TL;DR – We’ve got the end of Season 0 coming up in about a week. It makes no sense to rush into a period labeled Season 1 with a number of important organizational questions still unanswered and no governance token yet. Suggestion: let’s let Season 0 expire and enter our first “off-season” to wrap up some loose ends and get ready to start Season 1 on the right foot.
Kicking this thread off in the General
category; I’m just getting some thoughts down, looking for feedback and discussion, and then looking to turn this into a more formal proposal. At this stage, I’m not sure if the contents of this post will need to go through the typical governance channels, e.g., all the way to a snapshot vote, or if just the Season 1 definition will.
As for the current state of things, we’ve got a lot of questions to answer before I believe it makes sense to kick off a Season 1. The governance token timeline is dependent on getting the Early Contributor rewards ratified and the last of the legal questions answered – which we’ll leave to the experts. However, the rest of the organizational questions are within our means to agree on as for how to thoughtfully approach Season 1.
My interpretation of the minimum requirements prior to starting Season 1:
- Early Contributor rewards ratified
- Deployment of the governance token and claim site
- Agreement on a starting point for rewards (see: proposals one and two)
- Election of two new guild leaders: MBD and Community (see: proposal)
Other nice-to-haves prior to Season 1 are:
- Projects and guilds each having well-defined goals/objectives for Season 1
- Projects and guilds each having discovered their next iteration of leadership positions
- Improvements to the onboarding process
- <your idea here>
Apart from our immediate needs, it seems wise to pause between every season to take stock of how things went last season, take a breather, and then to set up the next season for success. This off-season concept and term seem to be becoming a standard for DAOs.
In general, off-seasons may include:
- Retrospectives: performed on the level of the DAO, each Guild, and/or individual projects
- Elections: may include positions within the Guilds, Operations Team, multisig signers
- Leadership transitions: ensure smooth ownership transition of tooling, procedures, etc.
- Prep for next season: e.g., voting on or preparing for the next season’s theme or priorities
- Reevaluate reward systems: gauge sentiment on whether rewards were appropriate for effort last season and make tweaks if necessary
- Rest: deliberately accomplish nothing, e.g., for a week
It’s hard to refute that these initiatives are important, but these types of organizational health items are the first to get rushed, overlooked, or dismissed when a deadline is looming. Giving them separate, dedicated time permits full attention to continue on season objectives while in that season, but also crucially builds healthy habits into the DAO, e.g., giving members a regular break from Discord, properly engaging in the process for regularly rotating leadership.
As for how long an off-season should be, there is a lot of possible hours packed into the items listed above. Eventually those processes would be streamlined, but we can expect them to take longer in the beginning to sort out. Still, I think one month is the minimum I could imagine giving to an off-season. My hunch is that two months is a good starting point for this particular off-season, and I could see valid arguments for going longer. In the end, it may be wisest not to set a Season 1 start date until we’re confident that we’re ready for it.