Part 1 - How it came to be
Welcome to Building in Public, in this 3-part series, I take you through Collab.Land’s journey building the Zodiac bot module, a new tool that extends Discord-based voting to execute transactions on-chain over a Gnosis Safe.
We are building the Zodiac Bot Module in collaboration with RaidGuild to provide TalentDAO, and eventually the wider web3 ecosystem, with a simple yet extensible governance framework that can be deployed right within your community’s Discord server.
For part 1, we are looking at the key players that make up the collaboration and why Collab.Land is building this tool. Part 2 will focus on the opportunity created by this nimble governance framework, along with the challenges and pain points faced in bringing this new product to market. And in part 3 we will show the Zodiac bot module in action, demonstrating how a variety of crypto native communities will be able to leverage this new tool to meet their own demands.
Purpose and Values 🌟
Collab.Land strives to meet the demands of the community and aims to push the web3 ecosystem forward. Collab.Land does not currently charge communities for access, and above all, we hold ourselves to the highest standards when it comes to privacy and member data.
Collab.Land provides members with the best possible solutions to reduce coordination costs and increase trust among tokenized-communities.
Let’s share how we got here today!
Coordination As Performance Art 🤝
At MCON2 (MetaCartel Conference) in September of 2022, Collab.Land facilitated a collaboration with multiple project teams: Orange Protocol, Sobol, and Hats Protocol; a showcase for how we can meaningfully integrate our tooling to help MetaCartel go fast, together.
The tweets below explain the collaboration in detail.
Nimble Off-Chain Governance with Verifiable Credentials 🪪
Before MCON, Collab.Land created a dynamic off-chain governance tool enabling members with token-granted access to a Discord channel to create and vote on proposals earning them Verifiable Credentials (VCreds).
VCreds are issued to members upon proposal creation, upvote/downvote, and proposal result. This feature upgrade will enable communities to assign reputation and track participation directly based on their off-chain governance interactions.
This means that in-Discord voting generates a measurable reputation for community members that they can take with them!
This new tool has attracted a great deal of interest from DAO and NFT communities, offering members a more friendly and streamlined way of participating in DAO governance.
Inviting Collaboration 🤝
Coming out of MCON, Saulthorin, who is an alumni of Bankless Academy and Founder of TalentDAO, wrote a tweet thread calling out to Collab.Land, writing, “Collab.Land is a standard” for token-gating access for Discord communities, yet she claims there is more to Collab.Land than meets the eye.
In her tweet, Saulthorin argues, “Collab.Land can extend off-chain governance to automatically execute real world on-chain transactions through a Gnosis Safe (multi-sig), doing so by building atop the Zodiac framework created by Gnosis Guild.”
Saulthorin’s suggestion was met with positive feedback from members of the community. The reinforcement was a strong signal that Collab.Land might drive value to the ecosystem by building this tool that enables automatic on-chain transacting through a Gnosis Safe, building on top of Collab.Land’s simple Discord governance feature. TalentDAO is a scientific research DAO and they will be the first DAO to integrate the Zodiac bot module.
If you want to learn more about TalentDAO, see their Manifesto!
Simple Governance ⏩ Automatic governance execution with the Zodiac Bot Module 🗳️💰
What next?
Collab.Land and TalentDAO came together to determine what the Zodiac implementation would look like. By adopting this tooling, TalentDAO will set an example so other communities can use their model, helping them structure minimum-viable governance through Discord.
Collab.Land submitted a consultation to RaidGuild, a full-stack design and dev service DAO, to discuss the requirements and begin speccing out the work to bring the Zodiac Module to life.
With the help of Collab.Land, RaidGuild members coalesced into a small group to outline the deliverables and requirements for the Zodiac Bot Module. RaidGuild members drafted the smart contract spec and came together to formulate a grant proposal, funded by the premier grant giving DAO in web3, MetaCartel. The MetaCartel Forum has the grant proposal, you can read about the details and the deliverables associated with the Collab.Land Zodiac Bot Module there.
To ensure the Zodiac Module would benefit the ecosystem as a whole, MetaCartel offered that the final product (Zodiac contracts) be open-sourced so that other communities can modify the tool to fit their own needs.
Why Build the Zodiac Bot Module? 🤔
Collab.Land fuels tokenized-communities and empowers members with robust tooling that cuts coordination costs and increases trust between stakeholders.
The Zodiac Bot Module is:
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a reflection of our mission
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a testament to our commitment to building in public
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a minimum-viable governance framework combining off-chain voting with on-chain transacting
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an example of how we collaborate 🤝
We are building the Zodiac Bot Module with RaidGuild to provide TalentDAO, and eventually the wider web3 ecosystem, with a simple yet extensible governance framework that can be deployed directly within your Discord server.
Collab.Land strives to enable communities with the tooling that is best suited for achieving their collective mission; the Collab.Land Zodiac Bot Module will be made available to all Collab.Land communities in the future.
Stay tuned for parts 2 and 3 of this series, “Building in Public: The Collab.Land Zodiac Bot Module.” Part 2 confronts the challenges we met along the way and elaborates on the coordination effort to bring the Zodiac Bot Module to all Collab.Land communities.
About Collab.Land
Supporting 41k+ tokenized-communities on Discord and telegram, Collab.Land fuels and empowers collaboration with robust tooling that cuts coordination costs and increases trust between stakeholders.
If you’d like to collaborate, connect with us on Twitter!