Deepfunding Blog

Our vision on the future of Deep Funding & why we are doing this experiment

Deep Funding has always been about the community. Today the community decides which projects are awarded a grant by casting a vote. However, this decision process can be extended to a lot of other topics concerning the governance of Deep Funding itself.
Our ultimate goal is to organize Deep Funding as a full community-governed organization, a DAO. This is however a very young field and we approach this transformation process with care. This experiment is a first step in expanding the community’s control beyond voting on the projects and helping us build out the processes and rules that shape Deep Funding. But perhaps even more important, this project is an experiment in governance itself, in the effectiveness of rewards, and the potential of using a ‘reputation score’ that is based on relevant constructive contributions of community members during the process.  

Context

At this early stage of Deep Funding, we still have the luxury of being able to experiment without incurring a lot of friction. At the same time, new insights at this stage will have a large impact on future tooling and processes. We like to take advantage of this opportunity by launching this  governance experiment that is mainly about two things: 

1. Getting input from the community on their vision of the processes and rules around Deep Funding and at the same time creating engagement by triggering this thought process
2. An early experiment in reputation-based governance

While we don’t have all the tooling in place to implement a full ‘liquid rank reputation system’, we’d like to push the envelope and already start experimenting with the tools we do have. Because of this early stage, we will not commit to strict rules that are defined in advance, but be free to intervene when necessary and define detailed rating mechanisms as we go along. For this reason, it’s an added benefit that this experiment does not directly impact any AGIX disbursements to Deep Funding projects, which might lead to discussions on the legitimacy of rule changes. There is however an opportunity for community members to earn some AGIX as a reward for constructive and recognized contributions, (In this case, the detailed rules of the calculations will be discovered/changed along the process.)
In other words, while the interactions and feedback are valuable to us, we see this first of all as an experiment and a learning opportunity, that we would like to share with the whole community. 

Therefore your input and participation are deeply appreciated. To give you a little bit of extra motivation we will distribute 100,000 AGIX among the contributors to this experiment, pro rato of each person’s gained reputation score. 

Rules

• We hope to get a lot of governance proposals that we will filter down to 2-3 feasible proposals on which we will consult the AGIX token-holding community by adding the questions and possible answers to a real, wallet-based community vote on our own voting portal
  • How we will filter down the proposals to 2 or 3 is TBD and part of the experiment 
• We aim to reward positive and constructive behavior in this process by adding voting weight to the related wallet and a reward in AGIX to be distributed among the participants, based on their activity
• In order to accomplish this, we will offer an option to connect your Swae profile with your AGIX wallet (read more below)
• We will calculate for each contributor the total rating of all their contributions. We will not commit to a final algorithm beforehand, due to the experimental nature of this process. Examples of activities that will be rewarded are:
  • Making a governance proposal and the quality and quantity of community feedback on the proposal
  • Providing comments and the community’s feedback on those comments
  • Note that these rates might also be negative (e.g. in case of spam, or an attempt to game the system)
• There are no -fixed- rules. We will keep the prerogative to make changes to the rules as we see fit, with the promise of a proper explanation of our considerations after the program 

Process

Community members can submit proposals or give feedback on proposed changes on our portal 

• A governance proposal consists of a question to the community, a number of optional answers, an explanation on how this proposed idea differentiates from the existing process, the benefits of the proposed change, and some metrics on how we would be able to measure success.  
• Every community member can create one or more governance proposals. We expect that Community members will first check if a similar proposal has already been added by someone else before submitting. It will be more effective to first have a discussion on the details of the first proposal than adding new variations immediately. 
• Every community member can give feedback on any of the proposed questions and answers. 
• The creator of the governance proposal is expected to give feedback in turn and make adjustments and improvements or explain why this is not warranted. 
• Every community member can give a rating to each governance proposal. 
• Based on the engagement on a governance proposal, the rating given, and how it differentiates from other governance proposals, we will filter out 2 or 3 questions to be offered to the community for a formal vote. We have not yet defined how we will filter. Exploring this is part of the experiment. Important factors will be; 
  • Practical feasibility  
  • Amount of engagement, and positive reactions
  • Rating 
  • Uniqueness related to other governance proposals at the time of creation 
  • Expected benefits 

Restrictions:

• The governance proposals are targeted (only) at the next round, round 2 of Deep Funding
• A governance proposal should not effectively block our capacity to allocate a reasonable amount of tokens to the next round
• A governance proposal should not block the organization of a new round within a reasonable timeline (though some details on timing could be a valid topic to vote on.) 
• The governance proposal should be feasible with the tools we have or can easily acquire
• The governance proposal should have the best interest of Deep Funding and our platform at heart and be aligned to the purpose of SingularityNET

Suggestions for potential topics to address in your governance proposal

• Timing of the next round
• Conditions for (project) proposers, such as the format of the proposal, or kind of proposal required
• Processes:
  • Eligibility assessment and pre-vote rating of a proposal (like expert ratings)
  • Voting (grade voting vs binary, vs. …)
• Awards for teams: 
  • Pools, height of the awards
  • FIAT value vs fixed amount of tokens, vs minimum exchange rate
• Themes

These are just some suggestions. We hope to be surprised by other creative and positive contributions.

Wallets, ratings, and rewards 

Everyone with a profile on our portal will be able to gain reputation points and rewards for their contributions. There are however extra rewards to be earned for those that have reputation points that can be linked to their votes cast on our voting portal.
Note that there is no KYC necessary. Even when your login is linked to your profile, we still only recognize you by your behavior, as long as linked to the wallet address. You can hide your wallet address from other users by entering a username. (See further below) 

To get the additional rewards for voting, participants must login to the portal using the same (Ethereum) wallet as they use for voting. This web3 / wallet login using Metamask is a new feature of our portal. For practical reasons, we are limited to Ethereum at this point in time. 

• Swae has a login with Metamask operational, but there is not yet a Cardano wallet integration.
• The SingularityNET Voting portal is not yet able to support multichain voting, so will also be limited to AGIX on Ethereum. 

Disbursement of rewards is done in AGIX on Cardano, so you would need both an Ethereum wallet and a Cardano wallet to collect the maximum reputation points and rewards. 

The process is as follows: 

• If you already have a profile on our portal you can choose to create a new Web3-based profile or continue with your current profile. 
• If you don’t have a profile yet, you still have the choice between a classic login or a web3 login. 

With an eye to the future and to profit from a maximum of reputation points and awards, a web3 login is preferred. We hope we will be able to connect web3 logins to existing profiles and perhaps multiple wallets related to a single account in the future, but this is still under debate, so cannot be guaranteed.

After login you can add two more things to ‘My profile: 

1. You can enter a username. This can be either your real name or any (respectful) pseudonym of your choosing. 
2. You can enter your public Cardano address. At the bottom of the profile form, there is a simple text field ‘Additional Wallet Details’. You can add your Cardano address here to receive any rewards in your wallet. This field is not visible to other users, but it will be visible to us when we get an export of all relevant data. It will enable us to disburse any rewards, without needing any further details or contact information. We chose this approach in respect of your privacy. 

Timelines:

• The mission will be open for 2 weeks to submit your proposal. The closing date is Sunday, October 2, 12 PM UTC. At the end of this period, there will be a public meeting where proposers can (optionally) introduce and elaborate on their proposals, and the community can discuss.
• After this, we aim for 2 additional weeks for the community to discuss and adapt submitted proposals. During this period there will be another public meeting to discuss the proposals.
• After all comments are frozen, we will select the top 2 or 3 proposals, based on community engagement, feedback, and rating as well as alignment with the rules and restrictions outlined above, and add them to the SingularityNET Voting Portal. We expect this may take another week.
• The voting portal is opened and the community can vote on the proposals. Each proposal will also have an option to vote against it, as well as one or more variations of a ‘pro’ vote. 

After the vote: 

• We will calculate the results, taking into account the reputation scores of voters and the amount of AGIX in their wallet, (which we may process by a ‘quadratic voting’ algorithm), and publish the results.
• Distribute awarded AGIX to the contributors, based on each person’s reputation score.
• Start preparing for Round 2, in alignment with the results of the community vote.

We hope to meet you all in this mission on our Deep Funding portal.
In case you have any questions, feel free to reach out on our Deep Funding Discord channel or our Telegram channel.