Recap - Scroll Alignment Workshops Nov 4-5

Co-Creation Cycle
1

TL;DR

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Three workshops were held Nov 4-5 to allow for participation from different time zones. In each workshop, ideas were sourced around three key areas of focus:

  • Ecosystem Growth: Identify what is driving growth across various protocols and projects, as well as what is currently under-explored that can help drive growth and innovation on Scroll.
  • Global Community: Determine where to direct resources and efforts globally to maximize impact and support local communities effectively.
  • Governance Iterations: Address the most pressing challenges in governance and test cutting-edge approaches to improve decision-making processes and effective coordination.

The full Miro board can be viewed here: Miro

Next Steps:

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Contribute Asynchronously

If you were unable to make the workshops or if you have had more ideas since,

please feel free to contribute asynchronously on the gray boards located beneath the workshop boards. Detailed instructions are in the gray ‘Idea Generation’ box. Please keep all contributions in the gray asynchronous boards to allow those who participated in the workshops to find your new contributions!

Join the Follow-Up Calls

This week, starting tomorrow, we will hold additional calls to review and refine the ideas generated during these workshops while sourcing more. These calls can be found on the governance calendar. As a reminder, the timeline for the co-creation cycle has been updated. You can find all relevant information here.

Workshop Summary

Below is a summary of recurring themes for each focus area, followed by the most upvoted sticky notes.

Recurring Themes

Ecosystem Growth

1. Concerns about sustainability and incentives:

  • For projects:
    • Maximizing sustainable growth: Beyond traditional funding models like grants or VC, support emerging projects by combining financial strategies for broader sustainability.
    • Strategic incentive timelines: Define incentives over time, setting KPIs and partner roles at intervals (e.g., 3, 6, and 12 months) to provide clear, measurable goals.
  • For governance:
    • Incentivized pathways: Sustainable, long-term incentives for governance roles are hard to design, with particular difficulties in retaining delegates and keeping them actively voting. Without clear incentives, delegates may lose interest in governance.
    • Mitigating participation and voting fatigue: Alternative approaches to high participation, like preference signaling, can maintain high-quality governance with less oversight. Identify low-fatigue indicators of sustained interest, creating tools that simplify the decision-making process and reduce redundant votes.

3. The balance between regional and global strategies

  • Market segmentation: To maximize relevance, segment different markets by region, use case, or other factors, weighing the pros and cons of a regional versus global strategy. A combined approach may yield the most flexibility and impact.

  • Localized governance committees: Consider forming committees by region to address specific local challenges, balancing global coordination with regional needs.

  • Locally and broadly applicable projects: Projects should address specific regional needs while having broader applicability. Ensure relevance across regions by establishing standards that support localized and universal utility.

  • Matrix structures that allow for alignment between the needs of specific regions and broadly-applicable problem areas.

4. Benefits and limitations of hackathons, partnerships, and impact measurement

  • Hackathons: While hackathons are useful, they can sometimes yield low-value projects due to lack of follow-up support across use cases. Auditing projects and involving multiple organizers can better align outcomes with regional and event needs.
  • Partnership strategies for longevity: Long-term strategies are needed with partners to ensure mutual benefit. Partnerships should be part of a broader mission with clear, sustainable incentives for both parties.
  • Impact measurement and tooling: Invest in tooling to measure impact across projects, using frameworks like Arbitrum DAO’s as potential references. Clear impact metrics help assess progress and refine strategic initiatives.

Global Community

1. Concerns about local engagement & empowerment:

  • Engagement spaces: Focusing on grassroots initiatives, local meetups, and collaborative spaces where communities can share ideas and solve local challenges, especially through blockchain adoption.
  • Funding & coordination mechanisms: Creating regional project funding programs and partnerships (e.g., grants, venture capital) that support local initiatives and enable sustainable community-driven growth.
  • Inclusion & accessibility: Decreasing language barriers, ensuring cultural sensitivity, and creating an inclusive environment that bridges on-chain tech with real-world impact, especially for communities with limited access to resources.
  • Different onboarding paths: Creating different paths can help people with different skill sets find ways of getting involved - Non-technical pathways are super important.

2. Expressed desire to reach novel talent:

  • University blockchain clubs: Building links with universities and target their knowledge transfer work streams. University Blockchain Clubs can help engage younger communities and have great potential for integrating Web2 developers into Web3.
  • Industry/vertical focused groups: Bets for networking outside crypto echochamber and leading to real adoption

3. The desire for a research-backed design and integrated approach:

  • Gather inspiration for research: Gather a library of existing organizations (eg. NGOs) that are well established. Study what works and doesn’t work for them, find mechanisms that can be combined for our specific purposes.
  • Community cross-pollinators: To make sure that we maintain a connective thread across the local/regional communities the DAO partners with, we should define a role whose responsibility it would be to connect across communities and spot potential collaborations and needs for shared infrastructure.

Governance Iterations

1. Consideration of specific voting and governance mechanisms to experiment with:

  • Token-weighted voting: Systems where voting power is directly tied to the number of tokens a participant holds, often criticized for favoring large holders (whales).
  • Non-plutocratic token voting: Mechanisms that aim to reduce the influence of whales, allowing smaller token holders to have more impact in governance.
  • Quadratic voting: A system that amplifies the votes of smaller holders, making it more difficult for large holders to dominate decision-making.
  • Dual voting systems: Testing anonymous versus fully transparent voting to see which method builds more trust and fairness in decision-making.
  • Reputation-weighted voting: Linking voting power to a participant’s reputation or activity level, incentivizing more consistent and meaningful contributions.
  • Preference signaling: Allowing individuals to express their preferences in a way that reflects their expertise or insights, not just their tokens or votes.

2. Discussion about delegate terms and participation experiments:

  • Delegate term limits: Preventing power consolidation by implementing limits on how long delegates can hold their positions, or rotating delegates regularly.
  • Re-delegation: Allowing token holders to change or revoke delegation, ensuring that power stays aligned with active and trusted participants.
  • Engagement incentives: Designing mechanisms to motivate delegates to stay engaged, such as rewards for active participation or penalties for neglect.
  • Delegate voting specialization: Enabling delegates to vote on specific areas of expertise, increasing efficiency and aligning governance with knowledge.

3. Exploration into transparency and accountability:

  • Auditing and metrics: Systems to measure the effectiveness of governance processes, ensuring they are functioning as intended and that delegates are working in the community’s best interest.
  • Transparency of decision-making processes: Making governance processes more transparent by documenting the rationale behind decisions and how voting outcomes align with community interests.
  • AI-powered accountability: Implementing AI systems to monitor and evaluate governance participation, ensuring that delegates fulfill their duties and hold a real stake in the outcomes.

4. Discussion of coordination considerations:

  • Iterative governance: Fostering an environment where DAOs continuously iterate and adapt their governance processes, learning from previous cycles and experimenting with new mechanisms to improve engagement and participation.
  • Tool integration for decision-making: Using AI, decision trees, or collaborative tools to better aggregate, process, and communicate community inputs.
  • Forum activity: Keeping forums alive and ensuring that new members can easily join and contribute to ongoing discussions, preventing the consolidation of power around long-standing members.
  • Problem definition and sense-making: Using structured methods like reasoning trees to clarify problems and identify the most effective solutions collaboratively.

Most Upvoted Notes

Ecosystem Growth

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Workshop 1:

  • Create a core focus for Scroll. e.g Base is Consumer, Arbitrum is DeFi, Solana is Memecoins. What area could Scroll focus on?
    • We could create a Scroll Request for Projects guide based on core focus areas
    • Some areas that are under explored: B2B use cases, MedTech, AgriTech
  • Strategies to bring established projects to Scroll
    • Attracting established protocols that are live on other chains offers a fixed cost and a predictable timeline
    • to ALSO deploy on Scroll or to MIGRATE to scroll?
      • if the former, then sure but what’s Scroll USP then?
      • If the later, it’s very expensive so should be part of a business cluster strategy and not spread across arenas
  • Innovative builder support programs
    • Value = builders & users
    • → Any convincing support that is non-standard is sth to look at
  • Not only focusing on devs but on viable teams
    • too many projects with terrible UX and no business sense
  • B2B uses cases (collabtech, organisations on chain, network state, community, gig work, creator economy, etc)
    • Big market, enabler for the DAO, and no one else is putting much focus there
    • Ethereum is one of the few that actually interacts with major non Web3 orgs such as NBA
  • Real world use cases in marginalized communities
    • Shows real world utility for crypto and blockchain, government support more lenient.
    • Grassroots funds, financial solutions and affordable loans in stablecoins
    • Refi is also an interesting use case
  • Smart incentive programs, incl. plan for retention
    • Still a standard to kickstart activity for decentralized ecosystems

Workshop 2:

  • Creating a Sustainable Cycle:
    • Funding user-friendly dApps (e.g., account abstraction, social impact) and onboarding popular apps to boost the network. Focus on education and community-building through events and hackathons to attract more developers and entrepreneurs—creating a cycle: community → hackathon → dApps → happy users → strengthened community.
  • Cultivating culture / belonging
    • A huge amount of growth and success comes from people feeling like they’re part of something and that they belong. Recently we’ve seen this in memecoin-ish communities but the core principles can be transferred over to more impactful efforts.
  • Sustainable and thoughtfully designed incentives
    • Building incentives that ensure that people are involved long-term, and that they feel valued/rewarded for their efforts
  • Creation of a dedicated " Scroll Research & Development Institute" (managed by the leading community members)
    • Because we need to bring new talent into the ecosystem and to make sure we find a way to provide not only the knowledge but also funding for these newcomers to be able to contribute in the continuous development of the protocol.
  • Staying close to user demands/needs
    • It’s easy to get pulled of course by “new things”. Iterative voting based on topics suggested via an LLM based on all comms channels inputs. This could make the DAO proposal free. The LLM suggests proposals, delegates approve and then projects apply to the brief. Delegates or community vote on allocation.

Workshop 3:

  • Decentralised Liquidity Incentive Systems
    • Liquidity mining works but it’s easy to over spend. Building long term sustainable token incentive systems is a good goal.
    • in order to build the type of depth in the markets that attracts bigger characters - worry this might become an l2 battle in the future - risk of it becoming a market driven system. Could be smart contract regulated
  • Incentives in builders from clubs or university
    • A lot of smart people at universities are trying to find a field to work in or contribute to. Incentivizing them though hackathons or grants could be a good way to grow the ecosystem.
    • What are regional “scroll squads”/how to empower people in different areas to produce ideas, plug into existing projects, have access to edu tools
    • research and development institute were we can provide funding to new talent from local communities
    • Gamified onboarding for education?
    • The importance for providing funding to uni blockchain clubs -people who can soon contribute meaningful, bring some new ideas in - doesn’t have to be coding

Global Community

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Workshop 1:

  • Regional communities with track record of impact

    • These communities are closer to the people that use blockchain and they are best at knowing potential talents and knowing what type of programs are best for them. They could be university based communities and city based communities.

  • Regional Scroll Squads tasked with educating and training Scroll Builders in Developing Economies.

    • By directly training builders in Universities and communities across the globe, real world products could be built to address their local needs leveraging the Scroll Tech Stack.

  • Regional project funding program directed towards raising communities

    • This will allow everyone to connect with the different communities from their region and share ideas, and work together in creating better solutions for the issues affecting their own communities

  • Specific areas of interest:

    • Latin america - most upvoted
    • Mexico
    • Eastern Europe is another area that would be great to explore
    • Africa
    • Argentina
    • Asia

Workshop 2:

  • Different onboarding paths
    • creating different paths can help people with different skill sets find ways of getting involved.
    • ^^ non-technical pathways are super important!
  • Grassroots community campaigns
    • Providing funding, education and support for underserved communities globally will position Scroll well, and help to ‘re-capture’ communities back towards decentralised and non-predatory ecosystems.
    • These could take many different forms:
      • Meetups
      • Education series
      • Hackathons
      • Workshops
      • Etc

Workshop 3:

  • A Decentralised Curriculum
    • Create a curriculum for understanding blockchain tech through to Scroll
    • structured into the core concepts - decent. in the sense that it is a collab endeavor - no one course lead
    • how can we also connect to resources and give technical skill, etc.
  • Regional Project Funding
    • It’s important to find a way to give the communities the resources they need to be able to improve access to better living conditions
    • If we can empower our communities on a regional level and help them become more relevant in the block chain realm, we can at the same time that we are going to have a constant flow of user and contributors
    • How can we best support local communities - maybe create regional project funding program, we can help communities improve qol but also have a constant flow of new users/contributors for scroll
    • Dao members are also community members - they usually know what’s needed locally and know what needs funding - can set up pathways to allow a stream to community members - need to have accountability and proof of tangible impact
    • Doesnt have to be onchain, can be flood assistance or general qol impact
    • provide receipts - capture hearts and minds to bridge the chasm between onchain useful and real world impact is

Governance Iterations

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Workshop 1:

  • Dynamic Voting & Compensation:
    • Link voting power and compensation to participation levels, incentivizing active contribution in DAO governance.
    • Why: It could balance power with activity, ensuring those most engaged in the community’s growth lead its governance and are fairly rewarded.
  • Moving away from solely token voting
    • Why: It would reduce the risks with governance take over attacks, ensure the most engaged community members have a say in the protocols roadmap and future
  • Re-delegation
    • The first (and obvious) problem is apathy, but if a user is already apathetic to a DAO and does not want to participate, imagine aaaall those who delegated once and never moved their VP again. It’s all about incentives.

Workshop 2:

  • Exploring and implementing voting mechanisms that aren’t token-weighted
    • Exploring things like Eigen’s endorsements system, weight tied to participation (voting, councils, etc), other non-plutocratic mechanisms
  • Negation Game
    • negationgame.com
    • A large-group decision-making tool for DAOs that favors sound arguments and objective knowledge, favoring contributors when they are internally consistent, epistemically humble, and capable of changing their mind.
    • Product is early stage and being developed alongside 2-3 DAO communities, including Eigen and Scroll.
    • Initially, the Negation Game is designed for strategy discussion and preference signaling.
  • No Iteration
    • It seems like once a DAO hits its stride that’s when it stops iterating. I believe that even super successful DAOs should keep iterating.

Workshop 3:

  • AI X Governance
    • telegram bots that use llm, etc could be cool ai experiments
    • aggregation of signal from multiple people - topic modeling and nlp to build an ai agent that acts for that group of people - funnels a bunch of collective deliberation into output that can be sent to wider dao
    • Building data pipelines from network participants and building AI representatives
    • how do you know the right info, and then how do you apply it?
  • Mapping challenges related to DAOs
    • By creating a more well coordinated landscape of problems and potential solutions, we can benefit by making sure that we’re making the most well-informed decisions
  • Token Distribution and Voting Protocols
    • We need to make sure that the user are delegating as much voting power to those working in the process of sourcing ideas and decision making
    • How do we make sure that the governance process is as transparent as possible and the information is getting to the users

As a reminder, the full discussion can be found on the Miro board here: Miro

Next Steps Checklist

  • Contribute ideas asynchronous here: Miro
  • Add the governance calendar to make sure you don’t miss:
    • Attending the follow up workshops
    • Voting within the 48-hour window
    • Attending the recap call to discuss the results and begin planning for co-designed proposals
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Thank you very much for this recap.

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Thanks for update about Workshop

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thank you, this is an excellent recap

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