This article was first published on LeapDAO's blog.

How we work

LeapDAO is a distributed team and strives to be truly decentralized. As a developer cooperative LeapDAO uses the holacracy governance model to structure teams and budgets in alignment with its purpose and roadmap.
Holacracy is an extremely dynamic framework which serves us well, a model which gives responsibility to every single developer. It encourages every member to work like an entrepreneur within a company, always working for the benefit of himself, the others and the collective. LeapDAO is structured in circles, you can imagine them as departments or domains. Regular meetings and calls help us stay aligned with our strategies and purpose. Circles are teams such as the "dev" circle or independent ecosystem projects such as Deora. The structure is constantly evolving, Glassfrog is the software of our choice to keep track of it.

Current organizational overview of LeapDAO

One person can have multiple roles within the organization and be a part of multiple circles, just like someone might juggle multiple responsibilities in a more traditional enterprise. We are truly decentralized and having structures which continually change for the better is crucial for us.

Every circle manages their own multi-sig wallet with individual budgets and is responsible for all tasks in their area of expertise.

Most of the work is done through bounties which anyone can propose similarly to colony tasks. Proposed bounties can be objected to through our Slack or the associated Github issue. Similarly, bounties without any progress can be challenged by other developers.

According to the concept proposed by colony each bounty has three roles:

  1. The gardener who prepared the specifications.
  2. The worker who completed the bounty.
  3. The reviewer who checks that the work fulfills the requirements and serves the purpose of assuring the quality of our products.

Bounties are structured into different sizes with increasing payout, all of which are denominated in DAI.

What colony means to us

Colony is an exciting project promising to deliver solutions for digital companies with a great range of solutions and a plentiful of smart contracts.

Next to distributing and managing money, LeapDAO keeps track of reputation as the important measurement within the organisation. Colony reputation is a way to keep track of merit, how much an individual has contributed to the success of an organization by clear metrics. At the moment reputation is added by being involved in the completion of bounties. Reputation is designed to decay over time, so that only active participants have a high level of reputation within the organisation. This way, we avoid plutocratic structures and only reward individuals who contribute to common good. Since colony has switched to the mainnet we deployed our own implementation.

To use the colony-task feature we created a bounty payout contract utilizing Colony payment. As a user interface LeapDAO forked the Gnosis multi-sig. The funds of every circle are managed by a separate Escrow council.

Deployed at wallet.leapdao.org this allows every circle to easily reward and payout contributors. The workflow goes as following:

  1. To the multi-sig wallet we added a payout bounty button.
Payout bounty button
  1. This button launches a modal with a flexible form allowing any member of the Escrow council to add the roles participating in the task.
Payount modal with flexible form
  1. If worker funds are held outside of the multi-sig (this applies if a Bounty is worked on through Gitcoin or Bounties Network) then we use the Reputation only checkbox for the worker, while still paying gardeners and reviewers directly.
prepared multisig transaction

How reputation benefits every developer

Please note: At the moment our mainnet is shutdown. The described setup was working for us, and will get a improved revival with added features like token governance, once our software is updated and the mainnet is resurrected.

Reputation was rewarded by distributing funds accumulated through our Plasma-bridge contract. Bimonthly, reputation turned into Leap tokens. To achieve this we query our Colony contract for the reputation root hash:


const { getNetworkClient } = require('@colony/colony-js-client');
const { open } = require('@colony/purser-software');
(async () => {
  const wallet = await open({
    privateKey: "0x0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000001",
  });
  const networkClient = await getNetworkClient('mainnet', wallet);
  const repHash = await networkClient.getReputationRootHash.call();
  console.log('repHash:', repHash);
})().then(() => process.exit()).catch(error => console.error(error));

Using the root hash a simple GET request to the colony API is sufficient to receive the individual reputation for each developer. For example to query the reputation amount for the ethereum address 0x8db6B632D743aef641146DC943acb64957155388 at root hash 0xdf32626d1f933a177f6a9431ff085b96561cc5da7240baccc4ef3897646f5553 we would place this GET request. At the point of writing we manually query reputation, calculate the individual reward share for each contributor and create a cute pie chart:

reputation pie chart

If you are interested in what we are doing, join the conversation on our Slack or follow us on Twitter. LeapDAO is a small independent team incubated by Status.im and running on the Ethereum Foundation grant. We are looking for active people to join our core research and development.


Colony is a platform for community collaboration—do work, make decisions, and manage money, together.

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