1. Name: Rather Mercurial

2. Role / Job title: gov lead / facilitator

3. Experience

4. Purchase summary

1. Superbenefit DAO

2. Size:

3. Type:

4. Maturity

• Rather emphasizes the use of deliberative processes and automated tools to engage community members in governance discussions, highlighting the effectiveness of bots in facilitating these conversations.

• Challenges include overcoming the inertia of traditional governance practices and integrating new tools that community members are unaccustomed to, aiming to enhance participation in decision-making processes.

• We discussed the deployment of bots and other digital tools to streamline governance processes, though it acknowledges the learning curve and adaptation required by community members.

• Rather Mercurial's role in facilitating governance discussions underlines the importance of skilled facilitation in driving effective decision-making, leveraging both technology and human insight to navigate complex discussions.

• The conversation primarily focused on discussing the experiences and perspectives of Rather Mercurial as a facilitator in web3 contexts, as well as their thoughts on sense making, deliberation, and the use of various tools.

• Artem speaks with Rather about their web3 experience and the role of a governance facilitator. Rather explains their involvement in small, peer-to-peer groups facilitating governance and being a governance steward in two different DAOs. They discuss the potential value of a deliberation bot like Harmonica in facilitating collaborative self-governance. They also talk about the difference between sense making and deliberation, emphasizing that both are crucial for effective decision-making. Rather shares their experience using GPT-4 to synthesize purpose statements during sense-making discussions. They discuss an example where they used a transcription bot to generate a purpose statement for virtual events, highlighting the usefulness of such tools in streamlining processes.

• Rather explains that using a transcription bot has been beneficial because it eliminates the need for extra meetings or creating documents after the meeting. They mention that specific wording and information about participants, entities, and topics are needed for the bot to work effectively. Rather also discusses their experience with sense-making processes and suggests that machines could potentially do this type of work better than humans due to unbiased decision-making. They suggest that some discussions, like shared values or compensation decisions, might be better done privately rather than publicly. The facilitator's role is deemed important in picking up on non-verbal cues and emotions during discussions, but narrating the meeting can help bots pick up on context and produce good outputs. Rather admits to being a less experienced facilitator and mentions organizational structures like sociocracy and holacracy as frameworks they use to some extent within their organization. However, they believe that with well-structured organizations and positive dynamics, extensive frameworks may not always be necessary. Adoption of these frameworks can sometimes be challenging due to lack of familiarity among team members.

• Rather discusses the use of liberating structures in group settings, emphasizing that familiarity and cultural support are crucial for their effectiveness. They suggest the need for a quick reference tool or bot to assist with sense-making protocols and provide links to relevant resources. Rather also mentions using various tools like Figma, collaborative docs platforms, chat channels, forums, Trello boards, transcription bots, GPT-4 (for exporting/markdown), and Docs GPT (for documentation analysis).

• Artem provides an update on their bot development progress and plans to allow prompt editing before sessions while building separate dialogues with participants. They express excitement despite challenges and mention potential funding opportunities and interest from customers in Superbenefit. A future discussion is proposed to learn more about Superbenefit and explore potential collaboration on business models.

• Rather discusses the increasing adoption of new tools and technologies in a particular sector, leading to positive outcomes. They express excitement about this trend and emphasize the importance of organizations embracing such changes. Rather also mentions that these adopters are valuable paying customers for applications. Artem expresses interest in using Rather's server and community after being impressed by their future governance posts on Mirror. Rather invites Artem to reach out for further discussions or join the community chat. They also suggest listening to the Crypto Ultrasound podcast to learn more about them and their sister DAO organization. The conversation ends with gratitude and appreciation from both participants, expressing inspiration from the discussion and looking forward to future interactions.

1. Manual Facilitation Effort: Rather emphasizes the intense, manual effort required in facilitating governance, pulling insights, and synthesizing community viewpoints for collaborative decision-making.

2. Tool Fatigue: The use of multiple platforms for different aspects of governance leads to tool fatigue. A unified tool could significantly reduce this strain.

3. Sense-Making Process: The sense-making process tends to be awkward and time-consuming. Structuring this process can streamline discussions and decision-making.

4. Lack of Impartiality: Personal biases in manual facilitation can affect the fairness of the process. A tool that provides impartiality could enhance governance outcomes.

1. Automation of Facilitation Tasks: Automating tasks like pulling insights from discussions and synthesizing viewpoints can save time and reduce manual effort, making the governance process more efficient.

2. Unified Governance Tool: Developing a tool that combines multiple functionalities (discussion facilitation, sense-making, decision-making) could address tool fatigue and streamline governance processes.

3. Enhancing Sense-Making with Structure: Implementing structured protocols or frameworks within a tool could make the sense-making process less awkward and more efficient.

4. Impartiality through Technology: Leveraging bots for governance tasks could provide the needed impartiality, reducing personal biases in facilitation.

“If I'm doing my job correctly, I'm not so much leading and influencing so much as trying to elucidate paths forward and then try to do the grunt work in that conversation of, okay, we've kind of reached clarity around this point. Somebody needs to write up the doc and then take feedback and let's iterate on it and propose it and ratify it. If all these things could be abstracted away into our social interfaces, our discord, etc, you wouldn't really need that governance facilitator, and you might even get a better result sometimes because it's impartial, especially if it's a bot. You can tell a bot your opinion and know that, okay, well, it's going to be anonymized, but I'm still going to be represented, and the spot is going to try to synthesize all of these things for us, or can summarize four different versions of what we think should be into one single document. There's so many situations where self organizing groups in general have to do that all the time, whether or not they have a governance facilitator. It's just that the governance facilitator makes that easy. So it's not a FT job running the org, but rather one person's taking on the grunt work, and everyone else can just have meetings and do what they're doing, and then once in a while vote on some stuff. So you're kind of abstracting away the bureaucracy. And hopefully, if it can be done with bots, it can be done in a more trust minimized fashion, too, which is always good. And there's less administrative overhead. So I don't think that only people like me would be interested in a deliberation bot. Hopefully, people who don't have access to somebody who does what I do would also find that very useful. Personally, I'd find it useful, too. If people properly realize the value of having a bot that can help them with deliberation in their circles and use it on a casual basis, whether that's in a game server or a DAO or citizen assembly or something, if that was properly conveyed and the UX was nice, it could be a very useful thing to lots of different people, not just facilitators or DAO governors.”

• 05:17 - Rather describes their role as elucidating paths forward and doing the grunt work in conversations.

• 05:39 - They explain the process of writing up documents, iterating on feedback, and proposing and ratifying them.

• 06:04 - Rather mentions the capability of a bot to synthesize different opinions and summarize them into a single document.

• 11:27 - Rather discusses the importance of having a meaningful discussion about the purpose of the project.

• 11:42 - They mention using GPT-4 to distill the purpose from the conversation transcript.

• 12:58 - Artem asks for more information about the story.

• 13:17 - Rather explains that they had a deep conversation about the purpose and used a transcription bot to generate a usable transcript.

• 14:37 - They mention that the output from GPT-4 served as a good starting point for defining the purpose.

• 15:02 - Rather discusses the need to refine the output generated by GPT-4.

• 15:28 - They mention the option of collabing on the wording or having one person spend time creating the document.

• 15:58 - Rather emphasizes that no extra meeting or homework is required to create the document.

• 20:58 - Rather highlights the importance of structured discussions and using a transcription bot to capture context.

• 22:03 - They explain the use of clear language and narration during meetings to help the bot understand the context.

• 23:33 - Rather suggests that narrating the meeting helps the bots pick up on important information.

• 24:24 - Artem mentions having 15 minutes and expresses interest in discussing facilitation.

• 26:21 - Rather suggests defining tactical and strategic meetings.

• 29:01 - Rather talks about the need for a sense-making protocol and references for coordination.

• 30:15 - They mention using breakout rooms or providing links for participants to gather information.

• 32:53 - Rather mentions using transcription bots and GPT-4 for various tasks.

• 33:25 - Artem asks for clarification on exporting to markdown.

• 33:59 - Rather explains attaching the transcript or other files to the prompt for GPT-4.

• 35:12 - They mention using links or documents for context and utilizing a tool called docs, GPT.

• 36:57 - Artem mentions running out of time and asks if there are any remaining questions.

• 38:03 - Artem explains the ability to edit prompts and use different frameworks.

• 38:49 - Artem discusses the plan for separate dialogues with participants using a vector database.

• Rather mentions the usefulness of a bot that can synthesize opinions and summarize conversations.

• Rather describes using a transcription bot to generate usable transcripts of meetings.

• Rather explains using GPT-4 to generate a clear purpose statement from a conversation transcript.

• Rather highlights the benefits of using a language tool to synthesize information and create documents.

• Rather emphasizes the convenience of using a transcription bot and GPT-4 to avoid laborious note-taking.

• Rather suggests that narrating meetings can help bots pick up on context and produce better outputs.

• Rather discusses the importance of clear communication during meetings to enable effective bot analysis.

• Rather mentions the need for consistency in tactical and strategic meetings within a team.

• Rather proposes the idea of a sense-making protocol or tool to facilitate discussions with multiple perspectives.

• Rather suggests using breakout rooms and providing reference materials to enhance participation in discussions.

• Rather mentions using GPT-4 and transcription bots for various tasks, such as exporting meeting transcripts and analyzing content.

• Artem explains the ability to edit prompts before starting a session, allowing the use of different frameworks.

• Artem discusses the development of a vector database to enable separate dialogues with each participant and generate individualized questions.

• small groups, mutual aid groups, P2P

• deliberation heavy

• superbenefit and ???

• starting convos aroung gov topics and facilitating deliberation of those, pulling insights what people said, represents collaborative PoV, running gov process that's collaborative

• [understand this space but don't need harmonica?]

• not big DAO guy

• what topic should we talk about rn? ops or strat

• a lot of what I do... my approach is if I could be a bot that would be awesome

• if I'm doing my job correctly I'm not as much influencing as showing path forward, ... someone needs to write up a doc and propose and ratify

• if that can be ??? into our social interface, discord and all, it can be ???

• you can tell the bot your opinion it can be

• or summarize different versions of what should be

• gov facilitator makes stuff easy

• I don't think that people like me would be interested in a deliberation bot, hopefully other people will find it useful

• if think properly realize the value of the bot and use it on a casual basis, gaming server or citizen assembly, that would

• [sensemaking vs deliberation]

• crucial and intersect a lot, not the same

• if you want to deliberate effectively you need to know what people think

• I feel they're related, if the bot can do both it makes it really indispensable

• tool fatigue is real, having one tool would be great

• sensemaking tends to be an awkward process that takes a lot of time

• taking convo transcript, feed it to GPT and asking what is the purpose of this group?

• feed the same transcript and see it do it differently

• ...

• we had a discussion about the purpose of the project (hosted a series of virtual events)

• very nuanced, had a deep convo, a lot of notes

• [can't find the exact prompt], please describe the purpose of this project

• it wasn't anything special, fairly low-quality

• what is the purpose of salons? what topic are we talking about? spin out amazing example, nice intro, purpose is this... itemized list of great aspects, clearly described, didn't have to do a lot of info gathering, wasn't perfect,

• nobody had to spend a few hours to process

• it needs the specific wording, who are the participants,

• ...

• another sensemaking around shared values

• posted the forum, upvoted, ... condensed them into 3,

• it took me a day and a half of super intensive creative work

• the machine might do it better

• sharing the opinions privately

• ??? (anonymous sensemaking)

• ...

• human facilitator can't be replaced, but...

• as long as they still do their job...

• you might have to be formulaic about it

• using a transcripting bot makes it really

• these are the updates on the board...

• when we shift the agenda I make it clear

• when there's something very nuanced happened we have a practice of recognizing that vocally

• ...

• I'm a terrible facilitator, take everything with a grain of salt

• [frameworks?]

• some of those things are built into org structure anyway

• we don't have a lot other than rudimentary bits of holacracy and S3, we kind of default to that

• basically all of those different formats tend to ???

• more or less similar

• luckily there's not a lot of frameworks needed

• with a correctly structured org and good vibes it's relatively easy

• ...

• people are not familiar with things like LS

• at least being able to tell people "hey we're going to use this" tends to be effective

• but if you don't know it... it's culturally dependent

• the key is being able to try different ones

• some sort of quick reference... we have different ideas, give us a sensemaking protocol for 6 people that's easy to use

• …

• use Figma a lot, Charmverse / Notion

• chat channels, hopefully threads

• forms for complex deliberation or governance

• even a Trello board can be used for brainstorming

• often use transcription bot and GPT-4 for a lot of stuff

• GPT-4 is nice because I can export transcripts to .md and attach files

• I also use DocsGPT that’s meant to be helper bot but I use to analyse content to write more docs

• …

• customers from superbenefit?

• folks who want to be onboarded to web3, more risk tolerant than most