Radicle Grant Application
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Project Name: jokedao
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Team Name: jokedao
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Payment Address: 0x24E302DE82089D3eaf4D961B1d1b1f55b4FEFb12
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[Level]:
-Seed
The combination of your GitHub account submitting the application and the payment address above will be your unique identifier during the program. Please keep them safe.
Project Overview 
If this application is in response to an RFP, please indicate this on the first line of this section.
If this is an application for retroactive funding (i.e. work that is completed and committed into a codebase), please drop any related PRs in this section.
Overview
jokedao enables bottom-up, on-chain governance, letting token-holders both submit proposals and vote on their favorites—enabling community-set governance for user-generated roadmaps, grants, endorsements, bounties, curation, and contests.
Brief Description
To date, governance in DAOs has largely imitated web2 corporate governance: core teams make decisions that are approved by a community of token-holders, who are not incentivized to participate in voting—and to the extent they are, are incentivized to vote yes. We’ve built an MVP of a fully operational web3-native governance platform that flips the way governance has been done: now it’s the community itself that can respond to prompts by submitting ideas and voting on them. For the first time, the community is incentivized to raise their voice, and governance becomes truly decentralized.
Decentralized governance is particularly useful use cases that incentivize communities to become actively involved in the projects of builders and creators, including:
- Grants
- Endorsements
- Bounties
- Competitions
- Giveaways
- User-generated roadmaps
- User surveys
- Text-image-and-video based contests and games
- Film festivals and curation
- Readers choosing a writer’s next piece
- Fractionalized NFTs developing fan fiction around their art
The implications change what’s possible in DAOs. Because we’re entirely on-chain (currently available across 8 major chains, including Optimism, Polygon, Arbitrum, etc.), we could build out “extensible governance” for transactions to automatically execute on-chain depending on the results of a vote. We could also build “composable governance” for multiple options to execute (ie different qualities of an NFT combined to mint an NFT). And perhaps most importantly, data wizards can create retroactive algorithms to judge the results of a contest according to different metrics and standards in order to create alternate frameworks for decision-making—even long after a contest has ended.
An indication of how your project relates to / integrates into Radicle.
We’re particularly interested in developing jokedao in conjunction with Radicle’s grants process, which we believe we can support substantially. In our new site, submitters will be able to submit entries of any length they like while the contests themselves will show short previews—enabling easy voting across different projects. A number of options for further development to support Radicle’s grants process are possible: for example, the process could be turned into tournaments, capital could be set proportionate to votes, transactions could be set to be automated based on the result of a vote, further front-end features for submitting proposals could be developed, rewards could be given for voting or voting on a winning option to draw more people into the Radicle ecosystem, voters could be incentivized to find and work together to discuss grants and devote their own support, and most importantly, on-chain governance could allow far greater analytics of voter preferences, correlations, and funding
An indication of why your team is interested in creating this project.
Most significantly, community-led governance creates stronger communities. In our own proof-of-concept, the jokerace, we’ve set up a framework to reward voters for participating each week, and as a result multiple teams have formed to compete, strategize, and form off-chain relationships in order to develop social consensus. Besides incentivizing greater discussion among teams while rewarding voters for their work in governing a platform, this kind of model can build significant relationships between DAO members while getting them excited about a DAO’s objectives—major missing pieces in today’s DAO landscape.
Team 
Team members
— David Phelps
— Sean McCaffery
— Naomi Hauret
Contact
- Contact Name:
David Phelps
- Contact Email:
- Website:
joke.mirror.xyz
Legal Structure
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Registered Address: Address of your registered legal entity, if available. Please keep it in a single line. (e.g. Main Street 1, London N17LJ, United Kingdom)
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Registered Legal Entity: Name of your registered legal entity, if available. (e.g. Developer DAO Ltd.)
Fully on-chain
Team’s experience
David Phelps is a 2x SaaS founder who cofounded ecodao, created a web3 angels collective (cowfund), advises TCG Crypto, is a Gitcoin Steward, and writes on web3 at his substack (syndicated by Product Hunt) and at @divine_economy. He bootstrapped his previous edtech company from scratch to 8-figure revenue while personally conceiving and overseeing apps still used monthly by thousands of students across the US (you can read more at cowfund.co. He was named one of the top 20 leaders in the DAO space by Seed Club.
Sean McCaffery uses they and he pronouns, has a background in Software and Data Engineering, and is now full on in web3 exploring and contributing to DAOs at jokedao, juiceboxDAO, and the towers three. They run a lot, love thinking about consensus-based decision processes and generally how people can organize together, and are a big proponent of worker power, mutual aid, and collective liberation.
Naomi Hauret has been a front-end developer for the past 6 years. She’s designed and developed tombheadzzz.vercel.app using SolidJS and TailwindCSS, developed the UI and frontend for ftm.bet), a defi prediction game, using ReactJS and TailwindCSS, and has designed and developed holodevdao.xyz, a derivate NFT viewer for the Dev NFTs of Developer DAO, using SolidJS and TailwindCSS. Other projects she’s worked on include FMonsters, Seez (as their first frontend dev), and Amnesty International. You can see her work samples at nice-tabletop-84e.notion.site/Work-samples-b77b4264378a4c48b46565a36acc045b).
Team Code Repos
Team LinkedIn Profiles (if available)
linkedin.com/in/david-phelps-40777859/
linkedin.com/in/sean-mccaffery/
Project Description
Please describe why you are applying for this grant.
We’re applying for three reasons:
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we love Radicle, are $RAD holders ourselves, and believe firmly in the future of open-source, permissionless building as an open-source project ourselves
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we’d love to work with Radicle on building an on-chain grants platform
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we see ourselves as a public goods project that survives thanks to grants, and to be perfectly frank, we can’t survive and continue building without grant money.
Deliverables 
Please list the deliverables of the project in as much detail as possible. Please also estimate the amount of work required and try to divide the project into meaningful milestones.
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Total Estimated Duration: 10 weeks
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Full-time equivalent (FTE): 1200 hours
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Total Costs: $40,000
The more you can organize your milestones into manageable chunks that are conducive to iteration, the better!
Milestone 1
Please add additional milestones in the same way:
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Estimated Duration: 2 weeks
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FTE: 240 hours
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Costs: $8,000
| 1. | Develop grants proposal module | Enable proposals to have their own page with full markdown |
Milestone 2
Please add additional milestones in the same way:
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Estimated Duration: 4 weeks
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FTE: 480 hours
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Costs: $16,000
| 2. | Develop tournament module | Let voters pick between two or more different options in a ‘tournament’ style that gradually creates brackets of winners, so that any given voter doesn’t need to sort through hundreds of proposals but instead can emergently create consensus by only evaluating individual items closely |
Milestone 3
Please add additional milestones in the same way:
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Estimated Duration: 4 weeks
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FTE: 480 hours
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Costs: $16,000
| 3. | Develop content moderation module | Enable downvoting, randomization of options with 0 votes, uploading of all times of content (video, music, etc.), ability of contest creators to determine which proposals are visible to a community to vote on |
Future Plans
Please include the following:
- How you intend to use, enhance, promote and support your project in the short term
We have 14 projects that have reached out organically about using us once we’ve deployed our new site: these include projects, including:
- Forefront: looking to use us to handle grants proposals
- MetricsDAO: looking to do competitions on the best on-chain analytics for chains like Optimism
- Mintsong: looking to do competitions on music NFTs for token-holders that they’ll mint and sell
- DAO Masters, Radar, and Regen Races: curation contests)
- DreamDAO: picking guests speakers
- The Doge NFT community (yes): meme-of-the-week contests
We believe these will greatly enhance our profile and draw other projects to use as well. In the meantime, our proof-of-concept, the jokerace, continues drawing teams to play each week.
Finally, we also have partnerships with Guild, Coinvise, Juicebox, and Wonder, who are all promoting our project and giving us significant (non-financial) support as well.
The team’s long-term plans and intentions in relation to it. In other words, how will it be made sustainable?
We have a number of ways to reach sustainability, ranging from NFT sales (which have supported much of our development so far) to commissions of rewards, to small cuts of token-minting and airdrops, to cuts from contests themselves. However, our goal is to be a public good that can decentralize to community after building key features and operate fully-functionally while letting community approve decisions for those who want to build out further.
We also are in talks with Arweave, Aztec, Protocol Labs, Skale, Aave, CityDAO, and Gitcoin as well, and all have suggested they are interested in giving grants as well (though these have yet to be confirmed).
Additional Information 
How did you hear about the Grants Program? Medium / Twitter / Discord / Announcement by another team / personal recommendation / etc.
We were recommended to apply for a Radicle grant by Camila Ramos, Nader Dabit, and Abbey Titcomb.
You can see what we’ve built so far at jokedao.io and a loom of our new contest build here: www.loom.com/share/2dc98e5048e941f99c34ffd1cc1f246c. We can share Figmas for the full designs as well if it’s helpful.
Currently, we enable users to mint voting tokens across 8 chains, make them non-transferable, create contests across 8 chains, set start and end times for submission and voting, set requirements for who can submit, and determine the max number of submissions and of submissions per wallet. Contests themselves are fully operational as well, letting anyone submit and vote on-chain at set times and export full data afterwards.
Polygon has agreed to give us a $20,000 grant, and we’ve gotten 5 eth in donations from a juicebox project; we’re also in touch with the groups above about grants, and we’re applying for more as well (upcoming: Nouns, Aaave, Uniswap, Aurora, The Graph).