Activating a community through "task applets"

Metagov Gateway
#1

This use-case is derived from conversations with Bea, Sebnem, Judy, and Sparrow from DADA, in the process of discussing the Setting up a working group use-case.

In this use-case, a platform has a community that they want to activate. In order to activate that community, the platform defines a set of “task applets” that any community member can invoke. Each app offers a curated, semi-automated workflow for a community member. For example:

  1. Organize an art showing on Decentraland
  2. Contribute an economics simulation
  3. Create and coordinate a working group
  4. Help manage money

The platform uses Metagov as a framework for building these task applet. The platform also gives its members access to the framework, so that they can contribute their own task applets to a pool of ways of engaging with the platform.

Importantly, each created applet would be connected to a reputation / token system.

Off the top of my head, I would imagine building this by connecting Colony (for building tasks) to IFTTT (for scripting cross-platform processes) to SourceCred (as the reputation/token system) to the platform itself (in order to script relevant platform actions into tasks). For money management, I would include some sort of wallet framework.

Using Metagov to support DAO governance
#2

As I’m reading this again, I’m realizing that this use-case would actually be quite useful for Metagov as well.

Essentially, these task applets could be used to reduce the transaction costs and information costs of the the principal agent (the platform) in this scenario as it seeks to contract work out to a set of distributed community participants.

#3

Thanks Josh. Can you expand on how Metagov is used as a “framework” for the task app? What is Metagov providing that doesn’t already exist in IFTTT or other task-building tools?

#4

So IFTTT is already cross-platform, and enjoys a no-code interface for building simple policies. The main requirements of the use-case that IFTTT alone does not fulfill are

  1. the “task” is not something that can be organized solely in terms of IFTTT clauses; it requires human contributions across a number of platforms, and thus the applet needs to be interactive—to me this means interacting with some set of services such as Loomio or Stanford PB in ways that IFTTT may not be set up to track, and
  2. no obvious or easy way to incorporate a reputation/token system such as SourceCred.
  3. There may be other conditionals that one would want to incorporate such as “these tasks are only available to users with moderator-level privileges”, which IFTTT may not be well set-up for.

Note that the idea above is to incorporate an IFTTT workflow directly into Metagov.