Summary
Season 0 expired on March 13. In the weeks that followed, we’ve been wrapping up loose ends, continuing on with existing initiatives, and starting a few new ones, referring to this period as an “off-season” (see: Defining off-seasons). This proposal offers a more formal definition of what we’re looking to accomplish in this off-season, prior to kicking off Season 1.
Generalized suggestions for Off-Seasons
In that first proposal, I suggested a few themes that could apply to every off-season:
- 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
Off-season 0 has some unique needs beyond these themes to adequately prepare for the start of Season 1. Those are captured below.
Objectives for Off-Season 0
- Mission, Values, and Goals
- Routine examination of whether the language and content still matches our priorities and expectations. An amendment would go through the typical governance process.
- Retrospectives
- Each guild, project, and initiative (e.g., web3con) conducts a retrospective to reflect and iterate on what we should continue, start, or stop doing
- Governance Token
- Ratify Early Contributor Rewards
- Reach resolution for those with compromised wallets
- Establish legal and accounting structures
- Deploy the governance token and claim site
- Budgeting
- Establish MVP for Guilds and Projects requesting budgets
- Establish and document DAO accounting practices
- Guild Leadership
- Define guild leadership positions
- Elect open positions
- Set Guild goals/focus areas for Season 1
- Create Season 1 budget
- Project Leadership
- Define DAO project requirements, e.g., RFC process, meetings, documentation, updates, etc.
- Assess each project for viability continuing into Season 1
- Fill open project positions
- Set project goals/milestones for Season 1
- Create Season 1 budget
- Onboarding
- Define and implement the next iteration of our onboarding experience into the DAO.
- Season 1
- Formally define and ratify Season 1 plans and budgets via the DAO governance process.
Inevitably, this will not be a comprehensive list of activity in this off-season, and that’s fine.
Off-Season Governance
When discussed in DAO calls and on the forum, there seemed to be general agreement that off-season proposals didn’t need to make their way all the way through the governance process (i.e., forum discussion → forum vote → snapshot vote). I’m in that camp for this Season 0 proposal, but believe this should be revisited as soon as an off-season introduces a reward system for activity that occurs during that period. The expectation is for season definitions to travel through that governance process, in part because they will have budgets included.
Duration
Off-seasons last until the next season begins. When we’re ready for it, a Season 1 specification post will get published on the forum and we’ll follow the DAO governance process from there. Given that no future off-seasons will need to deploy a governance token or establish accounting procedures for the first time again, it seems reasonable to expect that this off-season will go on for longer than a “typical” off-season in the future.