Title:
Improving decision making protocols within neighborhoods
Team member names:
Sofía Villarreal Carrillo and Humberto Besso Oberto Huerta
Short summary of your improvement idea
Equitably owned and governed organizations, such as neighborhoods, can use DAO tools to improve their governance, member participation, compensation, transparency, accountability, financing and cost reduction. Through tools such as Charmverse, wallet Safe and account abstraction, people in a neighborhood can reach consensus on actions related to community life, involving authorities and key stakeholders.
Q1. What is the existing target protocol you are hoping to improve or enhance?
Polycentric neighborhood governance, i.e., participatory proposal making, debating, and decision-making where neighbors, service providers, and government officials participate.
Q2. What is the core idea or insight about potential improvement you want to pursue?
Our hypothesis is that a neighborhood will optimize their governance processes, and with it, decrease their costs while increasing participatory engagement, accountability, and overall satisfaction by integrating a P2P governance culture along with web3 tools in a DAO-based environment.
We seek to 1) understand the current governance protocols that neighborhoods hold, to then 2) co-design with all the participants the interfaces they need to ease the adoption of a Peer governance culture to existing web3 tools.
Based on an Enterprise Architecture Management approach, and a Constructive Research approach we seek to understand the neighborhoods’ reality, to then improve each of the steps as if we would speak of modules.
We hypothesize that -module by module, a neighborhood is able to improve its governance by becoming a DAO, and with it enable scaling up to broader governance orders across different neighborhoods within a district, and between districts, to finally reach self-governance in a city.
Q3. What is your discovery methodology for investigating the current state of the target protocol?
This research will collect data from primary and secondary sources ranging from semi-structured interviews, legal and regulatory documents both from the government and the neighborhood association, polls to the participants, as well as literature review, and expert-interviews.
These multiple sources of evidence will allow the research team to triangulate conclusions and ensure higher levels of internal validity.
For this methodology, a constructive research approach (CRA) will be used to offer a double validity test by default. This double test is composed of 1) a technical part, which provides objective evidence of a tool working (for example, its auditable code within a GitHub repository) and 2) the adoption process part, which regards about the creation of an adequate instruction manual, training to the users, and testing the tool within the targeted organization (Lukka, 2003).
Combining the primary and secondary sources of data collection with the CRA’s double test will strengthen the overall research design and allow other practitioners and researchers not only to test or challenge the knowledge here contributed, but to replicate and improve on it for the common benefit.
Q.4 In what form will you prototype your improvement idea?
The solution will be co-designed and co-created with the neighbors through a series of workshops related to the use of blockchain, wallets, DAOs, and dApps.
The frameworks to lead the research are 1) citizen-controlled co-production for blockchain-based technologies, 2) value focused thinking to identify decision context, define and prioritize the objectives inherent to the context, and 3) design thinking to co-design the user experience of the artifact.
This approach allows the design and testing of the artifact in progressive stages (first created and tested as a no-code prototype, then with code, then improved in bi-weekly sprints). Also, it uses a double-test concerning a technical part, i.e., is the artifact working?; and an adoption process part, i.e, how was the artifact implemented? This adoption part includes the creation of an adequate instruction manual, training to the users, and pilot testing
Q5. How will you field-test your improvement idea?
According to Oyegoke (2015), the most appropriate method to test and improve a construct is through a pilot case study. Using this argument as support, this research will test its practical contribution by evaluating if the artifact was adopted or not by the targeted neighborhood and its polycentric governance actors (government officials, neighbors, service providers).
The pilot case study should try to solve a situation or event that happens commonly in the neighborhood, and that is currently solved using traditional mechanisms. If the artifact proves itself useful, and makes the process easier, more transparent and efficient, it will mean it can be tested with more communities.
Q6. Who will be able to judge the quality of your output? Ideally name a few suitable judges.
Members of the MetaGov collective, members of the Token Engineering Commons, Polycentric actors using the artifacts such as the Neighbors, Government Officials, and Service Providers.
Q7. How will you publish and evangelize your improvement idea?
We have been transforming a bus into a climate-positive house and school that will travel from México to Argentina evangelizing the findings, learning along the way, and improving the protocols and interfaces co-designed with each of the 20 neighborhoods we will visit throughout LatAm.
The bus will be the place where the workshops, governance sessions, and cultural dynamics will happen.
Q8. What is the success vision for your idea?
We hypothesize that -module by module, a neighborhood is able to improve its governance by becoming a DAO, and with it enable scaling up to broader governance orders across different neighborhoods within a district, and between districts, to finally reach self-governance in a city.
We aim to facilitate the emergence of smart, autonomous, and regenerative cities, through organized and self-managed communities that are capable of making decisions that benefit them and their environments.