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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Ocean: The realm of all blockchains, their communities, where all the fish swim.
Note: This proposal has a twin, focusing on the technology of the cross-chain. They were originally thought as a single proposal, but split to mitigate funding risk. See it here.
The Problem
What it means to be a decentralized organization is just yet beginning to be explored. Decentralized communities pioneer into uncharted organizational territory, facing new challenges, and experimenting with solutions.
The speed of progress is blindingly fast. New organizational structures, processes, and approaches are starting to appear, along with blockchain solutions to enable them. Novel research is taking our understanding further. A new dawn of human organization is on the horizon.
This is all great, but keeping up with developments in the exponential age is extremely challenging. Visibility is a crucial need. Without it, developments in one edge of blockspace go unheard in another, opportunities to collaborate never materialize, bridges don’t get built. Visibility is the first problem to solve. Barriers to entry must be lowered.
What is needed?
The blockspace offers many opportunities to collaborate to tackle organizational problems, finding them is the challenge. There is so much information available, yet no one has the time to sift through it.
A dedicated team with theoretical organizational knowledge and experience in organization building is necessary to find developments in the space, understand them, curate it for others, and publish original research on the processes of decentralized organizations.
What’s needed is a gateway to up-to-date, in-depth information, and original research in decentralized organizational building.
Our Approach
At LFF we are a digital community of 100+ with 15+ core team members from around the globe. Our general approach to problem solving in this space is experimentation and solving our own problems first.
We have been feeling the problem of visibility while building our organization. We researched other DAOs and how they tackled organizational building challenges. Information was hard to reach, often hidden on a Notion page, or a Medium article deep within the bowels of a DAO. Google searches found outdated information and was more often than not useless.
This is a general problem in the blockchain space. Finding places that aggregate good, in-depth research is difficult. This is why we’re building our knowledge base with a holistic vision, solving problems we face while building this decentralized organization, and creating common knowledge so others may have an easier time solving similar problems.
Understanding the space is critical to be successful in it. This is why research is a fundamental business function at LFF. This is why we have the Tech Help Collective (THC), which provides research into the tech and makes that knowledge as approachable to non-tech persons as possible. This is why one of Organization Labs’ main functions is conducting research.
Organization Model at LFF
We based our organization model on Teal Organizations, where:
- worker self-management is key,
- hierarchies are natural and dynamic,
- decision making is distributed.
This is a fit model for decentralized organizations. Few other organizations are aware of the theoretical background but many organizations in the blockchain space follow this model to a degree. Yet this model is mostly unexplored, and many problems exist in execution.
We’re solving these problems as they occur. The module system in these proposals is an experiment at solving one such problem: self-selection of individuals into fields of work. You can read more about modules here.
Our approach to organizations will guide the direction of this proposal.
Our Solution
At LFF we have a diverse group of technologists, secure systems experts, organization and governance geeks. Today, we are operating mostly in the DAO enabling tools space. We are mapping the Cardano ecosystem, learning the solutions, and producing expert knowledge.
With this and its twin proposal, we are building the gateway into the Ocean of blockchains. In this proposal, the focus is organizational knowledge:
- Gathering and curating knowledge from the Ocean on our knowledge base,
- Creating ADA vs. The Ocean Map, matching existing/building solutions on ADA to what exists on the Ocean, identifying potential areas of collaboration.
- Communicating findings with ADA builders and the rest of the Ocean through communication channels, meetings, workshops, etc.
- Internal research on organization building in the decentralized world.
Our Outputs
The outputs of the proposal will be documentation curating resources by other organizations and original research about these areas:
- Teal organizations, approaches to decentralized organization, organizational structures.
- Organizational processes, practices.
- Organizational challenges, problems, and approaches to solve.
- Governance approaches. Success of governance mechanisms, problems.
- Dead projects: What challenges spelled doom? eg. Why did this happen?
- Other organizational topics: Culture, decision-making, awareness, …
We’re building The Ocean Map: collecting information on how projects in the space approach problems, providing others the communication links to contact and begin collaboration.
We will also share our findings in community meetings and in other Catalyst communities, raising the awareness of our work.
These outputs will be evolving over time to reflect developments. Learn more about evolving documentation on LFF here.
Who will benefit?
There are many problems that need to be understood: organizational structure, governance, collaboration, decision-making, … Our guide on what we tackle is our own learning needs at LFF. So the primary beneficiary is us, we solve our own problems.
Yet, the problems we face are experienced by all decentralized organizations. We will share all of our findings with others, enabling communities in Catalyst, the Cardano space, and the rest of the blockchain Ocean. Specifically, we will publish our findings and market it in other communities we operate in the Catalyst space. They will be a beneficiary of our work, learning about the Ocean and finding possible partners.
We will find collaboration opportunities between builders in the ADA space and in the Ocean. We will contact them and let them know of our findings. When potential collaboration turns into real collaboration, these groups will benefit greatly. This is the overarching goal of the proposal, to catalyze connections, allowing bridges to be built where there was none.
Outcome
The outcome of our work is greater visibility into the Ocean of blockchains. We imagine our knowledge base will serve as a gateway for ADA builders to find others who are solving similar problems. We will use Obsidian to group similar ideas, make it as easy as possible to identify and make connections with others. Builders will simply explore on our platform and find others to learn from and to collaborate with.
Please describe how your proposed solution will address the Challenge that you have submitted it in.
Alignment with the Challenge
The challenge states:
> We need initiatives to increase communication, coordination and collaboration between chains.
> We have common challenges. Let’s solve those together.
Before communication, coordination, and collaboration can happen, one must know where to look. Without visibility, there is no communication, there’s no solving problems together.
Without knowing where to look, potential opportunities disappear. Knowledge from one part of the Ocean stays there. Innovations stay local. Common challenges are needlessly solved again and again.
As such, this proposal deals with the first part of the challenge question: “how might we create new connections between blockchain communities?” We create it by providing a curated experience to find these communities.
Key Metrics
The proposal primarily improves these challenge Key Metrics:
- Ideas from other chains implemented by Catalyst
- By knowing where to look, ideas from other chains will make their way into Catalyst, blossoming into existing projects, turning into new organizational structures, new experiments to try in Catalyst.
- Projects and dApps from other chains implemented on Cardano
- Connections with other chains will draw others to Catalyst, starting new projects and dApps with original ideas implemented elsewhere.
- Collaboration with others will lead to new cross-chain Integrations
- Catalyst-created solutions adopted by other chains/communities
- Just as ideas flow into Catalyst, they will flow out of it into other communities.
- Number of permanent initiatives with cross-chain teams (members from different blockchain communities together)
- Better visibility will lead to new connections, which will open the way for new initiatives between newly connected cross-chain teams.
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 - Marketing
The success of the proposal depends highly on the spread of the information generated. If we don’t take this into account, all this proposal will accomplish is a better informed LFF and a few other communities. Information will diffuse through word of mouth activities but this will be slow and ineffective in capturing the attention of the larger community, if we don’t make additional efforts.
That’s why we’ll be undertaking additional marketing activities to spread the information we generate. We will share this information in other communities' communication channels. We’ll join meetings and talk about our work and how it can benefit others. We’ll also reach out to Cardano builders who we think will benefit from the work we do, so that they can easily connect with communities from the other side of the blockchain Ocean.
We’re also growing the team at Love House, the LFF working group in charge of marketing, community building, and engagement. In time, we’ll have a strong team of content producers and storytellers who will create videos, short explainers, and talk to others about LFF and what we’re doing.