TLDR: The Cosmos Hub community debates whether it’s worth partnering with RnDAO to assess and improve community health.

“If Web3 is all about communities, how do we know if we’re heading in the right direction?” Daniel Ospina of RnDAO asks, leading into his proposal for funding from the Cosmos community. Assessing the health of communities, whether digital or analog or both, is difficult work requiring responsible data collection and analysis across multiple media. There must be quality data gathered from enough sources over a sufficient amount of time to provide meaningful results — which can then drive insightful analysis and decision-making that create measurably positive outcomes (many of these terms themselves require definition). RnDAO is seeking to explore this and build tools that facilitate and improve collaboration. The team has previously partnered with various organizations, including Aave, Aragon, and MetaGame, to create frameworks and tooling to support their goal of "empowering humane collaboration” — which is what they hope to accomplish through this proposal to Cosmos. As Daniel writes:

“the lack of real-time analytics leaves DAO community leaders and members without established baselines to measure against to understand the impact of community-focused initiatives, identify best practices, monitor shocks to the system, or rapidly gauge the effects of system-wide changes (such as market crashes, protocol migrations, etc.).”

The Proposal: Community Health research, analytics, and benchmarking

With this proposal to the Cosmos community, RnDAO asks for the equivalent of $30k in ATOM to fund research and tooling to do the following (as stated in the proposal):

• develop a framework for Community Health with actionable metrics

• create an open-source data collection tool

• implement the tool in Cosmos Hub and others

• analyze the interactions and perceptions data to validate the framework and provide insights to advance the Cosmos community.

RnDAO has a team of two PhDs in network science and a network designer ready to undertake the project with Cosmos, and they plan to begin with two specific approaches. The first is to use Organizational Network Analysis (ONA), which is described as “a structured way to visualize how communications, information, and value creation occur through an organization based on interaction graphs” — and is thought to be an improvement over traditional surveys. Second, they plan to use Pulse Surveys, which are “frequent and automated micro-surveys” to be administered via Discord. The data collected will be anonymized before analysis. The ultimate deliverable is a Community Health Report, which includes the conceptual framework, data collection tools, and key performance indicators — as well as “actionable insights” to improve community health. Delivery of the Community Health Report, to be presented alongside a workshop, will take place no longer than seven weeks after the grant has been received. A continuing engagement with RnDAO might be considered if the work proves valuable.

Response to the proposal has been strong but mixed. Some have stated that this kind of research and analysis could be very useful to the Cosmos community, especially after the conflict resulting from the failed ATOM 2.0 proposal. One commenter thinks that it amounts to surveillance. Another commenter says: “I don’t think we need a bot to tell us this has been a rough year, and that we need to work on some things.” And finally, some take the perspective that the proposal isn’t specific enough to Cosmos and that it isn’t worth the money to participate in an “experiment.”

Cosmos Hub governance makes use of both on-chain and off-chain mechanisms to help govern parameters such as signaling, changing consensus parameters, and spending funds from the community pool. ATOM token holders are provided governance rights within this process.

A proposal first begins off-chain through forum posts and discussions before it can be elevated to an on-chain proposal. To do this, a minimum of 64 ATOM deposit is required to post the proposal. Once this requirement has been met a voting period kicks off that lasts 14 days and must cross a 40% quorum threshold to succeed. Unique to Cosmos is the addition of the ‘NoWithVeto’ vote option, which rejects the proposal and burns the proposer’s deposited funds.

The Big Picture

DAOs — and organizations that aspire to become DAO-like — are entirely dependent on their communities. Nothing can be accomplished without a functioning community. Even within the definition of a “functioning community,” however, there is a huge range of quality: on the one hand, a community can be rancorous and just functional enough to stay active, while on the other hand, a community can be civil, efficient, and highly productive — exemplifying the best of what decentralized organizations can be. But lasting, healthy communities don’t just take shape organically, without effort; here again, thoughtfulness and leadership are needed.

RnDAO hopes to perform research across web3 organizations to provide some of the insights required to make progress on this front — and they are the first to do so in any formalized, participatory, web3-native way. As with all data and analysis, however, it is very difficult to know in advance whether the research will bear fruit and be concretely useful. And in a bear market, some are hesitant to spend the money to find out.

We’ll be tracking this proposal activity closely at Boardroom, follow our newsletter to stay up to date.  If you’re a voter in a protocol, make sure to check out Boardroom Portal.