#2581 Societal - A Homebase for Decentralized Communities
UPDATE: We are working on updating the proposal based on the comments from the community. We will update the post below when the new proposal is ready.
Dear Kusama Community,
My name is Graeme Fox - Co-Founder & CEO of Societal. For those of you that dont know, Societal is a parachain that makes it easy to organize, govern, and grow on-chain communities. Its streamlined SaaS application is the ideal platform for any Kusama community including the creator economy, protocols, social clubs, gaming, DAOs, and more.
Societal is seeking $238,041.72 USD / 8,883 KSM in treasury funding to become the homebase for decentralized communities on Kusama and provide governance and treasury management services to any tokenized project. The payment would be in two installments - half on acceptance and the other half after the completion of Milestone 1.
As it stands today, the DOTSAMA ecosystem does not have the creation, governance, and treasury management tooling products that other major blockchains do. By building these products, we will strengthen the DOTSAMA community, as NFT projects, DAOs and dApps will have a platform to manage their governance and community.
Societal has not applied for treasury funding before and has a small amount of VC backing. We are asking the treasury to support our project so that we can bring our product live on Kusama, onboard users. We believe that after we do this we will be in a position to go after more VC funding, as funding is currently at a stand still for early stage crypto projects. Additionally, we believe that the DOTSAMA ecosystem needs more usable applications, as most projects today are DeFi or smart contract platforms.
Please find the full proposal here. It would be great to hear your input about our proposal and I would be happy to answer any questions that you may have.
More information about Societal can be found here:
Societal accomplishments can be found here:
- Attended Inaugural Polkadot Blockchain Academy
- Polkadot Relayers
- Secured Three Web 3 Foundation Grants - Grant 1, Grant 2, Grant 3
- Accepted to Substrate Builders Program and Submitted Milestone 1
- Multiple Polkadot Panel Discussions - Academy Alumni, ETHDenver
- Rococo Testnet Deployment
- Product Videos
- Completed Scytale Academy
- Accepted to Berkley Blockchain Accelerator
- Cross Ecosystem Engagement
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Overall 33 % of users are feeling optimistic. The team appreciates feedback from an audit and plans to update their proposal accordingly, engaging with projects interested in launching DAOs on Kusama or using their platform for existing token governance. They aim to be a central hub for decentralized organizations within the DOTSAMA ecosystem, offering tools like payroll integration and subscription-based pricing. The majority of funds raised have been allocated towards development, operations, and marketing.
Overall 66 % of users are feeling neutral. The Societal team has provided a pre-referendum audit for a treasury proposal extension of Proposal#67. The audit focuses on information quality rather than project/idea quality and can be accessed via the Audit tab. Questions regarding inspiration, investors, open source status, ecosystem choice, tool bias, pricing calculation, MVP development, adoption strategy, and community value are raised for discussion.
AI-generated from comments
- Have you spoken to projects that want to launch a DAO on Kusama? Will these DAOs be on your own parachain? If yes, how is it different from deploying a much better tool to an EVM compatible chain?
- Who are the existing investors and how much money was raised and how has it been used?
- It seems like the team is asking for money to build their product, which is going to be a paid product? Is the project completely open source?
- Do you plan to stay put for Kusama ecosystem? Why cant this funding support Polkadot ecosystem as well?
- The proposal has a bias towards existing tools and ecosystem mapping hasn't been done properly. Genesis DAO is trying to do the same thing?
- Price should be calculated at time of creating proposal not when creating discussion
- Make a basic MVP from the VC funding raised and get some adoption with some users. Once that is there and community can see some value, you'd be more than welcomed to create a proposal for building opensource development.
Hello,
Thank you for your questions. Please my responses to your questions below. I hope that this answers your questions, otherwise I am happy to elaborate.
- Have you spoken to projects that want to launch a DAO on Kusama? Will these DAOs be on your own parachain? If yes, how is it different from deploying a much better tool to an EVM compatible chain?
Yes, we have spoken to projects that would like to use our platform and either launch a DAO on Kusama or use our platform for their existing token governance. Here are a few of the projects that we have spoken to:
- Kusama Kingz
- SafariDAO
- PolkaInsider
- Canadian Blockchain Consortium
- Capsule House
- Catalyze
- ChaosDAO
- DIA
- Unique / Quartz Network
- Watr
- Ajuna / Bajun Network
- HermesDAO
- Sora
If a project creates a new DAO on our platform, then the token will be generated on our chain. However, if a project already has a token then they can keep the token on their existing chain for governance. In the future, we will roll out cross-chain governance and cross-chain treasury management.
Our platform is different as we want to be the homebase for all decentralized organization / governance in the DOTSAMA ecosystem. We are building an Appstore for organization tooling where third party payroll, reputation and accounting projects can deploy their project to our chain, integrate into our UI, and offer the services to the organizations on our chain. We are also implementing a subscription based pricing system at the protocol level, which will allow the community to pay a monthly subscription fee and then all of the organization members can interact on-chain in the organization without paying gas.
- Who are the existing investors and how much money was raised and how has it been used?
To date we have 305K USD committed to the project. The current investors are as follows:
- Outlier Ventures
- Portofino
- Graham Frieman
- Lauren Selig
- Red Phone
- Other Angels
The majority of the funds have been used for development and to build out our MVP. Other funds have gone into operations and a bit into marketing.
- It seems like the team is asking for money to build their product, which is going to be a paid product? Is the project completely open source?
Societal is completely open source and has been from the beginning. You can find our GitHub account below, where you can see our node, node indexer, and client repos. While most of the application has been built, we are asking for money to finish off the remaining few features, test the product and onboard users. The product has plans to be paid in the future so we can sustain ourselves instead of asking for more money from the treasury. However, we do plan to launch the product for free at the beginning.
- Do you plan to stay put for Kusama ecosystem? Why cant this funding support Polkadot ecosystem as well?
We plan to have roots in Kusama and Polkadot. The open source development of this proposal can definitely support the Polkadot ecosystem as well, but we want to launch on Kusama first and that is why we are asking for funding here.
- The proposal has a bias towards existing tools and ecosystem mapping hasn't been done properly. Genesis DAO is trying to do the same thing?
We only mentioned existing projects in the DOTSAMA ecosystem in the proposal, under competing projects. There are other projects in different ecosystems that do similar things, but we believe that we can build a 10x better product with Substrate. This will allow any decentralized community in DOTSAMA to use a local product, instead of using an Ethereum based one that does not mapping to Substrate based tokens.
- Price should be calculated at time of creating proposal not when creating discussion
Thank you, I have taken note of this. I will update the KSM price when the proposal is created. However, I hope this gives an estimation of the KSM we are looking for.
- Make a basic MVP from the VC funding raised and get some adoption with some users. Once that is there and community can see some value, you'd be more than welcomed to create a proposal for building open source development.
We do have an MVP built and have had users test the product. They are now interested in seeing a live version of the product on Kusama or Polkadot. We will continue to have users test the product as we continue our development and ideal launch on Kusama. We know that this application and funding process will take some time so we have started now. We are also asking for the money in two installments, so if the community is not happy with what we have developed in the first half of the proposal, then they do not need to fund the second half.
You can look at our product videos below to see what we have developed.
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLukf6xUl2RLLdy7S81_Qua8SE_G0VhpKF
Hello! We invite a member of the team to join AAG this Monday at 3:30pm UTC to help us better understand this initiative!
Please reach out on Matrix @ jay-chrawnna:matrix.org
Thanks! 🙏
Hey Jay! It would be great to come one the show, I will send you a message on element now.
maybe start by creating, operating and developing DAOs on Kusama.
everything you propose is already possible, start simple and grind your way up - the tech is built, its the collectives that are missing.
Hi mrb, thanks for your response!
Our project would help create new DAOs, but would also help existing projects with their community / token holder governace. From speaking with new and existing projects, there does not appear to be a system on Kusama to do this right now. Are you able to point me to one that is able to do this?
Hey Societal team,
Thank you for the proposal.
Here's the pre-referendum audit for this treasury proposal.
Notes
- This audit was not influenced by previous audits.
- This audit reflects only the quality of information presented in the proposal and not the Quality of the project/idea itself.
- This audit can also be viewed from the "Audit" tab above.
The following proposal Audit is created as a part of the extension for Proposal#67. More information about the Treasury proposal template and the Audit process can be found on the link above. All templates are free for everyone to use. For any questions or feedback regarding the Audit templates use the discussion link from above.
Thank you very much for this audit! We will update our proposal based on your comments.
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