Since decentralizing less than a year ago, the Shapeshift DAO’s user and contributor communities have grown massively worldwide. As a DAO, this new growth increases the need for new collaborative solutions and mechanisms to keep our community and contributors on the same page. When organizations move as quickly as ShapeShift has been these past months—from progressively decentralizing from a corporation to launching our new open source app.shapeshift.com—sharing updates with communities could become disorganized, backlogged, and cluttered without the right tools in place. Lobby will act as a knowledge management tool and portal where all published articles and blogs about ShapeShift will be stored. This will benefit new contributors with onboarding, anyone interested in being up to date with the latest developments at the DAO or people interested in simply learning more about ShapeShift and its surrounding Web3 community.
Inclusive Web3 Communications
Since our inception as a DAO, we have looked for a knowledge management solution in Web3 that would easily consolidate all of our written content for the general public while giving our community more control over access and information. As we have grown, we noted a high barrier to entry for our non-English community, and translators found friction with current tools. Through experimenting with and looking at various options, including our use of Notion, we discovered that email-based access and seat-based pricing would continue to limit us to the constraints of Web2. We lived with these constraints for months, and they directly impacted our ability to lead the charge in promoting and facilitating inclusivity, community, and progressiveness within Web3. Lobby enabled us to take steps forward as a DAO toward that goal.
When Lobby was introduced to us, their team gave us a product demo that solved many of the issues mentioned above. Our contributors continued to work alongside the Lobby team to address key issues and pain points that our DAO一and many others一were facing. We continued to iterate and refine their product through real-world application and testing until we finally had the perfect Web3 native collaborative tool for our written content. Since then, we have successfully implemented Lobby as a tool for our marketing contributor network and international community to utilize, receiving overwhelmingly positive feedback from our ShapeShift users.
What Is Lobby?
Lobby is a knowledge base built for Web3. It was built in the true spirit of what a DAO is, how they operate today, and what they will be tomorrow. Lobby was founded by a Gitcoin DAO contributor after they experienced the growing pains of a rapidly scaling community first-hand. The platform brings token gating, translations, version control, and Q&A to an otherwise familiar knowledge base, enhancing the use case and lifetime of written content in Web3.
In many DAOs, Notion has been proving expensive and unruly. Contributors and members aren’t incentivized to keep their documentation up to date, causing holes in onboarding and collaboration between Workstreams and the broader community. The Lobby team recognizes a future where DAOs grow faster than seat-based pricing can accommodate. As these DAO communities become more global and multi-lingual, there is a need for a Web3 native tool like Lobby that can integrate seamlessly into processes and will constantly grow and evolve with organizations to reflect change and inclusion. There is a need to have an evolving, immutable record of past and present DAO life, and Lobby fulfills these needs.
Growing International Communities
ShapeShift DAO uses Lobby to organize and document our international growth inclusion efforts, traditional press outreach, and coordination. Once documents are drafted, they will be staged in Lobby and primed for release by translating to supported languages. Lobby makes the release process convenient and transparent for our international teams. Once a document goes live, it’s easy to make it accessible to the general public, which means faster updates and flow of information to our global community of FOXes. In addition, all other written content that will be published on other websites (unless strictly bound by media confidentiality concerns) will be available for the public to view in one place. This provides users with an accessible, Web3 native alternative to Notion and other Web2 platforms such as Medium that the DAO currently uses. With global and local indexing functions, users can easily find in-depth information pertaining to their favorite DeFi protocols and go down a rabbit hole of credible knowledge.
More $FOX Utility
Lobby's access control system is a robust way to use the security of the blockchain to add a layer of resiliency to your Lobby database. Lobby lets you connect any Ethereum mainnet or testnet ERC-20 (like $FOX) or ERC-721 to a role within their ecosystem. Trusted community FOXes can moderate reading, writing, and editing access controls for community members and contributors.
The Future of Organization
Lobby opens new opportunities for the ShapeShift DAO to be even more inclusive and accessible for our FOX family. The combined utility of having local, searchable translations as well as the access control utility available to $FOX holders expands the value proposition of our FOX governance token and the ability for anyone to contribute to the DAO.
Want to join ShapeShift on Lobby? Check it out here. Lobby just launched its beta and is beginning to onboard communities.
If you are leading or contributing to a DAO, join the waitlist or send a DM to @lobbyso on Twitter to talk about how Lobby can help.
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