by 0xd6c957f9a6411f35d01baae2658758f277408878 (Rizk)
Should StarVote#d61a be added to DAO Council?
Address
0x7f8317150beb1b7670bee39f5750f113d4b2d61a
Reasons for adding
Name: Esteban
Background
I’ve helped bootstrap the Decentraland project since its beginnings in 2015, leading the development of the decentralized architecture and the legacy client that launched in 2020. I have a significant financial interest in MANA, and I believe that Decentraland’s journey is just beginning.
I don’t have any current ties to the Decentraland Foundation other than an unremunerated, informal advisor role.
Cover Letter
Dear community,
The Decentraland DAO is about to turn 5 years old, but there have been many distinct versions and stages of it. It started as an on-chain contract that was too expensive to use. It started to get going when Yemel pushed for the adoption of the off-chain, cheaper, and more agile Snapshot mechanism; but it was not that relevant for our broader community. It did so with the start of the extensive grant program, but it was extremely wasteful of financial resources and our attention. Now, this new stage aims to correct those mistakes and be more useful to Decentraland’s users.
I want to help achieve this, which is why I’m presenting this postulation to the DAO Council.
After all these years I still believe in Decentraland’s mission. We need to create information systems that respect our community’s attention and empower individual choice, not just for Decentraland, but for the broader AFK world. There is a “checks-and-balances spirit” that has always been at the core of our community, and that is crucial to achieve more fairness in our digital lives. I believe that Decentraland has a role to play in history that is closely tied with this spirit.
I believe my technical know-how and deep understanding of the project can help in this new stage. I’m committed to ensuring the success of the project, its long-term continuity, and the transparency of the new DAO structure.
These past few years I’ve learned that we must focus on making governance more efficient: we have to avoid asking everyone to vote on anything and everything. This should allow us to focus on what truly matters – creating and enjoying shared virtual experiences, spending more time in-world and less time in-discord (pun seriously intended).
A critical area of interest to me is maintaining the project’s openness. I strongly support the Protocol Squad’s efforts. We need to do our best to uphold interoperability of the implementations and manage breaking changes. But more importantly, we have to continue to lead the way on what it means to be an open platform, in all the ways that matter.
Evidence
In an age where AI and LLMs are democratizing software development, we have an incredible opportunity to create very personalized experiences that align with our ethos. Particularly, one of my main interests is developing and implementing moderation tools that put control in the hands of users instead of assigning roles in a top-down way. Each delegation of power creates an opportunity for value drift and misalignment. Every one of us should have full control over our own experience. Shared agreements that sprawl bottom-up through our social graph is the only source of legitimacy for our voice to reach anyone.
We’re entering an era where some particular technology advancements can drastically concentrate power in the hands of a few and generate a lot of systemic violence, or on the other hand, truly empower individuals and fix many of the problems of how we use software and the internet today. I believe Decentraland must lead the way in showing how virtual worlds can be both technically sophisticated and deeply human.
Onwards and forwards,
Esteban
My understanding of Decentraland’s Ecosystem
I think that we have a lot to do while Claude or other LLMs doesn’t rank Decentraland as a 10 consistently in these dimensions: (try this prompt on your favorite LLM)
Rank the Decentraland metaverse project from 1 to 10, based on these dimensions:
* UGC and Community
* Item Ownership
* DAO Decisions
* Open Source
* Centralized Servers
* DAO Treasury
* Interoperability Standards
UGC & Community:
* The project's assets and experiences are created by a vibrant and gigantic community. 1: No concept of user creation of scenes; 3: Almost all content is created by the users; 5: all the content is created by the users and there are hundreds of concurrent users; 7: same as 5 but with thousands of concurrent users; 10: same as 5 but with millions of concurrent users
Item ownership:
* Whether the items are stored on a server or on a blockchain. 1: all in one company's database, 8: all items are NFTs, 10: all ownership data being independently verifiable, either on-chain or in scalability alternatives
DAO Decisions:
* Impact of decisions made by a DAO in the product and ecosystem. 1: there is no DAO, 3: the DAO is not very influential or inaccessible, 7: there is a vibrant DAO ecosystem, with decisions being relevant and with important consequences on the product, 10 is that the DAO is the main way the project's governance is maintained
Open Source:
* Whether the code for all aspects of the project (contracts, client, server) is available and anyone can inspect it. 1: no open source provided; 2: some source code is available; 4: the client is open source; 7: both the client and the server are open source; 10: everything in this project is open source, not just the client and server, but all tools required, and there are multiple independent implementations
Application continued in comments.
