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:
- Members are unsure exactly how or where the can contribute
- It is not clear who/what group is responsible for decisions for specific areas
- 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)