Retrofunding DAO for Education

Applications
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LEARN-DAO : Decentralized Retro-Funding for Education

Earmarking education funds

Anybody can spin up a LEARN-DAO. This DAO is responsible for disbursing funds to creators who are creating great quality educational material. Each LEARN-DAO will have it’s own agenda, by putting up a list of request-for-tutorials.

Anybody can fund this LEARN-DAO by wrapping tokens into learn-tokens. COMP becomes LEARN-COMP, DAI becomes LEARN-DAI and so on.

By wrapping, the grant has earmarked the number of tokens that are available for creators creating educational content. It is a public signal as to how much money the LEARN-DAO is willing to deploy for creating educational content.

Right now, all grant programs are requesting teachers to apply for grants. No body knows how big the grant is for education. Having this as public information will make it easy for teachers to pick up projects based on the grant sizes.

Permissionless tutorial creation

Right now you need to get in touch with the grant committee managers to get a grant for creating educational content. Since education is a part of a larger grant, the procedures are not well suited for educational grants.

The LEARN-DAO shall vote on the proposed tutorials retroactively. Retro-funding removes all the guesswork from quality of content. The judgement can be made after the fact whether or not the content was useful.

This lets a new teacher to start teaching by creating great quality content even if they’re not well connected. A kid in Nigeria can create Solidity tutorials even if she doesn’t know anyone who knows anyone who knows Vitalik.

Open Decision Making

Most of the grant approvals currently happen behind closed doors. It is unclear why certain decisions are getting made and how.

To keep up the spirit of openness, all the LEARN-DAO decisions are taken in public.

This along with the fact that the decisions are made after the fact (retrofunding), it sends out a message as to what kind of content the LEARN-DAO wants to fund. By seeing which tutorials got the grants and which didn’t, teachers can quickly adjust to create content that is most useful to the LEARN-DAO.

How it works

Super simple.

  1. A user creates a LEARN-DAO
  2. Community wraps ERC-20 tokens into LEARN tokens and funds the LEARN-DAO. eg. COMP token wrapped into LEARN-COMP tokens
  3. Content creators can submit a tutorial on the website of the LEARN-DAO
  4. A voting starts immediately upon submission and lasts for 48 hours
  5. The LEARN-TOKEN holders vote based on their holding by placing a buy order for more LEARN-TOKENs
  6. If the tutorial gets enough votes, the grant is disbursed to the creator. All the approved and disapproved tutorials are publicly available.
  7. The LEARN-DAO can also put up on it’s website a request-for-tutorials by listing out tutorials it wants the users to build by voting.

Would love to know the community’s thoughts on this

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Loved the whole concept.
Though my gut feel says, it will mostly be DAO treasuries instead of individuals who will wrap most of the tokens to create learn tokens. What are your thoughts on it?
Why do you think individuals will wrap their tokens? Will they require any incentive mechanism?

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Yes, I too reckon it will be treasuries that will wrap the tokens.
However the approach is to allow individuals to also wrap, should there be a delayed decision making on the treasuries side :slight_smile:

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Make sense! It is about the option as of this moment.
In this case, it is basically public funding as far as the individual token holders are concerned.

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I implemented this here. Would love your feedback on it! :slight_smile:

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Hello @madhavanmalolan , I run a non-profit foundation where volunteers contribute with research. Basically we are all volunteers including myself. At the moment we have no funding but eventually there will be when we get some grant.
Reading your post made me think that we could use your approach to reward the written contributions with tokens, and when there is funding the tokens will gain a value for exchange.
What do you think? or anyone if there is some idea/suggestion on how to … ?

1 Like