Key Project Data
- Name of project: Governor DAO
- Team Website: https://governordao.org
- Proposal Wallet Address: 0x37A6156e4a6E8B60b2415AF040546cF5e91699bd
- The proposal in one sentence: Aggregate, package, and sell crowdsourced data to Ocean Marketplace.
- Which category best describes your project?
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Project Overview
Description of the project:
Governor DAO comes as the community-ran, grassroots reboot following the CBDAO exitscam in October of 2020. The project is founded upon the same vision that many CBDAO supporters shared: to create a comprehensive ecosystem to ease the development or transition of a project to a working DAO framework.
Our approach is two-fold:
Internally, we seek to build out our own community to best leverage the benefits of DAO: meaningfully engaging community members at every level of talent and commitment, incentivizing this participation, and tying the success of the DAO to the benefit of all participants in the ecosystem.
Externally, we seek to port our good DAO practices to new projects looking to launch as a DAO and existing projects looking to incorporate decentralized governance or transition to DAO altogether. This includes leveraging our own active community of engaged “governors” as a bootstrap for projects who require mature, engaged voters to achieve quorum and working governance. It also includes the export of our working tech to other projects.
What problem is your project solving?
When done properly, the DAO model has massive benefits over traditional alternatives – tokenized ownership and governance can alleviate the risks of centralized control by the contract deployer, who may turn out to be malicious, inept, or coerced. It also alleviates liabilities and risks on a centralized team. And most importantly, a proper DAO should be able to leverage the aligned interests of participants, investors, and developers to engage members of the ecosystem effectively at every level – the algorithmic evolution of a beehive, so to speak.
However, doing a DAO right is very difficult, and even the largest projects in the space have experienced difficulty in working, decentralized governance (Ex: YFI and UNI).
A lot of this boils down to the fair launch ethos that typically encompasses a DAO being at-odds with what decentralized governance requires. When a token fairly launches, they distribute the supply to short-term incentivized speculators, farmers, liquidity providers, and otherwise. These interests do not reflect the longterm thinking required for being a good DAO participant: actively voting and seeking to act in the best interest of the project.
Governor’s solution is to leverage our own meaningfully, actively engaged community to govern other protocols, particularly in the days and weeks after launch. Projects lease or allocate tokens to Governor and can ensure that our diverse community of hundreds of token holders are onboarded as voters in their protocol, enabling them to get “over the hump”, so to speak, and alleviate the risk of farmers and traders failing to vote or voting against the longterm interests of the project.
What is the final product (e.g. App, URL, Medium, etc)?
“The DAO of DAOs”. The one-stop solution for projects to seamlessly transition to decentralized governance and DAO. This will likely exist as a collection of website dapps (of which we currently have a few on our site) and a one-stop mobile application for our own community to vote on other projects, do microtasks (explained below), and so on.
How does this project drive value to the Ocean ecosystem?
So at this point, I’ve written in detail about what Governor DAO is, and nothing on what Ocean could possibly have to do with it.
Our internal mechanisms for driving engagement and incentivization largely fixates around the crowdsourcing of data. We’ve already begun a pilot program rewarding our community members for filling out a survey regarding cryptocurrency market sentiment. We intend to continuously run surveys as get-paid-to programs. From there, we will format and package our findings as a data set for sale on the Ocean Marketplace.
The “working” DAO model has a natural synergy with crowdsourcing data. This is the digital gold mine, and DAO is the framework needed to enable communities to work as one to combine their data and each earn what they put in.
This grant will enable use to stake OCEAN towards our crowdsourced, curated datasets. A practice that is not yet widespread (but should be).
Immediately, this should translate to solid ROI – there is a very high chance that we will be able to establish ourselves as an active seller on the Ocean Marketplace (we are targeting end-of-quarter), and the introduction of safe, curated, crowdsourced data is a worthy addition to the marketplace. Estimated: 2 / 1 * 0.90 = 1.8 ROI
But this is also just the low hanging fruit. With an established reputation and working history of our involvements and revenue through the marketplace, we ultimately intend to expand our “Governance-as-a-Service” offerings to port our data aggregation strategies to the projects we work with and act as a curator/host on behalf of these additional projects. The ROI here is higher still, and although less likely to achieve, is even more exciting to Ocean DAO: 20 / 1 * 0.25 = 5 ROI
Project Deliverables
Category
By the end of Q1, we will package our first dataset per the aggregation of data from our community pertaining to market sentiment. This dataset will be made available on Ocean Marketplace. With the success of our inaugural dataset, we plan to build out many more data sets targeting relevant topics, crypto markets or otherwise.
Roadmap
Our first survey is live and incentivized as part of an ongoing Gleam campaign (prizes denominated in our GDAO token).
Data collection for the first set will conclude at the end of February.
Data analysis will begin in tandem with collection and emphasized after collection completes.
The organization of presentation of data into a market-ready dataset will span February and March, with the goal to publish the first set to the marketplace by end of March.
Project Details
Surveys are currently collected via Typeform and activity is recorded and later rewarded through Gleam. When Governor DAO further matures, we will ultimately have an all-in-one mobile application that assigns microtasks, delivers awards, and tracks historical experience and activity in a more nuanced role/level system to span the broader Governor ecosystem.
Team Members
Since birth, we’ve had 14 individuals play elevated roles as team members in the DAO (of which eight are currently being paid by the treasury and three more continue to support team work in auxiliary roles.
Full team information will soon be available on the main website: https://governordao.org
In the mean-time, here are our leads:
Green Jeff – Project Manager
- Github: https://github.com/zhhuffman
CryptoUnico – Smart Contract Lead
- Github: https://github.com/CryptoUnico
Sohilo – Website/Frontend Lead
Dyer – Chief Data Scientist