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tl;dr
The Ideation Pod will serve as Cabin’s rapid prototyping lab - a space where contributors can quickly test and develop new initiatives that advance our mission of building a network city. While Cabin Labs focuses on major strategic initiatives, the Ideation Pod empowers our community to explore multiple paths forward through small, focused experiments.
Stewards: Dahveed, Katya, Savannah
Sponsor: Kathi
Background - Why is this needed?
While Cabin Labs is focused on the big plays, the Ideation Pod will incubate a larger number of smaller Cabin contributor initiatives both in support of the Lab’s plays and in other paths for Cabin to explore. Each initiative will be incubated for one month without salaries, albeit with reasonable expenses covered and CABIN tokens rewarded based on progress made, as well as ongoing support from the stewards. After 1 month, each initiative should be ready to submit a proposal to the DAO for a 3-month, funded trial run as a new pod.
After reading every Cabin Snapshot proposal and talking to Cabiners past, present, and future, Dahveed came to the following conclusions:
- The Cabin Labs pod is doing crucial work in leading Cabin to its vision
- When Labs narrowed its focus, the communication of that shift left many Cabiners thinking that the entire Cabin DAO had abandoned them
- There are a lot of ways outside of Labs to support Cabin’s vision
- Those who want to contribute need clear paths to meaningfully participate, gain trust, test out their ideas, and move through the DAO governance process
- As a Cabin DAO member not affiliated with the Labs, I wanted a vehicle for my and others’ rapid experimentation to discover what works to build our vision + create viable revenue streams
Objectives
The Ideation Pod addresses these needs by:
- Giving voice to members who feel disengaged and want to contribute
- Creating paths to long-term, compensated contributor roles (pending DAO approval)
- Enabling rapid prototyping of new initiatives within reasonable budgets
- Fostering collaboration and play between people who want to build together (yay, teamwork!!)
The Ideation Pod will run for 3 months to begin with, providing monthly progress reports to the wider DAO. At the end of the first 3 months, the pod’s Stewards will make a proposal to the DAO for a longer run with more funding.
How it Works
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Timeline
- Incubation Period (1 month)
- Any active initiative that wants to be part of this pod is welcome (based on Steward capacity)
- Individuals or teams join the pod, design their experiments, set clear milestones, and recruit co-conspirators if needed
- Pod Stewards provide guidance and support
- Basic expenses are covered to run the experiment
- CABIN tokens are awarded by a DAO vote at month-end based on progress
- If team needs more time, they can request another month of incubation (based on Steward capacity)
- DAO Proposal
- If a team decides to move on, they create a DAO proposal for a 3-month funded trial of their work
- They include clear KPIs and modest funding needs
- Pod Stewards will help refine the pitch to the DAO
- Trial Period (3 months)
- If their proposal is approved, they’ll get to work
- Provide regular updates to the DAO
- At the end of this trial period, they can apply to the DAO for a longer run (e.g. 1 year)
Example
Let’s use Events at Conferences as an example. Assume that Savannah and Dahveed take it on starting on December 1st and - in one month - prepare a plan for ETH Denver. They would then present a proposal for an Events Guild to the DAO, with the 3-month goal of successfully running our planned events at ETH Denver, and with a reasonable budget for those events. In 3 months, ETH Denver would be over and a post-mortem presented to the DAO with a request for expanded duration, goals, and funding for the Events Guild.
Who are the Stewards?
Dahveed
A neighborhood steward in Haifa, Israel, I have an MS in Marketing with over 14 years of experience, including 7 in crypto (where for the past 3 years I’ve focused on DAOs and host 2 Twitter spaces on them). Having written sketch comedy for over a decade, I am known for storytelling and generating ideas. I’ve been bringing people together and building communities for decades in Philadelphia, NYC, Chiang Mai, Haifa, and beyond. I am already working on several of the ideas proposed below together with other Cabin members. After all those years working in crypto and DAOs, Cabin is the first project where I see myself forever. This is something I want to dedicate my life to because of how important community building is to me, how much better we can make our communities (including my own) via DAOs and other governance principles people bring to Cabin, and how awesome the people I’ve gotten to know in Cabin over the past 7 months are. I don’t think of the Ideation Pod or Cabin DAO as a job in any traditional sense, but this really does feel like my dream job with my dream people.
Katya
I’m a creative director with a curious mix of marketing experience and design sensibility. I’m passionate about crafting spaces and stories that inspire connection and wonder. As a 2023 creative resident at Cabin’s Neighborhood Zero, I got to experience the alchemy that happens when art, community, and purpose meet in the same room—or the same DAO…it’s catalyzing and magical.
I’ve spent most of the last year being a bit of a creative gypsy alongside a traveling artists collective, where I’ve learned that co-creation is like taking the scenic route to true community.
I’m fascinated by creating experiences that tickle the brain and warm the heart. This initiative feels like fertile ground for that. Cabin’s played an influential role in my growth as an individual and I would be delighted to co-steward alongside Dahveed and Savannah. My Cabin profile.
Savannah
Since I got involved in Cabin back in the Fall of 2023, I’ve wanted clearer and more welcoming on-ramps for participating and co-creating within Cabin. My hope is that this pod can help reignite the culture of do-ocracy, experimentation, and self-organized action among new and old Cabin folks.
My role on the team would be scoped to approximately 1-2 hours per week (as I’ve got a full plate with running NAP). I’d spend that time supporting the various projects that come through as best I can: sharing relevant context, helping folks design scoped first experiments, connecting aligned people, offering thoughts and feedback, sharing what we’ve learned from past experiments to inform new experiments, etc. You can learn more about me on my cabin profile. I’m excited to dive in with you all and find the right path forward.
We as stewards will participate in each initiative to the extent of our capacity and the team’s desire for our participation, checking in on their progress, offering constructive feedback, and administering the budget for their expenses. In this 3-month trial of the Ideation Pod, the Stewards will not receive any compensation.
We will not be able to nor want to:
- Pass judgment on the merit of any initiative
- Have any power to favor one over another (e.g. our own initiatives)
- Play any role in their advancement other than as a team and DAO member
- Have any power to distribute rewards for progress
What to expect
The Ideation Pod will run for 3 months to begin with, providing monthly progress reports to the wider DAO. At the end of the first 3 months, the pod’s stewards will make a proposal to the DAO for a longer run with more funding.
Ideas will be incubated for 1-month, with the option to extend at the pod steward’s discretion and capacity. The stewards will advise and support the teams of each accepted idea with guides, constructive feedback, and sometimes by joining the team outright. The goal at the end of the 1-month incubation period is for each team to be able to make a strong pitch to the DAO for a 3-month funded trial run.
Why are we proposing this?
I, Dahveed, am an ideator and can generate a million ideas. As can other Cabiners. Recruiting Katya as a co-conspirator, I want to use the Ideation Pod to show which ones are viable: those who attract a team and get approval from the DAO to move on to the next stage.
What kinds of initiatives?
Here are just a few we’re aware of (and who’s championing them so far):
- Cabin Squads (Dahveed): Unlike guilds, squads are interest/expertise topic-based teams that can help across guilds (e.g. parenting squad, placemaking, etc.).
- Social Scraping Project (Dahveed and JonBo): Catching tweets relevant to us and inserting Cabin into the conversation, including by linking to our website, NAP, and articles/guides. The squads are crucial for this initiative because the sheer daily volume of tweets can reach into the 100s, and the only way to engage with them in a timely and meaningful manner is by splitting them among squads and individuals within them who can respond in the times and time zones they have available.
- Events at Conferences (Dahveed and Savannah): Putting together small and deeply-connecting events at crypto and non-crypto conferences. Doing this at minimal cost with the help of local Cabiners as much as possible (e.g. Dahveed and Savannah’s in-progress plan for ETHDenver 2025 to bring a small group of attendees into Savannah’s Boulder neighborhood).
- Cabin Awards (Dahveed): Annual awards to neighborhood heroes in various categories to recognize individuals in Cabin neighborhoods and outside of Cabin too. The long-term goal is to make Cabin as synonymous with “neighborhood” and “placemaking” as Michelin is with high-end restaurants — via more and more media mentions of the Cabin Award, until the association with and the prestige of it is firmly formed in public consciousness.
- Grants Guild (Dahveed): VRBS, Nouns, and many more grant opportunities are available. It’s time to have a dedicated team finding them all and connecting them to those in Cabin who can do something amazing with each grant.
- Community Calls (Kathi): Long and hard conversations about what Cabin is to each of us, our roles in it, our visions for it, and so on. More a forum than a marketing call.
- Resource Library (Eileen): Bring together our various resources for neighborhood builders, which have so much value that they may even be revenue-generating for Cabin.
- Gatherer’s Guild + Neighborhood Treasuries (Eileen): Tangible co-management of resources at the local level.
- Pop-up Co-living (Daniel): This is one of the focus areas Labs has turned away from but Daniel wants to prove viable both financially and as a fit for Cabin’s broader vision.
These are just some examples, not all to be incubated together. Several of them are already being worked on and thus can be included into the Ideation Pod on Day 1 (e.g. social scraping and events). Champions of any ideas are encouraged to express their interest to one of the stewards early so they can begin their incubation month with a running start.
Why 1 month of incubation for each idea?
The goal is for the Ideation Pod to be rapid prototyping that gets initiatives from idea to being ready to apply to the DAO for a 3-month funded trial (with each team determining their own metrics that are both achievable in 3 months and significant enough to merit the DAO’s approval).
The Stewards will prepare a guide for the participants and will work with them to formulate KPIs and their pitch to the DAO. The 1-month duration should put enough pressure to separate “I really want to make this happen” ideas from the “nice to have” ones while avoiding creating a bottleneck for other ideas that await their turn.
To help teams hit the ground running on Day 1 and to make sure people coming into the Ideation Pod are taking it and their idea seriously, we ask for them to draft an Ideation Doc (sample here; template here).
The bar for success at the end of 1 month is for the team to be ready to submit a proposal to the DAO. It’s up to the team how much they accomplish in that 1 month to prove they are worthy of DAO funding.
Budget
Steward compensation
The compensation that we request is based on the overwhelming support from the comments and the Zoom call for the Stewards to get paid, as well as on the value shown by the work already done on the Ideation Pod over the past month. Specifically:
Value #1: Decentralizing Cabin, starting with the pod itself and, hopefully, with many concurrent initiatives run by various Cabin members and pursuing different directions within the overall mission of Cabin
Value #2: Creating a clear pathway for Cabiners new and old to get involved and get funded via the DAO
Value #3: Reemergence of Cabin’s culture of independent, creative doocracy — already, there are more people submitting proposals in the forum than in recent memory, seeing a place for themselves to create stuff within Cabin
And, to be frank, looking at the ideas, it’s reasonable to expect this to bring…
Value #4: Really strong ideas coming through the pod
Based on all of the above and on our individual time and role commitments to the Ideation Pod, we request the following compensation:
Dahveed: 2,000 USDC/month
Kat: 1,300 USDC/month
Savannah: 0 USDC/month (Savannah is donating her time)
Total: 3,300 USDC/month = 9,900 USDC/3 months
This is the minimum that, after much thought and discussion, we each determined that we need based on our individual circumstances.
Non-Steward budget
For the 3-Month Trial Period:
- 1,500 USDC total for the most necessary expenses (500/month)
- Distributed by the Stewards to the teams as needed
- Unused funds return to the Treasury
- 1,500 CABIN total for rewarding participants (500/month)
- Distributed to the teams and/or Stewards at the end of each month via a DAO vote (see this proposal on the vote mechanics)
Total maximum budget
USDC: 11,400
CABIN: 1,500
Next step
Unless there are major objections or additions from the community in the next 3 days, this proposal will be put on Snapshot for voting.
How many hours would you estimate that you plan to spend supporting the Ideation Pod per-week?
