notes on evaluating contributor impact in daos
Last week, I spent a lot of time reading up and studying impact evaluator frameworks following this grant by Ceramic and my collaboration with [redacted].
I really like to think of DAOs as “magic internet communities that allow members to coordinate funds and resources” (DAOhaus).
“A DAO is a commitment to share value with a community. A Telegram group with 10 members and 1 ETH is a DAO. A DeFi protocol with $1B+ of assets governed on-chain by 10,000+ token holders is a DAO. Regardless of size, DAOs look to solve core missions — evolving a group chat into a success-driven community.” (Coopahtroopa).
For the purpose of demonstrating how to go about evaluating and then rewarding impact, I compare a DAO to an orchestra and the process of contributor impact evaluation to an orchestra could serve as a great analogy.
Each member of an orchestra has a unique role, and their contribution is crucial to the harmony of the whole ensemble. Similarly, each contributor in a DAO has a distinct role and their work’s impact can be vastly different. Just as a conductor keeps track of every instrument’s performance in an orchestra, a DAO needs tools and frameworks to evaluate the impact of each contributor.
In an orchestra, there are many musicians, each with their own unique instrument and role. Some might play the violin, others the flute, and others the drums. In a traditional orchestra, the conductor guides each musician and ensures they are working in harmony. But in a DAO (Decentralized Autonomous Organization), there isn’t a single conductor. Instead, each musician is guided by a shared musical score or a shared vision.
Every player in the orchestra (contributor in the DAO) matters — from the first violinist (core contributors) to the bassoon player (less visible roles). The harmony and beauty of the performance (success of the DAO) depends on each musician’s contribution. Evaluating the impact of each musician in an orchestra is not just about how fast they can play or how loud, but about the quality of their performance, their timing, their teamwork, and their unique contribution to the overall harmony. The same applies to DAOs.
Before I began, I had a bunch of preliminary questions:
What is impact?
How do we evaluate impact?
How do we design frameworks and models for effectively capturing diverse impact?
What metrics should we look out for?
How do we test the frameworks’ effectiveness?
How do we reward impact?
First, what is Impact?
In the context of DAOs, impact refers to the meaningful contribution a member makes towards achieving the DAO’s goals and objectives. It’s about how effectively a member uses their unique skills, resources and efforts to move the needle forward for the DAO.
How do we begin to evaluate impact
DAOs need frameworks that:
- Capture both quantitative and qualitative contributions. Not everything that matters can be measured.
- Account for the diversity of roles and different types of impact. Some roles are invisible but critical.
- Look at the quality, not just the quantity, of contributions.
- Factor in teamwork, collaboration and community building.
- Align with the DAO’s objectives and goals. Impact needs to be defined contextually.
next, I need to write on lessons from contribution analysis, key functions of the technical paper for evaluating impact in the grant, rewards and even governance based on impact-weighted metrics for voting power? the fully automated framework I helped test and its technical architecture, weaknesses of the framework and improvement spots, assigning weights to different contributions and how to effectively test these frameworks.
