Please describe your proposed solution.
We are the Littlefish Foundation (LFF), a decentralized, global organization, building technologies that align individual actions towards common goals, enabling collective intelligences.
We use blockchain technology to redefine earning relationships between people, work, and organizations, enabling a new model of operation that grants more freedom to participants, while making sure that freedom results in progress towards the goals of the whole.
Our proposals are best experienced in the Littlefish Vault. There will be multiple links to it throughout the proposal with background information necessary to fully understand the concepts.
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PAs, you will need this information to understand LFF. This is a standalone proposal, but these are recommended reading to understand LFF.
- The Bleeding Edge of Organizations and the Big Problem
- The Basics - littlefish, colonies and Action
- The Big Picture
- Littlefish Action Model
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The Problem
Decentralized work in digital communities enables much, but there are issues with visibility. In office environments, peers chat and communicate throughout the day, learning about each other, what they enjoy, what they are good at. This doesn’t happen to such an extent in online work. Individuals don’t know about each other as well, and this hampers collaboration.
This is part of a more general problem that Littlefish Foundation (LFF) is attempting to solve. You can read about it here.
Ikigai in LFF
Ikigai is a Japanese concept meaning “a reason for being”. We first came across it in April, as we were hard at work writing our whitepaper.
At the time, we have been experiencing an immense joy for work, ideating and developing the foundations of LFF. Ikigai captured this feeling immediately. We put it in the whitepaper to explain the journey each littlefish(individual) takes. It has become a guiding philosophy for us, to build technology that enables individuals to find their Ikigai.
Early experiments with Ikigai
Our approach to problem solving in this space is experimentation. Trying out new methods of doing business, creating new processes fit for a decentralized organization built from the ground floor.
Before we found Ikigai, we were working on a visual method to understand our organization better. What are our needs? What skills do we have to match those needs? What skills are we missing? Those were the questions when we created the work on the left. Each bubble represents different things we want to build, functions we need, things we are doing. It is a high level overview of our organization.
Then we found this Miro template. We put a littlefish badge in the middle and it turned into the image on the right. Then we realized why not join them? Each individual can fill it up as they please, displaying a wealth of information at a glance to every other member of LFF.
The initial result was this:
Ikigai as an onboarding process
It is early in our experimentation with this tool but it has already garnered a lot of attention from newcomers and community members. So we made it into an onboarding process. Also, it is just fun to play with bubbles :)
This tool has some great properties. Let’s walk through the process to observe them.
1- We start with the work groups at the top made out of post-it notes. At one glance we can see what this work group is doing, what their responsibilities are, and who is in the working group.
2 - Next we have the bubbles for each working group. Each represents a more specific function, a project, something that needs attention. With these we now know what is needed by the community.
3 - Once we go through the bubbles and the working groups, we now have a general understanding of the types of work that are going on in the community. Next step is to just fill out the empty Ikigai board with the bubbles, adding new ones, personalizing it to taste.
And with that, the onboarded member has a general understanding of the community and the community has an in-depth understanding of the newcomer. Visibility expanded!
Our Solution
We have this great tool. We want to make it into a web application that anyone can use in their communities, starting with internal use. Our approach is building for us first, solving our own problems, and working with others to generalize the tools so others can benefit as well. We’re already in communications with several other communities who have shown interest.
We will build this as a free web service. Communities will create their own page and community members will fill out their Ikigai with community specific “bubbles”. These will be shareable externally and displayable on the community page.
Such a system will grant much needed visibility to who we are working with, helping all of us understand each other better, forge better work relationships that help us all move towards our Ikigai.
Please describe how your proposed solution will address the Challenge that you have submitted it in.
As Vitalik Buterin highlighted in 2014:
DAOs == automation at the center, humans at the edges
Automation is being built, yet it is not the only thing needed to make DAOs work. It needs humans at the edges to collaborate effectively.
As the challenge states, DAOs need tools for community collaboration. Most DAOs getting started with digital collaboration are finding it difficult to organize, to coordinate their efforts effectively in the digital, global, decentralized setting. Visibility of other members is one crucial need that is missing from the work stack.
This proposal ticks all the boxes on the specified Key Metrics:
- It will increase the number of communities engaged in collaboration using the LFF platform, a tool for DAOs.
- Greater visibility will mean more effective collaboration in DAOs, increasing ADA from DAO transactions.
- Great, fun to use tools like this will draw more DAOs to Cardano to use as the governance/management chain.
- This is a DAO tool, thus increasing the number of tools for DAO Ops by one.
What are the main risks that could prevent you from delivering the project successfully and please explain how you will mitigate each risk?
LFF General - Funding
Littlefish Foundation is a complex organization driven by individual efforts. It only moves forward if individuals drive it forward. The single biggest risk in front of that is financial. A large percentage of the team is based in Turkey, which has been experiencing hyperinflation for the past year.
Funding is the number one challenge we face. With funding we can pay the team to work on Littlefish Foundation and make their financial burden lighter. This all puts us closer to achieving the LFF vision. We are a global community with contributors from all over the world. Without funding, we will still build the LFF, but it will be more challenging and slower.
We are mitigating risk through diversification in multiple proposals, increasing the chance of receiving funding. We’re also budgeting for the Action Fund, partly to serve as a contingency.
LFF General - Technology Risk
LFF is developing a strong infrastructure to be able to scale, for that we need the support of a strong development community. The current team is very strong on tech development, with extensive experience. and we are welcoming more developers to join. We are already engaged with the Gimbalabs development community and have their support.
This proposal - Interest on Using the Tool
To understand the problem at a deeper level, the needs of users, how they approach a tool like this etc. we will use the manual version on Miro. Through this we will collect information. This information is important for us to solve the problem effectively. If we don’t get enough people using the tool, our information won’t be as useful. To mitigate the problem we will be sharing the tool with other communities, getting completely different perspectives on how it can be used.