[DRAFT] Guest pass / 'temporary membership' program

Proposals
#1

Team: derked.eth, dhaiwat.eth
Author: dhaiwat.eth

Summary: We want to deploy a derivative NFT collection on an L2 that lets D_D genesis NFT holders mint a guest pass (i.e. temporary membership) for anyone they want. The receiver will receive a guest pass in the form of an NFT to their wallet. This token will ‘expire’ after a certain time period. We’re thinking of setting this period to one month for now.

Why is this needed:

  • The only way to become a member of Developer DAO right now is to purchase a genesis NFT off of the open market. These NFTs are expensive (~0.2 eth). A lot of people just cannot afford to get one.

  • Apart from D_D being the awesome place it is, one of the big reasons behind our membership being this expensive is the fact that we only have 8000 max seats. Some of those are being squatted by whales so that would take the actual number to around 5000. If you compare 5000 to the number of people who want to get into our DAO, there is an insanely huge mismatch between supply and demand.

  • Money being the only gateway to a community that’s all about free education and public goods doesn’t sit well with me. I know we have a scholarship program in place which has been a huge success. But that is being run by only one or two persons + we will eventually run out of NFTs to give away. That’s a very narrow perspective. Why not decentralize the ability to give out (temporary) access to the D_D membership? I strongly believe that giving all members of the DAO the ability to do this will let people from more diverse backgrounds come join us at D_D.

  • We have heard from several companies, builders and students that they want to come check out the D_D community from within. This will let them do that for a short amount of time without bearing a significant cost.
    CleanShot 2022-05-27 at 21.57.57

  • This program will be the most beneficial for students and newcomers to the web3 space who want to start contributing to the DAO but cannot afford the NFT. They can join the DAO for a month through this program, start contributing and earn their full membership by getting compensated in $CODE tokens. (this is for the future once $CODE has been launched)

What we have done until now:

How this works:
Let’s say A is a member of Developer DAO, B and C are non-members who want to get in.

  1. A goes to the deployed frontend.
  2. A connects their wallet to the site.
  3. A wants to gift a guest pass to B so they enter B’s eth address on the site and clicks ‘Mint’.
  4. A signs a transaction that transfers an NFT to B instantly. This NFT will give B access to the D_D discord for 30 days.

After 30 days

  1. B loses access to the D_D discord.
  2. A wants to now gift a guest pass to C but they cannot do so for another 30 days. (this cooldown period has not been implemented in the MVP yet)

After another 30 days, A can repeat the process and gift a pass for C.

What needs to be done to make this a reality:

  • A positive response from the community on this forum post
  • Snapshot vote? If the community deems it’s required.
  • Contract deployment to Polygon / Optimism mainnet.
  • Frontend deployment
  • Change the Collab.land config for our Discord server to allow anyone holding a valid token from this new derivative NFT collection to join our Discord server and give them the ‘dev’ role. This role will be taken away automatically after 30 days.
  • Announcement to members.
4 Likes
#2

Great idea!, a couple of questions:

  • Is there any limit on how many passes a D_D member can mint (ammount, frequency)?
  • If a guest can keep minting passes couldn’t this be abused between two adresses?
  • Is the DAO ready to exponentially expand the community?
1 Like
#3

Sounds great, but a few things that we should consider.

The main point is how much guest and members we can support.

  1. Too much turn over and too much people can lead to a lot of “noise”, and make it harder for people who do want to contribute to understand what goes on.
  2. Turn over => much more on-boarding effort on dao and guild levels.
  3. Will there be enough opportunities to go around everyone who joins (as a guest or as a member)?
  4. It is expanded by the fact that each new member bring 2 new people to the community (the exponentially that Nate mentioned)

Another point to consider. Expanding and democratizing the opportunity is great, but are we currently providing our existing members (or at least most of them) with opportunities and helping them to achieve their missions? If not, IMO we should first focus on them (and in the meantime build out the process for accepting a bigger influx of members).

2 Likes
#4
  1. Yes, 1 pass that lasts 60 days can be minted once per 120 days per DD owner ADDRESS.
  2. Sort of, but there is some responsibility placed on members to not abuse the guest pass functionality. I also wouldn’t consider it abuse since you are capped on what you can mint anyways.
  3. Up for community debate.
2 Likes
#5

1-3 . Definitely true. Onboarding continues to be a struggle.

  1. Not true. Each unique owner ADDRESS (not token, address), can mint ONE guest pass that lasts 60 days every 120 days.
#6

Thanks for putting this together @dhaiwat10 and @Derked. Seems obvious we’re going to need to find a ways to "recruit’ new members into the DAO and democratise access. For example, we’re short on design and product skills, I wonder if guest passes in some form could potentially be a very good solution for this :thinking:

A few questions in good faith to straw-man this idea:

  1. Have you considered the cost to existing members re lowering the value of their NFTs and/or future $CODE holdings?
  2. As per [DRAFT] Governance Token Allocation Amendment for Founding Team & Advisors we’re already allocating the equivalent of ~387 memberships in $CODE to welcome people into the DAO. I believe @luan and co in the fellowships team are considering doing this in two ways: allocating $CODE to orgs so they can gift to their members and providing ways for people to earn their way into the DAO via paid tasks. How do these play together? Is the ~380 not already generous enough?
  3. What happens if they’ve been an awesome contributors but haven’t quite earned the 400 tokens to stay? That would suck! (imagine that would probably take > 2 months)

Another angle could be teams being able to request guest passes for specific skills they’re lacking to fill project roles? Or maybe each guild getting a budget of Guest passes for the Season ? Given we’re struggling with effective onboarding at the moment making it possible for our membership to double like this with no control might be too much to handle and negatively impact existing members who’ve "paid"to get in! If i could do this I know I would use it :joy:

Couple of other things:

1 Like
#7

Once again, big fan of this idea, since it reduces the financial obstacle for users. Couple thoughts of mine.

Length of access

I think it might be worth considering giving NFT access for the entire season (four months or so).

Contributors go through a journey of being in a DAO, with most being so confused about how to contribute. Onboarding is becoming more common, but some members won’t always be active as soon as they join, and rushing that experience may isolate them away from the DAO. Four months give them enough time to identify the interest within the DAO, contribute and earn enough tokens, and take their time whilst doing it.

It also answers a couple of the problems outlined by members in the forum such as too much onboarding and giving enough time to earn their way in.

3 Likes
#8

Thanks for the questions, Kemp!

  1. Yeah it’s a tricky one. I’m not sure if this will increase or decrease the valuation of $CODE or the genesis NFT. It could increase the value since this proposal would mean that one genesis NFT can now more or less give 2 people access to the server. This increases utility (?) but this might also mean that it’s easier to get access to the DAO membership. That makes it less scarce. Not sure how it will play out.

  2. That’s a completely valid point. My counterpoint would be that the fellowship program will only grant memberships to the people that the fellowship team selects. I know they will be acting in good faith and will reward people based on merit, but there is always some bias involved. Our proposal gives this power to all the members of the DAO, in a safe and measured manner. I think the fellowship program and this guestbook program can/should co-exist.

  3. Another DAO member can re-mint a guestpass for them! :slight_smile: We can bring them in again

Tracking success would ideally be looking at how many passes were minted and how many active contributors we got as a result. I am not sure if there is a way to track this, I don’t think there’s a metric to decide if someone is active or not. But we can prepare a report after one or two months to get a general idea.

#9

And I’ll update the format for the final proposal, thanks!

#10

Thanks for the comment @Bobbay! I definitely see the point you’re trying to make. I wouldn’t be opposed to this. Happy to hear other opinions too! Especially from you @Derked and @kempsterrrr