Should GnosisDAO fund Community Health analytics and benchmarking?

Governance
1

Hey, I’m Danielo, part of RnDAO. I’d love to hear your feedback on this proposal to champion healthier Web3 communities and provide insights to advance the Gnosis DAO and Gnosis ecosystem.

Simple Summary

If Web3 is all about communities, how do we know if we’re heading in the right direction?

We’ve been advancing a research project to:

  • develop a framework for Community Health with actionable metrics
  • create an open source data collection tool
  • implement the tool in GnosisDAO and others
  • analyse the interactions and perceptions data to validate the framework and provide insights to advance the Gnosis community.

We’re seeking $30,000 or equivalent as grant match-funding to complete the project.

About RnDAO

We’re an R&D DAO with a mission to empower humane collaboration. Having already delivered research projects on sub-DAOs and DAO Conceptual Foundations, Decentralised Leadership, DAO Compensation, and more.

Abstract

Like many others, Gnosis depends on the health of its community and its vibez—yet understanding and measuring these factors (what we call Community Health) is challenging.

Today, Web3 communities are left to rely on infrequent transactions data (on-chain records), while data from the significantly more frequent social interactions is limited to basic indicators of Discord or Discourse, Web2-oriented bots like Statsbot that give simplistic measurements, or a patchwork of “homemade” surveys to fill in the gaps. These solutions are ill-suited for DAO communities, surveys are time-consuming for community managers and contributors to use, and the results of these approaches, hampered by poor indicators and/or poor sampling, are unreliable.

Perhaps even direr, the lack of real-time analytics leaves DAO community leaders and members without established baselines to measure against to understand the impact of community-focused initiatives, identify best practices, monitor shocks to the system, or rapidly gauge the effects of system-wide changes (such as market crashes, protocol migrations, etc.).

Specification

For the conceptual framework, we have assembled a team including two PhDs in network science and an organisation designer with significant DAO and community building experience (myself) to bridge both theory and practice. We’ve reviewed over 50 papers on the topics of Community, Social Network Analysis, Resilience, Trust, Engagement, and more. And are synthesising all of these findings to define the key indicators that have high validity and high predictive capacity for community health, while also taking a holistic perspective that accounts for member’s wellbeing and planning to collect data across communities to offer an ecosystem health scrore too.

For the data collection tool, we’re going beyond traditional surveys.

This research proposal focuses on the use of two critical techniques as a starting point:

Organizational Network Analysis (ONA) is a structured way to visualize how communications, information, and value creation occur through an organization based on interaction graphs. ONA has been shown to provide a wide range of insights to improve contributor retention, avoid member burnout, predict team performance and community resilience, identify key contributors, enable decentralization, and improve coordination. Although relatively new, ONA is gaining in popularity over traditional survey tools.

Pulse Surveys are frequent and automated micro-surveys that provide qualitative and quantitative insights. In traditional organizations, they have been shown to increase employee response rate and employee engagement with related initiatives. They’re also used as a tool for culture design and implementing culture change. Lastly, Pulse Surveys significantly reduce admin work for community managers and related roles.

The data is anonymised and collected in a central repository for this first phase (we’re exploring decentralised hosting) and managed by a team having received ethics training and at risk of losing their credentials should it be misused.

Rationale

The techniques used (ONA based on communication and Pulse Surveys) provide maximum insights on Community Health compared with exclusively on-chain data analysis. And provide minimum disruption for community members and minimal admin compared to long-form surveys and user interviews. Crucially, the techniques selected and the usage of Discord messages increase participation by those less likely to respond to long survey e.g. those less engaged and thus likely with the most valuable feedback to give.

Although our initial focus is Community Health metrics, the proposed approach sets the foundation for further applications. The combination of ONA and pulse surveys offers unprecedented actionable insights in real-time. Some of the potential applications and insights for Gnosis DAO and Gnosis-Chain-based DAOs are:

  • Generate baseline metrics for Community Health / vibez to quantify and better understand the impact that a specific event is having on a community and/or sub-groups within the community
  • Predict which contributors are likely to leave the DAO and take preventive action (without breaching privacy)
  • Build funnels to track member onboarding and identify areas for improvement
  • Identify measurements of decentralization to serve as KPIs or Insights metrics
  • Monitor specific topics like contributor wellbeing, alignment, community experience, etc. in near real-time
  • Attract talent and investment with objective Community Health metrics instead of proxy metrics like member count or proposal count, or financial metrics such as TVL
  • Help new contributors find context-rich mentors outside of the existing pool of well-known but time-poor candidates

In addition to the initial research on Community Health, the potential applications mentioned above (and others to be found) can enable more effective and targeted efforts to build healthier DAO communities.

This research also helps reduce the tooling gap in DAOs compared to the employee and stakeholder experience at traditional corporations.

Why our Team?

We combine deep expertise in Network Science and Organisational Network Mapping, Business Intelligence, DAOs and Community Building.

Team Leads

Katerinabc

Ph.D. in Team Dynamics using Social Network Analysis, Teaching Collaboration, and Organizational Performance at Northwestern University (since 2016).

Co-organized Learning in Networks sessions at the International Conference of Social Network Analysis (2018 - 2020), and previously advised a people analytics company on social network metrics.

Twitter: twitter.com/katerinabohlec

Linkedin: linkedin.com/in/katerinab

Github: https://github.com/katerinabc/

Thegadget.eth

Software Engineer. Previously, Product Manager at Neolyze (Business Intelligence Dashboard for Instagram).

Github: https://github.com/thegadget-eth/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/mr_gadget22

Danielo

Previously, Head of Governance at Aragon, 8 years experience in Organization Design consulting (clients include Google, BCG, Daymler, The UN, and multiple startups), and visiting lecturer at Oxford University.

Twitter*:* https://twitter.com/_Daniel_Ospina

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/conductal/

Note: Other RnDAO members will participate throughout the process in user research, literature review, tool development, and workshop facilitation.

Team Advisor

Sam

Previously, Head of Technical Research at Aragon. Previously, Lead Developer of the official JavaScript API for the Ethereum blockchain.

Github: https://github.com/nivida

Twitter: https://twitter.com/furter_samuel

See additional team members here:

sobol.io/d/rndao/structure?view=circles

Budget & Timeline

Budget

$30,000 in USDC (or equivalent)*

DAO Health Conceptual Framework and translation into actionable metrics: $8,000

Data Collection Tool Development (discord bot for interactions data collection, config front-end, and results dashboard): $17,000

Data Analysis, Insights Report, and Community Workshop: $5,000

  • the requested budget forms part of a total $90,000 target. Total project costs will be split across multiple, participating DAOs (grants already received from Aragon and Aave).

Estimated Timeline
(the work has already begun and we’re currently in week 5 of this roadmap)

Week 1-6

  • Literature Review
  • Data Collection Tool Development

Week 6-8

  • Data Collection Tool Implementation on Discord

Week 8-10

  • Data Analysis and Report Creation
  • Workshop with Grant Sponsor team to discuss findings and recommendations
3 Likes
2

Read the community health article before, really interesting work you’ve done!
Support the proposal and look forward for more community analysis from RnDAO.:grin:

1 Like
3

Thanks Danielo for submitting this, seems for sure an interesting research topic. As you said this is already funded in part by Aave I was looking for some discussion in their forum but I couldn’t find it. Might you point me to it, this could streamline my research.

1 Like
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It didn’t go through their forum but directly to their grant committee, I’m afraid. it’s only for I think 100k+ proposals that it goes through community governance

5

Thanks for clarifying. I found the thread at the Aragon forum and place the link here for everyone interested:

https://forum.aragon.org/t/real-time-community-health-analytics.

6

I have read up a bit on the topic, but the more I read and think about it, the less convinced I am that the proposed budget and time frame is sufficient to answer the most relevant questions regarding ‘community health’

The community, as I understand it, are all the ppl involved in the project. There are some that can easily be targeted: People directly involved in the work and all those who are actively taking part in the discussions on the different channels that will be observed.
But regarding gnosisDAO and especially all the different projects on gnosis chain and their bunch of users (which imho should all seen as part of the community) it seems hard to imagine how these should be traced to be included in the analysis.

Most of them will never be seen in the gnosis disord or forum. Maybe they might be found in different social channels of ‘their’ projects, but maybe not even there on a regular basis, cause if a dapp is running well there isn’t much need for a user to go there.

Anyway, even if the focus of your proposal is the ‘core community’ and team it seems a valuable research topic. Hope to see some more input here from people closer engaged to the GnosisDAO than me.

2 Likes
7

Thanks for the feedback.

We’re indeed using a different definition of “community”. We’re referring not to the whole user base but to those who actually identify with it (e.g. sense of belonging, reciprocity, etc.). For example, someone who uses Uber and doesn’t interact with other users will have no qualms about leaving for a competitor, they are part of the social network but there’s no community there (it’s only transactional). While those that are heavily interacting in a DAO might or might not leave when a shock or competing offer appears (the research will show these groups).

Also, for the many other communities of the different projects, we can apply then the same method proposed here, and begin to connect them. That will indeed take more time and it’s why we’re suggesting this is an ongoing research workstream. The grant allows us to do the foundation and hopefully deploy in a few of these other communities, but at this stage, there’s too much uncertainty to be able to suggest how that will take place. What we can promise is the conceptual framework, building the tool, implementing it in the GnosisDAO discord, and offering those insights.