How we move forward as a DAO - Season 0

Title: How we move forward as a DAO - Season 0
Authors: @kempsterrrr @dabit3

Our community has grown fast.

We’re now counting ~1500 genesis NFT holders (3000+ minted) and > 1000 of us have joined the DAO server.

This includes multiple Protocol Foundation team members, Web3 Founders, major open-source project maintainers, Web2 community leaders, and many more other talented and passionate people excited by learning about, and building on, Web3.

Teams have formed around projects, individuals have launched something like 10 different tools for the community and the support we’re giving each other re learning, and collaboration, is invaluable.

We’re already in discussions regarding collaborations and potential treasury allocations with a few other DAOs and organizations, including Gitcoin and a new DAO being formed by the founders of Decrypt, among others.

It’s exciting and the potential is obvious to see, but how do we move forward from here?

Season 0

To give us some purpose and direction we propose initiating a Season 0 to focus on the following:

  • Finalising mission, values and goals
  • Establish core team
  • How we make decisions
  • How we recognise and reward contributions
  • How we fund the Treasury
  • $DBUCKS tokenomics and distribution plan
  • Choose flagship projects for the DAO
  • Derivatives NFTs launch
  • Plan for launch event
  • Focus for Season 1

Overview provided on each section below, some explored in more detail than others. None of this is intended to block the community from continuing with the great things that are happening at the moment. The aim is to spark discussion on some important topics and agree on a consensus on how we can move forward.

Finalise mission, values and goals + announce them

As discussed in last week’s call and taken further in this excellent post from @willblackburn, our primary challenge is defining our mission, values and goals.

It’s important we nail this down as soon as possible as it will provide the foundation for how we can make decisions moving forward and begin tackling other challenges.

I propose we engage in discussion on Will’s post and aim to convert feedback into a proposal next week.

It was decided on the town hall 2021-10-08 that we’d post a knew thread to discourse clearly stating where we currently are with the mission, values and goals, and seek feedback from the community there. Link to post -"Defining our mission, values and gaols* please contribute to this thread

Establish core team

How we’ve organised the community so far has served us well. People are supporting each other’s learning and collaborations have been formed however there we have observed some challenges:

  1. Members are unsure exactly how or where the can contribute
  2. It is not clear who/what group is responsible for decisions for specific areas
  3. We’re experiencing some inertia regarding re we move forward as a community

To address these we propose we identify some volunteers or groups who are happy to take some ownership specific areas:

  • Community Management (server moderation/structure/calls etc.)
  • Editorial (Blogging, newsletter etc.)
  • Events
  • Treasury/funding/Governance (including tokenomis, voting, DAOstack)
  • Documentation
  • Design
  • What else?

People who take responsibility for these areas should have autonomy to organise around these challenges, will join a core team that meets regularly (likely weekly) to ensure things are progressing and be responsible for weekly updates in community calls.

Where there are multiple volunteers for these roles the group should self-elect someone to take on a “lead” role. Roles could then run for a Season and be re-elected as needed.

How we make decisions

With over 1000 people in the server it’s important we define a process for how we make decisions as a group.

Taking inspiration from this Bankless DAO post, proposing the following approach to communication and decision making:

Conversations → brainstorming → proposals → consensus → execution

Conversations: Discord, (text/voice/video chats)
Brainstorming: Discord (Text/voice/video chats), Discourse (general)
Proposals: Discourse (Proposals) using this template
once finalised
Execution: Discord (text/voice/video), GitHub, Trello?

These general rules should make it easier for us to organise conversation and make decisions.

Not everything needs a proposal. The majority of things should not require much consensus at all so as not to slow the community down.

For example, suggesting a new topic in “Technical Discussion” or spinning up a new project channel in “Projects” should require a simple post with some support in discord.

Decisions that impact that wider community can be broken down into two categories: “soft consensus” and “hard consensus”.

Soft consensus includes anything that requires some community support to get moving (i.e. idea for regular events, detailed project proposal seeking support). Should be well documented using the template above and shared to discourse seeking feedback/support.

Hard consensus would be anything that requires broad community consensus to implement/change or affects governance/funding/treasury etc… These would require a snapshot vote (currently by NFT holders, in the future $DBUCKs).

How do we plan to recognise and reward contributions

The energy and contributions to the community so far have been great.

To keep our community healthy, it’s important we recognise and reward contributors early. Two proposed ways of approaching this:

  • Assigning roles (core team as above, by others roles also)
  • Specific thresholds for contribution on specific initiatives/projects
  • Community engagement tracked via SourcCred / Bot

The model we develop could play a key role in how we allocate and distribute the $DBUCKS token in the future (discussed further down).

How we fund the Treasury

For the community to support project launches (i.e. NFT derivatives) or provide backing for events, we need funding. There are several options for doing this and it could be a combination of all, or some, of them:

  • Bottom-up Moloch funding by community
  • Grant funding (GitCoin, Ethereum foundation etc.)
  • Outside funding (SeedClub, VCs)

Once we have some initial founding we could then aim to grow the treasury via on-chain revenue from projects (i.e. NFT Derivatives).

Plan $DBUCKS tokenomics and distribution

Providing a representation of ownership of the community is part of our mission, values and goals. To achieve this we need to research and propose an approach to tokenomics and distribution for the $DBUCKS token.

This token will not have any monetary value at launch. It will be a governance token that represents participation in the DAO and voting power.

Potentially something we can tackle in-house although could be wise inviting outside support (i.e. SeedClub).

Choose Flagship projects for the DAO

As an extension of our mission, value and goals, I believe it would be valuable for the community to at least 1 or 2 flagship projects for the following reasons:

  • Provide focal points for community to rally around
  • Public goods we can provide back to the wider community
  • Clear outcomes to help with securing grant/outside funding

These could also then form the/part of the focus for Season 1.

Plan Launch Event

There has been a lot of interest in running events already. Nader has suggested a great way to culminate Season 0/launch Season 1 could be with our first outside event.

The details of this are yet to be defined however suggested has been a mixture of inside and outside contributors speaking across a single day potentially remotely via video streams.

Conclusion

  • The community we have built is amazing. On top of the benefits we’re all already getting from the community there is huge potential for what we can achieve with a little organisation.
  • Getting these foundations in place is likely going to be our biggest challenge. Once we have done so we should have a good platform for delivering on our mission, values and goals.

Next Steps

  • Propose core roles seek volunteers
  • Distribute tasks between team
  • Populate this timeline.
  • Love it, let’s get cracking with Seaon 0
  • Like the idea, needs refining (see comments)
  • Don’t think this is viable (see comments)
0 voters
17 Likes

we do need to figure out a way to include more people in our scheduled events; we only had 3 of us on the website call today

Volunteer Groups / Teams Thoughts:

  • Is events big enough to be its own independent group? it might be. Otherwise I’d say combine it into Editorial and make that “Content”
    • Editorial → Content (newsletter, blog post, video, events, etc)
  • What does Documentation do? Historical or do we have someone to try to make up for me not properly commenting my code?
  • We, somehow, are missign a Dev/Tech team…

Proposals should determine the tasking given to a working group: working groups are entrusted to execute to the best of their ability to accomplish that tasking. The community will then get an opportunity for comment / revision before taking the working group’s product live (up to and including a vote of no confidence or the like to axe a product rather than taking something totally off-base live?)

  • The above might be too carte blanche for teams, but they need a fair amount of autonomy

Are there Tokenomics specializing DAOs that can help? Is DAOists qualified? Do we have a really talented tokenonomist (tokenomicologist? tokenomics practictioner?) already lurking onboard?

Flagship projects: Yes please. I would vote for Decentralized ID → Education & Resume & Job Board

5 Likes

Fantastic outline here @kempsterrrr and @dabit3 :ok_hand: . I really do like the idea of having core teams/squads; however, I would also recommend having a core engineering team as well to support the foundational pieces of the DAO like the derivatives, website and what looks perhaps the $DBUCKS smart contract. Now don’t get me wrong, the whole DAO is the core engineering team (regardless of coding skill level); however, i think we need some “DAO gardeners” with regards to providing some guidance around things like code reviews, helping projects get off the ground, unblocking people and providing general support/guidance to those who are new to the DAO (or even coding itself). In the same vein, i don’t know if you meat to clump that into Community Management or not.

I do agree with @gjsyme 's point around increasing the “foot traffic” into our weekly calls and i think one of the things mentioned as an idea in the last town hall was around alternating meeting times to accommodate more timezones.

As for flagship projects, I think it’s a no brainer here that a couple of these (heck even one) would really make us stand out more in the wild. I think the biggest fish to fry is around easing the onboarding process into web3. The other big thing in my mind to tackle is coming up with a platform in order to support a generalized hub for a variety of blockchains and eventually building a universal login around it. Most(all?) smart contract enabled blockchains support tokens and NFT’s but no way for them to co-exist. Imagine logging into a web3 game where you could utilize a combination of Solana and Ethereum based NFT’s around a custom(unique?) character skin. Or logging into an e-commerce sites building their loyalty points system into various blockchains and a user being able to utilize all of them from a single platform. I need to formalize the idea a bit more into proposal form but i thing something like that will blow the roof off what most other DAO’s are doing. Also, this type of thing may have residual effects in kinda stomping out some of the extreme tribalism around blockchains we have at the moment.

5 Likes

I would add a development team, responsible for taking care of the technical/code side of any DAO-wide projects. :slight_smile:

7 Likes

I would be interested for volunteer for editoral team.

I’m a total noob on crypto, but I worked as a developer, educator, and blogger for many years now.

6 Likes

I’d be down for being part of the development core team if we end up having one

3 Likes

FYI Dev team was/should be part of this, must have cut it out whilst editing MAY BAD :man_facepalming:

6 Likes

I love all of this and the end of Season 0 outcomes seem :ok_hand:.

The only big thing that jumps out to me is strong agreement with @gjsyme about merging Events and Content.

I’m not concerned that they are too small to be their own groups, but they are so intertwined that it’d silo things. If they’re done right, they should really be making decisions together and feeding off each other.

I’d also throw PR into the mix. We’re doing something really cool here, and especially as products come out, there will be a lot of opportunities for good coverage.

I’d propose merging those three into an Awareness Group with the mission to increase brand recognition and membership in the DAO.

5 Likes

Making a not of another important point missed in the list for Season 0 before I forget - legal status for the DAO

Have discussed this with @dabit3 very briefly but probably something we’d want outside counsel on (excuse the pun)

Love the feedback so far. Keep it coming!

5 Likes

This is all good stuff. I think on the Treasury side, a combination of community funding, grant funding, and outside funding, are wise.

Outside funding would be primarily about connections: importing/exporting talent, smart detached partners shining lights on our blindspots, and potentially any extraneous legal concerns (e.g. a member accidentally - or purposely - misuses a license).

Growing the treasury on-chain, from there, might look like our own project bounties. If $DBUCKS are ERC-20 tokens, they can be purchased to acquire high quality courses, similar to an NFT marketplace for in-game assets, and later traded on an open market.

This might motivate a supply-side economy.

We can also apply the token bonding curve idea, too, as the citizenry of Developers grows, e.g. a type of progressive inflation where an increase in $DBUCKS increases the price, which would incentivize us to grow the organization and reward hodlers and early adopters, while giving new Developers a chance to capture value based on growth, not scarcity.

7 Likes

Just want to say: Love the idea of $DBUCKS for purchasing high-quality courses as a utility/ demand-side driver of the token.

5 Likes

Thanks for this, really exciting stuff!

I would just comment on the Editorial part. I think that could be expanded to cover all of Marketing, rather than just Editorial (which is a bit limiting in scope). My idea of what the Marketing group could include:

  1. Written content on the blog in the form of articles, event recaps, forum posts, and lessons.
  2. Recording videos and podcasts for education and awareness
  3. Social Media management and sharing snippets (repurposed content we build elsewhere like in the community or on the blog)
  4. Webinars / online events that get the word out about the DAO (this could be a collaborative effort with the events group)
  5. Newsletter publishing and curation

I’d be up for volunteering together with anyone else interested.

6 Likes

Expanding on the topic of season 0.

Year 0. Season 0: Foundation.
October-December 2021.

A seasons system allows the DAO to gamify and reward contributions in a clear way, and gives members an easy way to engage with the community. It is a defined series of bounties with rewards that any member can join and claim during the season.

How Does it Work?

  • At the start of the Season, a series of tasks are revealed, along with the rewards for completing them.
  • At the end of each month, rewards are given for each completed task of the season.
  • Special rewards such as NFTs are given at the end of the Season for completion of all tasks.

TASKS for Season 0: Foundation.

  1. Collect the Foundation POAP.
  2. Pitch a project in the New Ideas channel. Reward: Season 0-Pitcher POAP.
  3. Start a project / Join a project. Reward: Season 0-Launcher POAP.
  4. Finish the project. Reward: Season 0-Builder POAP + Special NFT
  5. Make connection with another DAO. (Reward: Diplomat POAP)
  6. Write a text to publish in Mirror/Medium/etc for the DAO (Reward: Writer POAP)
  7. Make a video tutorial (Reward: Teacher POAP)
  8. Post 20 times in the Discord (Reward: Chatter POAP)
  9. Post in social media about the DAO (Reward: Social Media POAP)
    (More ideas?)

BENEFITS:
It gives the DAO a marketing tool to recruit people.
Makes onboarding easier.
Keeps the community engaged.

NOTES:
For the moment I’m proposing using POAPs. Once we have a treasure we can replace those with real rewards, or retroactively pay those with POAPs.
Other types of bounties and rewards can exist outside of the Season system.
The Season NFT can be crafted to take POAP into account for the rarity when minted, for example, adding value to it.

14 Likes

This is all excellent and exciting, I’m happy to be a part of it!

One suggestion on the core team would be to add a Business Development/Sales group that works in collaboration with the Marketing/Editorial function to get the word out about the offerings.

Where the Marketing group would focus on 1:many, Sales would focus on 1:few. For instance, Bloomberg recently posted crypto reporting jobs. The chances are probably low that the recruiting leaders at Bloomberg are aware of our job board (if we decide to build a job board), but would definitely pay to post their job there to fill these roles. Here’s an example of how LinkedIn does it. They recently hit $10B in revenue.

That said, it’s quite early for a sales group, but I do believe we should be thinking about it as a revenue generating group for the DAO when there are offerings available to sell.

I would love to contribute in this area in any way I can!

10 Likes

I really like the tasks for seasons idea. Also having POAPs would make it easier to attach roles and permissions to members through something like Collab.Land on Discord, again feeding back into a retroactive $DBUCKS distribution.

4 Likes

Yes. If we are going to act as a Service DAO, a unit making contact with other DAOs is basic. But I would steal the idea from Braintrust: If anyone gets a contact, and that contact makes a deal, you get a share of that deal.

4 Likes

The above ideas are excellent. In addition to these, I would like to share some ideas as well.

First of all, I think bootcamps would be a powerful idea to educate the community. It would be great if this was run by experienced DAO members. Also, these bootcamps don’t have to be just about web3. There are some very talented web2 developers among us who can manage and train small cohorts as leaders.

For this, I thought of a 4-stage system like universities. When i say bootcamp, i mean just a roadmap. We don’t have to create an actual live bootcamp. In the age of information, it’s really hard to find verified and organized information. That’s why, i belive if we create information base and set some project deadlines for each group and have some office hours with experienced members that would be sufficient. We can open some notion page or some spesific page in our website. As i said, all we need to do is verifiying resources. For example, if grand masters approve some roadmap like this for group 2:

  1. Complete this book https://www.amazon.com/Mastering-Ethereum-Building-Smart-Contracts/dp/1491971940

  2. Finish cryptozombies

  3. Learn truffle from this articles …

  4. Read these articles …

  5. Complete 2 dapp with team

Then this verified roadmap will be a bootcamp for that level one quarter of the year long.

1) Absolute Beginners

We need to train applicants at this level first at the web2 level. We can collectively give this group the development of tools that we will use in the dao, by giving simple projects on both backend and frontend. In addition to the above tasks, people who are included in this bootcamp focus on this issue for 3 months, being in the community and have the opportunity to support open source projects. In the meantime, these group/groups are mentored by experts in their fields and their progress is recorded in weekly or twice-weekly meetings.

For example, we can have this group write the question bank application. Everyone collects the questions that come to mind in this bank, and the most asked questions win more DBUCKS with an upvote system like reddit.

Tasks

  • Start learning web2
  • Complete bootcamp
  • Complete projects

Abilities

  • Beginner

2) Web3 Beginners

This group would be perfect for people who already have web2 experience and want to learn web3. The task of the people in this group is both to mentor the 1st group and to learn web3 in new projects with the help of the mentors in the upper group. From this level we can form groups to gather around bounties and hackathons to support tokenomics. For example, we can participate in hackathons with groups of 5-10 people and transfer some of the income to mentors and some to the treasury. The bootcamp of this level will proceed in the same way.

For example, let’s plan that we are making a tool that visualizes the gas fees in solidity contracts (it will show the fees that the functions will spend as in the example). The tools to be used in this tool, the development of web3 tools to be used in the dao and the decentralization of the applications made by the 1st group may be the responsibility of this group.

Tasks

  • Mentor absolute beginners
  • Complete bootcamp
  • Complete projects

Abilities

  • Expert on web2

3) Web3 Mid-Level

Starting with this group, we can start to produce projects and solve real world problems. What this group has developed can be used to develop both the DAO economy and their own personal economy. This group should now consist of people who have produced several projects on web3. Their responsibilities should be to mentor a subgroup and make a presence there by participating in hackathons. Again, there should be senior level web3 experts above this group. This group can collect rewards by participating in hackathons with their work. They should be made up of small groups, presenting their presence in different hackathons on Gitcoin, and engage in an active development process by meeting every few days. In addition, differentiations may begin from this group. Groups that want to work on Defi, nft groups, dapp groups can be established in different areas according to the project proposals.

For example, a decentralized advertising network in the logic of buysellads. Decentralized delivery of both social media ads and advertisements in the website domains between publishers and advertisers. Example scenario: the advertiser likes a certain social media account or site. It stakes eth to advertise here. The request is forwarded to the publisher. If the publisher rejects the ad offer, the eth stake is broken and the fee is deducted and sent back to the advertiser. If the publisher accepts, eth is staked in one of the liquidity pools. During this period (1 month, 1 week etc) advertisements are tracked and analytics data is collected. As a result of the tracking, if the requested amount of advertising is completed, the eth is transferred to the publisher’s address. (I will create a detailed proposal for this project)
Tasks

  • Mentor web3 beginners
  • Complete bootcamp
  • Join Hackathon

Abilities

  • Can create more complex dapp

4) Web3 Grand Masters

This group should act as the core engineering team. DAO’s layer 2 solutions, flagship projects such as defi and NFT derivatives should be developed by this group. In addition, this group should guide the first 3 levels and provide mentorship according to the demands of these people. In return, they should receive a considerable reward from the treasury. Those who complete the first 3 stages should be entitled to take part in these flagship projects. With the work of this group, we can also participate in accelerator programs and grant programs.
Tasks

  • Mentor and verifiy bootcamp resources
  • Create new complex dapp for DAO (like Defi, Layer 2 etc.)
  • Apply grants

Abilities

  • Grand master of web3

I know it’s a little bit messy but i would like to hear your ideas about open bootcamp concept. I believe we can educate tons of users with this approach and if we think more on that, we can have better ideas and better structure for educating people. And of course, we need to know more information about members levels and passions.

11 Likes

I really like this! very chewable and pragmatic. It leaves room for non-planned tasks during a season, but incentivizes individuals to work towards the stated goals and having the DAO put it’s money where it’s mouth is.

2 Likes

I really like the general idea of this, and provides a way for new-comers to gain experience and become more entrenched in the community. However, I would suggest staying away from rigid requirements for an individual to “graduate” to the next stage. (not that you were really implying that.)

I think the larger value of the system you described, is that through this general roadmap of education, we can develop a set of bets practices and wiki of resources to allow quicker onboarding and “mental-shift” from web2 → web3.

As these resources become solidifed, people new to the dao and looking to tackle a task will have an easier time figuring out what tools the community suggests/uses and how the different building blocks of web3 can be combined, which isn’t always obvious to new comers.

3 Likes

STARTUPS (idea from thecryptodiver, adapted for the Season concept)
Starting every Season, any Dev can put out a proposal for a project.
Every Dev votes on the project that they are interested in & would like to work on.
Voting closes 2nd week of the month.
Based on the number of votes, we choose the top 3 projects to work on for the whole Season. Devs can join one of the elected projects to work on it.
At the end of the Season, we present the finished startups.

4 Likes