Whatever good things we build end up building us
Two and a half months ago, Developer DAO was born.
My hope was to spur the creation of a community-owned collective of builders aligned with the same values, ideas, and principles that have inspired me during my career – the opportunity to get paid doing what I love while working towards common goals for the benefit of the world with a major focus on building free and public goods.
There are many people in web3 focused on building cool shit, experimenting at the bleeding edge, and learning in public all while helping other people gain opportunities, and not focused on trading and speculation. These are my people ❤️.
What’s happened so far 🧱
Since the launch of the DAO, the community has gained tremendous momentum, both on Discord and on social media. Our members have stepped up and built out the core infrastructure needed to make a DAO succesful - snapshot voting, forum, website, a wiki, guilds, Github, and and now a newsletter among other things.
We’ve established our missions, values, and goals and have ratified Season 0 via a community snapshot with over 99% consensus.
In the short amount of time since we formed, there have already been multiple projects spun out of the DAO, including Open Palette - a generative art platform by Devin Abbott, which already has over $400,000 in sales.
We are joined by some of the most talented and passionate educators creating high quality blog posts, tutorials, videos, open source projects, and general learning materials to help onboard the next generation of web3 builders.
Developer DAO is a decentralized web3 clearinghouse. We continue to curate and share some of the best web3 learning material in existence through our Twitter account which has been growing by over 10,000 followers per month, almost all of our followers being developers and aspiring developers interested in web3.
We’re also able to use our platform to draw attention to the projects, content, and profiles of our members and others in web3. Many have seen substantial increases in traffic, follows, and likes after joining the DAO. The nature of a DAO combined with our intentional social media focus on DAO members has helped boost the network, visibility, and awareness of those without the fortune of yet owning such a large platform themselves.
We’re already expanding into events, starting with small one-off live streams and meetups and eventually growing into virtual and IRL conferences and hackathons. The first stream with Austin Griffith (👑), only planned a day in advance as an experiment, has been viewed over 5,000 times across platforms.
We’re also exploring the idea of a web3 incubator. As more projects spin out of the DAO, we are in a unique position to support these projects as a collective by providing the resources, connections, and network effects needed to successfully launch new projects and products.
What we aspire to be đź”®
public good - a commodity or service that is provided without profit to all members of a society, either by the government or a private individual or organization
I’m inspired by people like Austin Griffith, Kevin Owocki, and Scott Moore because of their focus on building public goods.
One of the main focuses of our DAO is creating and sharing public goods in the form of content and educational materials, events, open source, and general web3 knowledge. If you follow us on Twitter you probably already recognize that we have one of the best curated feeds of web3 content around.
I think we can set an example of how to create a massive amount of free value for exponentially more people outside of the DAO, while still recognizing the need for sybil resistance of some sort for builders and organizers within the DAO.
As an ethos, we should consider this focus on public goods while still working toward staying solvent by also building projects and doing things that generate revenue for the DAO.
Exciting updates ✨
We recently welcomed Preethi Kasireddy as an advisor! 🔥
We’ve had an enormous amount of interest from investors and other potential supporters. We have not yet decided on all of the ways we will be fundraising for the treasury, but will be sharing a few updates soon.
How we move forward 🪄
On October 29th we ratified our missions, values, and goals.
This set the stage for what is to come next, including our first set of initiatives in continuing to lay the groundwork for what’s to come.
As the name suggests, Season 0 is about laying the foundations for the DAO, while continuing to build upon the momentum we already have.
We will be focused on:
- Finalizing the DAO structure.
- Refining our guidelines for governance.
- Funding the treasury through a handful of collaborations, initiatives, and sponsorships.
- Researching options for a governance token.
- Planning a Season 1 launch event with DAO partners.
We are excited to see what happens next and encourage everyone reading this to follow us on Twitter and subscribe to our newsletter to stay up to speed.
This is an abridged update from my Discourse community post here.