This is an edit of the Super Season proposal to make a four-month season for Season 4 rather than a three or six-month season. Based on discussions in the #seasons channel and feedback from many contributors, a four-month season (16-weeks) seems to be a happy medium.
The schedule of a 16-week season would be:
Break week: April 4-8
Season 4 Start: April 18
Founding Day/One Year Anniversary: May 4
Permissionless: May 17-19
Break Week: August 8-12
Season 5 Start: August 15-19
For reasoning on why Iām proposing a longer season, I refer you to the original Super Season post.
Ways to keep project alignment and meet goals during a 33% longer season:
Retrospectives performed by the PM team
GSE check-ins with coordinators and core contributors
Reporting of key project and guild metrics and KPIs in the Gearing Up newsletter
I voted yes despite preferring a 3-month season for accountability reasonsā¦so lemme share some thoughts on accountability:
The only group that individual projects/guilds are accountable to are the ones that fund them. In this case, the grants committee and the banklessDAO multisig holders should be holding projects and guilds responsible, respectively.
Regularly reporting is good, but TBH the gearing up newsletter doesnāt feel like the right channel to me after seeing it work for 3 months
GSE seems to be a catch-all for problems in the DAO. Thereās no guarantee they will work on accountability. Besides, itās the GC and bDAO multi-sig holders who have the real power to hold projects/guilds accountable.
Ditto for PM team - they have no authority over projects/guilds
Iām unsure there is a perfect timeframe for a seasonās length. Some of us will have different thoughts as to shorter or longer for different reasons.
Going back to the six-month timeframe from the original proposal, I thought it was a good thing. However, after seeing othersā thoughts, I changed my mind.
As bDAO matures, it will find that āhappy mediumā on this issue and others. I believe this is a good place to settle for now and see how it goes.
Depending on what people think about a 4 month season in general, Iām thinking it might be better to start it for season 5 in an attempt to avoid rushing to change guild and project operations to fit the new time frame which would start in a month. Unless people think that is enough time to reframe the approach.
Another thing that crossed my mind is GSE timeframe was set to 3 months during season 4. So payment was based on 3 months. If we keep the deadline to end of season 4 to present the plan, that gives GSEs 4 months instead of 3. This could be good to give more time or bad by removing urgency. It also locks up peoples commitments for an extra month without an extra month of pay. Now of course the GSE deadline could still be 3 months instead of 4 even with a 4 month season. Just adding more things to think about.
Edit - I voted yes to 4 month season but not to start in season 4. I think a season 5 start would be better
An incremental move is appealing! Maybe we make it to 6mo eventually. Ultimately agree with moving to lengthen the time between grant requests as it can be fairly time consuming (side note: Iām toying with the notion of āauto-renew with vetoā as a mechanism that could alleviate this as well).
Can you share any math around budget changes? I suppose it all trends proportionally to time in most cases, but I wonder if there are any outliers we are missing.
Most roles would need to be modified across Guilds etc; this is an interesting way to specifically word role salary to reflect in context to seasonal length. For example, a Guild Organizer role is paid by rate * length rather than a static amount. That way, in the future if we change the length again, role program text does not need to be modified AND budget can be easily calculated.
Per @ManuelMaccou point about delaying until next season since S4 is closing in fast, I can see this being true. This post only has 15 votes so far, so we would need to step on the mf gas to solidify this change before the S4 spec is publicized. My gut says we probably missed the boat since this Friday would be the earliest day to launch a full scale notice (and wait a week) which is basically 2 weeks from now to cement modification to everyones budgets in the middle of them writing budgets.
TL;DR
4 month is lit
itās probably too late to squeeze this in before S4
The common ground that resonates with me here is that weāre all trying to move bDAO towards financial sustainability and seem to be in agreement that weāre not tracking in that direction.
The argument that the ābudgeting overheadā is the problem here doesnāt really land with my personal experience at bDAO and elsewhere. The value of the process is not in the budget that come out of it, but in the planning process that leads into it and in the intentional reflection point that allows bDAO to revisit how it allocates its funds going forward.
Inertia is a very powerful force, so I view this 4x/year ādisruptionsā as something rather valuable.
There is no perfect system. Every system can be gamed (blindly copy-pasting last seasonās budget).
And no system lives in isolation. The effectiveness of one system is impacted by the effectiveness of other systems (in this case, the quality of the decisions made by the grants committee, for example).
Extending the seasons will not make the system less game-able, but it will result in incorrect decisions having longer/larger effects, with less opportunities to course-correct, further exasperating the downward spiral.
Letās instead focus on increasing the value from the agility that the current seasonsā length enables.
We had a very productive retrospective for daodash led by @links
Iād be in favor of a longer season after the proposed project alignment mechanisms, namely retrospective, GSE check-ins and KPI reportings are implemented and running smoothly.
I voted yes for the super season and I can see the advantages, but Manual made a great point about the GSEās and I feel that we should let this one ride until S5. After gathering a soft consensus here I feel we should bring this to Snapshot and implement after S4. We are in the process of aggregating information for the S4 temp check now named the Season 4 Community Vote. We should have this up for the community by April 7th/8th.
