Creating A Learning DAO

Thought experiment on creating a DAO to incentivize writing

This is essay 7 of 7 for The Tech Progressive Writing Challenge. Join the conversation in the  build_ Discord.

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I recently came across this interesting Tweet by @FarzaTV.

Farza 🇺🇸 🇵🇰 @FarzaTV

It’s hard to beat cos like Facebook, Uber, Udemy, or LinkedIn by building a better product or network. They're quite ahead. Instead, offer a better incentive model to your users. Ex. UdemyDAO -- students earn stake as they learn, instructors earn $ + stake as they create value.

I'm using this post as a thought experiment for creating a learning/writing DAO as outlined by Farza.

Let's call the learning/writing DAO GutenDAO after Johannes Gutenberg who forever changed the world by introducing the printing press to Europe.

The main purpose of GutenDAO is to grant tokens for writing essays. GutenDAO tokens would act as another incentive to learn. From my experience, peer accountability and structure creates a great learning environment. But, adding additional incentives is always a plus.

So, hypothetically, 1 essay grants 1 token. For example, during The Tech Progressive Writing Challenge, people who completed an essay every day of the challenge would be granted 7 Guten tokens. (I'm still unsure if this is the correct way to think about this - please let me know!)

BUY WHY?

First, awards are great incentives regardless of the value. As much as we hate to admit it, people love winning. Awarding tokens to “winners” creates further incentive to write and learn.

But, the second benefit of the DAO is more interesting. It could create incentive to have more people write. (This is the part of DAOs that I missed in my earlier essay Blockchain@Columbia's Lion DAO). The powerful part of a DAO is the incentive alignment.

"A healthy, robust protocol will garner more usage, and in turn, increase the value of the tokens of which each DAO member is in possession of. So as the protocol succeeds, so do the token holders." - Consensys

So, not only are writers incentivized to write and learn more, they are incentivized to get their friends to write and learn. This would create a robust community of writers supporting each other.

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There are many logistical questions with this model. To be frank, I'm still trying to understand the technicalities of how to set this up.

One question that comes to mind - is there a standard for the essays? What qualifies granting a token?

Through action and taking steps to create something like GutenDAO, I will hopefully work through these questions.

Updates to follow!