RADAR x Radicle Grant Proposal

RadarDAO · May 2, 2022, 8:47am

Radicle Grant Application

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See the Grants Program Process on how to submit a proposal.

Project Name: RADAR DAO
Team Name: RADAR
Payment Address: 0x149D46eC060e75AE188876AdB6b24024637003C7
**[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

Overview

Please provide the following:

RADAR is a decentralised community of futurists, researchers, discoverers, trendmakers and builders co-creating the first community owned and powered futures engine: discovering, incubating, and delivering better futures.

TLDR; We’re a FUTURES DAO using insight and foresight methodology to discover possible futures to then incubate, fund and tokenise them.

If you’re not sure what the ‘futures industry’ is, it spans across strategic foresight, research, insight and innovation strategy practices, guiding businesses and organisations to future proof themselves against the opportunities and challenges of a changing world.

We’re currently in our stage of community market fit. While the community has been growing and curating since Dec 2021 with over 100 hand-selected and 1-1 onboarded members, we’re now running for our MVP of 3 cycle process of ‘discover’ (research) ‘incubate’ (rapid prototyping) and ‘deliver’ (funding and launch) and bringing in the next 1000 futurists to web3.

###What is RADAR focused on?

RADAR leverages web3 technologies within our processes and org structure as a DAO to address the global topics the community is interested in, whether its #aesthetics #environmentalism #education or #digital-culture; our community is a diverse group of experts exploring the future together.

Central to this focus is building open source collaborative research processes and, ultimately, a futures protocol: a decentralised data layer to map cultural shifts on-chain, and identify the trendmakers who pioneered them.

We believe in #inclusive-futures, and so we challenge our research processes, possible futures, and community member breakdown with proactive diversity. Aiming for balance, creating space, and encouraging diverse perspectives.

Our research processes, approach, tool-sets and methodologies will be open source and available for anyone to use, in addition to this; our focus is to build our futures protocol as a composable data set, to help identify trend makers in culture and create verified on-chain expert reputation.

We believe this is important to Radicle as a platform powered by permissionless, decentralised, and open-source development with collaboration at its core. Like Radicle, RADAR is focused on its contributors owning their infrastructure and data, while sharing it in collaborative and interoperable ways for others to build on.

Our processes will establish entirely new ways of curating and working in the research industry, as well as serve as a space for discovering the future of aesthetic trends, development trends, community trends, work and labour trends, technology trends and more — futures that we believe are relevant to those building and innovating within the Radicle community.

Throughout our collaborative research process and futures protocol, we’re looking for ways to bring value back to the collaborators and trendmakers who create and feature in the research. To do this we’re proposing using radicle Drips, through split mechanics, and issuing NFTs to every contributor of the report.

By using drips, we can find innovative ways for revenue from the reports to flow instantly to the creators, allowing contributors to allocate % of recurring wealth generation every time reports are viewed and sold.

We’re also proposing, when the time is right, to integrate dynamic subscription models into our token-gating, meaning that contributors can gain incremental ownership over the DAO while using Radicle drips to pay back the contributors and trendmakers who are creating content and incubating futures.

For the core team, a mix of DAO operators and experts in the foresight industry, it’s a concept which challenges and rebalances the futures industry as a whole — an industry we believe has become overly extractive and exploitative of the trendmakers at the forefront of culture.

At every level, from collaborative research to innovative use of web3 mechanics, the process of futurists discovering, incubating and delivering collective futures will change everything.

Team

Team Leader

Jack Fancy - RADAR Instigator

Team Members;

Jack Fancy
Nick Susi
Keely Adler
Nikita Walia
Matthew Weatherall

Contact

Jack Fancy
Contact@fancyy.xyz
Radardao.xyz

Legal Structure

Registered Address: NA
Registered Legal Entity: NA

Team’s experience

#Jack / Fancy - Web3 Strategy at Protein & Instigator at RADAR

Co-founded Protein & RADAR, both decentralised communities at the forefront of web3. Protein is reimagining social impact through the lens of good growth. RADAR is community reimagining collective research processes and funding the future. Fancy also advises global brands entering the web3 landscape, a key stakeholder in SeedClub (SC02) and has written extensively on web3 models for ForeFront.

#Susi / Nick Susi - Executive Director at DotDotDash
Leading DotDotDash’s web3 strategy after co-founding the Complex community-based intelligence arm, forecasting what’s next in culture and creating new 7-figure business line. Clients & collabs: adidas, Foot Locker, Banana Republic, Coinbase, A/B Partners/Ford Foundation, Ad Council/CDC, JED Foundation
#Keely Adler - VP, Cultural Futurist, Integrated Strategy at Dentsu

After nearly a nearly decade-long career grounded in creative strategy and qualitative consumer research, she’s now spearheading a Cultural Futurism practice within the strategy group at Dentsu: leveraging foresight to help brands understand — and future-proof — themselves in rapidly shifting context.

#Nikita Walia - Founder and CEO of BLANK, a studio focused on strategy, design, and ideas.

After working across every aspect of social to strategy, Nikita launched BLANK, a global brand strategy studio whose work has landed 3 of its clients on Interbrand’s Breakthrough Brands list, helped position another as one of Fast Company’s World Changing Ideas while landing an appearance on Time’s 100 best inventions list.

#Matt Weatherall - Creative Strategist and Workshop Facilitator

Matt’s got 10 years experience leading strategy, comms, community, and innovation across global clients, hackathons and anti-culture artist collectives. His “thing” is designing experiences and spaces for co-creation, incubating and nurturing ideas as part of Swarm, Wild Labs, Glimpse, and Good for Nothing agencies. In his spare time he also runs Special Guest (open mic events) and has launched self-initiated viral campaigns and activations featured in the BBC, ITV News, and CNN.

Team Code Repos

NA
NA
NA

Team LinkedIn Profiles (if available)

Fancy - https://www.linkedin.com/in/fancy-y-b06477132/
Susi - Nick Susi - dotdotdash | LinkedIn
Keels - Keely Adler - RADAR | LinkedIn
Nikita - https://www.linkedin.com/in/nikitaontheinternet/
Matt - https://www.linkedin.com/in/mattweatherall/

Project Description

We’re looking for a grant of 50,000 USD to run a live brief; to discover, incubate and deliver our first RADAR owned and created future.

This means discovering an emerging trend, ideating what that means for culture, creating products and solutions for that trend and launching them as a Community-owned project.

For example, our collective future could tell us to incubate ideas at the intersection of music and web3, it could inspire us to support an individual working on a new type of AR software, it could teach us about a shift in deSci to launch a decentralised university.

Alongside this, we want to allocate a budget to fund a product squad to start building MVPs of the needed web3 tools and integrations within the process to start developing the futures protocol. This is something we hope to develop through further grants and building a relationship with Radicle.

Deliverables

For the deliverables of this project; the focus is to achieve proof of community.
Produce a collaborative research report built in the open
Incubate rapid prototyping and ideation stage including a hackathon
Deliver a RADAR product into the world

Within the grant budget we aim to allocate:

10,000 USD to plan and finalise the research process, using Radicle drips and platform to build in the open, as well as creating the workshops and frameworks to test our MVP.
10,000 USD to a product squad to build MVP tools for the futures protocol using Radicle products and tools.
20,000 USD to a collaborative research process in order to produce a RADAR report, a deep dive report, trend presentation and futures hypothesis determined through a 6-8 week research process/methodology.
10,000 USD to facilitating a hackathon & NFT crowdfund

Total Estimated Duration:
~ 3 months -
**Full-time equivalent (FTE):
3 FTE
Total Costs: Amount of Payment in USD for the whole project.
50,000 USD

The more you can organize your milestones into manageable chunks that are conducive to iteration, the better!

You can see a ful timeline here - https://www.notion.so/radarxyz/Cycle-1-Roadmap-96957c7f53c14812b11cf863aefb2a18

Milestone 1 - DISCOVER

Please add additional milestones in the same way:

Estimated Duration: ~4-6 weeks
FTE: 2
Costs: 20,000 USD

Number	Deliverable	Specification
1.	Finalise Signal Metrics	Finalize curation mechanics & metrics for identifying strong signals
2.	Finalise Collaborative Research	Work with the community to finalise our established research methodology
3.	Opensource Workshop Materials	Finalize & build materials/workshops for RADAR research process
4.	Web3 Tooling	Integrate drips, splits and web3 tooling into our curation mechanics and signal mechanics
5.	RADAR MVP tooling	Ship MVP integrations for our first collaborative research process
6.	Beta Testing	Run beta testing on integrating RADAR tooling within the research process
7.	Use decentralised governance mechanics and our native token to set a community focused brief for the RADAR REPORTS stage

Milestone 2 - RADAR REPORTS

Please add additional milestones in the same way:

Estimated Duration: 4~6 Weeks
FTE: 2
Costs: 15,000 USD

Number	Deliverable	Specification
1.	Run the RADAR Research process	Including collaborative desk research, expert interviews, ethnography, round-tables, microgrants
2.	Produce the RADAR Report	Strategise, write, edit and artwork a futures report relevant to the research
3.	Produce a collective futures hypothesis	Collaborating with Psi and their collective intelligence tools to determine a collective futures hypothesis for milestone 3
4.	Produce an NFT report from the report	Using drips to distribute revenue back to contributors of the report as well as those paid in producing it

Milestone 3 - INCUBATE

Please add additional milestones in the same way:

Estimated Duration: 1 week
FTE: 1
Costs: 10,000

Number	Deliverable	Specification
1.	Run a Hackathon	Run an approved members 3 day rapid prototyping process with a minimum day rate fee including sub-hackathons, roundtables, ideation and design thinking to build ideas, prototypes and MVPs around future hypothesis
2.	RADAR DEMO day	Showcase of ideas and prototypes established in the hackathon
3.	Launch the RADAR NFT	Establish tokenomics of fractionalised NFT which can become a funding mechanism the end of the hackathon process to launch products

Milestone 4 - DELIVER

Out of grant scope. But our next milestone is to launch a RADAR funded concept into the world through funds raised in our RADAR NFT which is a membership pass to hackathon created products.

Future Plans

Please include the following:

We’ll promote RADAR, as we’re already doing, through deep web3 and industry connections, education and vision.

RADAR has an extensive and sustainable revenue model, builty on producing insight and foresight work through consulting and client relationships. The core team has operated in this space, both as individuals and as part of leading global agencies.

Alongside these client briefs, the opportunities for moving to a pseudo-service DAO and incubating ideas gives RADAR a unique position in taking equity stakes in ideas it believes will change the future.

This is a good place to share how you might like to get more grant funding for future work

We’ll be looking for further grants in order to build our futures protocol and proof of future NFT ecosystem: creating on-chain reputation for trendmakers who are driving forward the trends and tailwinds that go on to impact culture at large.

We hope that this is the first of many collaborations between the Radicle and RADAR communities.

Additional Information

How did you hear about the Grants Program?

Personal Recommendation though one of our founding Members White Flamingo.

Here you can also add any additional information that you think is relevant to this application but isn’t part of it already, such as:

We also hope to work with Radicle’s community of developers to build this project; and if there are any members who are particularly interested in exploring the future, we’d love to work with them on bringing our futures protocol to life.

As part of our proof of community, we’re going to be engaging similarly value-aligned partners across the web3 and web2 futures ecosystem to support our work. We’re long-term believers in the future of RADAR, so any additional grants received will be allocated to the futures protocol and treasury for continued development.

abbey · May 10, 2022, 1:02pm

Hey @RadarDAO, thanks for the application. Abbey here, from the committee. I wanted to ask a couple questions regarding the proposal:

Can you elaborate what you mean by “futures”? I understand that it “spans across strategic foresight, research, insight and innovation strategy practices, guiding businesses and organisations to future proof themselves against the opportunities and challenges of a changing world.” but I’m having trouble understanding what the concept actually means in practice.

Can you elaborate more on the functionality of this futures protocol? What does it mean to “map cultural shifts on-chain”?

I understand the Radicle Drips use case, but what other MVP tools do you envision being build with the Radicle stack?

RadarDAO · May 11, 2022, 1:39am

Hey @abbey , Fancy here from RADAR by the way. These are great questions and thank you for asking htem

So

When we talk about futures we mean what the actual future may look like, for example behaviours, technologies, products, individuals, concepts which will have impact on culture. For RADAR ‘delivering better futures’ means actually building those products, ideas, communities, concepts which fits a vision for what the future will look like.

In practice ‘futures’ is used to advise start-ups, brands, governments, individuals on what the world will look like in 2, years, 5 years, 10 years time so they can plan accordingly. This means launching new projects, advertising, funding models etc.

Another banging questions, the functionality of the futures protocol is essentially a vast data set which is made up of hyperlinks (e.g the signals) and context (peoples comments) we use these to track which innovators and talking about what and when (while allowing them complete control over their data and reputation)

At a personal level, this creates an incredibly exciting opportunity to build interoperable expert reputation on subjects from the mainstream to niche, without stalking linkedins or twitter feeds. It allows individuals to have a ‘proof of future’ which proves that they listened to the band first, discover the app, invested in the coin etc…

It also allows us at a high level to map the data to see how an idea moves from the ‘early adopter’ to the ‘mainstream’. These are all tried and tested techniques in social listening and trend mapping, however done with deep extractive processes… RADAR is different at the community owns the data. (Something we’re currently establishing through what licenses we use)

With the Radicle stack we’re hoping to build out our proof of futures NFT MVP (this stores your signals data and proves your reputation) our dynamic subscription memberships (which change depending on how much you engage within the community) and also thinking about ways in which we create the reports themselves. We want each Report to be tokenised based on contribution, so we’d love to be inspired by how Radicle thinks about its code collaboration and attribution within its platform, and how we can learn from the community as well as even using this grant to spend on Radicle members to help us solve these challenges.

We also have an exciting challenge we’re looking to explore around the governance of voting on ‘hypothetical futures’ - this is something we’re thinking of exploring through contribution accumulated through radicle drips over the course of a research project, to them be used as voting power at the end.

1000% up for a call as well here to hear more about the stack and what possible collaborations/tools we could work with to help support these MVPs.

Thanks for these questions! looking forward to more!