ArbitrumDAO Co.Lab News Week 2/24

In the space of three weeks in December 2023, we received over 100 registrations to the ArbitrumCo.Lab.
At RnDAO, we are aware of the importance of Collaboration Tech but even this level of demand for support for research in this field took us by surprise. As such it took us a little longer than planned to arrive at a final shortlist but after additional rounds of application and interviews over the Christmas period, it is with great pride that we have finally arrived at the confirmed set of ArbitrumDAO Co.Lab Fellows (below) who started their Fellowship program this week. Congratulations!

We want to thank our intrepid Fellows and all those who applied and whom we hope will continue to support the program through our broader Co.Lab Collective initiative, for their faith in us and their time and effort in the weeks ahead. We also want to thank our Fellowship program mentors for their patience and perseverance to get us to this point and beyond. Finally, to all those in the ArbitrumDAO (ThankARB, Delegates) and the broader Arbitrum community, we want to express our deep gratitude for enabling us to offer this Fellowship program of supported research into important collaboration tech challenges. We hope this program will make a lasting impact on venture development in the Arbitrum ecosystem and progress the cause of humane coordination for the world!

Isla

https://www.linkedin.com/in/islamunro/

Problem space - [Governance, Finance]

Isla will research investment curation, decision-making and reputation in investment DAOs, so that anyone, anywhere can easily build an investment track-record.

Isla has been thinking about designing better venture capital for almost 10 years. She's been with the FTW DAO team since 2021, and they've already created a community to launch. She joined Safe as Grants Lead in 2023 and has worked closely with the team in the Gnosis ecosystem delivering Grants and seeing many of the pain points first hand.

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Humberto

https://www.linkedin.com/in/humbertobesso/

Problem space - [IRL, Finance]

Bringing Web3 to the streets! Researching how Web3 can power micro-credit to undercapitalised people through co-ownership.

Humberto holds 14 years of experience in IRL community building and social entrepreneurship. His business partner, with over 8 years in traditional finance and street commerce, owns a micro-credit company that can pilot the research. Humberto has been involved in web3 projects since 2017 with organizations like MetaGame, The Commons Stack, and Proof of Humanity. He has also presented peer-reviewed papers, spoken at events and on podcasts.

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Rich

https://www.linkedin.com/in/richardjameslopez/

Problem space - [Community]

How to embed transparency in Ops tools for web3 Orgs such as a decentralized CRM, a collaborative treasury tracking tool, and other everyday tools for Orgs to use internally.

As the Sales lead at Pocket Network, Rich experienced community demands for transparency in aiding growth. He conducted user research interviews on this topic for over six months and has a good understanding of the obstacles experienced by operators in different Orgs.

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Dominik

https://www.linkedin.com/in/dominikstumpp/

Problem space - [Governance, Culture & Trust, Reputation]

Decentralized reputation systems, crucial for collaboration, often face limitations. They tend to lack context sensitivity, standardization, and interoperability, struggle with subjective rating classification, and are susceptible to manipulation. Dominik's research focuses on these issues within reputation systems, exploring potential solutions possibly using knowledge graphs.

Dominik has been working full-time in the area of reputation systems and is investigating knowledge graphs for evaluating the reliability of information. This fellowship gives him additional capacity to better build something foundational in the reputation area.

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Milena

CV-final.pdf

Problem space - [Rewards allocation, Incentives]

Compensation is a recurring pain in DAOs and Collectives, who lack a trustless and automated method to distribute gains within the collective and its community.

Milena brings three years of DAO experience, co-founding Aut Labs (formerly SkillWallet), which underscored collaboration hurdles within DAOs, stressing the importance of early-stage user testing and feedback. Active in hackathons, she enjoys constructing prototypes, blending technical skills with community-driven strategies. At EthIstanbul, she developed a profit-sharing network prototype and aims to conduct comprehensive research on community and collaboration dynamics related to this project.

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Artem

https://www.linkedin.com/in/temazhiganov/

Problem space - [Governance]

Validate the need for enhanced sensemaking and deliberation among governance professionals, confirming their challenges with current tools.

Artem's passion for governance, sensemaking, and democracy, is backed by 10 years of experience in creative strategy, product marketing, and customer research. Artem's in-depth study of governance in DAOs and platform co-ops for an MSc thesis. He also built Harmonica (a conflict resolution bot).

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What's next?

These 6 Fellows have started working with RnDAO's team and mentors to address their challenges. They’ll be exploring the Arbiturm community for user insights and finding ways to add value. Their learnings will be published for the benefit of the Arbitrum community and the fellowship used as a launchpad to design protocols that provide robust answers to these problems.

RnDAO believes in collaboration and movement building. If you’d like to get involved, contribute, partner or otherwise engage with any of the fellows, you can find them in our Discord (link in rndao.io) and our community managers are happy to facilitate any collaboration.

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