Expert Networks

[joeycharlesworth]

Aragon Nest Proposal: Aragon Expert Network

Abstract

With knowledge and noise all around us, it’s hard to know who you can really trust. We propose to create a verifiable, reputation-based human resources marketplace: The Aragon Expert Network.

This network based app aims to connect DAOs on Aragon with subject matter experts including software engineers, sales & marketing engineers, designers, and business consultants globally - either for one-off consultations, longer-term projects, advisory positions or full-time hires. Subject matter experts are members of the wider Aragon ecosystem that have proven their skills through the completion of tasks within Aragon DAOs and have opted-in to be listed in the Aragon Expert Network.

Building a startup is currently much harder that it needs to be with founders often asking themselves questions such as:

Who would be a great mentor for my startup?
Who should I contact for advice regarding X?
Who should I engage for project Y?
Who should be hired for role Z?

Built on top of Aragon OS, this network application aims to enable Aragon DAOs to access the smartest people across the Aragon network at lightning speeds whilst improving decision making.

DAOs can choose to pay experts in whatever token is available in their vault including their native token, helping align long-term interests with advisors and service providers.

Reputation

Colony.io have made some solid efforts with reputation tracking of Colony members. We propose to collaborate with the Colony core team to bring the same system of member reputation tracking into Aragon DAOs. Broadly, this will include:

• Enabling DAOs to set custom skill sets and domains
• Assigning reputation tracking to DAO members based on performance and activity
• Calculating reputation for each member on a universal basis

We believe the future of venture capital lies in "venture-as-a-service", which includes expert networks - and we’re not alone.

“If I created a Venture Fund, I would create a firm with virtual services, not too different from the a16z model, but without employing people. So I would get CPOs, Engineering Talent, Marketing people who wanted to be involved with the venture fund and provide services. The reach in that case may be greater than the reach we currently have. You would create a network of people who could help companies without necessarily hiring them. They would get shares, have the privilege of investing with the venture firm, maybe get a little carry…that would be cool!”
Peter Livine, Andreessen Horowitz

Deliverables

• Implementation of a member reputation algorithm applied to users on an individual/organisation and network wide basis, such as the one used by Colony.io including reputation decay
• A dedicated app built on top of AragonOS with the following functionality:
• Ability to browse members/addresses across all Aragon organisations. Members will be filterable by relevant fields to the user such as:

1. Skills
2. Reputation
3. Hourly Rate
4. Total amount earned

• Ability to create a job posting and invite a single or multiple experts to bid on it (Autark’s “Project” app could potentially be used for this)

NB: It’s possible we will be able to build this on top of Aragon ID and the ongoing integration work with 3Box.

Grant size

Funding: Up to 50k DAI, split into chunks paid out over achieved deliverables.
Success reward: up to 50k ANT, given out when the final public release is ready.

Proof of Concept

Numerous examples exist of successful centralised expert networks, including:

Clarity.fm - 30,000 experts globally, aimed at startups.
GLG - 650,000 experts globally, aimed at investors.

[joeycharlesworth]

Notes from the group discussion of the expert network at the Aragon Berlin Meetup

Summary: The proposed expert network is a directory of all Aragon DAO members, together with their skills and associated reputation. The following opportunities and challenges were identified during the group discussion:

• A freelancer marketplace like Bounties.Network or Upwork could be created as part of the expert network. Alternatively, we could just integrate or fork bounties.network. This could be used for hiring proven talent, which is typically the largest challenge that founders have when building a startup.

• It was suggested that the expert network could also provide a critical missing part of the architecture for Aragon’s upcoming arbitration court. Specifically, it would enable a fairer system to decide who is qualified to arbitrate a specific issue.

• It was suggested that “reputation and tasks” could be a strong motivator to drive users to the Aragon network. Seeing what tasks you can perform for Aragon DAOs and knowing that you will earn a reputation score for doing them would likely increase the number of people wanting to work for Aragon DAOs.

• It could be used as a filtering system to reduce the amount of notifications to users and “Information Overload” through more targeted filtering of tasks based on a user’s skill sets. For example, when assigning new arbitration requests or other tasks created from within other Aragon DAOs (such as with the Open Enterprise “Projects” app), related notifications could be sent only to users with matching skills in that domain. This would also be useful in helping the overall communication and proposal making systems to scale through more targeted notifications.

• It was suggested to integrate Sourcecred, a reputation protocol for open collaboration. Sourcerank uses the PageRank algorithm to generate a score, called cred for every contribution. By integrating Sourcecred into the Expert Network, it would enable us to understand how worthy member contributions were to Github repos, Twitter, Discourse forums etc. This would generate valuable reputation-based data points for both technical and non-technical communities. It is envisaged that Sourcecred would just be one data source of many that makes up a users’ weighted reputation score. Other potential data sources include:

  • a) The task rating given to a user upon task completion within the Open Enterprise “Project” app.
  • b) Member reputations on Bounties.Network.

• It was also suggested to integrate 3box (already ongoing by Autark) to view more friendly user profiles together with their native user identity validation (Facebook, Twitter, Github etc). The idea would be to then display the user’s skills and reputation score next to their 3box generated profile.

• The exact formula to calculate reputation requires further research and continuous optimisation. Some members thought it was unfair to use “amount paid” to an individual as a reputation proxy, given that pay asymmetries exist based on people’s geographic location, discrimination etc.

• Another idea was to use “member reputation” as an optional method of distributing DAO proceeds between its members instead of existing distribution methods such as proportion of tokens held.

[LouisGrx]

Hey @joeycharlesworth, a few questions to start the discussion hoping others can join us :)

We propose to collaborate with the Colony core team to bring the same system of member reputation tracking into Aragon DAOs.

• Are you guys in touch with anyone from Colony?

Implementation of a member reputation algorithm applied to users on an individual/organisation and network wide basis, such as the one used by Colony.io including reputation decay

• I'm not an expert of Colony's reputation system, could you please explain the main principles in a few sentences? How granular and skill specific is it? Any concrete example you could point me at?

Ability to browse members/addresses across all Aragon organisations. Members will be filterable by relevant fields to the user such as:

• I'm not technical enough to deepdive in each statement, but it feels like there are multiple technical challenges here. Have you guys have started thinking about the architecture of the solution using the Aragon Stack? What would be taken care of on-chain and otherwise what technology would you use for computation heavy tasks?

Success reward: up to $50k in ANT, given out when the final public release is ready.

• For informational purpose: the ANT amount is capped to 30K per proposal in the Nest program.

[joeycharlesworth]

Hey @LouisGrx.

"Are you guys in touch with anyone from Colony?"

I spoke with one of the Colony core team members and they don't want to put any of their resources on this. Fair enough, completely understandable.

I'm not an expert of Colony's reputation system, could you please explain the main principles in a few sentences? How granular and skill specific is it? Any concrete example you could point me at?

• A user earns reputation for completing a task based on the specific skills that task was tagged with.
• Should there be multiple skills tagged, then reputation is divided equally based on the number of skills added.
• This global taxonomy of skill tags is available to all colonies, and is maintained by the Meta Colony
• Reputation is non-transferrable between users.
• Each task is given a 1-3 rating by the evaluator and earns / loses reputation based on the following ratings:
• 1 rating = User did not complete the task well. Reputation penalty equal to 1x payout
• 2 rating = User completed the task acceptably. Reputation gain equal to 1x payout.
• 3 rating: User completed the task superbly. Reputation gain equal to 1.5x payout.
• A user can lose reputations in 3 ways:

1. • badly executing a task (as shown above)
2. • Being involved in a dispute process
3. • Reputation decay (see below)

• A user’s reputation automatically decays each 90 days by a factor of 2 (but is calculated every 24 hours). This ensures that the most active and continuous contributors in the Colony are most incentivised.

I'm not technical enough to deepdive in each statement, but it feels like there are multiple technical challenges here. Have you guys have started thinking about the architecture of the solution using the Aragon Stack? What would be taken care of on-chain and otherwise what technology would you use for computation heavy tasks?

I have a call with Luke Duncan & Daniel Shavit on Tuesday next week. Luke already recently built a Sourcecred integration so we are going to have a call to discuss potential synergies and architecture of how this might work.

Will revert back here.

[yeqbfgxjiq]

@joeycharlesworth What's the latest status on the Expert Network? Are there any blockers still and/or what do you need to be able to move forward?

[joeycharlesworth]

Update: I have now joined the Aragon Association and as such won't be continuing with this Nest proposal directly. This said, I still believe there to be a very urgent need for an expert network, not only to provide operational support to projects in the Nest and Flock programs but also to give anyone on Aragon the ability to more easily get discovered and get paid for their work and time. I hope somebody else might want to pick this up in the future and I would be happy to support on an advisory basis @burrrata @stellarmagnet @CryptoDani @fcdagdelen @lkngtn

[proofoftom]

Congrats @joeycharlesworth! Can't believe I'm just seeing this... I'm a huge proponent of reputation DAOs and would love to see this get implemented!

For reference, I've been presenting on the concept of integrating Colony in Aragon for a little over a year now: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1yd1ezdqce0lBO0jszac__uQBgGHg618qFYAFpzlxLj8/edit#slide=id.g1f87997393_0_1166

What are the next steps for moving this forward @LouisGrx?

[AaronAbuUsama]

Hey @proofoftom just requested access to the sheet

[proofoftom]

Hey @proofoftom just requested access to the sheet

Whoops! Just made public

[yeqbfgxjiq]

@proofoftom Really cool presentation!

Reputation is something that has been on the roadmap since day 1 and is something that would really help make DAOs more useful for humans. Colony integration could help by creating reputation and believability weighted voting systems in Aragon DAOs. Would you have some time this week to chat about your experiences and goals with DAOs, what's going on with DenverDAO, and how Aragon can help?

Also a big fan of your Aragon Market app. Have you deployed it to APM on Rinkeby or Mainnet and/or what more do you need to do to get it ready for launch? If there's more work to be done, would a CFDAO or Nest grant help make that happen?

[proofoftom]

@burrrata Thanks for the diligent response! The DenverDAO COMstack has been iceboxed in favor of developing Civitas, a reputation DAO as a service platform that incorporates a lot of the COMstack functionality under one roof. I'm available to discuss more at your convenience, feel free to ping me on Keybase - @proofoftom.

There's still tons of work to be done on Aragon Market, it's currently just a UI skeleton. I'd definitely like to get that over the finish line though as it's part of a larger project I'm working on which is a DEX for Aragon DAOs running the Market app. I'll put together a Nest proposal for such and post it to the forum soon!