Social DAOs aren’t necessarily meant to be well-funded businesses. However, to function in the long term, there are issues that we need to tackle. We need to separate the DAO from the developer. Elevate the experience for developers/builders/creators within the DAO whilst allowing the operational side of Developer_DAO to move forward.
Simply put, we need to break the DAO down to enhance efficiency and productivity in a manner that empowers individuals without stripping away voices. Service providers/ Sub-DAOs are a great way to empower individuals to act on behalf of the Developer_DAO
By minimizing governance and introducing Sub-DAOs, we can help reduce friction whilst creating new pathways for developers to get involved.
Many Developer_DAO members (including myself) contributed to Developer_DAO and received job offers from protocols or companies. However, not everyone who plays the game will be as fortunate, and we need create pathways for people to continue their journey in D_D by joining certain Sub-DAOs that can employ them to provide external services.
A good example is D_D Labs and D_D Agency, but there are endless chances for Developer_DAO members to create Sub-DAOs.
$Code
$Code is a tricky one, since there are a lot of factors that go into making a token valuable. There are various ways for $CODE to be integrated into the ecosystem that elevate its value.
Empower Sub-DAOs to handle responsibilities and bring revenue for D_D
Grants for builders
Lock tokens to get access to certain positions with a slashing mechanism (skin in the game)
Access to the DAO
Access to premium part of D_D newsletter
Access to Vibes_IRL
Players need to know what they can do with their “in-game currency” and what makes it valuable enough for them to retain it. Why keep $CODE? What privileges does it give me?
Developer DAO currently feels too large, and bureaucratic, which is harming the experience for the majority of members who are here to make friends, have fun, network, learn together and build cool stuff. Without having to worry about budgets, Governance, legal, finance etc.
Can you give examples of the harm here and where it is showing up? That will be helpful to connect how the suggestions directly solve the problem.
Members want to start a project in the DAO but don’t want to do the budget process, they just want to build things with their friends and the DAO to be a good/enjoyable place to do that.
Members want to get involved in the DAO and help build it but the resources are not there to fairly reward them. This has happened multiple times on events and is happening in DevRel IMHO, we lose great people as a result.
we have various teams planning/budgeting independently but working together to bring in value, makes it very challenging to allocate funds fairly and budget/plan effectively.
Members want to do something that might add loads of value to the DAO but going from idea to execution is confusing/long-winded and often blocked by others/process problems (finance, access to tools/accounts) that can’t be made open/fast in such a large/complex org.
no one is really clear what the expectations are of projects spinning out of the DAO (i.e. perks and Eden), most quickly move out of the DAO logistically as it’s too much overhead to continue operating physically in the DAO
One of the significant changes I would see would be combining many guilds into service-focused methods. Additionally, I would expect initiatives to share if they intend to make money for the DAO. If we change the game, that will enable paid positions from some of these things.
I’m unsure if the guild model still works tbh. their primary value is social, typically they don’t collectively create value, groups of folks in them do. having a social space for folks with shared kills and interests makes sense but guilds don’t seem to be based on observations. think empowering groups to spin things up that benefit the DAO independent of the DAO/it’s experience would be better.
Lots of different delineations here. IMO should be decided on a case-by-case basis.
think we can experiment here using social mechanisms like POAPs for attending workshops/social events. assume by case-by-case basis you don’t individual folks?
if it’s external and reasonable, we should issue code to it. If it’s internal and laborious, we should pay people USDC (or whatever real money). We should issue $CODE for it if it’s internal and fun.
Like this framing, definitely agree for folks “building the DAO” rather than just participating $CODE alone can’t work. imagine these changes will reduce the opportunity to build the DAO in the short-term but mean people are more meaningfully rewarded. particularly if we empower folks to spin things out.
This is a super important benefit of this to me. more folks with more $CODE to decentralise and influence governance.
More and more I’m thinking we leave this pretty open and see what we get back, could have some novel ideas of value return. the disadvantage is the legal implications of their actions and needing folks with Governance power to get involved in conversations.
super good question. not entirely sure how to answer but what’s important is:
things decentralise over time, as quickly as is safe (whatever that means!)
folks can earn meaningful governance quickly if they’re contributing a lot
folks are not at a significant disadvantage simply as they have less money to “buy” governance
the governance systems itself hold folks accountable in a fair and transparent way
think we can improve on all these points. some of the ideas above i feel achieve them to some degree, accountability for sub-daos need’s to be worked out but more generally in the DAO hopefully adopting the final version of D_D Code of Conduct and moderation process - Seeking Input wil help to
haven’t had time to read the article but made a TODO for tomorrow/Monday
Really like these ideas as something to work towards. think the vision isn’t far off the academy and then the agency or partners looking to hire would use the points/badges/NFTs they earn as signals to speak to/hire.
love the idea of folks being able to trade their time/contribution for participation in the upside of projects, rather than just being paid a wage for it. this is part of the plans for [Draft] D_Agency proposal
completely agree with this. if we get smaller and make creating sub-daos far more natural, hope and suspect we’d unblock and unlock a lot of creativity and value creation for the DAO/it’s members/ecosystem. right now people are just to blocked by too much on-going process/governance imho (I’m largely responsible for much of it)
think everyone would love to see this
like the idea of slashing and skin in the game for access to opportunity, particular where other people/entities are taking on risk to provide the opportunity.
@meowy working on an update to the DDIP process here.
Added this clause regarding conflicts of interest:
Conflicts of interest
Members and Stewards are expected to abstain from votes that directly benefit themselves (i.e. Voting to pass a budget request that rewards them). Such violations will render votes invalid unless corrected before the Snapshot vote ends.
Any Governor/Steward can raise a claim of conflict during the DDIP process if they feel one has been overlooked.
I kinda have some ideas that I wanna explore which is similar to the ElasticDAO, when you check it out lemme know. I will share some thoughts with you then.
But more importantly, I wanna explore the “accountability” part.
Every responsibility should have a weight for folks to carry.
We won’t go anywhere if we are just trying to please everyone and not putting things into motion.
You earn your way into the dao through the academy (for free)
When you earn your way into the dao, you get access to the mentorship program, where you get paired with a mentor.
Once you’ve been with your mentor for a set period, they can stake their reputation on you joining the agency.
Once you are at the agency, you get paid for professional working experience. The joining of the agency would require you staking x amount of code in this case but would allow the DAO to have people stake their reputations on people they trust and put their money where their mouth is.
There are a lot of details to be worked out (and who can skip what steps), but I think this could open up the dao to new developers in a healthier way. Sometimes it’s beneficial to align particular different funnels for different groups.
I think this is what changing the game could mean overall. Not just how we make money but also how we make developers.
In this process, we play a very meta role in deciding the future of those around us.
I caution all of us to remember that
perfection is the enemy of progress - Winston Churchill
No matter what path we take, I encourage us to consider the funnels it will push people through and how it will be funded. The proposed above is not a social funnel. It’s not to make friends, but with that in mind, we can still do both for those who want to play the game with $ and not friends.
A proposal reaches quorum when at least 50% of eligible EGT has voted. and passes when at least 60% of the votes are "Yes ". Proposals which pass are executed by the multisig.
Not sure about this. Would worry that people don’t contribute in a meaningful way and do the research required of them to make a good decision. I guess there’s no perfect mechanism and being required to vote or getting slashed has been something I’ve discussed with a lot of people regarding voting mechanisms for populations in general.
Have read this now mate, some really interesting ideas. Try to summarise:
minimise the impact of those with large holding by setting a cap on votes at a defined level
Broadly speaking my views are limiting the governance power of large holders is a good thing, their take on it is novel by setting a hard cap on voting power. struggling to reason about this a little (probably as tried), not clear to me that the benefits of this vs say a reducing curve of voting power proportional to token holdings. be super interesting to hear others’ better take on this for you and others
as the circulating supply of tokens increases, rebasing increases the maximum vote proportionally
obv connected to above. together they’re quite interesting in that they reward consistent contributors but don’t “price out” newer folks. that said, over time when the cap is super high I wonder if it would “price out” newer folks more than say a reducing curve of the voting power. we need data models!!! cc @BluePanda@impactbilli.eth you’ve been creating some of these also cc @Wikist
Reward folks for voting 5%
Penalise folks for not-voting 10%
interesting mechanism to get folks participating in Governance, sounds like they’re minting the rewards and burning the penalised tokens, can’t double check as their site and docs seem to be down.
definitely gamifies governance in a novel way. we have some struggles already regarding retaining folks’ contribution and interest, two sides to this whereby punishing people purely as they don’t have the time but rewarding people for contributing, interesting balance.
This vision is interesting and my thinking is aligned in many ways.
do you see this as the path or a path?
one thing that feels important to me is making the game more fluid and allowing members to play it in different ways, so think we should remove any strict dependencies between one level/path and another. this is happening already with some people playing the game and other just hanging out vibing, or choosing a particular level of the game to focus on.
I THINK one shouldn’t have to do x to do y, beyond maybe holding or being staked a certain number of tokens.
at the highest of high levels, I could see the funnel as something like:
Learn
Build
Ship
I wonder if each level should be able to be played in different ways. For “Learn” maybe it’s via academy, workshops or mentorship. For “Build”, it could be Agency, joining an existing project, getting a job with a partner or ENS-style grants rounds, internal grants from partners (like an ongoing/regular hackathon) and for “Ship” maybe it’s joining an internal incubator where what you build returns some value back to the DAO.
one core theme for a better game that feels sensible is $CODE is rewarded for playing the game and then used to allocate the DAOs hard treasury resources (USDC, ETH etc.) to empower people to create more value independent of DAO governance that flows back to the DAO (either as social capital or financial capital).
Even writing this out though it’s introducing a dependency between Agency and the DAO that might limit its ability to create value by tying access to $CODE for good/bad.
I wonder how important it is for each individual part of this game to be sustainable in its own right, post-allocation of initial funding from the DAO, and be free to operate largely independently of DAO Governance. We’re taking a bet on trusting them with the resources they’re being allocated to further the mission. Maybe there are certain cases whereby the DAO consistently funds them over time assuming they deliver on the value they promised.
I fully support minimizing the power of large token holders. Setting a hard cap sounds like another extreme though. Something like an inverse quadratic function would work best IMO.
Yes. I wouldn’t say bureaucratic, but indeed, large organizations have a tendency to slow down and become inefficient.
I voted against it, but I think there are solid points that support that. I agree with pursuing the outcome: fostering the social experience. Would be great if we can define this as an experiment though (what are the starting conditions, what we change, what is expected outcome).
IDK No strong opinion on that.
Totally behind this, this is actually long overdue. What is necessary though is to define a success criteria for pods that are going to receive funding. In a sense of “you are doing xyz to support our mission, for this amount of tokens”. It would be also great if we can move this function to trustware layer, not sure if there is a good tooling for that though.
Bankless DAO is talking about moving away from this model, because it’s becoming a popularity contest, and also because it is hard for DAO members to keep up with the admin of monthly Coordinape rounds (light lift to be sure, but when you have 278 discord notifications every day…)
I think that all four of the bullets in the tldr represent a logical evolution of D_D based on what has been learned over the past year, and especially since the launch of the $CODE token.
(I’m largely responsible for much of it)
also cc