DAO Ops proposal

👩🏽‍⚖️ Proposals
1

Author: Erik_Knobl

Summary

The proposal seeks to create DAO Ops, a sub-DAO focused on managing the Operational Layer of the Developer DAO, with the goal of investing in the community of the DAO.

Specification

1.1 DAO Ops

DAO Ops main goal is to coordinate revenue-generating activities operating under the Developer DAO Foundation legal setting, and use the income to support the Community activities of Developer DAO.

1175Ă—511 17.3 KB

This will be done by creating the framework for members willing to perform activities with the capability of generating revenue (Executives), be able to receive a share of that income, and send the rest to the DAO’s Treasury. This income will be used to reward contributors willing to perform activities that will benefit and grow the community (Operators).

Therefore, there are two types of contributors of DAO Ops:

  • Executives
    Contributors who have revenue-generating activities for the DAO, operating under the Foundation legal setting. They are expected to deliver all revenue from their activities to the Developer DAO’s Treasury. In return, they will rewarded with a monthly commission of 10% of the monthly revenue generated.
    This includes:

    • Partnership Leads
    • Jobs
    • (EDIT: Removed Fundraising as they are proposing a sub-DAO)
      Any member of the DAO can propose a new revenue-generating activity, by making a suggestion to the Council of Stewards. Stewards will discuss and decide on each proposal.

  • Operators
    Contributors who perform tasks that don’t directly generate revenue for Developer DAO. In order to be able to reward these members the following process will take place:

  1. Stewards will discuss the general distribution of the budget, and split it between Operations, Community and Partnerships Support.
  2. Each area will have Coordinators, responsible for the organization and coordination of each specific Domain. It is suggested each area keeps a list of tasks the DAO needs done in their specific Domain, and coordinate members doing those tasks. If there are any tasks available, there should be an effort to recruit members to perform them, trying to include as many participants as possible, while ensuring the well-functioning of the community.
  3. Any member of the DAO can apply to perform any of the open tasks in the list, by making a request to any Coordinator. Any member of the DAO can suggest a new task to a Coordinator.

1.2 Budget Request

There are two requests for the budget: USD based payments, and $CODE Rewards.

USD based payments
The DAO won’t spend more than half of what it currently has, therefore, total funding for Community tasks can’t be more than 50% of the total existing USD in the DAO Treasury on the first day of each new season. The DAO won’t risk spending more than what’s already in its pockets.

  • Total current existing USD in the Treasury: 133,949
  • Total budget requested (50% of the total): 66,974

The following is the initial list of tasks considered for the budget, pending further discussion among Stewards:

[DRAFT] DAO Ops Tasks S2

General amendment: Other sub-DAOs can request in their budgets up to 5% of the total funding of the total existing USD in the DAO Treasury on the first day of each new season, and it will be up to the Stewards to approve or negate that expense based on the importance of the tasks performed by the sub-DAO. Initial suggestion would be to limit the number of approvals of this type of funding to 2 or less for season 2.

$CODE Rewards
The total request for $CODE will be a pool of 100,000. The rewards allocated to each contributor will be 1 $CODE for each USD paid. $CODE not used in this way will be returned to the DAO in the first 5 days of the end of the season.

Domains of Operations, Team and OKRs

Community

Ensured a safe and enjoyable environment for Members with a consistent cadence of community events and structured asynchronous spaces for Members to interact and connect.

Partnerships

Engage partners, close partner deals, manage accounts, and take briefs on content. Appropriate hand-off.

DevRel

Communication with partners and DAO members to ensure deliverables have champions, get scheduled, are completed and are marketed.

Operations

Manage accounting and legal issues, including Contributor agreements and agreements for the relationship between the DAO and its Sub-DAOs.

EDIT: Removed all instances related to new Core Team. Delegated those duties to all Stewards.
EDIT: Added Coordinators for each area. Added Domains of Operations.

5 Likes
2

Kinda annoyed with the amount of work that went into Labs to not be used but this is a lot more achievable and reasonable imo.

3

The loose definition of “seasons” is tripping me up a bit but I think the relative allocations looks reasonable. One thing I noticed is that we have 3 people listed for Newsletter but it’s generally been a 4-person team.

4

I’m still really worried that we have zero ethics attached to this. This question is going to continue to come up. This approach is putting the cart before the horse. How do we ensure the ethics of the money that comes in? We need to work this out.

5

Fixed. Any suggestions on how to split the reward?

6

The line of defense regarding ethics will be the persons acting as Stewards. However, happy to work out any suggestions regarding ethical guidelines.

7

I understand this line of thinking. I’d like to see an additional proposal as well, but not put it in this one as I’m sure it will cause a significant amount of discussion, that ultimately isn’t the point of the proposal.

8

What about Revenue-Generating contributors that are not under the Foundation legal setting eg. sub-DAOs with own entity?

That would create a reserve that would allow the DAO to operate only for 2 seasons straight if income will not be gathered in an amount required. Or is it that in such a crisis case the second season would be a half of the first half? If so then that makes more sense, though cuts the value proposition that the DAO can generate in worse times. And also assuming that every season people will aim to spend all of that 50%, we will always have to operate on positive balance sheet or on the even. People would probably always strive for using all of the funds available. A cap per type of an initiative would maybe prevent that.

9

Other sub-DAOs can make their own requests, and will not be included by DAO Ops. The domain of DAO Ops includes only contributors willing to operate under Foundation.

Willing to discuss the percent, but yes, that’s the plan.
If we have less money in the next period, say only 80,000 in the Treasury, then total budget is 40,000. And so on. The opposite is true, too. If we have more money, we can spend more. It’s a collaborative effort: invest in more people, with the idea that an active and engaged community will increase the opportunities for everyone.

1 Like
10

Not sure I fully grok the proposal yet. I do like safeguarding the treasury in a clear way
and the large number of people that could potentially take on tasks.

One of my first concerns is a psychological one: I have doubts that this bounty board-like system instills a real sense of ownership over any of these domains. I’d like to continue to attract long-term thinkers and not just task mercenaries. Other side of the same coin, I’m also not enthusiastic about scoping down to five core decision makers at the top, though it may be an efficient way to dole out tasks.

2 Likes
11

Fully agree. Perhaps it wasn’t clearly written. I have edited:

“Contributors who perform Community tasks for Developer DAO. The Core Team will maintain a list of tasks the DAO needs done, assign members to do them, generating a sense of ownership on their domain. If there are any tasks available, there should be an effort to recruit members to perform them, trying to include as many participants as possible, while ensuring the well-functioning of the community.”

Other side of the same coin, I’m also not enthusiastic about scoping down to five core decision makers at the top, though it may be an efficient way to dole out tasks.

Open to any other suggestion, perhaps Stewards do the general budget of tasks, and coordinators (Operations, FC) assign the tasks as part of their role.
This is not a core part of the proposal, and can be adapted as needed.

1 Like
12

I would welcome on-chain NFTs that would give proof of helding this position in the DAO at that time. That would make it “an official proof of work” for the D_D. We can bound these NFT generation/dispensing to the snapshot vote.

1 Like
13

Just saying it doesn’t make it true. It’s not about the language you’ve chosen, I think its just one of the trade-offs of such a system - at least as I currently understand it. Another way to highlight the idea is that, on their own, groups build budgets as a team (e.g., the Partnerships or DevRel Team) and you lose that here.

14

No problem adjusting to that, assigning each working group a share of the total budget, and let them use it as they need. I’m not interested in anyone having full control over each expense. However, I do care about not spending more than what we have.

Again, the core of the proposal is:
1-Revenue-Generating contributors should get their rewards based on the income they bring to the DAO. Initial percent is 10% but fully open to discuss more options/different numbers.
2-There is a spending threshold of XX% of the current treasury to fund Community tasks. Initial percent is 50% but fully open to discuss more options/different numbers.
3-All important tasks done should be considered by this budget.

2 Likes
15

I totally agree with you @ntindle that this proposal is not the place for this discussion. But I am saying that this and any other proposal still doesn’t have any guard rails regarding ethics and that we should start getting that into place. We had a conversation about it a long time ago. It was brought to nothing as I see it, despite a massive amount of engagement. @Erik_Knobl, otherwise these small groups of people, stewards, executives, etc have nothing to fall back on. And in their election process, has/does this question of ethics in the context I’m talking about come up? It results in them having to make executive decisions based on their own interpretation of what ethical for the DAO and that’s not fair on them or for the rest of the DAO.

We already have a mission and vision statement, which I believe serves the DAO quite well as a community, but its ethics are only inward facing to serve our community. They don’t anticipate bringing outside influence into the community and that’s where we need guardrails - and anyway, we simply need to define that for ourselves, and the question will also be asked from external folks that want to engage with us. Just because at this stage in the game, it doesn’t seem like a priority for us, doesn’t mean that others haven’t thought about. Believe me, they have. The whole world of business and education is alive with the conversation around ethics, and has been for a long time. I’d like to see us future proof ourselves.

But yeah, let’s open the conversation on a clean page specifically to address this crucial topic.
cc @luan

2 Likes
16

Appreciate this line of thinking. Look forward to hearing possible implementation ideas if you’ve gotten that far.

2 Likes
17

Re: Kemp’s comment in the DAO Ops Tasks S2 doc on non-sponsored content.

I think I’m with Kemp on not assigning a USD value to non-sponsored content. We can always have (and will) some bounties in $CODE budgeted for that activity.

Writing Value over Editing

I see blog editor and blog writer getting the same amount. In cases, editor getting more. I have closely worked with both the personas and think we can reassign some USD value from editor to the writer (given $100 per blog is not justifiable at all, should be at least $250 - $300).

DevRel Fulfillment Coordinator’s Role
Missing from the doc.

Not sure if it’s considered under Partnership Fulfillment Coordinators, but needs to be described explicitly.

2 Likes
18

I like that idea, that and specifying which season and the role in the metadata. Becomes an online history of positions holders in DD

1 Like
19

Great efforts moving forward with another proposal @Erik_Knobl - lots of interesting concepts and ideas.

A large part of the DAO Governance Structure Upgrade was to simplify and clarify structures and roles.

Have you thought about the complexity this new terminology is adding back into the DAO? If so, what are your reasonings for adding more role terminology back into the mix vs not?

How are these Operator roles selected?

Is the intention here to be cash in the treasury on a given day or leftover cash from the previous season?

The figures you’re quoting here include income/expenses from Season 2.

Below is the balance sheet today, not including S2 income/expenses or job board revenue. The critical number is Equity (Cash + what we’re owed - what we owe) = $88,454.41

This will have a very meaningful impact on the proposed budgets, they would be $44,227.205 rather than the $66,974 currently being used.

image
image2008Ă—2472 335 KB

In general, very supportive of having mechanisms for ensuring the treasury is protected and it’s growing over time. I wonder if the above info would impact your thoughts about budgeting for S2.

Love the idea of setting the threshold and putting that decision to the Stewards. Is this on top of the 5% for non-revenue generating roles, and is that per Sub-DAO?

Thoughts behind this $1 rate for $CODE? Do you see it being expanded across the DAO for other activities?

These numbers aspirationally are interesting but depending on your thoughts on the above might need to changed and that will have knock on affects.

A few questions/thougnts:

  1. Why are most roles documented with what seems like hours and the coordinator’s roles on %? If we update the revised figures I’ve shared above, that will leave the ops work at $2,200, which is not sustainable for the level of work. This means ops would coordinating AR/AP/Contracts/Payments etc. for less money than the folks they are coordinating doing work that takes less time
  2. I don’t think paying folks for unsponsored content is a good idea. We can use $CODE for that.
  3. I’m not sure your numbers make sense vs the number of partners we do/don’t have. Could be interpreting the doc though !! I believe using smaller amounts to retain folks for roles, and then multipliers based on deliverables makes more sense ala the original labs proposal, specifically for editing and writing sponsored content. This achieves balance between retention and drive to increase revenue.
1 Like
20

This is an attempt to elaborate in that effort.

We can use “revenue-generating contributors” and “non-revenue-generating contributors”. I just think it’s shorter.

That task has been delegated to coordinators of each area.

Leftover from the previous season.

Thank you, this is good feedback. The system will adapt to any adjustment in the available budget, affecting all rewards.

Yes, on top of that. And for each sub-DAO. Right now there is no clarity if other sub-DAOs can request USD, why, and how much. We need that.

I just think it’s simpler because the real reward is USD. If required, I can add the hourly calculations.

There are two steps in this process. First we have to know which roles we are rewarding, and how much each area needs. These initial numbers are an effort to have consensus, and learn how much Community, Operations, and Partnerships need?
Then, we balance and negotiate those numbers. If we start saying currently a role will be paid with $100 monthly from a 50,000 seasonal budget, we know it’s 0.2 of the total budget. If the available budget is reduced, we adapt that reward to that percent, just like coordinators.
If we have more money, all payments remain the same. If we have less money available, all payments will be reduced.

Open to discuss ways to improve the payment/percent, in a way that creates a system for all. It’s still a work in progress. Currently, Operations is ranked in the same level as other coordinations (community and devrel), and compensated as such. My initial suggestion for you would be to have a basic role, and also take on other (defined) tasks, which all together will be a sustainable payment. But if you feel we should create a unique role, with a single payment superior than the rest of the roles, we can discuss it too.

$CODE is no meaningful reward for any task. But if enough people feel the same, totally open to change that.

I no longer believe in retaining a handful of persons to save the DAO. It’s not working. I believe in rewarding as many people as we can to have a vibrant community and increase the possibilities to everyone. All business opportunities will depend on us having a community, therefore, let’s invest in it.

1 Like