Blu3 DAO Hacker House Proposal

[afrishan]

Blu3 DAO Hacker House at Activate Miami

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Blu3 DAO Background

Today, while crypto and web3 space have garnered a lot of attention and interest from women, the barriers to entry remain extremely high.

Some of the serious Challenges include:

1. The complexity of web3 – web3 is a new word and world - with a completely “new language,” “new technology,” and “new internet resources” that are not generally utilized by the public. It is overwhelming for any newcomer (not just women).
2. Lack of security or increased scams – Women tend to be socially conditioned to be more risk-averse. Combined with the lack of understanding as well as increased risks or scammers, this causes women to avoid this space completely.
3. Male-dominated industry – Finally, the overwhelmingly high number of men vs women ratio can make it hard for women, especially young women, to find communities and mentors where they feel valued and included. Harassment or unwanted advances have been experienced by many women attempting to learn about web3 in physical events, which makes it harder for them to feel empowered in the space. With most opportunities in this space coming from your network, women tend to miss out on a lot of these opportunities because, statistically, men are more likely to nominate and bring on other men into their projects.

Blu3 Origins

Our name was inspired and founded as a result of Harmony’s Blue to Fly campaign. The butterfly is our symbol as it represents transformation and personal metamorphosis - shedding older identities and external expectations of society, oftentimes painful but necessary for personal growth so that we can build our strength to fly.

Blue is the color of empathy. In life, the thing that connects us most is our pain. With empathy, we’ll be able to be more understanding of each other’s situation and create more love and support for each other. Only then, we can build a better world together.

Blu3 Ecosystem overview

Blu3 DAO’s mission is to empower women to achieve financial freedom through learning, exploring, and building their careers and visions in the Web3 space. Our goal is to grow and diversify the crypto ecosystem by focusing on an end-to-end solution that is fair and frictionless. This includes onboarding, education, and direct deployment of women talents into Web3 - as users and leaders. We are an ALL-inclusive female-focused DAO, and open our arms to women, trans, non-binary, and allies.

1. LEARN : Increase education and awareness of the web3 and crypto world
2. EARN : Expand the female crypto labor market and investors
3. PLAY : Create a fun and safe space for females to play and connect.

Miami Hacker House - Q2 2022

This proposal asks for funding for a Hacker House for Activate Miami 2022 . Blu3 DAO is also working in conjunction with Storj on sponsoring women scholars. The Hacker House will be a place to meet, engage and have thoughtful discussions with scholars and builders.

We have curated a unique but effective Blu3 DAO experience for our scholars and aim to replicate these accomplishments by working with more womxn thorough our partnerships with Harmony and Storj. Following our tremendous success at DevConnect/ETHAmsterdam, we would like to continue to sponsor strong hack teams to compete in hackathons around the world.

Blu3 DAO presents this funding proposal with the main objective of providing a central place for our womxn hack teams to collaborate during the Activate Hackathon happening in Miami during the week of May 16th 2022. With the results of each of the scholarships that we have received so far, we demonstrate that sponsoring inclusive communities leads to the development of a better ecosystem.

Women developers in web2 are searching for opportunities to move into web3 for their personal fulfillment, financial freedom, and freedom to innovate. We seek to help women build in this space by competing in and winning hackathons and completing developer bounties. Blu3 DAO and Harmony are also aligned with this initiative, where our scholars will have the opportunity to showcase their talents, contribute to technological growth in our ecosystems, and many for the first time experience a life-changing educational crypto conference experience.

Metrics and Goals for Blu3 DAO Miami Hacker House

• Working towards the Blu3 DAO Global vision, onboard 25+ womxn to our community through events participation and source potential future scholars and builders
• Host 1 panel and 1 technical workshop promoting Harmony and Storj technologies and diversity in web3 at the Hacker House for the wider hacker community
• Share opportunities to build through ZKUniversity or Open Harmony Bounties with womxn developers who are scholars and who we meet during the hackathon
• 7+ posts from official Blu3 DAO accounts tagging Harmony Protocol on Social Media during the Hacker House
• Operationalize a Blu3 Hack DAO (our developer DAO) to recruit and enable womxn developers
• Launch Blu3 DAO Miami and grow 50+ new community members on Telegram

A total of 16 womxn will be hacking towards innovation and radical social change through Blu3 DAOs partnership with Storj .

This grant will provide $12,000 for the hire of our Hacker House and will serve as as key meeting place for our scholars.

Total Budget and Proposal Ask = $12,000

Blu3 DAO Multisig Wallet Address: 0xC5768ee2630d7FCDAC7c2d4B19a3a3621f6F8E6E

@lij

[lij]

sharing with team and will revert soon.

[kategoheen]

Can’t wait to see what’s next after your wins at DevConnect

[Daphne_Charles]

Excited for this! Miami is a booming new tech hub and the perfect place to onboard local developers to the Harmony ecosystem.

[lanzdingz]

Blu3DAO has proved itself in having high quality hacking teams - winning multiple prizes at the last 2 conferences (Rio + Amsterdam). Excited to see the projects/products that come out of this.

[littlemoneyboss]

We saw incredible new projects that was created and won ETHRio 1st prizes and then even more new projects created and won ETHAmsterdam 1st/2nd/many prizes…

Looking forward to see what our Blu3 ladies and NB can create in Miami!!

[LaProfe]

Wow! This is so needed. We MUST continue to be intentional about representation in the web3 space.

It was such an inspiration to see a group of women hackers (some of which are new to the space) making HUGE waves In Amsterdam.

These wins validad our efforts as we work tirelessly with the DAO community to onboard more womxn. These events also help us inspire more womxn to take the leap into the web3 space. Seeing is believing.

It goes without saying that by creating a platform for talented womxn to be showcased, we position ourselves as the protocol that fosters an environment of diversity and inclusion. #bluedao #blu3tofly #whoruntheworld

[Mattyontap]

I like this idea a lot! Love your vision! To help me gain a little more clarity, I do have a few questions:

1. Metrics: Is the aim of the hacker house focused on education & onboarding or will this also include a focused hackathon to build new projects?

2. Will this be 100% brand new scholars, and will provisions be put in place to ensure they build projects that will provide more immediate value to the chain and community? For example, bounties/projects that are current needs of the chain vs a more open concept?

3. In addition to the metrics you shared, do you have metrics for the scholars’ outcomes from this hacker house?

Matty

[Jacksteroo]

Love to support the effort. I think the community has been recently very vocal (esp. on Reddit) about DAOs and bringing awareness to Web3, hence we need to add some metrics and accountability to how fundings should be handled going forward.

Btw, how much is Storj contributing into this?

Also I’m curious to understand the breakdown of the $12K and may cite some examples of the goals. Community members might be curious to ask what does “7+ posts from official Blu3 DAO accounts tagging Harmony Protocol” do to bring utility to Harmony?

In my humble opinion, the metrics stated are a bit qualitative. I understand it very well, that this will increase the funnel of builders into the ecosystem. It’s also hard to justify hand holding the onboarding 25+ people for $12K.

How can we help make this work?

[Novee]

Thank you Jack! We have read the thread and open to work with the wider Harmony community so we encourage constructive feedback and ideas. We understand the current sentiment and Blu3 is working hard to become self sustaining.

In Miami we will launch our Blu3 Hack DAO which will operate like a dev shop for femxle developers. Due to our successes at ETHRio & ETHAmsterdam, we have a pool of talented builders ready to work on projects that will boost the ecosystem and Harmony’s multi chain future.

1. Storj is contributing $30K to sponsor all of our scholars. The ask of the Harmony team is to sponsor the Hacker House $12K (which serves as a central location for the women scholars to build, and as an event space to hold workshops, panel discussions and additional bonding time to welcome new women into the web 3 space.)
2. Unfortunately, the cost of living in Miami is high. At every conference/hackathon that we attend the Blu3 DAO team facilitates team building, strategy sessions, ecosystem panel and discussions, as well as wellbeing check-ins which require space over multiple days. Hiring event space within hotels is very expensive (can be a few thousand just for a few hours). Hence, we decided it would be more beneficial to have a Hacker House instead (which would be both an event space, as well as accommodation for a few).

For transparency, out of the 12K, the following is the breakdown:
$9.5K - Cost of Air B & B for 8 nights (sleeps 8, 10 maximum if we utilize the living room space, but plan on keeping that empty so we can do morning wellness events)
$700 - Cleaning, workshop materials, miscellaneous items
$300 - Transportation
$1,500 - Food, snack and refreshments for events

In an effort to help with cost efficiencies, Blu3 partners with Storj and Harmony so that both parties can reap the benefits of bringing women scholars to conferences, increase diversity to the ecosystem and bringing education and awareness of the protocols to women developers. Having a Hacker House is important for the following reasons:

a) A central place for developers to build together - collaboration is key to success and having a dedicated space for our scholars was a need that we identified during our experience at ETHAmsterdam.

b) It provides a welcoming and safe space for women to enter web 3. Sexual harassment issues are often undiscussed but are very real and represents a key barrier to entry for women into web 3. We have dealt with incidents of this nature in past events, so creating a women Hacker House creates a welcoming space for other women to join, and feel supported.
c) Cost efficiency: We use this space jointly as an event space as well as accommodation for selected few scholars so that we can bring more scholars.

Social media posts are a form of advertising for the Harmony protocol and the ecosystem. This allows us to raise awareness of Harmony outside of the community, decreasing the echo chamber effect as we aim to engage more people. While this seems to lack utility, it certainly helps to increase the social ROI which is important as community is an underpinning web3 principle. People and builders want to build on something that they have heard of and are familiar with.

Jack - While these are qualitative, they are impactful nevertheless. For example, our 2 (out of 3) hackathon winners in Amsterdam are DAO related tooling with huge potential for success. If these are great projects, Harmony / Blu3 can decide to further fund them to build on Harmony. FYI - they have already received multiple offers to build on other chains. The point is - we bring great talent who are builders and can potentially be building the next big thing on Harmony.

Last but not least, scholars are like ambassadors to Harmony when they are sponsored. Many people associate Blu3 DAO to Harmony and this represents the level of talent that we have.
The 25+ people is just an estimate (we may have more women participants later - friends of friends, etc.) but these are high quality talent - we go through a very rigorous selection process to get the best talents out there.

[afrishan]

Hey Matty, I’m glad to see that you’re as excited for this as we are!

1. Blu3 scholars, through our partnership with Storj, will be participating in the Activate X Wormhole hackathon (https://www.activate.build/miami). This is the first multi-chain hackathon taking place and so this Harmony hacker house will not only serve as a place for education and onboarding but we will have 20 scholars building out new projects under the hackathon tracks: Defi, Infrastructure, Metaverse & NFTs. At this time we are still working on our agenda but have already secured a technical workshop from our Storj partners and we will also be speaking about the Harmony ecosystem, and doing TGIs with the scholars (an important culture for Blu3 and Harmony). As a DAO, we advocate for our scholars to build DAO tooling & DeFi and Social Tokens projects however the scholars decide to build and submit their best ideas at the hackathon.

2. The ask from Harmony as part of this proposal only covers the cost of the Hacker House, including some supporting items e.g transportation for scholars, workshop/panel equipment hire, and any cleaning costs.
   Storj is the “Silver Sponsor” for Activate Miami and will be allocating all of their sponsorship to the Blu3 scholars ($30K) - which will be used to pay for travel stipend, accommodation, and a few side events. With the sponsorship, we are expecting a total of 20 women & non-binary scholars (10 more than Amsterdam)! Our agreement with Storj was to prioritize hackers, so we are open to Blu3 alum as well as brand new scholars. Blu3 leads will be staying in this Hacker House but they will also be hacking. Based on our experiences in Rio and Amsterdam we have found that having a few experienced hackers in our scholarship cohort increases the quality of projects, and helps transition hackers who are new to Web 3. Hackathons are inherently stressful and so having a whole team of completely new scholars may be detrimental to the overall hacking and scholar experience.
   As part of our program we do inform scholars about current Harmony bounties including the bounty on the social token dApp. We however, cannot force the scholars to undertake any projects if it is not within their interest.

3. It is too early to speculate how many teams we will submit into the hackathon as each team can contain up to 6 people but doesn’t have to. We expect to have at least 4 hacker teams submit their projects. If we look back at our past performance in Amsterdam, of the 3 Blu3 hack teams that took part at ETHAmsterdam, 2 are going to continue their build. These projects focus on different areas of web3: DAO Tooling, The Metaverse & Gaming. It’s important to highlight that winning projects e.g The DAOverse and DAOra all have the potential to be built on Harmony. Ultimately, we will publish a report on our performance at Activate Miami which will openly available for the community to read.

Please share any metrics that you think would be suitable, we encourage all allies to join Blu3 DAO!

[amartay1986]

@Jacksteroo

I am sorry but this needs to be addressed by someone on the Harmony Core team…

How does $9500 out of $12000 going towards a ‘mansion’ for 8 nights HELP Harmony in any way??

No one is going to say it but that’s what a 5 bedroom house is. A MANSION!!

Is this what Harmony has become??

$11K out of $12K going towards a mansion and prime time food…

You are destroying your investors money by giving to proposals like this.

@sick_of_this @A_TI @serenity @PeaceLoveHarmony @No_White_Flags @mohanarvindk @Sbae @juanonewuan @Point7C

I told myself I would never come back on here and respond. Someone sent me this and I honestly thought it was a joke only to see it be a reality.

Harmony currently at $588M market cap and you keep spending funds like you are a multi billion dollar company with VCs just throwing cash at you.

[sick_of_this]

To play the devil’s advocate- these sponsorships could be useful if they brought actual developers to Harmony and encouraged them to build stuff here.

But now to get a bit real with this and address Blu3 DAO and Harmony, since there’s several issues at play here.

What are you guys building? Without pointing to how many prizes you won, could you actually explain what you built? I’ve been at dozens of hackathons and very often the winners would not be decided by solely what project they built, but a lot of other things.

From looking around on Twitter i see some projects (please add if I missed/misunderstood any)-

Cocoon protocol doesn’t appear to have anything to do with Harmony and their Twitter primarily mentions Near and Storj.

Sphere is related to Storj again.

Here’s another-

A P2E app that pays in Matic clearly doesn’t seem to have anything to do with Harmony either. Side note- I’m not sure if this idea is just plain terrible or it’s because the summary on the “welcome to wengo” is so atrocious.

Coming to the elephant in the room- Sunny. You guys really listed her a scholar?

Remind me again what her resume in building successful projects is (cough…Vegan DAO…cough)? I’m sure if you’ve spent any amount of time around these forums, you’re aware of what the general consensus on her is correct? And you’d also be aware she has literally not done anything to clear the air around her?

To the Harmony Team, why was there no public post saying this was funded? I think pretty much anything that got funded also got a public comment so that the community knew. Why go stealth mode here?

[Novee]

Hello,

Thank you for your passionate, but unfortunately inaccurate response.

1. First off - this is NOT a 8-bedroom Mansion. It is a two single story inter-connected home that has 5 bedrooms in total. That means, half of us are sharing space together in an effort to be cost-efficient. I don’t know where you got your info - but would appreciate some accuracy.
   2. Prime time food - Unless you consider bagels and groceries from Target, and a take-out lunch from a cafe = Prime Time food, I don’t know what you are referring to and your basis of that. We actually buy groceries (such as eggs, bagels, tomatoes, some juice, croissants… ohh and yes, strawberry cream cheese) so that we can again, be cost effective.
2. Btw - not sure which part of the world you are located in, but $9,500 for 8 days for Miami (including taxes, and cost of cleaning and all the Air B and B fees), is quite reasonable.

Let me also add a little color to this situation… We understand the current market condition is unfavorable, hence, we at Blu3 DAO pursued the following:

1. Partnered with Storj (a friendly partner to Harmony) for this sponsorship. Storj sponsors our scholars and Harmony sponsors the Hacker House. By doing this - both protocols get exposure to the scholars, while splitting the cost. In fact, in this case, Storj was our main sponsor.
2. We did the Hacker House because it was going to be cheaper as we can use it for both:
   a) accommodation for some
   b) event space
   As you may or may not be familiar - event spaces including food can run up to thousands of dollars on its own. So, this is actually a cheaper alternative.

By utilizing a Hacker House - we have an event space and can order cheaper take out food options.

c) Through this Hacker House - we used it for several occasions, including: a technical workshop for Harmony, a technical workshop for Storj, a venue for our TGI gathering and a venue for a women brunch which hosted more than 60 women scholars around the world (from Her DAO, Blu3 DAO and Women Build Web 3). There was also a thank you note of gratitude towards Harmony and a Harmony sign in this House during this event.
d) Did I also mention that the Blu3 leads developed the technical materials presentation - leveraging the materials from Harmony? And we had A LOT of devs in this scholarship cohort, including a crypto lawyer.
e) Lastly, we had 4 teams and 1 solo from the list of scholars. 2 out of the 5 decided to build on Harmony in this hackathon (note that Harmony wasn’t a key sponsor and hence no bounty was offered. We can only recommend but cannot force the scholars to build as the scholars were actually sponsored by Storj). And btw - these are the 2 that WON the Infrastructure and the NFT track at Activate Miami. Both teams thanked Harmony / or had Harmony logo on main stage.
f) I was also a judge during Activate Miami. In an appreciation to Harmony and Storj - I was wearing a Storj shirt and a Harmony cap during the judging and presentation day (I wasn’t under any obligation at all). PLUS - there were a few good projects that I took noticed (Defi, Gaming), spoke to them, and sent them to the Harmony team.

So - all in all, Harmony sponsored $12k, but got the following back:

1. Devs learnt about Harmony, and got a Harmony deck presented
2. Shout-out on main stage with logo and appreciation.
3. Marketing to more than 60 women scholars from 3 female DAOs.
4. Had 2 projects built on it, and WON and got mentioned in main stage (do you know how much prime dollars other protocols have to pay to do this??)
5. Ability to share cost with Storj while getting the exposure to the scholars.
6. Scouting for good projects by partnering with Blu3 (instead of needing to have Harmony presence on-site). We function not just as scholars, but partners and ambassadors to Harmony.
7. Getting the marketing and promotion (without the additional need of having to fly in person Harmony team to this event).

So what you see as an Expense = is actually an Investment. ROI comes in many shapes, types and forms.

We do the above for Harmony - because we appreciate Harmony as a sponsor to us.

And lastly, my friend - if you already choose to leave Harmony (your lost IMO), then keep to your word. Saves both you and I a lot of time. I, myself, is bullish on $ONE.

[serenity]

To further comment on what sick of this said

i’d give a no to any form of wokeness, the idea is attracting new devs, doesnt matter if they are african vegan or non binary or male, female or whatever, what i would say yes to would be what simply attracts new devs
got mixed feelings considering that blu3 DAO was, if i recall correctly, about attracting ‘‘minority’’ devs
still devs at the end of the day but its unnecessary to focus specifically on certain people, it lowers the amount of potential new builders.

[Gioele]

Harmony should consider doing more industry-wide sponsorships because most of the times local organizers just put in a lot of shitty unrealistic metrics and they have an incredibly small reach tbh but make huge asks like the most expensive venue in their city or smth. Hopefully the grants will be more focused on quality of event, evaluating things like sponsor landscape, and previous experience of running something similar.

Happy to become a volunteer on Event grants team over 5 years of experience raising event sponsorship and I know how most sponsors evaluate what they throw cash $$ at .

[amartay1986]

@Novee

There was also a thank you note of gratitude towards Harmony and a Harmony sign in this House during this event.

You got to be joking? You seriously are justifying your costs by leaving a note? Harmony sign? How much did that costs blu3 Dao ? $10 bucks tops?

And lastly, my friend - if you already choose to leave Harmony (your lost IMO), then keep to your word. Saves both you and I a lot of time. I, myself, is bullish on $ONE.

You are not bullish on ONE you know why? Because you are slowly draining from every single harmony investor and you don’t even see it.

[amartay1986]

This is what Harmony cares about.

Ultra woke donations.

No reputable marketing firm right of California would deem this as long term sustainable.

You notice Sunny is always in the picture?

Not a coincidence… its rinse and repeat in full circle.

[juanonewuan]

I feel like all this “minority” bullshit is pointless , try to reach as many people as you can , just by focusing on the minorities you are actually becoming what you apparently hate , what about all of those great devs that just cuz they don’t fit on your “minority” criteria cant access to the benefits that those that use they/them or whatever bullshit useless pronoun do ? Why focus on such as small group when it objectively lowers the quality of the job since you reduce the sample size , reach everyone , who cares if they have a dick , a vagina , both or a fucking helicopter between their legs , stop trying to focus on groups, it does as much harm .

and yes now that YOU and yes I mean YOU are reading this, go ahead , report the comment , but know that every single thing I’ve said it’s true , and know that the end is coming, we as the Harmony community ,we are not gonna allow you to keep freeloading off us , with our money , with the money we could be using to improve as a whole .

[Point7C]

Blu3 DAO Funding Proposal - ETHDenver 2022

funded $30k to complete the initial $75k tranche: Ethereum Transaction Hash (Txhash) Details | Etherscan