and drawing on support from the the engineers, data scientists, designers, and product managers who are primarily focused on building our products.

Team

Jovian Browne - Diamond DAO cofounder & research lead

Jovian will be the core facilitator of Season 1: Anonymity. She has an interdisciplinary Masters from NYU, has built distributed recruiting systems for DAO Ops at dOrg, performed UX research on DAOs for Aragon, and engineered communities at Panvala. Jovian has also spoken on the Future of Work at MOCN 2021 and presented her research on Designing DAOs for Diversity at Wyoming DAO Day, MetaGame, and Panvala.

Christian Lemp - Diamond DAO cofounder

Christian is a web3 founder and PhD student of complex systems with a focus on modeling, simulation, and analysis of human social systems, collective action problems, and information systems. He has 7+ years leading operations analytics teams building work management and process optimization solutions.

Contributors - Xqua (Harvard Phd, Evolutionary Biology and Complex Systems); Karin Brauer (Haas Blockchain Initiative UC Berkeley); Bridget Greenwood (The Bigger Pie)

Grant Request

$50,000 to support six months of research.

What the funds are for

$8,250 a month to fund community bounties for production & distribution of research. Diamond

  • Survey design, administration, and analysis
  • Record focus groups and publish as podcasts/Youtube videos
  • Monthly Mirror posts

Help Requested

We’d like network support to amplify reach of content.

Additional Links, Resources, Portfolio

Forum Post on Anonymity
Jovian’s Talk at the Wyoming Summit
Diamond DAO forum
Discord
Diamond DAO Twitter
Jovian Network Twitter
Diamond DAO Community Documentation
Bounties Board
–> Research bounties funded by Moloch grant would go here!

:crossed_fingers:
Thank you for reading this far!
Your feedback is encouraged!

1 Like
#2

This proposal was posted past the deadline of the current grants period, and I don’t have the time to review any more than is currently on my plate right now. Will check this out in more detail when we open up our next funding round next year.

#3

Hey There! Thanks for the update, and I can understand if there is too much on your plate. We are a bit confused about what was the deadline. The dates posted in the forum post that we referenced were --> Welcome to the Q4 MolochDAO Grant Round!

November 1st: Exploration Phase - Applications are open!
November 15th: Scrutiny Phase - Criticize!
–> we are here
November 29th: Submission Phase - Proposals Go On-Chain!
December 3rd: Deadline for Submitting Proposals
December 6th: Sponsorship and Voting Phase
December 13th: Results and Grace Period
December 20th: Proposals are Processed! End of the Pipeline

#4

For the sake of clarity, I’ll post that we’ve heard back from Moloch reps in DM that this proposal will be considered in the current grants round. So, please, readers, feel invited to scrutinize and comment at will. Thank you for your feedback.

1 Like
#5

In this round we conflated the submission period and discussion period. So it’s open all month and also discussions can happen whenever proposals go up and throughout the month. I have to say I’ve liked this strategy and think it has generated some energy. I believe we are posting polls on Friday to start to assess what the DAO would like to see on-chain. (Of course anyone can post a proposal in v2, so this is really more about the likelihood of a proposal being sponsored after it goes up.) So - Diamond DAO is still within the open application period.

1 Like
#6

That must have been our customer service department. :slight_smile:

#7

Steff,
Your proposal is extremely intriguing! I am a little confused on how the quantifiable data will interface with the artistic productions, how these different areas will be scoped and integrated into the reports, how the interviews/research will be conducted, and generally how the funds will be used. I think the $50k ask is pretty reasonable, but who are the members of the task force? The problem seems relatively clear, but the solution remains ambiguous to me. I’m keen to support this kind of direction if more clarity can be provided.

2 Likes
#8

Hey Travis - thank you for the feedback and great questions. We were off for the holiday weekend and a full response is coming now that we are back.

#9

Hey Travis :wave:

Thanks for the thoughtful feedback. We’re going to split our response across two posts, to allow for participation by some of our contributors. The first post will address the questions below:

  • “how [will] these different areas will be scoped and integrated into the reports?”
  • “how [will] the interviews/research”
  • “how the interviews/research will be conducted”

Solution scoping

What does the solution look like to us?

  • Builds awareness (with content) that unresolved issues around privacy and anonymity present ethical challenges and block innovation
  • Builds a shared understanding of existing preferences, attitudes, and policies with concrete data and case studies
  • Provides a space for community feedback to surface and communicate emergent best practices
  • Uses art to promote a culture of it being “cool” to care about real world issues like privacy and anonymity in the same way that it’s “cool” to care about memes and money (i.e. ConstitutionDAO, Ohm Forks).

Process

1032Ă—298

Toolset

  • Interviews & Focus Groups
    • Semi-structured interviews follow lines of inquiry scoped in the research plan
    • Collaborative format conversations aim multiple perspectives on one particular fact of the problem area
  • Surveys
    • Surveys help us A.) get a broader understanding of how people think or B.) investigate specific points of data that is not available on-chain.
      • Sample questions on missing data points
        • Do you have an avatar?
        • Is your avatar human / non-human / gendered / non-gendered
      • Sample questions on public sentiment
        • What occasions justify opting in to sharing data?
          • When someone makes a wallet / starts getting paid / gets event access / etc.
        • Where are the areas of highest contention vs. accord?
        • Is aggregated data safer than data on individuals?
  • Artwork
    • Artists have a role and voice in helping communicate complexity in ways that are intuitive to wider audiences.
    • Art is brings impact and vitality, reaching audiences on a deeper level.
  • Mirror updates
    • Memo-length articles to share highlights from the research lab, news, and modules in progress.
  • Research report
    • Analysis of the survey results, combined with the most salient insights from the interviews and focus groups. quantitative insights, published on Mirror and circulated.
  • End-of-Program seminar
    • Core contributors will present key takeaways and host an AMA at the conclusion of the program.
    • Any artworks will be presented during the seminar and used to publicize the event and publication.

Plan Diagram

877Ă—711

Please stand by for the next post on the task force team & use of funds. :gem:

#10

Hello Again!

This post addresses the remaining questions:

  • “who are the members of the task force?”
  • “generally how [will] the funds be used?”

Interdisciplinary Task Force

Making open-source research happen takes cooperation & support from multiple partners. Diamond DAO will cover salaries for Jovian & Christian, leaving several key collaborators in need of funding. We still plan to run an open call for contributors so the final team will change. That said, here is today’s snapshot of who will serve on the “task force.”

  • Full time team at Diamond DAO, compensation provided by Diamond DAO.
    • Jovian Browne (Diamond DAO) - Program facilitation & content creation
    • Christian Lemp (Diamond DAO) - Data modeling & artwork from data
  • Collaborators coming in for the Research Lab, compensation to be covered by the grant
    • xQua (Harvard, Diamond DAO) - Research Residency - Mapping / modeling research questions
    • Mary Q (Index Coop) - Research Residency - Surveys & Analysis
    • Katy Jeremko (Indie DAO) - Visual Art - anonymity & identity
    • Bridget Greenwood (Bigger Pie) - Research advisor on how missing data --> inequity in the workplace
    • Karin Brauer (UC Berkeley) - Research advisor

Use of Funds

Research residents & advisors $24,000 ($4,000/mo)

  • Research questions
  • Survey design & implementation
  • Data analysis & reporting

Community activation around the research lab $13,500 ($2,250/mo)

  • Bookings & communication
  • Mirror updates
  • Social media
  • Seminar coordination

Podcast $4,500 ($300 per for 15 episodes)

  • Editor $3,500
  • Equipment/software/music $1,000

Art $8,000 (~6 artists $500-$2,000 each)

  • Original artwork, responding to the themes of the research lab, and the right to associate with other deliverable of the research lab, such as alongside of reports and announcements.

Thanks for reading all the way to the end! Please do let us know if you have any more questions at all!

#11

Hi there, @0xKaty, co-founder of IndieDAO. Jovian and I met through her awareness-raising diversity events in Brooklyn and have been extremely inspired by her research work.

I’m passionate about about inclusivity and diversity. At IndieDAO, we’re taking this research into practice with careful and non-bias onboarding processes, as well as diversifying admittance to the DAO to establish a dynamic culture. In my personal artwork, I’m exploring the identities that we show up with online. There is a lot of interesting cross-over that Jovian and I have discussed, which I’d love to better incorporate not only into our DAO but also into some of the portraits I’m working on as part of my latest series on the she/her identity.

Here’s a sample of a piece in the style I’ve developed:

Untitled_Artwork 2
Untitled_Artwork 23900Ă—3900 697 KB

I’d love to see both artists and DAO community managers looking into this research for how they build systems design, and be involved in helping to develop valuable streams that both audiences can use.

1 Like
#12

Hello. I’m Christian, partner with Jovian at Diamond DAO.

I am curious about how people coordinate within their communities. At Diamond DAO I lead the technical work sourcing and transforming data for analytics and applications. I believe that as the complexity an organization increases art and data visualization is needed to convey the deeper story beneath a wealth of information.

Here is a sample of a short analysis and data visualization I created and posted from our Diamond DAO Twitter account:

What I would love is to bring arts, artists, and science together to create a deeper understanding of the complexity of the orgs we operate within.