Barracuda Offers a SAAS Solution | BanklessDAO Weekly Rollup

Catch Up With What Happened This Week in BanklessDAO

Sep 24

Dear Bankless Nation 🏴,

This has been a tremendously productive week in bDAO. Forum proposals are up for discussion, Bankless Publishing has initiated a newsletter, there are global events with bDAO representation in the works, and several of our projects are hitting key milestones. Bankless Card is looking to start their pre-seed funding round, Bankless Academy will soon release their sixth lesson, and the Mad Hatter project is expanding in several ways including multi-language support for bot commands. There’s rarely a dull moment in bDAO.

Educational opportunities abound. DAOlationships is hosting two of these — an AMA on DeSci and a demo focused on online activism. The Education Guild’s learning sessions for next week are How to GitCoin and How to Coordinape. Don’t miss a Level Up opportunity from AV/Design Guilds which will feature color grading in Premier Pro.

Several weeks ago bDAO was provided with an operational review by the Barracuda team. The team produced a report examining five key pain points observed through their own interactions in our Discord and interviews with several regular contributors. This week’s editorial summarizes those points along with Barracuda’s proposed solution for BanklessDAO.

Congratulations to our latest L2 nominees Mag, anointingthompson1.eth, Kutubu, Og, Crown, taylans, and fiyin!

Contributors: anointingthompson1, Austin Foss, d0wnlore, Chameleon, Trewkat, siddhearta, HiroKennelly

This is an official newsletter of BanklessDAO. To unsubscribe, edit your settings.

🙏 Sponsored by humanDAO

Uplifting underserved communities with Web3's most useful NFT.

🗓 Weekly Recap

Community Highlights

🌐 Global Events

DAO ni Nini session at ETHSafari. Source: Sharon Jebitok on Twitter

BanklessDAO is showing up and representing our community all around the world over the next month. MCON was a huge success, with the bDAO sponsored GM Bus showing up strong; stay tuned to YouTube on Monday for a a trailer and some cool shorts. ETHSafari has been happening all this week; a huge shout out to Morte-ch and Miss Purple (pictured above) and the team for representing.

Come October, bDAO will be present at events on two continents. At Ibiza NXT from October 13-15 we will have our own panel present and a ticket giveaway. Eth.Panama will be running from October 26-28 and we are looking for a team to represent bDAO in Latin America.

#️⃣ WeAreDAO

Bankless IMN 🦇🔊🏴 @IMNbankless

This week #WeAreDAO features a pillar of our community! Active in bankless Academy, Fight Club, bDAO Global events, and as a DAOlationships AMA host, you must have already interacted with him in one way or the other. A true CORE contributor. Thank you @theNFThinker 🙏🚀😍

This week, Flowscience is in the hot seat, discussing bittersweet serendipity, which sounds like an ice-cream flavour, but is not.

What is your favourite DeFi protocol?
Ref.finance
What is your favourite ice-cream flavour?
Half-baked or if I have to choose something normal it's a tie between mint cookie crumble and cookie dough. Strawberry milkshakes though, FTW!
Which of the NFTs that you own is your favourite?
Check this guy out:

Where would you love to travel to?
Around the world via motorcycle and boat.
What did you aspire to before you discovered crypto, and has that changed at all?
I was running a startup lab I built from scratch for 6 years. It was a bit beyond what myself and the team could handle but luckily we spun out a non-profit data publishing DAO before it closed.

Through crypto and BanklessDAO I was able to move full-time into DAOs and DeSci over the past year. It's been incredibly difficult but equally rewarding. Bittersweet serendipity. I'm still hoping to continue lab work at some point, but it'll be using what I've learned on this new path to do something better.

That’s it — short and sweet! If you would like to be featured in Kat’s Roll Call, answer the questions via this form, and keep consuming the Weekly Rollup goodness.

What’s New

🎙 BanklessDAO Podcasts

Get Involved

🎁 DAOlationships Demos

Next week DAOlationships Guild has two presentations scheduled. On Tuesday September 27 there will be an AMA in the BanklessDAO Twitter Spaces at 20:00 UTC, presented by senad.eth to talk about talentDAO and DeSci.

Join in on Wednesday September 28 at 18:30 UTC in the #Watercooler voice channel to hear about Wistaverse, a dedicated online community for digital activism.

📚 LEVEL UP Session

Do you want to learn more about some of the tools used in the Web2 and Web3 space? If so, join anointingthompson1.eth as he helps you LEVEL UP your color grading game with Premiere Pro. Head over to the learning-opportunities channel to add your availability on the lettucemeet.

📖 How to Gitcoin Session

This brand new “How to” session from Education Guild covers Gitcoin. Learn how we can contribute to the projects we believe in and help grow the Web3 ecosystem during the different Gitcoin Grants rounds. Join Fine in the #Watercooler voice channel on Wednesday September 28 at 13:00 UTC. Click here to RSVP to the event.

📖 How to Coordinape Session

Coordinape is a platform for DAOs to easily and fairly distribute resources to contributors. The Education Guild is repeating the How to Coordinape session, just in time for the October DAO-wide Coordinape. If you are new and want to be involved in the next Coordinape round, join Quietfox in the #Watercooler voice channel on Thursday, September 29 at 13:00 UTC. Click here to RSVP to the event.

🙏 Sponsor: humanDAO — improving lives through crypto.

Barracuda Offers a SAAS Solution

Author: Austin Foss

Earlier this month we were given an “Operational Deep Dive” report of BanklessDAO’s processes, thanks to the team at Barracuda. This team has already engaged with bDAO through their Cuda Pages project — used to create a bDAO-associated links page available via our Twitter account.

Barracuda’s report outlines five pain points:

Partnership Management
Grants Management
Contributor Payments
Getting Access to the Apps People Need
Communicating with the Right People

Barracuda cites having worked with and interviewed bDAO contributors NF Thinker, Senad, Ornella, 0xRene, and Mr. V during the research phase of this report.

The Five Pain Points

1. Partnership Management

The DAOlationships Guild currently provides a customer relationship management (CRM) service for bDAO and manages this manually through both Discord and their Notion page. Barracuda’s observations of the CRM found these five issues with the current process:

Inefficient use of contributor time.
Missed partnership opportunities.
Existing partnerships difficult to track and manage.
No clear driver of the partnership to continue engagement.
Reputational risk associated with lack of clarity.

In the sources section of the report, there are links to a document containing several screenshots of Discord conversations, all but the first concerning bDAO’s CRM, as evidence of problems and existing interest to improve the process.

Next, Barracuda identifies seven key outcomes of an effective solution:

Automated filtering of irrelevant or poor-quality partnership requests (spam).
Prospective partnerships can meet requirements asynchronously.
All required background information is present before a team reviews it.
Objective partnership approval process by quantitative data and analysis.
Resources from involved Guilds committed to prior to approvals.
Ongoing partnerships assigned a driver.
A single dashboard for all ongoing partnerships.

2. Grants Management

Barracuda points out that although our grants process is well organized regarding intake, the evaluation process has room for improvement. Considering their observation that nearly every project is approved, they made the following four interpretations:

Capital allocation is not aligned with DAO longevity.
Less capital is being directed to more credible projects.
There is unclear return on investments.
Tracking of ongoing grants by non-committee members is unclear through Notion.

To address these concerns Barracuda’s solution would include:

Reduced subjectivity of approvals through quantitative data and analysis.
A single dashboard for all grants, approved or otherwise.
Assigned drivers for each grant, currently called champions.
Data collection of grant performance to inform future approvals.

3. Contributor Payments

Payment of guild and project contributors is compiled and executed manually. For each guild, Barracuda estimates that it takes more than six hours per month to account for each contributor’s payout. This info is pulled from role salaries, bounties on Notion, bounties on Dework, and Coordinape. Of the conversations cited in the aforementioned document, the one about this pain point alludes to some friction in Coordinape’s operation.

If contributors want to monitor this range of payouts for themselves they have to then compile across all those sources. Barracuda identified two key pain points in the payment process:

Identification of the amount each contributor is owed.
Execution of the multi-sig necessary to send payments out.

Complete automation of the payment process is not realistic given the requirements of a multi-sig, but the Barracuda team believes there are two outcomes a solution should provide:

Reduced time accumulating the complete list of contributor payments.
Faster submission to the multi-sig and collection of signatures.

4. Getting Access to the Apps People Need

Here the Barracuda team addresses the sprawl of DAO infrastructure; Discord, Dash, Figma, GitHub, Notion, and so on. User management would ideally include:

A single point of reference that propagates permissions across all DAO applications.
All necessary permissions granted to new members with one action.
Easier off-boarding of former members by revoking permissions with one action.

5. Communicating with the Right People

Communication in a Discord server as vast as bDAO’s has always involved a steep learning curve. From being swamped with notifications to finding which ones are personally relevant can be time consuming and Barracuda sees this as an opportunity to streamline this process for every contributor. A positive solution would provide:

Per-member appropriate notifications for meetings, events, and proposals.
Dynamic group messaging instead of guild- or project-wide notifications.
Capability for contributors to rank notifications in order of priority.
Targeted digests to reduce time catching up.
Limits on irrelevant tagging.
Integration of these improvements within Discord.

Barracuda’s Solution

Pilot Program

Barracuda’s end goal is to offer a suite of tools in a Software as a Service (SaaS) model. Before that stage, and to fund development of their software, Barracuda is asking BanklessDAO for a 1,000 USDC deposit to launch a pilot program alongside three to five other DAOs.

The pilot would include:

Close collaboration to create a tailor-made solution for bDAO.
Barracuda’s design, engineering, and product resources to build the software.
Audit of the key performance indicators (KPIs)
Dedicated communication with Barracuda for a twelve hour service-level agreement (SLA).
Personalized support during the software creation process.
Transition, training, and implementation assistance.
Price lock-in after the pilot program.

Following the pilot program Barracuda expects the enterprise tier for their SaaS software package to be “well over $1,000/month”, but for participation in the pilot program bDAO would be offered one year of all-in access for $1000/month.

Barracuda’s Planned Solution

From the five pain points Barracuda identified, their recommendation is to prioritize management of partnerships and grants. Components of planned implementation include:

Smart forms that collect all required information from partner and grant applicants.
An all-in-one dashboard aggregating necessary information and easy next steps.
CRM integration tracking partnership and grant lifespans, follow ups, and KPIs.
Analytics reports on the impacts of partnerships and grants.
Automation of and integration with our existing tools.

Barracuda provided this diagram as a visual reference:

Weighing Up the Pros and Cons

Credit to Barracuda for being transparent about the potential downsides to bDAO. These include time investment, cost, and execution.

The time spent developing a new software suite and the engagement with the customer, bDAO, could be greater than expected for both parties, but that is the cost of having a well-tuned solution at the end of development.

Financial cost, both the deposit and the monthly subscription, might seem out of place in a world of free software, but Barracuda are offering to refund the deposit if the bDAO community is not satisfied with the end product.

Execution is potentially the most significant downside; will the solution produce sufficient process improvement to justify the associated costs?

Barracuda lists two methods to track the success of their proposal:

Direct savings in terms of salaries. Using the example of guild and project treasurers each taking an average of 6 hours per month, Barracuda believes that this could be refined to one hour each per month.
Improved contributor experience. Barracuda plans to demonstrate this with an increased Net Promoter Score (NPS) in a dedicated contributor NPS survey prior to the start of their engagement and another taken three months after implementation.

No O’fish’al Word Yet

Barracuda’s proposal has not yet made its way to the Forum, and it’s unknown if anything further will come from this report. If nothing else, bDAO would do well to consider how to implement some of its recommendations. Regardless, stay tuned for further discussion or engage now via the existing Discord thread on the topic.

Resources

Barracuda Primary Report
Barracuda’s Observations of bDAO’s Discord
Barracuda Website
BanklessDAO’s Cuda Page
Barracuda’s answers to questions posed by RunTheJewelz in Discord.

🎣 Phishing School

Authors: d0wnlore and the InfoSec Team

Why Bring Your Pseudonym IRL?

A few weeks ago I had the opportunity to attend MCON 2. This was a highlight event for me as far as conferences go, even if it just felt like a bunch of old and new friends getting together to have fun and talk DAOs, which was certainly a good thing.

But those who have met me IRL know that I prefer to still refer to myself by my online handle, d0wnlore, whenever I can. I’ve met others at MCON 2 that prefer to do the same. But this can rub some people the wrong way, especially those new to the crypto space or cypherpunk culture. Are we playing this whole Web3 identity thing a little bit too hard by still referring to ourselves by our Discord, Twitter or ENS nicknames after the other person just introduced themselves by their given name?

Here are three key reasons you might want to maintain your pseudonym IRL. We’ll explore each of these further.

You value your privacy and want to decide when, how, and with whom you reveal parts of your real identity.
You like to role play or take on different identities that outwardly represent different parts of your personality or capabilities.
Your safety demands that you keep parts of your identity secret, either due to past incidents or having a threat model where risk to your safety is particularly high.

You Value Your Privacy

Let’s face it, the data we release onto the internet, even through private APIs and databases that only a few machines or highly-privileged people should have access to, can be used and abused in a variety of ways. The general public is now aware of the possible consequences of our lax relationship with data protection, but few of us are willing to put in the effort needed to protect it. Those with pseudonyms are some of those that want to protect their data and realize that even data given to others IRL can be leaked downstream through the internet (photos of you being attributed to your real name as an example).

Most traditional businesses and Web2 industries that have the power of mass data capture will do the bare minimum to avoid practices that jeopardize your privacy. Against such adversaries, it’s useful to pre-emptively control the dissemination of our real identity in ways that we know have more predictable results: we share them with people, not corporations or APIs, that we know and trust.

You Role Play

There’s something to be said about people who always refer to themselves by pseudonyms — that it lends them an air of mystery (or at least I’d like to think that 😅). Assuming a different identity, Jason Bourne style, allows you to assume that identity’s persona and focus on their unique aspects — background, skill sets, communication style — and ignore the limitations that may tag along with your real identity. Others may also have an easier time associating the real you with your online you if they have just a pseudonym to frame all the context under, if that pseudonym has fame/notoriety for doing specific things.

If you are ever familiar with cosplay or live-action role-playing (LARPing) you see how this can be expressed in the real world. But for many of us in Web3, we just want to shed parts of our real identity and cover them with new parts that we have full control of going forward, while we have fun doing it.

Your Safety Demands It

You may have been a victim of doxing, harassment, unjustified arrest, or another unfortunate event related to who you are, what you do, or people you associate with. Or you may have a certain status or notoriety that makes the chances of these events happening in your future more likely. Having all information related to your real identity in the open can increase this risk. By adopting a pseudonym and hiding parts of our real identity we can mitigate the attempts at harm.

As with those that are concerned about their privacy, those concerned about safety foremost want to pick and choose how their real identities are displayed. But when the stakes are higher it may necessitate having to hide information even from those they know and trust, to reduce second-order effects such as real names being leaked through stolen chat logs.

🏛 Governance

Snapshot Votes

📜 BanklessDAO Constitution and bDIP Standard

The BanklessDAO Constitution represents BanklessDAO’s values, mission, structure, processes, and governance according to the best of our community’s ability to capture it. It is the codification of our community operating system, meant to serve rather than constrain its members. This Snapshot is to adopt the BanklessDAO Constitution as our lead governance document and the location of our living agreements within the DAO. Please vote here.

Proposals in Discussion

🧪 Test DAO Proposal

Test DAO is looking to improve the adoption of blockchain technology, by providing a solutions hub to common barriers and offering, simplifying, and teaching a variety of DeFi solutions.

Test DAO aims to do this by exploring, documenting use cases, hands-on testing, thoroughly reviewing, evaluating, and subsequently simplifying and teaching these innovative technologies and tools to facilitate the onboarding process and empower future blockchain contributors to expand the ecosystem collectively. Check out the updated version of the proposal here.

💸 Member-Based Guild Funding

During the Season 6 funding round, The Grants Committee will be implementing the automatic guild funding mechanism (now called member-based guild funding). To begin with, current Guilds will each choose to be designated as Guilds or Departments for Season 6 funding.

All Guilds/Departments must then provide a Forum post that describes progress made during the previous season as well as plans for the next season.

Guilds must also include a list of their active members and a calculation of their definition of active members, but there is no requirement for a detailed budget.
Departments must also include a detailed accounting from the previous season and a detailed budget for the next season.

Check out the updated proposal and definitions of Guild and Department here.

💳 Bankless Card Pre-Seed Funding Request

Since the last update in April, near the end of Season 3, the Bankless Card project team has been hard at work. Over the past five months the team has refined their playbook and pitch decks, met with both Visa and Mastercard, applied to become a Delaware legal entity, and among many other achievements the team has grown to more than 25 contributors.

Bankless Card’s ask in this proposal is for 4,405,020 BANK, broken down in three parts:

2,793,020 BANK for Season 5, to help obtain external funding.
1,300,000 BANK for retroactive funding for Season 4.
312,000 BANK for retroactive funding for Season 3.

For a full breakdown of progress to date and plans for the future, don’t miss this Forum proposal.

✅ Action Items

🧐 Review the transition to member-based guild funding and provide feedback.

🦉 Learn how to use Web3 tools through a range of upskilling opportunities.

🏃‍♀️ Catch up: Review this week's Community Call notes or listen to the recording.

🙏 Thanks to Our Sponsor

humanDAO

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