A crowd communication and governance platform designed from the ground up specifically for use by an emerging wave of DAOs (decentralized autonomous organizations ).
DAOs are blockchain based collaborative structures that are ‘automated at the center, humans at the edges’, complete with their own internal capital to allocate as they desire. This internal capital is spent by accepting/declining proposals - immutable, binding contracts - by people, businesses, and organizations (known as service providers) who wish to transact with the DAO.
Daohub will provide a platform to:
- Establish and shape a DAOs social and cultural identity, ambitions, and purpose. Facilitate discussion and debate about the general direction of the use of its internal capital.
- Examine and comb through the details of a service provider’s proposal line by line, complete with annotations that host sub-discussions about the section in question.
- Allow thought leaders or groups within a DAO to rise and accrue influence organically. Reward meaningful contributions and disincentivize bad/wasteful ones.
- Provide a mechanism for service providers to meet with and get feedback from the DAO prior to an official proposal - a virtual trade show of sorts. (Just thought about this, might be interesting).
Daohub is an open-source organization. Daohub will leverage a close relationship with the slock.it DAO, and build an initial product offering with the needs of the slock.it DAO in mind. In due time, daohub will submit a proposal to the slock.it DAO as a service provider to build the platform for its use. If accepted, the slock.it DAO will fund the development of daohub in return for preferential rates and a % of all future revenue. Daohub will then shop the platform around for use by other DAOs.
A DAO’s daohub will only be accessible by using that DAO’s unique token as a key. Members of the general public with no ties to a DAO will not be able to view its daohub.
Each token can only be registered to one user account for the sake of transparency and to encourage full stake disclosure. Thread creators (OPs) can set a minimum stake required to participate in the thread. However, all threads can be viewed by all members.
Comments in a thread can be sorted by day/week/month and weighted by:
- Stake
- Web of trust/reputation
- Upvote/downvotes
- Number of replies
- Controversy
Creating posts will cost the OP a small amount (1 - 5 cents), but will be enough to disincentivize spam posters. Replying to those threads will cost 1/10 of the OPs fee, creating child comments to these parent replies will cost even less, and upvoting/downvoting will be cheapest of all. The OP will receive the discussion fees from all of the main replies and thread upvotes, and commentators will receive discussion fees from their nested replies.
In this way, comment threads will double as a mechanism to redistribute fees amongst participants. Meaningful contributions will be rewarded financially, creating incentives for high quality discourse and thoughtful discussion. Daohub will take a percentage of all discussion fee revenue as a platform fee (YTBD, but something like 1%), which will be a main source of revenue.
A daohub will most likely require community moderation. To mitigate the possibility of censorship or corruption, membership to the moderating team will be fluid. Members can vote mods in or out seamlessly. The exact method of voting is yet to be decided.
- Redundant, decentralized storage of daohub using Storj/IPFS
- DDOS protection
Daohubs will have to reflect their DAOs and be splittable, almost in real time. Large profile splits could be manually adjusted for, but it’s likely we’ll see smaller groups (<12 people) splitting off from the parent DAO to form their own child DAOs and projects. If they have no holdings left in the parent DAO, they cannot be allowed to view it once the split is final. Users who hold tokens on both sides of a split will have access to both hubs.
In the event of a hostile breakup, we may want to include a feature that allows the parent DAO to raise the minimum stake required for viewing the parent daohub past the default 1 token/1 wei for the departing users. You could have scenarios where individuals will leave <1% of their holdings in the parent DAO just to spy. The alternative to this would be re-introducing minimum stake for viewing certain threads, but we came to a consensus that this wasn’t ideal. Thoughts? How do we approach a hostile breakup?
Daohub should also recognize that a new group of tokens has been generated create a forum accordingly. This could get very complicated, very quickly.
Ideally we would all want the project to be 100% open source. If it was self-funded, this would be a no-brainer, and there seemed to be consensus about this. However, daohub needs to provide an adequate return to the slock.it DAO. Slock.it can make it’s Ethereum Computer code open source primarily because A) the barriers to entry for a physical product are much higher than software B) the slock will leverage the network effect to make it advantageous to go with the incumbent, in this case the EC/slock.it DAO. Daohub won’t have these advantages.
What is stopping someone from forking the eventual project, removing the % of transaction fees that go to the slock.it DAO, and re-releasing the code under a new name? These are questions that would be asked if daohub ever sought out funds from the slock.it DAO.
Does daohub opt for a combination of discussion fees & value added services as its main source of revenue? I.e: the code for the core components are open source and can be forked and developed by anyone, but it keeps a suite of features closed source as well as offers support packages at an additional cost? Basically the Redhat model.
This document, and indeed the project itself is being created in a decentralised and collaborative fashion. Please feel free to leave comments here, on the #doa_hub forum slockit.slack.com (you can request an invite at slack.slock.it), or on the google doc linked below. https://docs.google.com/document/d/1hHX_ftHc1B84yiHpGPToCLFeORaRIVy7mR_Hh1PqSus/edit?usp=sharing