DaoLens — The last stop for community management

Managing a DAO is a challenging task. Managing and organizing the load can and frequently does get out of hand. DAO leaders have no option but to use a plethora of software to monitor everything within the community, frequently leading to chaos and poor management.

You are not alone if your DAO uses multiple tools for various tasks. Given the lack of tools that can function as 'hubs' for your team, this is to be expected. Spending more time on tools you can't focus on in the community is not new. There are plenty of others sailing on the same ship as yours.

How communities are currently managed is inconvenient, isolating, and dependent on third-party software. Let's discuss the issues DAO managers are dealing with.

Why is the current system flawed?

DAOs themselves are not the root problem. It is their operational frameworks that require improvement. Managing any community is inherently challenging; the fact that the landscape for DAO tooling is still underdeveloped is quite a significant additional hurdle.

Given the multiplicity of functions a DAO has, community leads need to use several tools. This includes Discord, Discourse, Snapshot, Gnosis, MetaMask, Dework, and Galxe. Context switching results in a general lack of cohesion across teams. When you're in the woods, you want a Swiss Army Knife-not 5 different tools that weigh you down and are cumbersome to carry together.

So let's explore DaoLens, who have built exactly this.

Introducing: DaoLens

DaoLens is a one-stop community management tool for DAOs and communities. It combines everything required to operate a fully functional community into one platform.

It provides tools and plugins to integrate within your community so you can focus on engaging in your community rather than managing and organizing it.

DaoLens aims to provide solutions for communities and DAOs to generate more value and increase efficiency in line with conventional organizations today. It helps you manage your DAO on four fronts: discovery, onboarding, contribution, and operation.

The story behind DaoLens

DaoLens was cofounded by Apoorv and Vikram, who had known each other for almost a decade. They graduated from IIT Guwahati - one of the most prestigious institutes in India. Soon, they developed an interest in blockchain technology.

One of the building blocks was DAOs, which started in 2016. Both co-founders noticed a trend toward DAOs and began dabbling and experimenting. Eventually, they realized the need for robust DAO tooling as they experienced the current paradigm's inefficiencies.

That's why DaoLens was founded in 2022 to bring the scatteredness into one big umbrella.

What DaoLens Offers

DaoLens provides infrastructure and a suite of tools to make community managers' life easier. It helps on four critical fronts — onboarding, discovery, contribution, and operation.

Onboarding

Whether your community is well-established or newly formed, onboarding is unavoidable. When new members join, they must feel welcome into the community. DaoLens combines all the contexts spread across your docs, websites, and other platforms. New members can know everything about the community from one place.

Lurkers are members who don't regularly participate in community activities. There are some communities where there are more lurkers than contributors. If your community is one of such, DaoLens also provides self-serve solutions to work around this.

Discovery

Once the member is joined, they need to get familiarized with everything that happens within the community. They must learn about different channels, roles, activities, and much more.

DaoLens provides a Discover DAO Library that helps newcomers understand the DAO and how to get started regardless of their level of expertise in various domains.

Contribution

Contribution management is the most tedious task in any community. Whether it may be knowledge management, discussions, payouts, on-chain and off-chain signaling, task submission, bounties, approval, or anything, the community relies on multiple tools. Members often switch back and forth between multiple tools for day-to-day tasks.

The flow of conversation is often disturbed, and the context gets lost while using multiple tools. DaoLens brings the whole suite of tools under one umbrella, so members can participate without being bothered by different tools.

Operations

DaoLens provides a highly curated playbook of solutions for establishing and scaling your community. Whether you are a newly formed DAO setting up processes or looking for a scalable solution for your community, you will find a guide. It is compiled information from the best DAOs presented in a single handbook.

DAO Manager by DaoLens

DaoLens offers their DAO Manager. The DAO Manager is an umbrella platform that provides all the tools to manage your community in one place.

Gating

A community with no gatekeeping always creates noise. The community feels spam, promotions, and unnecessary messages.

DAO Manager makes it possible to add members based on specific criteria. You can add people based on the tokens they hold, tasks they have completed, and their reputation. The new member gets added only if they meet such standards.

It helps you to monitor member activities as well. You can gate every action based on the tokens they hold, traits of NFTs, or even their on-chain credentials.

More than 100 communities use DaoLens to manage their onboarding and operations. These are various Gamers, Creators, developers communities, Ed3 DAO, RYI Unity, and Uniflex - to name a few.

Task Management

Task Management with current solutions is chaos. Managers need to work with multiple third-party software all the time. Issues associated with this are greatly compounded in remote only teams with people across different languages, time zones, and cultures.

The DAO Manager offers Linked tasks and proposals with the ability to create them directly from the discussion.

Reputation Management

Reputation is a crucial factor in any community, especially in working communities like DAOs. Qualitative knowledge about one's co-workers is crucial to any organization, as any organizational framework/hierarchy relies upon it. This emphasizes the importance of reputation management. Reputation can be measured for anything community leaders may want. Highly reputed members can be given special permissions into discussion channels, events, bounties, and even votes!

DAO Manager allows you to browse every contribution at a member level.

Decision Making

DAO Manager supports various voting mechanisms and integrates with third-party voting platforms like Snapshot, maintaining the infrastructure that undergirds the decentralized nature of DAO governance.

Proposals are another integral part of any DAO. DaoLens gives you the ability to create proposals from discussions. Additionally, you can create tasks related to a discussion and interlink those tasks with the discussion.

For instance, suppose a member wants to claim a bounty wish to know further steps. They can have the entire context of everything related to it.s

Payouts

Payouts are crucial. Even a momentary lapse of attention can lead to losing funds, and such lapses are far more likely with the excess steps that someone would currently need to take to pay a contributor.

By implementing in-app payments, the DAO Manager enables leaders to pay people at the same place their work is evaluated simply by clicking their name. No need to note copy-paste 26 character addresses, move apps, and payout, only to realize it was to the wrong address! For the same reason, DaoLens has also integrated multi-sigs through Safe!

How to get started

DaoLens provides you with a plethora of tools to build your community. You can plug them into your community and start using them instantly.

Get into a community

You can join an existing community or create one of your own. You must claim the newly created workspace as yours, which requires verifying yourself.

Add members

DaoLens provides options to bring members from your previous community and their roles. Alternatively, it also gives you a link you can send members to join.

Integrating existing tooling

As mentioned earlier, DaoLens gives you tools out of the box. You can integrate them into your community and simplify tasks for yourself and your community members.

Future Plans

The team is working hard toward creating a solid interconnected infrastructure for communities of all forms and sizes. They are leveraging modern technologies to simplify contributors' journeys.

They recently launched an AI Assistant, 'Robin'. Robin will help communities with various tasks to make an easy road for contributors and community members. It is available as early access if you want to check it out.

Wrapping Up!

DaoLens provides an infrastructure and a suite of tools for community managers to manage DAOs. It helps managers with four important aspects of managing any community - discovery, onboarding, contribution, and operations

We are excited to launch DaoLens through our Launchpad. Check it out here now! 🚀🦉