Research

Ideation and Research

• Research
• Ideation and Research
• Raid Guild onboarding review
  • Conclusion
  • Recommendations
    • 1. Easy to do
    • 2. Will take some time to finish
  • Notes on onboarding
• Continuity Drift's analysis
  • • Metaphors
    • Fitness Landscapes
    • Character Sheets
    • levels
    • Performativity

Raid Guild onboarding review

In which gallant squire HHH (S3 Cohort) goes through a bunch of documents and links to find out what they* are doing for onboarding, and returns with comments on what Raid Guild does/could/should/oughta do during onboarding.

*they being CabinDAO, Bankless, FWB, Forefront, Superteam, amongst others

With assistance/resources/links/orders from fellow S3 Cohort members govinda, gaia dadabit, BorrowLucid, uschtwill, others.

See Raid Guild Projects > Onboarding for the notes and list of resources that this review is based on.

Conclusion

Providing extra resources during onboarding / pre-onboarding would help align expectations of those being onboarded, and reduce the workload of those in charge of onboarding.

Align expectations—When is the next cohort; what should I do while I wait for the next cohort; what do I need to do during onboarding; what's the path to membership.

Reduce workload for those in charge of onboarding/tavern-keeping—expect fewer repetitive questions in Discord channels as key info can be provided in documents; resources can be reused or trivially updated for successive cohorts.

Recommendations

1. Easy to do

Use pinned posts in Discord channels to provide links to more information about onboarding and Raid Guild in general

• Why pin posts with links to more info? Newly joined people ask the same questions over and over.
  • A bot could be used to post a "Check the pinned post for more info" message.
  • If there is a gap between cohorts and prospective members do not receive information they may assume that nothing is happening in Raid Guild DAO, and quit.
• e.g. in the season-X channel, a pinned post has a link to the calendar, FAQ, and various How-To docs.
• e.g. in the tavern channel, or a start-here channel: "Next cohort begins X date" / "Prepare by reading all this"

Example pinned post from Superteam DAO.

2. Will take some time to finish

Collate and fact-check all that extra information about onboarding and Raid Guild in general

• Why collate and fact-check the extra information? Once organised and typed out, the key info can be put online and all in one place. People with questions can visit the Raid Guild library to search for answers on their own before posting in Discord channels
• The S3 apprentice onboarding project has produced 99% (non-scientific calculation) of the FAQs/How-To/Calendar documentation required for successful onboarding.
  • Useful additions to existing documentation include an organisation chart, an outline of contribution zones and how to contribute, and information about how contributions to work may be made by Cohorts who are not yet Raid Guild members.
• To keep information fresh and up to date would require ongoing work.

Clarification on Raid Guild roles and path to membership

• Why should Raid Guild roles and path to membership be clarified?
  Clarification would help manage the expectations of prospective members. Those who can make the commitment will self-select and continue; others may drop out early and make way for those who are a better fit for Raid Guild.
• Currently the apparent roles in Raid Guild are members and non-members (not to be confused with skills, e.g. Paladin/Warrior/etc). Non-members include cohort/apprentices and those-yet-to-be-onboarded AKA lurkers.
• The current path to Raid Guild membership appears to be:
  1. Sign up for onboarding
  2. Progress through onboarding
  3. ??? A member sponsors your membership proposal and it passes
  4. Profit You are now a member
• Are prospective members aware of that path, and can Cohort/Apprentices contribute to (paid) Raid Guild work if not a full member?

Notes on onboarding

(In no particular order. Potentially useful additions to RG onboarding are highlighted. Resources used for the review can be found at Raid Guild Projects > Onboarding.

Continuity Drift's analysis

The trick, for me, is how to have robots/programs give value to human ecosystems/relationships, rather than make humans interact more robotically, with less presence and awareness.

Interactions with onboarding software, be they discord bots or some kind of character sheet stored as an NFT, should be the interaction, not just some pre-determined, centralized mechanism for deciding who is worth interacting with or talking to.

Metaphors

The DAO is like a role playing game. The problems of human coordination you are trying to solve are like an ancient demon. The onboarding process can be like a bot, a program.

Except, in my opinion, it shouldn’t actually be a bot, or program. Unless either the deployment or active development of the bot loops back to human input, some conversation or game around the code, but larger than it.

Metaphors illuminate the subject because of a dissasociative shock, a drift of continuity. When taken literally, they lose their power.

Fitness Landscapes

James Conway’s mathmatical simulation Life is called a game, but is actually a simple set of rules determining the survival of cells on a mathmatical grid. The game is in trying to figure out starting configurations that can lead to interesting, persistent behavior. The game itself has survived, the meme of it, because it takes new human inputs and return surprising, beautiful results.

The kind of onboarding bot I would enjoy using is one that somehow learned and adapted to my experience, and through which I could learn about and from other cohort members.

Character Sheets

What if, for potential “scribes”, there was a bot that could simply count how many words a user had typed (there would some human supervision needed to avoid spamming).

Players could also be rewarded by words published elsewhere, perhaps with multiplier effects if they were using platforms relevant to the DAO.

Alternately, players could assign ability scores based on self-evalutation of competency, and when micro-bounties were posted, they could only be claimed by heroes with appropriate stats (unless they enlisted another party member).

Experience points could corresopond to xDai earned, and quests could also be limited by experience level.

levels

One simple way to think about or implement experience levels would be that the level equals the number of players in the party. First level characters prove themselves with low-effort, low-reward solo tasks, and progressing to level two means they team up with another cohort member. Level three might be finding an appropriate, higher-level guild member to lead them on their first real quest.

Performativity

The thing that I didn’t explain well in the audio call is that, if you are trying to ship an asynchronous onboarding bot, but at least part of that project is using the development of that bot as an onboarding tool (as you should), then it seems like the product isn’t just the code, but the less codified algorithms marshalling the human resources and incentive structures responsible for the initial and continued development.

The design philosophy, or game metaphors.

The repository needs to be a good bot, but also a good story.

• Govinda: Agreed! immerse them in RG's metaverse

Guild is a great word to describe what RG does. Conceptually, it functions a lot like the thieves guild in Skyrim, or the bounty hunter's guild in Mandolorian. Some members are more respected within the guild and are the ones that clients will likely look to first to ship the products they want. Full membership should be contingent upon slaying your first demon. The onboarding bot and quest system should be a tool to familiarize apprentices with the organizational stack and tool set, and then move apprentices toward collaboration with other members of the cohort

Core Feature set:
-Self-Directed, choose-your-own-adventure style quest bot that allows prospective members to move from pre-cohort introduction to first team formation and first quest. Flow could look like:
- Pre-Cohort
- Organizational tool familiarization
-Discord
-LettuceMeet
-Miro
-Notion
-DeWork
-???
- Role selection quest (Multiple roles possible? Does that mean repeat the quest? Should multiple options be available?)
- Class specific tool familiarization
- Initial class poap quest
- Cohort meeting
- Collaboration quest
-Bounty Board
-Individual Projects
-Literally ship anything
-Judgement of the Shadow council
-Can upgrade POAP to full membership
-Process can also be used to upgrade membership of raid members further to assign greater power/reputation in voting.

Judgement by the shadow council: Submitting a video to established guild members within your chosen role to evaluate your skills and award you a poap (gear?) or not. secret voting mechanism. roles should have sub-daos that can choose the requirements for their own membership.