Project Name
Eden Protocol of Developer DAO
Project Category
Build & Integrate
Proposal Earmark
2nd/3rd Grant
Proposal Description
What happened before
Eden, as a project, is now almost 3 month old and in that short period of time we’ve managed to have over 35 contributors with 25 of them sticking with us for the long run. The idea of solving a problem of project/person matching came around at the beginning of June 2022, after having experienced firsthand the hardships of finding a relevant project to contribute to in a DAO.
As founders, @BluePanda and @Impactbilli were lucky to match in a very complimentary skill set - BluePanda from a technical POV with a Ph.D. in Machine Learning, experience as a Senior ML engineer at several multinational corporations & CTO at a startup. Impactbilli from a more business-oriented POV building a digital innovation consultancy, where he has worked on a large-scale AI & data - as well as cutting edge Hybrid AI projects with multinationals, European Institutions & research institutions such as IMEC. Starting to work together, we’ve asked ourselves the question - how could we leverage our AI & data experience to drastically improve the flow of finding opportunities and talents to contribute with?
Early on both of us were engaged in Developer_DAO, so having raised the topic we’ve received a lot of support from fellow D_D members and before we knew it there were 25 permanent contributors working in 5 teams around the project/person matching. In this iteration we’ve moved to the new approach - 4 squads - which basically means several autonomous squads that combine all roles in one team and allow developers to work on the feature directly with designers, product & research team using a build-measure-learn loop as their main driver.
Today, we’ve shipped a bot and an onboarding side of the platform that now is being actively used in Developer_DAO to onboard new talent and capture data about them. This is then used to recommend relevant opportunities to the new joiners. This is a big step for us, as every iteration of the product is followed by extensive user research and continuous improvement of the tool.
Our previous OCEAN deliverables
Using our first grant from the OceanDAO we were able to develop the first iteration of our branding a.k.a. Soul of the Eden protocol, as well as, a website and a social media presence - which allowed us to approach users with more credibility. On top of that, we’re grateful for the meaningful connections and genuine involvement with the Ocean & Algovera communities we intend to develop as we have & will continue to connect with several of you during town halls etc.
What we’d like to do for this next round
For the next iteration, our plan is to start diving deeper into our data strategy. One of our beliefs is that everything that’s a platform today will be a protocol tomorrow. That has some profound implications for the way we look at data, as - up until this day - “data plays” are the main ways platforms like facebook & google monetise. In a protocol, that dynamic shifts from platform asking the question how can I monetise the data to the protocol’s question: how can I provide maximum utility for the data back to the users. This will make the thoughtful generation & consumption of data more important - as well as data’s tangible value to end users a whole lot bigger. This is due to the completely different ownership structures between platforms & protocols.
From a strategy pov, project/person matching is also one of the areas where truthful information has higher value. For the first time in history, we can embed blockchain enabled skin-in-the-game mechanics & mechanism designs at the atomic level to ensure higher trustability of information. This aligns nicely with the protocol centering on quality rather than the platforms who are incentivized to go for quantity.
In order to deliver the best matches between talent and opportunities, it is therefore crystal clear that in-depth, trustworthy data points will play a key role. To provide immediate utility from that data in a thoughtful, pragmatic & user-centric way will therefore be a core tenant of our strategy.
Our efforts in defining that data strategy will push us to go deeper in the before-mentioned considerations & explore additional blindsponts by as well as lay out a high-level plan inline with this data strategy for our data architecture, including collecting, storing, consuming, securing, distributing & governing the data.
We believe our ethos around data interoperability (point 3 of our manifesto) really aligns deeply with the Ocean DAO philosophy. In order to be able to add to the Ocean Ecosystem with algorithms & data, we need to grow Eden beyond Developer_DAO.
We’re applying to our second round Ocean grant to work towards our data strategy deliverables and we want to use the grant to consult Data specialists, preferably from within the Ocean, Algovera & DeveloperDAO communities. Our collaboration has proven itself in the past and it only strengthened our desire to build long-term sustainable relationships across both our projects.
Grant Deliverables
- Draft of the data strategy (why, how, what, where and whose data are we storing & consuming? What are our core data (governance) principles? How will we bake in security? How can we adhere to the “protocol” mentality? + answers to additional questions that arise from consultancy sessions,…)
- Define v1 of data architecture ( what concrete data stack, schemas, pipelines & data capture mechanisms does the strategy translate to?)
- proof of initial implementation in form of database schemas (v1) outputted by GraphQL & NEO4J
Project Description
Today, in DAOs, many great opportunities remain buried beneath overwhelming discord channels, outdated notion tables, DM’s, and a multitude of calls amongst only a handful of the most dedicated people - making it a hassle for DAO members to find opportunities to learn, earn, contribute or connect. The harder it is for members to find people & opportunities to contribute, the harder it is for the DAO to engage & retain talent, the less likely the DAO will be able to succeed in its mission, as the people are the DAO.
We’re solving this problem by making it frictionless & hyper-relevant to find the right opportunities through a high-quality project/person matching assistant, called “Eden” (fka as Soil in Developer_DAO). As people find & engage in relevant projects with ease, the DAO becomes healthier, more effective & long term (economically) viable.
Eden utilizes ML techniques to analyze personal and project profiles to find the best match based on skills, interests, previous experiences, on-chain endorsements, (social) interactions and availability. To benefit from Eden, community members set up their profile through a one-time onboarding process. What makes Eden special, is the ability to participate in community driven, on-chain, progressive profiling: this means that relevancy markers such as endorsements are being added to your profile by the community all the time. Leveraging skin in the game mechanics, data is peer reviewed which ensures the data, such as endorsements, is trustworthy and has meaning. On the project side it looks quite similar. Project Champions are guided through a project onboarding process that makes sure data is qualitative. This information is then used to match the right people with the right projects.
Final Product
Eden aims to be the world’s opportunity protocol, where anyone can find work they love & that work can find them - decentral, autonomous & community driven. At the core of Eden is an ML driven assistant in combination with a platform-like interface & protocol mechanics (such as intellectual & social capital staking, token enabled governance, …) which can click into any discord, slack, telegram … or wherever the community operates. This assistant serves as a personal project scout, flagging the most relevant opportunities to each member & flagging the most relevant community members to each project.
Value Add Criteria
Both founders have deep data & AI expertise from a technical as well as business POV. This fact combined with the nature of the project around project/person matching makes us confident that the algorithms & datasets that will come from our project will be very interesting for Ocean. We would also be happy to participate as customers in the Ocean marketplace, as our main value proposition is around project/person matching - we intend to benefit from having access to algorithms & datasets through Ocean. We hope that OceanDAO will become an active user of Eden protocol and will benefit from meaningful matches between its talent & opportunities.
Because we are using & enabling skin-in-the-game endorsing mechanisms, we believe the data we can add to Ocean will be uniquely interesting & not easily replicable. Specifically in understanding how people “bet” on each other's abilities at scale - which we could foresee have huge value in other applications than project/person matching.
On top of this, we’re convinced that the core functionality of project/person matching that eden provides will be useful to the whole OCEAN ecosystem
Core Team
We are lucky to have an amazing team of 25 core contributors born from the Developer_DAO. For the sake of brevity, we’re mentioning the two founders & project leads relevant to this application here + we have added a slide with an overview of all the contributors. 
Miltiadis Saratzidis
Tech Lead
CTO, relevant Fullstack, Blockchain & ML experience
Github: https://github.com/BluePanda-io≥
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/miltiadis-saratzidis-b1a396129/
Background: BS CS, Masters ML, PhD Deep Learning; Tech lead role in major corporations; CTO in fintech company; Web3 founder & active DAO contributor;
co-founder at FInseka.pl
@Impactbilli
Tom Husson
Product Lead
Github: https://github.com/HussonT
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tom-husson-b30a48a1/
Background: BS CS, CEO & founder of digital innovation consultancy; Podcast host theimpactbillionaires.com; Web3 founder & active DAO contributor;
Founder at Humain.ai
Lolita Mileta
UI designer | Community Facilitation | Research
Linkedin:
Background: BS in Political Science & International Relations, PM Scrum Master in Sabre Corporation; UI designer; project facilitator
@ADZ
Adrienne
Strat | Brand
10 years of strategy experience (consulting and corporate), then built two talent businesses in Asia (two exits), now a web3 consultant with Bankless Consulting (part of Bankless DAO) and active contributor to talent coordination and GTM.
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/mwlite/in/adrienneyoungman
@wiseTy#8689
Tyrone Dunmore
Backend | Product
Upcoming CS graduate @ The University of DC; Community Manager @ Developer DAO; Backend & Product @ Soil Github:
Github: https://github.com/tyronedunmore
Advisors
Ben Fielding
CEO gensyn.ai
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ben-fielding/
Background: PHD, serial entrepreneur,…
Mieke De Ketelaer
AI Director IMEC, Author
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/miekedeketelaere/
Background: PHD, AI pioneer, …
Wim Tobback
CTO at OECO
Linkedin: https://be.linkedin.com/in/wimtobback
Background: Managing Partner. Head of Technology and Innovation. Venture Builder. Trendwatcher.
The whole of D_D
Funding Requested
7500
Minimum Funding Requested
Wallet Address
0xd6354d9ad4b1c6f119df32e580ED0E720781CD82
member btw, in the Graph and AI analysis )
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Eden