ProposalsProposal 734
ProposalsProposal 734
“I see the immense potential of this initiative to harness decentralised technology for the betterment of underprivileged segments of society and beyond” Aya Miyaguchi - Executive Director Ethereum Foundation
DAOs, like Nouns, striving to use their resources "for good" often face challenges in channeling them toward meaningful, real-world impact beyond the Web3 ecosystem. We are creating a groundbreaking Web3 infrastructure of hyper-local community DAOs, designed to empower ‘real life' disadvantaged / disempowered communities with resources in a way that is radically more efficient, transparent, and impactful.
Initially funded by the New Zealand government we have already built an easy-to-use, lightweight DAO inspired workflow / governance system (see how it works) that has now been successfully trialled with 15 communities in New Zealand, Australia, and the UK over the last 18 months.
We’ve learned that this system works particularly well with young people. Most recently, we completed our first youth-focused trial, where youth used the tool to propose ideas, vote on priorities, and decide how the money should be spent (see the case study personally funded by Aya Miyaguchi). They then took action to bring their projects to life. This approach gave them hands-on experience with leadership, decision-making, and financial control, while also creating meaningful impact in their community.
To minimise end user friction, to date the platform has been built using traditional Web 2 technologies. We now want to go to the next stage and build out the Web 3 “back-end” infrastructure to allow funds (as stablecoin on a layer 2) to flow from a funder (e.g. Nouns) directly, transparently and incorruptibly to hyper-local community groups who would be empowered to use funds to address a predetermined focus area. Specifically, we want to use the new platform to fund two youth (18-25) groups to take action in the areas of:
These trials will help us further explore how Web3 tools like on-chain funding and transparent decision-making can empower communities, build youth leadership, and deliver measurable social impact. Our goal is to give young people greater control over their future while showcasing how Web3 can support real-world, community-led change.
We see this as a huge opportunity to onboard new segments of society to Web 3, reframe Web 3 as a force for good for people outside the Web 3 ecosystem and shine a light on Nouns as one of the earliest projects to bridge the Web 2 / Web 3 philanthropy gap.
Please see Appendix below for our daft Litepaper that give for more information on “how” we are doing this.
Our Web 2 based “product” is already in use ( in NZ, Australia and the UK), funded by grants from the New Zealand government, Menzies foundation and the founder of Xero.com (Rod Drury).
We are requesting USDC$110,000 in funding from Nouns DAO, which will be spent as follows:
It should be noted that we have a number of streams of work already in place (including supporting our existing trials, building relationships with potential funders and raising money) that we have allocated a separate budget for. The activities / milestones below specifically relate to the Nouns grant work.
Activities
Milestones
We have been working with marginalised community groups for over three years and are therefore aware of the difficulties in predicting timeframes - we have to move at the speed of trust. It is therefore hard to predict how quickly the trials will gain momentum. We will be working closely with all stakeholders to ensure success whilst evolving / building out the product and scaling the platform.
Supporting these trials offers significant value to the Nouns DAO community.
First, the publicity and media coverage surrounding the trials will highlight Nouns’ involvement in empowering youth through innovative Web3 tools. This can help position Nouns DAO as a leader in applying Web3 technology for social good. We believe that it will be easy to capture mainstream media attention in New Zealand and beyond (examples of previous project media attention include - TV Documentary, Business Desk, Devx, Crypto Altruism Podcast, TV3 News, Power to the People Podcast, Radio New Zealand, national newspapers)
Second, these trials will directly demonstrate how cryptocurrencies, smart contracts, and decentralized decision-making can be used in real-world settings to solve community challenges, providing a compelling case for how DAOs can drive positive change. By supporting this project, Nouns DAO can showcase its potential to make an impact in communities, build trust, and attract further partnerships.
Thirdly because our initial target market is youth led projects there is an opportunity not only to onboard them into Web3 but also get them involved in Nouns DAO. This has the potential to bring new energy and bids on Nouns. The younger demographic is more likely to be digital native already (Tik Tok, Fortnite, Roblox) making the jump into a DAO much easier.
And finally we will be open sourcing all our code if we receive this grant thus potentially giving others in the Nouns ecosystem ways to use what we have built. We are also keen to explore a Nouns fork.
The Wellbeing Protocol was founded by Mark Pascall, a New Zealand based crypto OG. Some of the highlights of Mark’s career:
In 2020 he was joined by Benjamin Alder, a designer and social entrepreneur. There are currently two developers also working on the project and we are in the process of hiring two more.
Over the last 3 years the team have been researching, building and running trials across the world. Some of the highlights:
We are going to move forwards with a more community friendly brand for the community facing interface (the app): Hum.Community. The Wellbeing Protocol will stay as the infrastructure provider and ultimately the protocol.
To appreciate the mechanism and potential benefits it is important to first understand the four key stakeholder groups: Communities, Proof of Good Validators (Validators), Funders and The Wellbeing Protocol (TWP)
The initial focus of this project is hyper-local place-based groups of people (typically 15-300) who share a common purpose / challenge. Our experience is that if these groups are given relatively small amounts of financial capital and the right tools/support they will work together to make a positive impact. We will refer to them as communities. For example:
Note that a person can be part of more than one community and community members are generally persistent (i.e. people don’t come and go) and set up to solve a continuous problem (i.e. not a single/specific project)
Typical community needs/desires:
Proof of Good Validators (Validators) are existing organisations working in the community development space. Some characteristics of typical ideal Validators:
Typical Validator needs/desires:
Any individual or entity who wants to use financial capital to do good in the world. Our focus is on the increasing number of well resourced DAO’s who may want to do good in the real world using Web 3 rails however it could theoretically range from a teenager with $40 through to high net worth individuals, foundations, government social welfare agencies.
Note that within the existing social welfare and philanthropic / charity sector a huge amount of resources are devoted to trying to get money to the segments of society that most need it. Increasing numbers of philanthropists are moving towards “empowerment philanthropy”.
Typical funder needs/desires:
TWP would oversee the development and maintenance of the infrastructure and all assets needed (e.g. training resources and communities of interest). TWP would become a DAO, or Steward owned entity, i.e. an entity that instills two core principles into the DNA of a business: self-governance and profits serve purpose. These structures ensure that:
TWP needs/desires are:
Figure A - High level money/data flow
The basic concept is that we want to create an ecosystem of incentives that support the needs / desires of the stakeholders described above. Our goal is to create a world where:
Figure B - Mockups of Funder / Validator Dashboards to be built
Communities would use a simple to use workflow / governance app that uses Web 3 inspired governance techniques (e.g. quadratic/conviction/delegated voting etc) to create an ongoing stream of proposals for microgrants that would go directly to individual community members. Note this part of the system is live and has been tested in 16 trials in three countries over the last 18 months via our participatory grantmaking app. Note that much of the inspiration for what we have built came from work by Jeff Emmet from Common Stack. See “Conviction Voting: A Novel Continuous Decision Making Alternative to Governance. Jeff is a supporter of the project.
Figure C - screen shots from existing live application being used in three countries.
Note
The current systems for funding / supporting the most marginalised / disadvantaged / vulnerable segment in our society is complex, bureaucratic and inefficient. It often involves numerous intermediaries (often competing for the same pots of money) and a lack of transparency. We believe this system can radically change this by offering a complementary system that is more efficient, transparent, resilient and community empowering. We have already proven that traditional funders are happy to pay for those benefits. Our business model is to take a small % of the funds going into the system. This might start high but reduce as we scale and the funding total increases. We are a not-for-profit and propose to be radically transparent with all our finances.
Over the last 18 months we have been working with communities to build and refine the workflow/governance app interface and working with Validators (community development organisations) to build out the assets (e.g. training material, best practices etc) to support communities in different parts of the world. Our objective is to continue to organically grow out the number of Validators and trials (and therefore feedback) whilst building out the product features and moving onto Web 3 rails (Ethereum L2).
Once a community is engaged and trusts the system (as they have for all our trials) it give us a powerful foundation to build out additional functionality / tools in response to community feedback. So far we have had requests including community savings pools, volunteer coordination tools, community “voice” amplification tools, alternative governance mechanisms etc.
Once this is replicated thousands or millions of times the result is a highly resilient, decentralised network of grassroots changemakers. As we start to connect them, they start to become a powerful movement.
We will be following an Agile process with a two week sprint cycle.
The key parallel workstreams are:
Once we have got to a scale where the business model and impact is proven then we anticipate building out a tokenomic strategy that allows us to scale further.
“I see the immense potential of this initiative to harness decentralised technology for the betterment of underprivileged segments of society and beyond” Aya Miyaguchi - Executive Director Ethereum Foundation
DAOs, like Nouns, striving to use their resources "for good" often face challenges in channeling them toward meaningful, real-world impact beyond the Web3 ecosystem. We are creating a groundbreaking Web3 infrastructure of hyper-local community DAOs, designed to empower ‘real life' disadvantaged / disempowered communities with resources in a way that is radically more efficient, transparent, and impactful.
Initially funded by the New Zealand government we have already built an easy-to-use, lightweight DAO inspired workflow / governance system (see how it works) that has now been successfully trialled with 15 communities in New Zealand, Australia, and the UK over the last 18 months.
We’ve learned that this system works particularly well with young people. Most recently, we completed our first youth-focused trial, where youth used the tool to propose ideas, vote on priorities, and decide how the money should be spent (see the case study personally funded by Aya Miyaguchi). They then took action to bring their projects to life. This approach gave them hands-on experience with leadership, decision-making, and financial control, while also creating meaningful impact in their community.
To minimise end user friction, to date the platform has been built using traditional Web 2 technologies. We now want to go to the next stage and build out the Web 3 “back-end” infrastructure to allow funds (as stablecoin on a layer 2) to flow from a funder (e.g. Nouns) directly, transparently and incorruptibly to hyper-local community groups who would be empowered to use funds to address a predetermined focus area. Specifically, we want to use the new platform to fund two youth (18-25) groups to take action in the areas of:
These trials will help us further explore how Web3 tools like on-chain funding and transparent decision-making can empower communities, build youth leadership, and deliver measurable social impact. Our goal is to give young people greater control over their future while showcasing how Web3 can support real-world, community-led change.
We see this as a huge opportunity to onboard new segments of society to Web 3, reframe Web 3 as a force for good for people outside the Web 3 ecosystem and shine a light on Nouns as one of the earliest projects to bridge the Web 2 / Web 3 philanthropy gap.
Please see Appendix below for our daft Litepaper that give for more information on “how” we are doing this.
Our Web 2 based “product” is already in use ( in NZ, Australia and the UK), funded by grants from the New Zealand government, Menzies foundation and the founder of Xero.com (Rod Drury).
We are requesting USDC$110,000 in funding from Nouns DAO, which will be spent as follows:
It should be noted that we have a number of streams of work already in place (including supporting our existing trials, building relationships with potential funders and raising money) that we have allocated a separate budget for. The activities / milestones below specifically relate to the Nouns grant work.
Activities
Milestones
We have been working with marginalised community groups for over three years and are therefore aware of the difficulties in predicting timeframes - we have to move at the speed of trust. It is therefore hard to predict how quickly the trials will gain momentum. We will be working closely with all stakeholders to ensure success whilst evolving / building out the product and scaling the platform.
Supporting these trials offers significant value to the Nouns DAO community.
First, the publicity and media coverage surrounding the trials will highlight Nouns’ involvement in empowering youth through innovative Web3 tools. This can help position Nouns DAO as a leader in applying Web3 technology for social good. We believe that it will be easy to capture mainstream media attention in New Zealand and beyond (examples of previous project media attention include - TV Documentary, Business Desk, Devx, Crypto Altruism Podcast, TV3 News, Power to the People Podcast, Radio New Zealand, national newspapers)
Second, these trials will directly demonstrate how cryptocurrencies, smart contracts, and decentralized decision-making can be used in real-world settings to solve community challenges, providing a compelling case for how DAOs can drive positive change. By supporting this project, Nouns DAO can showcase its potential to make an impact in communities, build trust, and attract further partnerships.
Thirdly because our initial target market is youth led projects there is an opportunity not only to onboard them into Web3 but also get them involved in Nouns DAO. This has the potential to bring new energy and bids on Nouns. The younger demographic is more likely to be digital native already (Tik Tok, Fortnite, Roblox) making the jump into a DAO much easier.
And finally we will be open sourcing all our code if we receive this grant thus potentially giving others in the Nouns ecosystem ways to use what we have built. We are also keen to explore a Nouns fork.
The Wellbeing Protocol was founded by Mark Pascall, a New Zealand based crypto OG. Some of the highlights of Mark’s career:
In 2020 he was joined by Benjamin Alder, a designer and social entrepreneur. There are currently two developers also working on the project and we are in the process of hiring two more.
Over the last 3 years the team have been researching, building and running trials across the world. Some of the highlights:
We are going to move forwards with a more community friendly brand for the community facing interface (the app): Hum.Community. The Wellbeing Protocol will stay as the infrastructure provider and ultimately the protocol.
To appreciate the mechanism and potential benefits it is important to first understand the four key stakeholder groups: Communities, Proof of Good Validators (Validators), Funders and The Wellbeing Protocol (TWP)
The initial focus of this project is hyper-local place-based groups of people (typically 15-300) who share a common purpose / challenge. Our experience is that if these groups are given relatively small amounts of financial capital and the right tools/support they will work together to make a positive impact. We will refer to them as communities. For example:
Note that a person can be part of more than one community and community members are generally persistent (i.e. people don’t come and go) and set up to solve a continuous problem (i.e. not a single/specific project)
Typical community needs/desires:
Proof of Good Validators (Validators) are existing organisations working in the community development space. Some characteristics of typical ideal Validators:
Typical Validator needs/desires:
Any individual or entity who wants to use financial capital to do good in the world. Our focus is on the increasing number of well resourced DAO’s who may want to do good in the real world using Web 3 rails however it could theoretically range from a teenager with $40 through to high net worth individuals, foundations, government social welfare agencies.
Note that within the existing social welfare and philanthropic / charity sector a huge amount of resources are devoted to trying to get money to the segments of society that most need it. Increasing numbers of philanthropists are moving towards “empowerment philanthropy”.
Typical funder needs/desires:
TWP would oversee the development and maintenance of the infrastructure and all assets needed (e.g. training resources and communities of interest). TWP would become a DAO, or Steward owned entity, i.e. an entity that instills two core principles into the DNA of a business: self-governance and profits serve purpose. These structures ensure that:
TWP needs/desires are:
Figure A - High level money/data flow
The basic concept is that we want to create an ecosystem of incentives that support the needs / desires of the stakeholders described above. Our goal is to create a world where:
Figure B - Mockups of Funder / Validator Dashboards to be built
Communities would use a simple to use workflow / governance app that uses Web 3 inspired governance techniques (e.g. quadratic/conviction/delegated voting etc) to create an ongoing stream of proposals for microgrants that would go directly to individual community members. Note this part of the system is live and has been tested in 16 trials in three countries over the last 18 months via our participatory grantmaking app. Note that much of the inspiration for what we have built came from work by Jeff Emmet from Common Stack. See “Conviction Voting: A Novel Continuous Decision Making Alternative to Governance. Jeff is a supporter of the project.
Figure C - screen shots from existing live application being used in three countries.
Note
The current systems for funding / supporting the most marginalised / disadvantaged / vulnerable segment in our society is complex, bureaucratic and inefficient. It often involves numerous intermediaries (often competing for the same pots of money) and a lack of transparency. We believe this system can radically change this by offering a complementary system that is more efficient, transparent, resilient and community empowering. We have already proven that traditional funders are happy to pay for those benefits. Our business model is to take a small % of the funds going into the system. This might start high but reduce as we scale and the funding total increases. We are a not-for-profit and propose to be radically transparent with all our finances.
Over the last 18 months we have been working with communities to build and refine the workflow/governance app interface and working with Validators (community development organisations) to build out the assets (e.g. training material, best practices etc) to support communities in different parts of the world. Our objective is to continue to organically grow out the number of Validators and trials (and therefore feedback) whilst building out the product features and moving onto Web 3 rails (Ethereum L2).
Once a community is engaged and trusts the system (as they have for all our trials) it give us a powerful foundation to build out additional functionality / tools in response to community feedback. So far we have had requests including community savings pools, volunteer coordination tools, community “voice” amplification tools, alternative governance mechanisms etc.
Once this is replicated thousands or millions of times the result is a highly resilient, decentralised network of grassroots changemakers. As we start to connect them, they start to become a powerful movement.
We will be following an Agile process with a two week sprint cycle.
The key parallel workstreams are:
Once we have got to a scale where the business model and impact is proven then we anticipate building out a tokenomic strategy that allows us to scale further.