The Mutual Knowledge Software Development Assessment
Jun 1- 4, 2021

Hello NFT-DAO Community,

As we’ve had some turnover with development folks, some asked to be informed on the coming and going of individuals within the community. As this is an open source project, please understand contributors are always free to come and go on their own terms. People may contribute or simply observe. I’ll add some back-story and jump into the assessment we commissioned on development.

From the beginning building the Comprehensive NFT Framework in a collaborative manner was simply suggesting that 42 Fund-3 proposers of different NFT solutions work together to build one ‘comprehensive’ version as an open source project. Initially, I wrote the proposal with the simple idea we should work together. I had no thoughts of a DAO structure initially. That only occurred when Tyler and Troy joined the effort and those suggestions were added into the final Fund-3 proposal. I believe it is a good long-term solution to form a DAO to steward the Comprehensive NFT Framework we code-named BOXCAR. However, in the Genesis document, it was made clear our first priority is to deliver the BOXCAR Framework.

We organized with a lead over each core function: Marketing—Tyler Wailes, Governance—Troy Egan and Development—Michael Yagi. Each lead has had autonomy to experiment and build their holon and teams. Which they did, and held team meetings to progress our goals. This is new and experimental and each will attest much learning occurred both personally and organizationally.

Software Development
In the early days, we had a few developers contributing ideas. No one really stepping up to build a product and we were prepared to hire a contractor to develop the solution, until Michael Yagi came into the picture and assumed the Lead over a developer holon. Michael recruited his team from community folks who were showing some interest, and who also had several Catalyst proposals of their own. As he was building his team, he had several contributors coming and going at various times. Things settled with a few core devs who the MuKn report mentions. Michael and I had several conversations about making sure the devs are committed to building an open source project before they started because we had the option of contracting the work to be done. We moved forward with the community team and schedule to build.

Along that timeline we suggested the Gov holon figure a way to provide a Contribution token to recognize everyone’s work. A Governance token would be too far out.

As the fund-3 proposal states, we were seeking ways to commercialize our work to have a long- term sustainable DAO. A few devs felt they needed some assurances they would be remunerated for their contributions and the code was being held in a private repo only they had access to. We offered the devs ADA equal to their time at USD120,000/yr. which they refused as they believed the monetary value of their code in equity or Gov tokens would be greater. However, we were not in a position yet to offer equity or Gov tokens as those aren’t formulated. Ultimately 3 of the devs decided to finish up the MVP Ticket Sale app and depart to work on their own projects.

Taylor Yoon, Quinn Parkinson and Dmitri Safine completed their work, transferred the code to our open source repo under Apache License 2.0 as agreed and left the project. Michael Yagi recently chose to no longer lead the dev holon, while remaining a contributor.

This report from MuKn was commissioned to get clear view of what the finished work the devs left would require in order to run the Ticket Sale app.

Please read the MuKn report for the finer details. The Ticket Sale app is not operable in the final state it was left. It is MuKn’s opinion we are better off starting over for all the reasons they outline.

We are excited to be working with MuKn and some other professionals moving the project forward using contractors as was the initial plan. MuKn will provide their expertise and extended dev relationships to meet the requirements.

Warm Regards,
Rich Kopcho

Consultation Cost
$7250 total (4102 ADA)
$5621.76 ÷ 1.83 = 3072ADA
$1811.24 ÷ 1.76 = 1030ADA