Overall, this is an excellent construct for Moon DAO. Wouldn’t recommend implementing anything below until the DePrize model has been “trained” with a case study (lunar comms). These ideas are for inspiring future Moon DAO thoughts/dreams!

Ideation extension: Think if the lunar comms incubation period is successful, MoonDAO could experiment with opening the ideation phase to a much larger audience. I’m envisioning something akin to the One immediate concern one may have is: “how would we process all of the 1000s of ideas each day by randos.” But MoonDAO members wouldn’t need to, necessarily. Unanimous AI provides a “swarm voting” mechanism. My hypothesis is that you wouldn’t even need to pay folks to vote, they would do it based on curiosity alone. Maybe make a group of 5 ideas and have votes on the best, then keep repeating until the law of large numbers tells us what the best ideas graduate to the Moon DAO ideation.

Secondary impact: Imagining the vibe akin to the App revolution of the early 2000s but with space hardware. About 95% of the ideas will not make it, but there are bound to be some winners. And even if it isn’t marketable, it opens up space opportunities to folks that may not be exposed to it normally: see 13 year olds that made thousands of $‘s from Apps back in the day.

Machine/Human judge: The judge of the winner could be either a machine or a judge. A machine is preferred for traditional acquisition requirements that have objective metrics (NASA style). But DePrize winners may have achieved a capability through a means that does not lend itself to objective criteria. DARPA bases their success/fail criteria on capabilities, rather than requirements. A goal such as: “enable GPS receivers small enough to embed in myriad consumer devices.” This would probably need a human judge.

Post DePrize rewards: Depending on how the DePrize is written, there could be a potential for high value within the losing teams at later time. Imagine Team A achieves the required data rate of 10Mb/s from the moon to earth and wins the DePrize in October. In the following January, Team B finishes their project that can deliver 10Gb/s. Or more abstractly, Team B finds a way to push comms via graphine coating (or something novel) that can’t hack it short term, but has game changing impacts down the road. Guessing the blockchain could be used to store lessons learned for the future. If nothing else: it helps decrease redoing projects from the past and saves time. This is a key feature of DARPA innovations: lots of them are shelfed until the limiting technology has been improved to make it a possibility. Best way to implement this I can think is to still give the losers IP rights to developments that are unique to their project. These IP are tracked for the future and give an ROI if they’re picked up by a funder in the future. Eventually, instead of scouring the patent office to see if your idea has been done: some future Obsidian-like program could smartly direct you through the IP environment to find one that fits your needs.