Giveth - Karma governance analytics integration

Giveth Proposals
1

Proposal Information

Proposal description:
This proposal aims to implement an analytics suite for DAO governance contributions, providing Giveth with tools to take data-driven actions. The goal: increase informed engagement, accountability, and ultimately DAO governance automation.

Karma aggregates and analyzes governance contributions such as votes (on-chain and off-chain), Discord and forum discussions, and any other sources the DAO may use for governance. The aggregated data is transformed into actionable insights that are displayed on a Giveth contribution dashboard.

The primary benefit of this dashboard is contribution visibility and accountability. However, our system also generates custom contribution scores that can be used for a number of governance actions, such as distributing nrGIV to active contributors, delegation, allocating additional voting power, assigning access & permissions or distributing rewards (governance mining).

Authors: @mmurthy and @KathleenOlstedt

Proposal Details
The proposal details along with implementation steps are explained below.

1) Indexing Contributions

Karma will index Giveth’s sources relevant to DAO governance contributions. These can include (but are not limited to):

  • Aragon on-chain voting
  • Snapshot voting
  • Garden’s data
  • Forum activity (proposals initiated, discussed, posts discussed, likes received etc.)
  • Discord activity

2) Scoring Contributions (optional)

For a simplified review of governance activity and possible follow-up actions (e.g. allocation of voting power), Karma aggregates different contribution data and calculates respective scores.

An example of the scoring model used by Gitcoin can be found here: reputation-scores/gitcoin-health-score.provider.ts at main · show-karma/reputation-scores · GitHub

Final scoring results can be seen here: Gitcoin DAO Contributors Leaderboard

Note: As governance contributions vary from DAO to DAO and have different significance in them, the scoring will be customized in close coordination with the Giveth executive council. The scoring logic is open source so that Giveth can audit and verify the scores at all times. The aggregated data is exposed through APIs and can be freely integrated with other applications as needed.

3) Actionable Insights via Contribution Dashboard

A custom Dashboard (hosted on Giveth’s subdomain) can be set up to display contributor stats.

Salient features of the custom dashboard include:

  • High-level voting stats
  • Voting history from Snapshot and on-chain
  • Contributor details
  • Contributor voting reason for each proposal
  • Contribution Scores (optionally) to summarize all activity, incl. not displayed sources such as proposing and commenting via forum.

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Example: https://op.showkarma.xyz

|488.1146616541353x523.2182130584192
|488.1146616541353x523.21821305841921240Ă—1330 191 KB

Example: Delegates of Optimism DAO

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Example: Delegates of Optimism DAO

Through API access, the governance contribution stats can be displayed where needed, e.g. in the Forum or in Discord.

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Example ENS Forum Plugin: Profile - nick.eth - ENS DAO Governance Forum

Alternatively, Karma can provide a standard (off-the-shelf) Dashboard that is hosted on Karma’s domain.

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Example Gitcoin Contribution Dashboard Gitcoin DAO Contributors Leaderboard

  1. Action & Automation

Based on actionable insights, key governance actions can be automated. These include distributing rewards or issuing permissions based on contribution scores (e.g. automatic access rights to Discord channels or allocating additional voting rights). In addition, SBT badges can be minted to serve as on-chain credentials and role assignments. For this, it has proven useful to define thresholds and assign corresponding membership levels.

Note: Karma is fully composable and believes in the power of DAO Governance Legos. Further permissions based on scores (such as token-gating communication channels) could be added in collaboration with players such as Guild.xyz.

Expected duration or delivery date (if applicable):
We expect to deliver one month from the time of approval

Team Information (For Funding Proposals)

Names, usernames, and/or relevant social links for team members (Twitter, Github, Giveth Forum, etc.):

Skills and previous experience in related or similar work:
The Karma team is experienced in building high-quality, scalable software systems and has deep expertise in DAO governance. Mahesh Murthy - the founder of Karma and responsible for Technology, Product & Operations - has built complex software systems from the ground up. Kathleen Olstedt, Business Generalist & Governance Strategist has advised Web3 organizations with Bankless Consulting and was part of Idle Finance’s Treasury League.

A few notable implementations are:

  • Optimism, Aave & dYdX commissioned Karma to build the Delegation Dashboard, and add new visibility features in an iterative process.
  • Gitcoin’s steward health cards are powered by Karma. All the stats are calculated by Karma and exposed through API that is rendered by Gitcoin’s frontend.
  • ENS DAO uses Karma’s discourse forum plugin to display governance stats of DAO participants inside their forum profile.
  • Idle Finance tracks governance contributions via Karma (Governance Mining), to
    identify & reward its most engaged participants.

Funding Information (For Funding Proposals)

Amount of GIV requested:

For the implementation and continuous maintenance of the Dashboard (considering the size of the DAO) for a year, we request the following setup fee (equivalent $ amount in Giv), depending on the customization effort:
A) Custom Dashboard incl. delegation feature: $10,000 worth of Giv tokens
B) Standard Dashboard with limited customization: $5000

After the first year, the DAO has the option to renew the service at a cost of $5000/year.

The payout can be linked to the following milestones:
Milestone 1: $2000 - Identify all the sources of integration and agree on detailed requirements with the team.
Milestone 2: $3000 (off-the-shelf dashboard) or $8000 (custom dashboard) Upon completion of the project and successful handover of the dashboard with all functionalities. We are also open to the milestone 2 amount disbursed on a quarterly basis vs a lump sum.

Ethereum address where funds shall be transferred:
0x627f84bb4bBA3333f253F09fe22A445F195bCF34

1 Like
2

Let’s add in a simple poll here we can use for signalling:

  • Yes to basic analytics ($5k yearly)
  • Yes to custom dashboard for Giveth ($10k yearly)
  • No to any integration.
  • I have questions and/or concerns … will post below

0 voters

3

I would 100% support this if some how this could replace sourcecred and be part of our rewards system. That would be great! Cause of course praise is great but if we could round it out with github and forum contributions… oh man, that would be huge.

2 Likes
4

We can definitely do that. We have both forum and GitHub integration already, so it’s a matter of ironing out the weights and tweaking it. How about as a next step, discuss with your team and flesh out the requirements and come up with a plan?

5

Had a great call with @mmurthy to see more options for using Karma analytics as an input into our rewards system.

As mentioned they have a few existing integrations we could adapt to our needs. Here’s some notable details I found from out call:

Github

With Karma they can get analytics on all Giveth repositories we want to include and checkout commits made by our contributors ot those repos. it take into consideration the the lines of code changed, rather than the # of actions made (PRs, commit, issue interactions etc…) which is an improvement over sourcecred which only looked at the quantity of actions, irrespective of the impact they made on the code.

Discourse (forum)

Similar to discourse they can count user actions made on the platform, actions such as likes made, posts and topics created. We can also give weight to interactions made by forum category, valuing certain ones higher than others…

Maybe there is more details I’m missing but it seems their integration can do everything sourcecred and more.

Snapshot

With snapshot they are able to track who voted on proposals, the obvious interaction, but also more!

They are able to track if a user voted on the winning proposal which could add to more interesting features…

I made this suggestion in last week’s GIVernance call, where we could hide the results of ongoing snapshot votes, revealing them only when the snapshot vote has ended, this feature already exists in snapshot. We could then reward people who voted on the winning answer, incentivizing not simply engagement but active participation in our governance systems.

Aliasing

They use very similar methods as sourcecred to alias all the different profiles together - each platform ID is attached to a user’s eth address. each integration requires users to complete a verification action, on the given platform, with the exception of snapshot, because the eth adress is already their id.

I’m pretty excited to try this out to gain more governance analytics, implement a new ways of collecting and rewarding participation and contribution AND potentially laying the foundation for a Giveth delegation program!

Curious to hear more from the rewards team on this one @NikolaCreatrix @Danibelle @Franco @clara_gr @mateodaza !

1 Like
6

Gm! I highly recommend focusing on factoring those data points that are qualitative and not quantitative, otherwise the incentives aren’t aligned on impact and thus the propensity for individuals to focus on the wrong things are incentivised.

Examples:

  1. Discourse activity (having less posts with higher quality is far more advantageous in DAOs, not more posts)
  2. Voting in alignment with the winner (you are incentivising people to vote to win, not make the right decision
5 Likes
7

Agree, @Leuts! More is not necessarily better. That’s why, for example, the scoring impact of forum comments can be capped. In general, measuring the quality of individual contributions is still in its early stages. Yet, there are proxies that provide valuable clues, e.g. if someone participated in a proposal discussion (forum activity), the final vote might be of higher quality. Correlating measurements is a good place to start.

1 Like
8

@mitch for the poll… As I understand from the Original post, the custom dashboard is 10K for deployment, but the service renewal is still 5K/year (not 10K yearly, someone correct me if I’m worng).

I think Praise is so great to reward qualitative aspect of collaboration and this would be a great fit for the quantitative part.

I agree with keeping an eye on biases from the quantitative perspective as stated by @Leuts and @KathleenOlstedt

9

@cotabe thanks for your comment. We’d like to clarify that the mentioned numbers are not final, as we haven’t fully worked out the requirements yet. However, it will be between $5k and $10k. If the community is in favor, we will work with Mitch and team to fully define the specs. The final proposal will include the exact amount and details.

1 Like
10

I would really like a comparative analysis between the standard dashboard and the customized dashboard. What is possible with each, to be able to make up my mind on which I think would be better to implement?

11

This would be so great!! It has proven difficult to find an alternative to SourceCred and I think it offered valuable insight into the level of contribution and value added by a contributor that isn’t accounted for in praise.

Also, If we chose the standard option now, could we upgrade or choose to make it more custom at a later time? @mmurthy

12

I believe, starting with basic analytics can give us a better insight to later decide if we want/need full integration and how we want to implement that.

13

@Cotabe Here is what you get from Standard dashboard

  1. All the sources (Snapshot, Forum, Github) integrated and displayed on dashboard
  2. Display voting history
  3. API access to all the data

Custom dashboard has all the above plus

  1. Dedicated site that can be hosted on giveth subdomain with giveth branding
  2. Search proposals inside voting history of users
  3. Ability for voters to display reason for their voting
  4. We are adding more advanced analytics over the next couple months about how voter behavior, leaderboard for upcoming active participants and many others.

For sure we can migrate to custom dashboard at later date. From our past discussion with Mitch, we cover all the metrics sourcecred covers plus more.

3 Likes
14

I support this proposal - the dashboards go a long way to uncovering insights into our DAO and would really add enormous value if it could become part of our rewards system.
I support starting with standard dashboard and once we have a better understanding of how it works and is used in practice then we can further consider customisation alongside Karma’s development and creation of new features.
Thanks @mitch for this proposal and to @mmurthy and Karma for presentation and info. I am excited to see where this project goes.

2 Likes
15

Thank you for this proposal. Karma is a great product!
I see a great opportunity to integrate Karma data (via API) with the Praise System, other than that …

Is there anything in our organization right now that is blocking us, slowing our performance, preventing us to function as a DAO, and we need a solution (in this case Karma) to solve that problem for us?

1 Like
16

The Snapshot vote conclusively decided that our community favours the standard integration!
https://snapshot.org/#/giv.eth/proposal/0x9640c4019e2f5d4f8ea64697db30854abe9133d38db93f9fca068551b3f7d7df

Gardens proposal is LIVE, vote now with your GIV!

2 Likes