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###### tags: `Haus Party Live`
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# HAUS Party LIVE! Notes: 7/8/2021

Join us for 🎉 Haus Party Live 🎉 every Thursday at 2pm EST on the [DAOhaus Discord](https://discord.gg/daohaus)

## Notes From the [Livestream](https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1080562611)

[YouTube Link](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ynjfT7QcP1o)

**Topics**

>**MakerDAO SES**
*Juan Guillen and Wouter Kampmann*

>Standing for "Sustainable Ecosystem Scaling" the DAO is growing the Maker Protocol's moats by removing barriers between decentralized workforce, capital, and work. The goal is to achieve an effective, decentralized, and scalable ecosystem. Let's hear their vision on how to achieve the optimal driving force for protocol growth.

**Hosts & Guests**

- Felipe Duarte, dekanbro, vengist, Vanilladelphia.eth
- Juan Guillen and Wouter Kampmann from MakerDAO Sustainable Ecosystem Scaling initiative

---

🌱 *Welcome to our metaphorical garden!* 🌱

## [[1:34]](https://youtu.be/ynjfT7QcP1o?t=94) Guest Introduction

The Maker community has been treading the path for many in the DAO ecosystem through their various initiatives, and today Juan Guillen and Wouter Kampmann join Haus Party Live!

- Juan Guillen and Wouter Kampmann from MakerDAO Sustainable Ecosystem Scaling initiative
- Working to take MakerDAO fully decentralized
- Maker community has been "treading the path" for many in the DAO community:
- Community engagement initiatives, Sourcecred, etc.

## [[2:30]](https://youtu.be/ynjfT7QcP1o?t=150) Updates (DAOhaus Universe)

- Focusing on community work — Discord restructuring to split into tracks (Scholars, Contributors, Supporters, Summoner) which provides pathways for onboarding folks into the community
- Streamlining folks and helping them get where they want to be
- *How to DAO* class (4 sessions, 1 per week) starting in next few weeks!
- Not just about [DAOhaus](https://daohaus.club/); focusing on providing a cross-cutting education for DAOs
- NFT vault (collaboration with [Rarible](https://rarible.org/)) coming soon
- Working on platform improvements (improving developer experience, documentation, platform functionality)
- Shoutout to Amos who is doing some great documentation work for DAOhaus!

🏰 If you want to get involved with DAOhaus, the streamlined [DAOhaus Discord](https://discord.gg/daohaus) paths are a great way to start. 🏰

## [[5:30]](https://youtu.be/ynjfT7QcP1o?t=330) MakerDAO Sustainable Ecosystem Scaling Initiative

- Cofounder of Maker + Community (now part of the core!)
- Wouter: Maker is one of the older DeFi projects (considered one of the starters of DeFi movement)
- Started small ~2014-2016 with early crypto enthusiasts bouncing ideas off each other
- Not as much infrastructure when they started, so Maker was paving the way
- Maker Foundation created after first version of protocol deployed (single collateral DAI)
- Principle of Maker Protocol: lock in crypto collateral into a vault (originally known as *CDP - collateral debt position*)
- For example, locking in $10000 worth of ETH → take out loan against that denominated in DAI (2017ish)
- Today there is a sprawling ecosystem with several stablecoins in many forms, but early on Maker was focused on creating a decentralized stablecoin
- Very early in the space — and had some early tutorials on using dApps (2016, 2017)
- [[9:30]](https://youtu.be/ynjfT7QcP1o?t=570) When MakerDAO, DAI, and CDPs came out "felt like one of the massive steps toward decentralization"
- What's it been like navigating this from the front lines of the whole movement?

### [[10:36]](https://youtu.be/ynjfT7QcP1o?t=636) Bootstrapping a Decentralized Protocol

- Early on, questions about if it was possible to make it decentralized from the start
- Decentralization steps taken at Maker:
- As a social structure, was decentralized
- How do you bootstrap a decentralized protocol from the start?
- Several projects struggle with this today
- [[11:07]](https://youtu.be/ynjfT7QcP1o?t=667) **Maker Foundation** created to kickstart the protocol and *then gradually decentralize it*
- Maker Foundation's Three major goals:
- 1) Going from single collateral DAI → multi collateral DAI (ETH, wBTC, others added through governance process)
- 2) Put the tools into the hands of the community to do governance (social construction around the tools)
- 3) Bring everything to critical mass — Protocol that generates profit that funds its own expansion, maintenance, and development
- Recently achieved these goals! Now working on decentralization of the Maker Protocol

### [[13:05]](https://youtu.be/ynjfT7QcP1o?t=785) Decentralized Sustainability

- "Can a protocol take care of itself and how do we get there?"
- Maker also been navigating the social side (humans working together) throughout the years
- Taking hard line on decentralization led to emphasizing social consensus — out of necessity due to seeing needs within the community
- Community building and focus seemed to emerge as a higher priority perhaps due to core focus on decentralization
- Social structure and consensus around Maker Foundation needed to come from the community and then created structures and tools to allow for voting and governance
- Other social aspect is around team building and sustainability:
- How to maintain team work while scaling?
- How to manage communication channels when growing?
- When scaling up this becomes challenging and the community has been working on putting *Maker Improvement Proposals (MIPs)* in place
- Regulates *through* governance
- Supporting multiple *core units* working together in a decentralized environment without a boss that hopefully results in coordinated effort toward consistent product that keeps growing and adding to its own revenue
- Lots of progress and changes happening due to the community governance structures (such as the MIP process)
- *Contributors* and *users* of protocol
- Scaling: creating an order of operations where contributors can navigate the structure and get paid for their contributions so they continue contributing
- People proposing MIPs coming from outside core community was interesting to see
- Juan found maker fascinating and started getting into the community calls and contributed MIPs
- Became involved to help build out SES to grow Maker to the next level, then wrote some MIPs, became involved when discussing about building and scaling SES
- Over the years, Maker Foundation became a staple/necessary part of the infrastructure of the entire space, and then decided to provide to the community...

## [[20:30]](https://youtu.be/ynjfT7QcP1o?t=1230) Sustainable Ecosystem Scaling

- What is the current stage of the transition?
- "It's a spectrum" — achieved a lot but want to do more to become even more decentralized
- Milestone has been reached by achieving the three outlined goals
- Next stage is working to scale everything up in decentralized way
- [[22:27]](https://youtu.be/ynjfT7QcP1o?t=1347) What are the hardest parts to becoming fully decentralized?
- Does it relate to core teams? *Meteor Strike*? Tools we're using (Discord)? People?
- Have reached point of full decentralization — no longer organization employing the critical team — protocol now paying itself for sustained expansion and *this is the point of full decentralization*
- Can't just stop here and do day-to-day operations — need to grow or else the protocol loses out
- Scaling the whole thing up is biggest challenge
- MakerDAO not same meaning as often used in crypto space
- Maker is a collection of independent teams that can coordinate through governance and are *building together* to expand the protocol
- [Dunbar's Number](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number) — at point where everyone knows everyone, and need to grow beyond that
- [[25:00]](https://youtu.be/ynjfT7QcP1o?t=1500) What are the KPIs being considered when talking about scaling? What areas are you looking at?
- Speaking from the SES perspective:
- Scale up number of people participating and building on the future Maker protocol infrastructure
- Currently have 8-10 teams working together to make this happen. Want to 10x this!
- Become first DAO to reach beyond Dunbar's Number and have solved coordination problems through governance process and smart contracts
- Organization of this size pushing for growth of the Maker protocol
- SES focusing on *people aspect* — adding teams as well as individuals
- [[27:07]](https://youtu.be/ynjfT7QcP1o?t=1627) Build "unstoppable machine that continues to push the Maker protocol forward"
- Building a "Decentralized machine that turns crypto broken dreams into gold."

## [[28:29]](https://youtu.be/ynjfT7QcP1o?t=1709) Contributing

- What types of contributors are they looking for? What types of teams?
- Currently in mapping phase focusing on removing barriers
- Onboard right people and make sure they get the capital to work on what matters (identifying the useful work to be done)
- Part of SES is an incubation program
- Focusing on **basic building blocks** to cover things once taken care of by the Foundation
- Building fully independent frontend development team (all the interfaces that make the protocol successful)
- Other teams working on security, data services, etc.
- Need to think about every function that is needed in a multinational size corporation and ask "*what form does this take in a decentralized context*?"
- Big conceptual thinking exercise
- [[31:05]](https://youtu.be/ynjfT7QcP1o?t=1865) Team management is very different in a decentralized environment — working through education, onboarding, advisory
- Identifying, reinventing
- Exposing problems and find someone in community to help and work on a problem they find interesting

### [[31:55]](https://youtu.be/ynjfT7QcP1o?t=1915) Critiques of Decentralized Organizations

- How are you addressing questions around decentralized/flat organizations approaches to strategy and longer-term goals?
- Criticisms and questions about how this is difficult/impossible without an executive layer
- How is this addressed? How are core teams working together and still having a vision and mission?
- [[32:45]](https://youtu.be/ynjfT7QcP1o?t=1965) "On the one hand, need to keep it decentralized" — can't be part of the decentralized community and expect everyone to believe in same mission and vision
- Look at open source: Ideally has a roadmap, but there are disagreements all the time
- Ask how resource allocation can happen in a decentralized environment — sustain through funding?
- Would have different groups with different opinions, but can clearly articulate vision about *where DAO should go*
- Disagreements will continue to exist and the way that they're resolved is different — teams will articulate certain visions → delegation power to turn into objectives → resources provided to bring these to life
- [[36:40]](https://youtu.be/ynjfT7QcP1o?t=2200) *Loss of efficiency* is a potential problem:
- At least the type of efficiency we tend to view in the dominant paradigm:
- Linear flow of efficiency in structured orgs → *different* in DAOs and the parallel thinking that happens is an upside
- DAO efficiency allows for emergence as community members participate
- Maker pioneered the way in many things that became trends in the space

### [[37:58]](https://youtu.be/ynjfT7QcP1o?t=2278) How do I make a MIP?

- Working on tooling to make this more accessible
- Presentation layer that allows for browing MIPs in a more accessible way: [https://mips.makerdao.com](https://mips.makerdao.com)
- Nice way to see the MIPs
- Sub-proposals are implementations of these MIPs
- Good way to see MIPs
- Writing a MIP requires some prior knowledge
- [MakerDAO Forum](https://forum.makerdao.com/) and chat is a good way to start and ask for direction

## [[40:00]](https://youtu.be/ynjfT7QcP1o?t=2400) Juan's Story and "Harvestable Nuggets" on Contributing

- Going from community member to core team:
- Was doing things with Maker on the side while working, and was getting pulled in by various initiatives — DAOs are "biased towards action"
- [[40:34]](https://youtu.be/ynjfT7QcP1o?t=2434) **Ask more for forgiveness than permission** — build a thing, and see what people think**
- 🌱 Harvestable Nugget: *Ask for forgiveness not permission* is a great mindset for contributing to any DAOs as this relates to efficiency 🌱
- Asking for permission is slow for value creation — can be more streamlined to reach consensus when getting feedback on a thing
- *Show initiative* and just do something
- When people get hands-on, they look toward others to direct them
- Paradigm shift for people looking to contribute
- [[43:17]](https://youtu.be/ynjfT7QcP1o?t=2597) "An un-tensioned bow can't shoot any arrow."
- If there is too little conflict, trying to increase conflict to get people to tell the truth
- If too much conflict, try to reduce conflict to appease
- No true communication within hierarchies — people hesitant to tell each other what's going on
- Softening hierarchy → actual communication
- Whole point is openness and accessibility but sometimes jargon and terminology can be difficult for folks to get involved
- [[46:56]](https://youtu.be/ynjfT7QcP1o?t=2816) How to make accessible enough for folks to get involved and contribute?
- Education and creating tools that enable anyone with skills and motivation to contribute
- [[48:20]](https://youtu.be/ynjfT7QcP1o?t=2900) In project that's moving forward, can be pushing edges further out as momentum builds
- 🌱 "It's like a boat going through water and the wake is pushing people away." 🌱
- How do you throw the line out to bring people in?
- Faster something is moving the harder it can be to pull people in - if you blink, things move on

### [[49:51]](https://youtu.be/ynjfT7QcP1o?t=2991) What Should We Broadcast Right Now?

- How can we best serve all of us that are part of this special moment? What should we broadcast?
- [Podcast Recommendation: Balaji Srinivasan on The Tim Ferriss Show](https://tim.blog/2021/03/24/balaji-srinivasan/)
- Speaks about the paradigm changing work being done and identities
- When people are ready they'll join the movement, and it may not be for everyone
- 🌱 [[53:32]](https://youtu.be/ynjfT7QcP1o?t=3212) **"Price of admission [to DAOs] is true desire."** 🌱
- Maker as a protocol has so much to govern, and then DAOs also figuring out several pieces — many DAOs (such as DAOhaus) are navigating this and spending time and energy trying to solve scaling issues while being involved in building and sustaining a community
- [[56:08]](https://youtu.be/ynjfT7QcP1o?t=3368) Lots of folks spending time and energy trying to solve question of scaling beyond Dunbar's Number and finding the *metacoordination* layer of multiple groups working together
- How do new teams pop up as needed? How do older teams dissolve if they're no longer needed?
- Developing this *agility* to go up and down in scale as needed is a shared problem across the DAO space
- Efficiency:
- [[57:23]](https://youtu.be/ynjfT7QcP1o?t=3443) We tend to think of efficiency as avoiding people doing double work, or removing anything perceived as waste, but "the power of the DAO is massive parallelism"
- Won't be as coordinated as in a hierarchical structure, and there may be duplicate work, but there's so much of this going on that it makes up for the loss of efficiency at the individual level
- DAOs help **boost the power of emergence** — there is value in double work and this can lead to even more impactful outcomes

🎉 Check out [The DAOis](https://thedaoist.co)t Event on July 23, 2021! 🎉

## Resources

- [Podcast Recommendation: Balaji Srinivasan on The Tim Ferriss Show](https://tim.blog/2021/03/24/balaji-srinivasan/)
- [The DAOist](https://www.thedaoist.co/) - July 23, 2021
- [https://mips.makerdao.com/](https://mips.makerdao.com/)
- [https://forum.makerdao.com/](https://forum.makerdao.com/)
- [https://twitter.com/MakerDAO](https://twitter.com/MakerDAO)
- [https://www.youtube.com/MakerDAO](https://www.youtube.com/MakerDAO)