Please describe your proposed solution.
Tools and frameworks to enable the building of DAOs that provide the benefits of employed workers.
Some researchers believe that as much of 10% of the global workforce engages in some sort of gig work today. The model, however, is broken. 40% of all gig workers make less than minimum wage. More than 60% want to quit within a year. Gig economy workers, based all across the world, all struggle with a shared set of challenges: insecurity, anxiety, low wages, and high costs.
I am currently working with the ride-hailing community here in Ethiopia, and I plan on testing a pilot project with this community. This community is 10,000+ workers strong that feel like they are being exploited by the ride-hailing companies.
The creation of a ride-hailing or delivery company controlled by its workers could be one of the only ways to succeed in such a low-margin business.
With this project, we hope to research the various needs each stakeholder has, and accordingly design the frameworks and tools to enable the creation of DAOs for the needs of any gig workers community.
How would such a DAO work anyway?
Payments
Workers could choose to get paid in the DAO's tokens, or even the fiat that customers pay the DAO with. The transactions would be instantaneous, completely auditable, and transparent, and would be operated entirely by the smart contract.
Coordination
The DAO can coordinate on any co-working platform – Discord,Telegram, etc. There will be dedicated departments that replicate those in traditional platforms, such as HR, marketing, operations, legal, product, and so on that ensure that the DAO operates smoothly and functions like a ‘real’ organisation. The employees within these departments can either be full-time resources or can even be sectoral specialists that are part of a DAO themselves that freelance to offer these services.
Governance
To avoid a scenario inchi whales make all major decisions, the DAO can potentially introduce a ‘proof-of-personhood’ based voting mechanism – the system would verify that an account corresponds to a unique individual human, who obtains one vote. Proposals on the future direction can be submitted by anyone with the DOA's governance token; they may have to attain a certain number of votes in order to be discussed further, after which they might need a 60% majority to pass (this number, obviously, is adjustable).
Please describe how your proposed solution will address the Challenge that you have submitted it in.
This proposal aims to build the tools and framework that gig-workers will need. These tools and frameworks will target gig-workers broadly but will be designed to specifically address the needs of ride-hailing or uber-like centralized service workers.
The first pilot community will be built together with the ride-sharing association in Ethiopia, which is currently 10,000 workers strong, and we hope to onboard 3,000 with our initial phase. We will also be integrating these workers with our wallet (Endubis Wallet) for easy engagement with the Cardano platform.
What are the main risks that could prevent you from delivering the project successfully and please explain how you will mitigate each risk?
As with any DAO the biggest piece to building a successful project is the community it has. Even though our target audience is in need of such a project, the legal aspects of running such decentralized projects with no clear and open methods for tax collection can cause a legal challenge. As such, we will be working on this project with partners with strong legal knowledge to ensure workers fulfill all legal obligations.