Learning as we build labDAO
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When we published our piece on labDAO, we really weren’t intending to launch the thing yet. But sharing the idea lit the fuse and we were off and running. Here are some of my learnings from the first few weeks of building in the world of DAOs.
A DAO is just a Discord server and a multi-sig wallet
I’m not sure “DAO” is the right nomenclature at this point, as it’s really just an “on chain” organization - which is nominally decentralized but isn’t yet autonomous. People who are helping build labDAO include Solidity developers, scientists who work at CROs, scientists in academic institutions and community bio labs, marketing and communications specialists, designers, lawyers, biotech entrepreneurs, automation scientists, and open science / crypto enthusiasts. We are working to build tools to track their skills as well as their participation and time spent on labDAO. We will then allocate labDAO tokens according to their level of participation.
Team building and engagement is web3’s primary value, for now
web3 promises a lot in terms of rethinking economic incentives and ownership, all of which will be important in the long term, but its primary value at the moment is the ability to quickly rally people around projects.
I am blown away by how many talented people have started working on labDAO over the past couple of weeks. It’s driven by excitement around web3 and, in particular, its low barrier to entry, facilitated by community building / communication tools like Discord and Twitter. In the spirit of wgmi, people are willing to suspend concerns about ownership, labels, and pedigree, because in web3 it feels like there is more than enough to go around (for now).
It’s easy enough to get a list of interested people…. but now we have to assign duties, build operational and reporting structure, and allocate resources. People are probably working on too many different web3 projects at once: 2 - 3 seems to be the upper limit. We see about 10% of our discord community participating on a daily basis.
Operations management in web3 is still developing
There will be emergent leadership on any project and that leadership should dictate focus areas / steer the ship. We are working on a MVP to be included in our upcoming white paper: an outsourced experiment, funded and run through labDAO. This will require three key pieces:
a “buyer” to request and pay for the experiment
a “provider” to run the experiment and upload the data
the on-chain marketplace and data management tools to act as interface between buyer and provider.
Actually, there is a fourth meta-piece: the operations management to make it all come together. DAO community managers are the COOs of the web3 world.
labDAO’s goal is to dramatically accelerate the pace of research and development, by increasing access to global technical resources, by capturing scientific data on-chain, and by incentivizing people to participate in this ecosystem. To do this, we want to take the best of web3 and the best of company building, recruit a stellar team, and build a useful product. Please join us.