Gino from the Governance Squad and Gia from the Grants Support Squad recently attended the EthDenver conference as guest mentors for the BUILDathon, covering topics such as product development, project management, and community building. As always, there was plenty to learn from peers in the ecosystem. Here are some of the key highlights from their experience:

Connecting with fellow DAO contributors

Gino and Gia had the opportunity to meet with core contributors from the Decentraland DAO, including Fractilians, CKBubbles, ChedarQueso, MetaGameHub partners Nico and Amir, and Queen Salti. They discussed a range of topics, including the need for a code of ethics to moderate the community and the urgent need to fight plutocracy if we want to distribute power. The group also noted that there is no clear description of what the DAO squads do, which could help contributors understand their role in the community. All these topics are being addressed by the Facilitation Squad, Grants Support Squad, Governance Squad, and working groups, among other valuable community contributions.

Learning from other organizations

Gino and Gia also gained valuable insights from other organizations at the conference.

1. Gitcoin is protecting web 3 from bots and bad actors with open data. They are catching sybil attacks by looking at their behavior across time, as there is a high correlation amongst them. Here you can check out the talk, and shout out to Disruption Joe for sharing their experience.
2. The Govrn is working on a contributions tracker for their community. As pros from these tools we see the value it adds to reputation, acknowledgment of work made by the members, and the insight that based on community contributions, the projects become infrastructure over time. As for the Decentraland DAO, at the moment the way community members contribute to the DAO is through delegating the responsibility of the important or operational work to core units. It would be good to first spin-off a Bounty program first, to realize the value of a tool like this one.
3. Regarding grant programs, there were a few projects with a strong presence at the conference. Among them there was Gitcoin: They were stewards of their Passport Protocol, and it would be a good tool for the Decentraland DAO, as they are doing groundbreaking work by catching sybil attacks, and more so if we are interested in quadratic funding.
4. SAFE gave a talk where they provided a short product update and an experimental work on how DAOs could raise capitalizing the traditional Safe contract used by VCs and popularized by YCombinator. DCL DAO could benefit from this in the potential event of having investors interested in the project.

Tally gave a talk about the state of the Governor framework adoption and how DAOs are still facing voter apathy. They did a deep dive into specific delegation and airdropping challenges. DCL DAO could benefit from some of the ideas presented like flexible voting, professional delegators, and tips on how to do a governance airdrop in the right way.

Encouraging presence in community spaces

Connection with the community, brand awareness, sharing knowledge, and strengthening the connection with the community are some of the gains from being actively involved. We encourage the members of the DAO to apply to the open calls of these conferences and go spread the word on what we do and how we do it.