For the next couple of months I think our focus should be executing on the Polis MVP, publicizing our work on the polis MVP, recruitment, and building partnerships (in that order).
The Polis MVP will be some combination of written insights and a dataset available via a web app.
We do need to start thinking about the sort of tools we want to build to help members design, develop, and distribute data products.
I (personally) think that we should focus on distribution at the beginning so I will centralize my thoughts in this thread.
I’ll kick off with two concepts I’ve been thinking about: living lists and rumor markets.
Living Lists
Internships and entry-level jobs are essentially someone doing focused curation: creating lists of things that meet some set of (often esoteric) criteria established by the organization.
For instance:
- Find developments in Industry X relevant to Company Initiative Y that occurred in Geography Z.
- Find examples of companies that meet criteria X, Y, or Z.
- Build a dataset of potential (customers, partners, investors) and associate tags with them
- Landscape the information environment (sources and methods of access) related to topic X
- Find me underground parties
- Find examples of interesting DAO proposals that meet threshold for inclusion in the Polis newsletter
This work requires humans (or at least humans in the loop) because it requires the application of judgment and usually some level of subject matter expertise.
This work is necessary because people and companies operate in an environment of information chaos. Without curation to “prepare the information battlefield” it’s very difficult to keep up with the wide variety of complex topics that people are expected (and required) to understand to succeed.
Living lists would be a product (that we could build tooling to support) that would help people outsource the legwork for keeping up with complex/esoteric topics in challenging information environments.
A user would request a feed of insight on some topic, stake funds, and then set a unit price for unit of data (i.e. $100 per 1, $100 per 100, whatever). For each unit delivered, the staking contract would release funds.
There are complex incentives to figure out here (i.e. what if I don’t like the feed?) but I’m confident that something like this could have generic applicability and be a valuable method for DAO members to monetize their insights.
The platform could also be used to post advertisements targeted at our members (jobs, contracting opportunities, consulting opportunities, products & tools, etc).
Alpha Markets
Sometimes people have information that others would be willing to purchase. For instance, say I’m at the BTC conference and heard about a sick party. I could sell access to my knowledge about the party.
We could essentially have a feed (similar to Twitter) where members of Diamond DAO (which were subject matter experts on some topic or topics that we cover) would be able to post Alpha on that topic or topics.
So, for instance, since we will spend time collecting and analyzing DAO data (and have several members who are active in multiple DAOs) our members may have shareable Alpha on DAOs.
They could post it through some sort of app as either un-gated (free, open) or gated (paid) Alpha.
If it was gated, you would have different classes of (potential) access that people could purchase (or attempt to purchase).
- Buyout price (secures exclusive access)
- Early admission price (secures early admission)
- General admission (get it for free, with everyone else if no one buys it out)
Folks could build reputations by releasing ungated Alpha (#alphaDrops) so that they were taken seriously when they released gated Alpha.
Other considerations
When we’re thinking about products, we should think about how the mechanics of the product can help the DAO capture and accrue value (i.e. through a utility token). Look forward to seeing people’s thoughts.