Cal3
Eggs: The Origin
Discord has become one of the main social platforms for users across Web3; not only that, but it’s also been the birthplace of many DAOs across the entire ecosystem. Many users have started collaborating on Discord; and when a group wants to schedule a meeting, they begin a sequence of message exchanges to locate a time that works for everyone. This takes minutes, hours or sometimes days to figure out, because it is asynchronous and usually across multiple time zones.
The sequence starts with each person checking their calendar availability and offering a few slots. If there is no match in the first round, which is not uncommon, the process is repeated. In the meanwhile other meetings may alter their calendar availability which may cause renegotiation of previously offered availability; while there a few apps that solve this hassle across web2, they have drawbacks once used amongst web3 native working-groups (i.e. DAOs).
The lack of a solid tool has been sensed across DAOs. As the ecosystem grows, builders become frustrated with the limited functionality of Discord bots and web3-native infrastructures to use that provide them with the correct solutions tailored to their specific needs.
Caterpillar: The Growth
With each DAO comes groups of builders beyond borders, each from their specific timezones. Naturally, these builders start to encounter the “When to meet?” issue. In the DAO experience ~ failing to meet and sync up on a project could lead to delayed milestones, loss of interest, frustration and even dropping out of the project completely.
Cal3’s first seeds were planted by Lipman and Ivelin. Two passionate DAO contributors/builders focused on bringing new ideas to life that have experienced that first-hand. As a result this specific caterpillar of an idea started growing within the OlympusDAO workspace. Natural conversations started coming together; from one conversation to the other, from one leaf to the other, this caterpillar started taking form and growing for the better. An initial team came together to solve this issue and bring a solution to it.
Since then, the team has accomplished a great deal of progress in regards to what kind of a butterfly they want this product to metamorphose into; and they have a clear outlook of Cal3’s target audience, current functionality, milestones and goals ~ all while having plans for the future of the product.
Chrysalis: The Cover
The problem was identified, the goals were set and what once was an idea started becoming a reality when passionate team members came together to build it out.
Here’s a list of team members, milestones, goals, resources and more.
Core Team
-
Lipman (Co-lead) - lipman#7206
Active OlympusDAO contributor across operations, engineering, marketing, and more. Previously ran business dev and new ventures for large ecommerce company in the US. -
Ivelin (Co-lead, Product) - ivelin.eth Ω#2149
Engineering front-end contributor since Dec 2021. Background as open-source contributor and tech entrepreneur with 3 exits (one bootstrapped, two VC funded). ivelin (Ivelin Ivanov) · GitHub -
UndeadOracle (UI/UX, Design) - TheOracle#1964
Web3 builder involved with multiple projects and proposals across different DAOs (NounsDAO, OlympusDAO, etc.) and the web3 space as a whole. Background in design, user research, A/B testing and product design (c. 2016). -
Jem (Developer) - Jem#1357
Full time contributor to Olympus since October 2021. Worked on frontend of Give product. Experience in frontend and backend software development, business. -
Lienid (Developer) - Matt#8446
Engineering contributor since Oct 2021, primarily frontend helping launch Olympus Give and continue to build it out, and now transitioning to doing frontend and backend. Previous work in data science and academic research. -
Chronos (Developer) - Chronos#8818
Engineering contributor since Nov 2021, leading and working on the back- and front-end in the project Verified Ohmies - a Discord bot to allow Ohmies to prove ownership of Olympus tokens and get a verified role on Discord. Previously worked as a Data Scientist for 3 years and subsequently as a back-end engineer (mostly AWS) for 2 years.
Goals
As mentioned above, our goal is to make Web3 interactions smoother by providing the current tooling to our target audience. Less clicks, more functions and better connections. Cal3 has Web3 ethos within its core while focusing on these key points:
- Providing security by staying pseudo-anon
- Providing comfort by staying within Discord
- Providing efficiency by enabling effortless scheduling
- Providing convenience by making it easy to add meetings to your personal calendar
Discord, despite being a web2 app, has been very easy to use for users to come together, build wonderful communities and grow within them. DAOs especially have been utilizing Discord as their main social app and it makes the most sense for us to be focusing on the same comfort app for our target audience.
We’re all DAO builders and we understand the frustration of coming together, but if done right, the meetings are super effective, super refreshing and super-duper important to get a progress check.
Milestones & Budgeting
Our milestones and budgeting were initially drawn out to receive a grant from OlympusDAO, but we’re trying to pin down the best resources for our team to build upon. We are currently targeting a 100K grant from Olympus Grants and we’re aiming towards receiving around the same budget from NounsDAO to provide us with the initial budget of 200K to build the best scheduling tooling that web3 has to provide.
Why partner with NounsDAO?
We’ve decided to keep the codes and assets open-source which is very much aligned with the CC0 route of NounsDAO. We believe that keeping things open-source leaves so much room for growth for both builders and users ~ this could lead to more creative ways for both parties to develop their ideas and needs.
We’ve decided to bring more awareness to the uniqueness of NounsDAO by implementing their branding one way or another - including potentially renaming the product from Cal3 to NounsCal or the likes of it - and bring brand recognition to NounsDAO via a wider range of users across the web (regardless of their knowledge of web3, crypto, NFTs and et al).
The evolution of web by Jordan Singer
Butterfly: The Act
Our butterfly is almost ready to take wing. We’ve already passed 2 of our 4 milestones and we’re aiming to have our product go live in about 3 months (June/July 2022) as milestone 3 for MVP. In the meanwhile we will keep focusing on building and providing an ever-changing product that grows within the decentralized web and provides users with a smooth working experience.
Thank you for reading through, don’t hesitate to leave your thoughts, questions and concerns so that we can get back to each and everyone of them, remove the blockers and help Cal3 fly!