Title TalentDAO: The Future of Work is Decentralized

About talentDAO is a community of digital vagabonds, deranged scientists, and renegade internet natives, passionate about DAOs and the future of work. We believe DAOs can provide a path forward where knowledge is decentralized and talent is unlocked for the betterment of society.

There’s just one problem: The science of DAOs is yet to be known; it must be explored. It must be learned. Traditional scientific settings are largely broken due to outdated institutional norms, obsolete academic infrastructure, and inefficient funding models. So without hesitation, a team of researchers has taken the plunge down the Web3 rabbit hole to find a new solution.

At talentDAO we are studying layer zero and building human coordination experiments so that we might all benefit. In simplest terms, we are using science to fix DAOs and DAOs to fix science. To do this well will only be possible if science is given an infrastructure and culture upgrade. This is where we come in.

Read more about what compelled us to pursue our mission in the manifesto.

Zooming out DAOs create opportunities for global impact. Human coordination structures of this scale have never been available to solve challenges in scientific innovation until now. Over the next 20 years entire communities of scientists will organize using DAO structures. A digital nation of scientists operating as a DAO will dramatically improve the probability of achieving important sustainability goals mandated by the United Nations. We focus on four of them.

Goal 8: Decent Work and Economic Growth Everyone should have access to decentralized working arrangements. To see that through, we’re building the foundations required for a decentralized work economy starting with the talentDAO community. Our goal is to have the majority of members who wish to be bankless and self-sovereign workers a reality by 2030. Everyone should have the right to decent work, free from affliction and labor exploitation.

Goal 9: Build infrastructure and foster innovation The traditional academic process has stifled innovation. The scientific record of knowledge is vulnerable to the risks of centralized Web2 storage. TalentDAO is building all of its research on a completely decentralized publication that is censorship resistant, immutable, and safely secured on Arweave. We are fostering innovation by allowing for a bottom up approach to research by creating an open social graph of scientists built on Lens Protocol.

Goal 10: Reduce Inequality Ensuring funding and educational resources are provided to all students across the world, not just the weird ones. Contributing to open source research that is accessible to all and with no paywall required. Traditional research publications systematically discriminate against students with less access to education resources.

Goal 11: Sustainable cities and communities In the future DAOs will be sovereign digital nations. At talentDAO, we aspire to create a Network State of interdisciplinary educational institutes, providing high quality education and research to all parts of the world, not just the privileged. We cannot go at this alone. That’s why we’ve teamed up with groups such as CityDAO and Sapien Network to scale together.

What we are building Web3 solutions for scientific peer review, funding, and publication. Making it easy for any education program to launch a journal and sub-DAO.

Our first solution is a framework for a peer reviewed journal publication and open science social graph with native DAO governance on-chain integrated. We are building research primitives and governance technologies to help onboard the next 1000 web3 enabled research sub-DAOs.

The Journal MVP is live on Polygon mainnet and open for private beta. Users can inquire on our Discord or send us a DM on Twitter.

We wish to scale this project further and release it open source upon completion. The talentDAO community started the Journal of Decentralized Work because we love studying DAOs. We hope to see other communities fork our solutions to form research communities of their own. Any problems we solve to build our own DAO operated journal will in turn be solved for others when we open source the code.

How we educate and advocate Products take time but our mission can’t wait. That’s why we began creating original applied research from day one. Several emergent research projects have formed that are entirely driven by community participation and championed by a talentDAO researcher. We do our best to provide resources to these groups and onboard more students to help create new ones.

1. DAO Leadership: Sharing leadership is a key tenet of DAOs. Yet distributing leadership across members of a community is easier said than done: there are several instances of centralized leadership within the web3 ecosystem. For this reason we set out to study leadership in the decentralized world of work adopting a quali-quantitative research approach.

Read the Mirror publication here Learn about our Core DAO Leadership framework here

2. DAO Health: We have developed an open source instrument for measuring the 23 psychological factors that contribute to healthy functioning DAOs. The instrument is based on decades of research in organizational psychology but incorporates the nuances of web3 organizing to ensure applicability. The research team is currently in the process of conducting validation research on the instrument and has further plans for developing a predictive contributor analytics strategy using its insights.

   Read our write-up on the project here. The instrument is open source and can be found on Github.

3. DAO Onboarding: As DAOs become more popular and attract new people to contribute to their missions, a set of challenges must be addressed in order for DAOs to scale. One of the main issues is the onboarding process for new members. Poor onboarding creates a barrier for new members to discover their place inside DAOs. We aim to research onboarding processes in DAOs to identify best practices or what tools and strategies may benefit different DAOs.

Learn more about the project here

4. DAO Compensation: It's relevant to study the behavioral aspects of DAOs. DAOs must consider fundamental operating procedures such as governance structures related to contributor compensation and its effect on contributor engagement, performance, and retention in the DAO.

Learn more about preliminary results here

5. Project LION: We are partnering with LabDAO to build an AI system for DAO operations. L.I.O.N is an acronym for linguistic informatics for organizational networks.

We initially intended for LION to be an AI system that could help analyze community health. Recent developments in AI have caused us to shift focus. Our lionOS repo first tackled some of our initial goals with assessing community health from discord data. Now we want to incorporate this into our next project: Leo.

Github: https://github.com/Project-LION-AI

[Note, Project LION is pursuing funding on its own and will not receive any funding from this grant.]

6. Newsletter of Decentralized Work (NoDW): A monthly newsletter educating over 1900 people about the wonderful world of DAOs. The newsletter is freely available and always will be.

   Read the newsletter here

7. DAOversity: we partnered with BanklessDAO to run a survey with their members to understand DEI practices and how included/excluded contributors feel inside the organization. The research article will be published the first week of May, 2023.

8. Discourse Research: so many DAO communities rely on Discourse to host their online forum discussions. These forum discussions are often focused on topics related to changes in the DAO’s protocol or improvements in governance. For a data scientist, the Discourse knowledge base is a treasure trove of data. So why not study it to understand the meta-science of DAO governance? This study seeks to do just that.

Check out the research proposal cross-posted on the Smart Contract Research Forum to learn more about future directions: research forum post

For the DAO hackers out there the data notebook has been made public to explore the NLP models being used.

9. DAO structure & design research: the core objective of the DAO Structure & Design project is to create a well-researched body of knowledge about DAO structures and design. It is not an audit project about what exists, but more about how effective and impactful DAO structures should look like. This body of knowledge will be published so the broader community can discuss the results and make use of these insights.

Check out the team project page to learn more.

How we use your funds By supporting our work you are supporting open science and helping us onboard more scientists into the Web3 Decentralized Science (DeSci) ecosystem. Your funds help pay for development costs of scientific infrastructure, like the Journal of Decentralized Work. Your funds help provide scholarships to students all over the world who want hands-on experience working and researching DAOs. Finally, your funds are used to fund open source public goods projects that the talentDAO community members propose, in pursuit of our four sustainability goals. We will provide monthly progress updates on all product builds, students funded, and new research conducted.