User research for Decentralized Governance

Context

In June 2021, I joined a diverse group of innovators and researcher with a focus on decentralized governance. The Governauts research group came to life and we created a Telegram group. A community with growing number of users gathered to learn about the relevance of the topic and absorb knowledge that could help to inspire their actions. More importantly, we want to offer a collaborative landscape to exchange questions and open positive input to facilitate the impact of decentralized governance, from multiple angles. On a weekly basis, in the core team, we invested time and effort to provide exciting content to the community so they can learn and interact about decentralized governance. Based on the team cross-pollination activity, the Telegram group conversations and my own experience, I wanted to focus pulling together the community needs, the learning activities and the adoption challenges.

Approach

In this context, a generative methodology helped me to design and launch a qualitatative survey to listen and understand the Governauts community on the Telegram group. In Novermber 2021, the survey with six questions guided the community to express their input in three weeks window. The goals were to identify the Governauts archetype, uncover learning opportunities and listen to what the problems are to facilitate adoption in decentralized governance. Out of 180 people on the Telegram channel, 26 members completed it (14%).

Outcome

At the DAO Reward System Assemblage, I presented the qualitative survey results from the Governauts community. You can watch the presentation here or the full event here. In a nutshell, the research detected three main ongoing needs:

Social: cultural building, values alignment Coordination: work streams vs resources allocation UX: simplicity of front-end — ease of use

Another relevant area of the research is about the main problems towards adoption. Below I share a slide with the archetypes that frame the DAO leader as well as contributors’ perspectives:

This research triggered further steps to investigate work streams and skills needed to facilitate the onboarding process in decentralized communities.