Project Description

Today, in DAOs, many great opportunities remain buried beneath overwhelming discord channels, outdated notion tables, DM’s, and a multitude of calls amongst only a handful of the most dedicated people - making it a hassle for DAO members to find opportunities to learn, earn, contribute or connect. The harder it is for members to find people & opportunities to contribute, the harder it is for the DAO to engage & retain talent, the less likely the DAO will be able to succeed in its mission, as the people are the DAO. We’re solving this problem by making it frictionless & hyper-relevant to find the right opportunities through a high-quality project/person matching assistant, called “Eden” (fka as Soil in Developer_DAO). As people find & engage in relevant projects with ease, the DAO becomes healthier, more effective & long term (economically) viable. Eden utilizes ML techniques to analyze personal and project profiles to find the best match based on skills, interests, previous experiences, on-chain endorsements, (social) interactions and availability. To benefit from Eden, community members set up their profile through a one-time onboarding process. What makes Eden special, is the ability to participate in community driven, on-chain, progressive profiling: this means that relevancy markers such as endorsements are being added to your profile by the community all the time. Leveraging skin in the game mechanics, data is peer reviewed which ensures the data, such as endorsements, is trustworthy and has meaning. On the project side it looks quite similar. Project Champions are guided through a project onboarding process that makes sure data is qualitative. This information is then used to match the right people with the right projects.

What happened before

Eden, as a project, is now almost 5 month old and in that short period of time we’ve managed to have over 40 contributors with 25 of them sticking with us for the long run. The idea of solving a problem of project/person matching came around at the beginning of June 2022, after having experienced firsthand the hardships of finding a relevant project to contribute to in a DAO.

We’re solving this problem of talent coordination by making it frictionless & hyper-relevant to find the right opportunities through a high-quality project/person matching assistant, called “Eden” (fka as Soil in Developer_DAO). As people find & engage in relevant projects with ease, the DAO becomes healthier, more effective & long term (economically) viable.

As founders, @BluePanda and @Impactbilli were lucky to match in a very complimentary skill set - BluePanda from a technical POV with a Ph.D. in Machine Learning, experience as a Senior ML engineer at several multinational corporations & CTO at a startup. Impactbilli from a more business-oriented POV building a digital innovation consultancy, where he has worked on a large-scale AI & data - as well as cutting edge Hybrid AI projects with multinationals, European Institutions & research institutions such as IMEC. Starting to work together, we’ve asked ourselves the question - how could we leverage our AI & data experience to drastically improve the flow of finding opportunities and talents to contribute with?

Early on both of us were engaged in Developer_DAO, so having raised the topic we’ve received a lot of support from fellow D_D members and before we knew it there were 25 permanent contributors working in 5 teams around the project/person matching. We're working in squads - which basically means several autonomous squads that combine all roles in one team and allow developers to work on the feature directly with designers, product & research team using a build-measure-learn loop as their main driver.

##Our achievements to date##

Today, we’ve shipped a bot and an onboarding side of the platform that now is being actively used in Developer_DAO to onboard new talent and capture data about them. This is then used to recommend relevant opportunities to the new joiners. This is a big step for us, as every iteration of the product is followed by extensive user research and continuous improvement of the tool. We built the flows of 'finding a talent' , 'finding opportunity' & 'finding people' and we've user tested it with over 150+ people in Developer DAO and other communities. Our amazing team has shipped the website https://www.edenprotocol.xyz/

Our strategy for coming months

For the next iteration, our plan is to start diving deeper into our data strategy. One of our beliefs is that everything that’s a platform today will be a protocol tomorrow. That has some profound implications for the way we look at data, as - up until this day - “data plays” are the main ways platforms like facebook & google monetise. In a protocol, that dynamic shifts from platform asking the question how can I monetise the data to the protocol’s question: how can I provide maximum utility for the data back to the users. This will make the thoughtful generation & consumption of data more important - as well as data’s tangible value to end users a whole lot bigger. This is due to the completely different ownership structures between platforms & protocols.

From a strategy pov, project/person matching is also one of the areas where truthful information has higher value. For the first time in history, we can embed blockchain enabled skin-in-the-game mechanics & mechanism designs at the atomic level to ensure higher trustability of information. This aligns nicely with the protocol centering on quality rather than the platforms who are incentivized to go for quantity.

In order to deliver the best matches between talent and opportunities, it is therefore crystal clear that in-depth, trustworthy data points will play a key role. To provide immediate utility from that data in a thoughtful, pragmatic & user-centric way will therefore be a core tenant of our strategy.

On the other hand, we’ll be working on further developing and testing our platform. Right now we’re on an alpha stage, and have built frontend, backend and AI. Users is a #1 priority for us, so every new feature is carefully tested by our product managers to ensure that matches are hyper relevant and question we ask are brief and simple.

Final Product

Eden aims to be the world’s opportunity protocol, where anyone can find work they love & that work can find them - decentral, autonomous & community driven. At the core of Eden is an ML driven assistant in combination with a platform-like interface & protocol mechanics (such as intellectual & social capital staking, token enabled governance, …) which can click into any discord, slack, telegram … or wherever the community operates. This assistant serves as a personal project scout, flagging the most relevant opportunities to each member & flagging the most relevant community members to each project.

Value Add Criteria

Both founders have deep data & AI expertise from a technical as well as business POV. This fact combined with the nature of the project around project/person matching makes us confident that the algorithms & datasets that will come from our project will be very interesting for Ocean. We would also be happy to participate as customers in the Ocean marketplace, as our main value proposition is around project/person matching - we intend to benefit from having access to algorithms & datasets through Ocean. We hope that OceanDAO will become an active user of Eden protocol and will benefit from meaningful matches between its talent & opportunities.

Because we are using & enabling skin-in-the-game endorsing mechanisms, we believe the data we can add to Ocean will be uniquely interesting & not easily replicable. Specifically in understanding how people “bet” on each other's abilities at scale - which we could foresee have huge value in other applications than project/person matching.

On top of this, we’re convinced that the core functionality of project/person matching that eden provides will be useful to the whole OCEAN ecosystem

Core Team

We are lucky to have an amazing team of 25 core contributors born from the Developer_DAO. For the sake of brevity, we’re mentioning the two founders & project leads relevant to this application here.

@BluePanda Miltiadis Saratzidis Tech Lead CTO, relevant Fullstack, Blockchain & ML experience Github: 1https://github.com/BluePanda-io 1≥ Linkedin: 1https://www.linkedin.com/in/miltiadis-saratzidis-b1a396129/ 1 Background: BS CS, Masters ML, PhD Deep Learning; Tech lead role in major corporations; CTO in fintech company; Web3 founder & active DAO contributor; co-founder at FInseka.pl

@Impactbilli Tom Husson Product Lead Github: https://github.com/HussonT Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tom-husson-b30a48a1/ Background: BS CS, CEO & founder of digital innovation consultancy; Podcast host theimpactbillionaires.com; Web3 founder & active DAO contributor; Founder at Humain.ai

@Milo Lolita Mileta UI designer | Community Facilitation | Research Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lolitamileta Background: BS in Political Science & International Relations, PM Scrum Master in Sabre Corporation; UI designer; project facilitator

@wiseTy#8689 Tyrone Dunmore Backend | Product Upcoming CS graduate @ The University of DC; Community Manager @ Developer DAO; Backend & Product @ Soil Github: Github: https://github.com/tyronedunmore

@waxy#0208 Eric Blockchain Dev / FE This is Waxy's second career Previous: BA in music performance, Audio Engineer for 20 yrs, Production Manager for 8 yrs, General Manger for 2 yrs - all in the live events industry 20 yrs total (I was double duty) Current: YouTube Grad, 2.5ish yrs of full stack web dev., I just build GitHub: https://github.com/e-roy

@eloigil Eloi Gil Peiró Role: Full Stack Developer - lead Background: Industrial Design Engineering Graduate; Web Dev Teacher; Fullstack Dev @ European Comission project & Telecom company & Branding consultancy GitHub: https://github.com/heavensbee001 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/eloigil/

The whole of D_D