The LGBTQ+ community has made great strides in its fight for recognition and equality, spearheaded by activists and concerned citizens across multiple decades. From the fight to legalize same-sex marriage to the push to spread AIDS awareness, grassroots organizations have always worked to advance Pride and LGBTQ+ rights.
However, there are still issues inherent in any organization that can negatively impact activism going forward. Difficult matters of leadership and group decision making, the issue of fundraising, and the sharing of organizational expertise across geographic barriers highlight potential pitfalls for those looking to share their voice in the national conversation. These issues contribute to large inequalities in the level of LGBTQ+ advocacy between different countries, states, and towns, contributing to differing levels of support for members of the community and for public policy changes.
Pridesum is a Web3 solution that aims to help solve these issues.
Pridesum provides technical support and connects like-minded advocates to help activists around the world leverage Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) for LGBTQ+ advocacy, empowering them with easy-to-use, customizable, democratic tools to change the world at a grassroots level.
DAOs, at their core, are blockchain-based organizations governed by code. Businesses, NGOs, governmental bodies, and clubs can all be represented using DAOs. When configured properly, DAOs allow for unparalleled accountability, equity, and efficacy within an organization due to their governance policies allowing for members to democratically decide the organization’s direction (secured by hard code) and contribute resources to the organization.
Pridesum helps bring these unique benefits to the Pride advocacy community through technical support and more. As an example, one kind of DAO that Pridesum can set up is called “PrideSeed”. Essentially, it is a club-like advocacy and consulting organization consisting of a number of members in a geographic region, who all share an equal stake in the PrideSeed. Its goal is to bootstrap/start sustainable LGBTQ+ advocacy structures in the local area using the DAO as a template. Eventually, the current members would find new prospective members and mentor them one-on-one to replicate their success in another community.
In this case, Pridesum can help in a number of ways. First, it can help the PrideSeed’s members create it in the first place, as even with current tools, creating a DAO (that specifically has the governance policies and setup that would work optimally for advocacy applications) requires specific knowledge that not everyone has the time or desire to acquire. Second, it can provide learning materials to assist in the mission of setting up advocacy. Third, it can help connect existing members of PrideSeed with new prospective members, allowing it to fulfill its purpose of spreading essential knowledge on advocacy.
We used HTML+CSS+JS to build our frontend, a front-facing webpage geared towards informing advocates who could potentially use our service. We used Python (Streamlit + Pandas) to create an internal page for clients to quickly monitor ownership of their organizations, using Bitclout's API to access real-time ownership information of DAOs on the DeSo blockchain.
To create our demo DAOs, we used a service called DAODAO. Based on the $DESO blockchain, the first blockchain of its kind to create decentralized social apps to scale, DAODAO allows users to create DAOs and customize their operation to their own needs, which Pridesum will guide them through. In addition, we used supernovas to publish sample NFTs on the DeSo blockchain as potential documentation and rewards for Pride advocacy and participation in our DAOs.
Future directions for Pridesum include fleshing out the pipeline for initializing DAOs on DAODAO, working further with existing expertise and experience in the field of LGBTQ+ advocacy, and setting up member login to sync with the DAOs they are a member of to display only relevant information in the internal site.