Hi everyone,
I’m Angela, founder of Token Engineering Academy. TE Academy is the first educational institution for this crypto-native new engineering field. Since July 2020, more than 700 students from 21 timezones participated in our programs.
I’d like to propose a collaboration with Gnosis!
In November 2021, we’ll kick-off a community research initiative on Rewards Systems. The goal is to bring together 20-30 researchers from various backgrounds to work on Rewards Systems for DAOs. The work will be based on real DAO cases. We’ll offer an extensive educational program and facilitate the research process to create maximum output.
This is an excellent opportunity for Gnosis Zodiac to create attention, and work collectively on Zodiac DAO Improvement Proposals.
Please find below more information, happy to answer on any questions! 
TLDR
Deliverables:
- Introducing Zodiac:
⁃ workshop with researchers, partners, and DAO stakeholders to create awareness and set the scope for Zodiac DAO Improvement Proposals - Research documentation:
⁃ community researchers work on Rewards Systems and
⁃ document their results in public HackMDs/Github repos
⁃ discuss progress in weekly sessions (sessions are recorded and shared publicly), and
⁃ share their results in a final presentations event (public) - Handover to Zodiac bounty/grant program
⁃ to further develop the most interesting results in DAO Improvement proposals
Program start: November 2021 (preps start now)
Program end: March 2022
Organizer: TokenEngineering Academy | Token Engineering
Funding request: $20K (total funding ~60K, program will be co-funded by several DAOs)
Our motivation
Rewards Systems are a vital element for DAOs to compensate builders for contributions and grant decision-making power and co-ownership to those who are so critical for a DAO’s value. Ecosystem Development via proposals and grants has become a popular method to distribute funds, and establish a shared perspective on value-add. All Rewards Systems need reliable value assignment, to ultimately lead to a healthy reward distribution.
The Governauts Rewards System Research initiative will explore:
- How to best track contributions and account for the richness of value adds that come in many forms: code, communication, care, creativity
- how to assign value, how to define value and associated roles, and permissions
- what do stakeholders expect from rewards, and does the system in place meet these requirements
- what are metrics to measure the reward system healthiness - in its respective lifecycle
The program
We’ll provide education:
- case introductions:
- TE Commons Praise
- 1-2 additional DAO cases with a Rewards System in production (currently in the proposal process)
- partner talks, incl. Zodiac
- Token Engineering fundamentals
- DAO case studies and insights from Gitcoin, CommonsStack, BlockScience, TE Commons, and more
- multidisciplinary insights from game design, behavioral economics, currency design, and monetary theory
and mentoring:
- define an own research question in the scope of Rewards Systems
- use methods from the Token Engineering toolkit
- form multidisciplinary teams
- produce actual outcome
This program is open to anyone, and free. We’ll have an application process to ensure that participants
- have the right background, e.g., Political Science, Behavioral Economics, Mechanism Design or Data Analytics
- commit the next three months to work on Rewards System Research questions
- attend an education program, learn and work on a self-defined research question
Track Record
This program is organized by TE Academy, and part of the Governauts initiative.
The mission of TE Academy is to develop the Token Engineering discipline and grow the number of skilled Token Engineers in crypto. TE Academy has run research initiatives like this several times already:
- Gitcoin Grants Quadratic Funding
- Balancer Simulations
- OMNIPool Engineering and Simulations
- About TE Academy Research Groups
Incubating Governauts is an initiative to establish a dedicated branch in Token Engineering focused on decentralization and governance.
We organize workshops and discussions, provide a platform for collaboration and bring research programs to life with TE Academy.
Team
Along with our core team, we’ll have mentors and governance researchers on board from DAOs like Gitcoin, CommonsStack, BlockScience, TE Commons, and more.
Angela Kreitenweis
Role: Host, organizer
Discord: akrtws (TE Academy) #4246
Background:
Angela has worked in early-stage startups since 2008. In 2018 she co-founded the Token Engineering Community, which has quickly grown into a global network. The Token Engineering Community aims to establish a new engineering discipline for successful and sustainable cryptoeconomic systems. In 2020 she founded TE Academy. TE Academy is part of the TE Commons ecosystem to fund and grow Token Engineering public goods.
Livia
Role: Research Lead
Discord: liviade #1387
Background:
- member of the Commons Stack team
- leading the Cultural Build of the Token Engineering Commons where
she stewards the Soft Governance and Culture working group - guided by the concept of self-sovereignty to nurture environments that
can promote individual agency in collaborative settings. - having a theater and performance background, Livia believes in the
development of everyone’s subjective expression and embodiment of intrinsic motivations as a critical element for participatory decision making
Shawn Anderson
Role: Research Lead, Data Scientist
Background:
- MSc.
- founder of Longtail Financial
- steward of the labs at the Token Engineering Commons, and teaching
assistant at the Token Engineering Academy, - passionate crypto-economic entrepreneur that is applying rigorous
data science techniques to token engineering and actively participating in the scaling of decentralized institutions for incentive alignment around sum-positive economies
Peter Hacker
Role: Educational Programming, Facilitation
Discord: heater #9765
Background:
- Bachelor degree in Economics and Mathematics
- four years in eCommerce data analytics and
business strategy - active TE community member (TEC, cadCAD,
BlockScience, Commons Stack)
Jessica Zartler
Role: Educational Programming, Lectures
Discord: JessicaZartler #2263
Background:
- Governance Researcher (BlockScience, CommonsStack, TE Commons)
- Governauts Ground Control team member
I’m looking forward to the research, collaboration and resource sharing that will occur over the next few months while researching reward systems.
