I think it is a pretty tall order to create hard timelines on this process for a few reasons:
We are talking about a major DAO-wide reflection and realignment, which takes a significant amount of work and attention.
As many have said, the people doing this work will likely not be compensated, which means we cannot expect their full-time effort.
Only after we re-align as a group can we decide what work needs to be done. If we don’t know what needs to be done, how can we set a hard timeline?
I understand there are parts of the DAO some believe are essential and others don’t. Part of this proposal is to put all groups in the same boat (not-funded) and have the DAO weigh in on whether or not that is the case. By working out what is essential, it will also help us re-align our entire organization.
I am 100% with you that the DAO needs a full rework and revamp.
The DAO doesn’t know what it wants to do, and we gotta find out.
Maybe you’re right, maybe we dont need guilds, maybe we dont need GC, maybe we could move to onchain governance, that would solve some issues.
I agree that distribution of the BANK got out of hand with no clear structure. That’s one of the main things I was vocal about in the GC if you remember.
I agree with you on 70-80% of this proposal.
But I don’t think everything should be stopped. Because it will be harmful.
We will lose more people.
BANK will get even worse.
The reputation of the DAO is damaged because of the HQ issue and the double-asking-money-proposal, and if it stops working, it will get worse.
Completely stopping the DAO will do serious damage.
Instead of finding a temporary solution to bridge this transition, we are just closing down all the doors until things happen and the sun shines again.
Makes no sense.
We all agree that the current distribution system doesn’t work.
We need contributors to work on revamping the DAO.
We are also saying that people should do work without getting compensated for the time and resources, because again - it’s not about the $BANK and money, it’s about $BANK giving the voting power.
We are choosing to shut down everything, instead of looking for a solution that is a temporary alternative to the current dysfunctional system. And once we have something better, we move to that.
People not getting compensated = less investing themselves in the work = a lot more time until the DAO is back in function = fewer people.
This space moves too fast for us to allow ourselves to shut down and lose people. Expecially now with the baby bull.
I think I understand and hear your concerns but I see it a bit differently.
I think part of what prompted this action is that many have realized there is no direct correlation between payment and contribution (or at the very least meaningful contribution). Imo this is partly due to the current market value of $BANK and partly because we’ve created a system where contributors expect to be compensated independent of the quality or value of their contribution.
To your point above, I think it would be interesting to see what proportion of $BANK is retained and used as voting power as it is earned, and what proportion is immediately sold. While $BANK is defined as a governance token, the impression I have is that most contributors and recipients (by number, not by amount of $BANK held) consider it a means of monetary compensation.
I see this as a governance action, and afaik governance participation isn’t something the DAO has ever compensated.
Further, I see this as a critical inflection point for the DAO and the way we compensate going forward might change drastically. If we lose contributors during this process, they always have the opportunity to return once it is complete, and I’d argue that if some folks are only here to be compensated throughout this process, we’re probably better off without their input. I know that’s a bit spicy, but it’s how I feel.
Agree with you on this. Without getting into too much detail, exactly this happened in the Legal guild. Once we established the criteria that payment should equal contributions, people disappered. So yeah, with you on that.
Is it not a utility token, and one of utilities is the governance?
True, that may be one of the reasons why our governance is basically non-existing and broken.
Yes, agree, and it should change because the current is not working.
I am just against stopping the DAO alltogether and not thinking about consequences of such actions.
Traditional law firms usually want a contingency up-front + billable hours which can mushroom if the task is not tightly specified. This is due to a mix of high fixed costs plus the fact that DAOs are legally uncharted territory you are paying for their learning curve
However, taking myself as an example
I’m technically paralegal (or more precisely legal executive) so the lawyers would bill their $400-$1000/hr then outsource the grunt work to people like myself anyway
due to bar rules, there are strict rules against taking equity or stake in the client … however, if BANK is used as internal exchange, I could use to to swap for services (eg graphics design)
since the founders are willing to burn a portion of their initial grant, how about using a portion of this in treasury as escrow for anticipated 3rd party legal expenses. Since the IP formalising removes legal risk and creates contractual certainty between bDAO and BanklessHQ it benefits Bankless LLC which I understand (correct me if wrong) is predominently flows through to RSA and David anyway. The escrow just acts as lower limit, the precise costs will need to be estimated as part of the pro-con debate
I think they don’t always mean a semantic “hard timeline”
They instead mean; we need to revisit where we are at this date.
This conversation about branding has been brewing in various ways for a few seasons now. It could be that the movement (when funding was actually flowing) was just slow enough to not be terribly productive. Or maybe, it was productive enough to lead us here.
That being said, you can continue to sit in the conversational reflection period for all of eternity, if you’d like. It could work, and you could iterate as you go along. But you also have to consider:
A: Folks who were as gung ho at the start would still be gung ho once you can finally say “you’re ready”
And B: those people that were enticed by what happened at the start (re all those posts that I use to see about going full time DAO that I suddenly can’t see anymore haha) will move on, and take those friends that may be beneficial to the DAO with them.
None of these things are deal breakers for having a hard timeline or not having a hard time line. Because I suspect this is a new world that the community has entered.
I wish I could find those posts that I saw earlier that basically were cheer posts for folks to make a living on the DAO. I’m gonna plug them in here for this exact moment.
That said, you aren’t wrong. But if funding becomes bountiful and life is a good and all fairies and roses, are we going to be saying this same thing? Come here and make money but tsk tsk if you’re only about the money?
Ironically. I look at myself and ask myself this too. It’s kind of the whole sticking point about airdrop farmers I figure.
As with most (94% at this time) of the DAO, I saw this proposal and immediately agreed with it.
@DAOlexa’s reply did make me wonder, are there one or a few groups that should continue to receive funding/grants during this overall pause, such as the legal group?
Alternatively, we could plan to do a retroactive funding round as part of getting back on our feet after figuring out our new direction, etc, and this retroactive funding could “pay” (i.e. grant governance rights / BANK) for people who do a lot of work during the restructuring.
Hey @homie , these are great questions. And it’s like crystal ball gazing. We don’t fully know what the future holds for us. But by working with great people, and we definitely have some in bDAO, we can be sure to learn huge amounts on the way. That on its own makes us richer people, even if we still have to look to others for our daytime meal tickets.
The combination needed to find a product or service that others need -and will reward value with tangible, exchangeable tokens - is something we in Bankless DAO understand better than many, and yet it’s still a really difficult road to travel and find success.
We are just at the beginning of such journeys, and your questions are good metrics for us to consider from time to time along the way in retrospectives.
Ethically, perhaps some may think work should continue. But if funding has stopped per this proposal, only those committed to the strategic relaunch are putting their hands up saying we want to give this a strong pivot, and we don’t expect to get paid for that work. And bDAO won’t know what the pivot looks like until that work has taken place. Maybe folk won’t want to work under new conditions. I’m also optimistic, though, about what bDAO 2.0 will look like, because I’m very secure we have good people working on this. Discussions like this are after all in public in forum, and the sentiment check proves that others have worried about this for a while. The only thing is Guild Role Holders should know and be prompted to comment.
I think long term that’s true, @DAOlexa , but we are only just at the beginning. What bDAO have done is to provide a place that some can live off, and others can develop skills, and move up from there. The impressive fact is we have lots of folk from Africa - where it’s reasonably web connected. But it’s important to recognise the cost of living in Africa is such that $20 goes a long way. I think bDAO can learn from Africans like @thinkDecade , who have a much more immediate grasp of the need to survive in the face of challenging and even hostile conditions. A Burundi colleague of mine, in Facebook, recently died through lack of health care facilities. We should consider our own positions with humility, we are mostly pretty lucky by comparison. Personally, I’m going to wait to see the detail of what emerges, and try my best to contribute positively to that. You might note a Discord community post I made just now, even Facebook was a second mover, benefiting from mistakes from a predecessor.
I don’t see this as stopping the DAO, only suspending the paying aspect until that gets redefined.
Maybe that’s an urgent incentive for us to find better paths sooner, to get this part back online ASAP.
Perhaps that can happen piecemeal, proposal by proposal, to get grants started again sooner. It may need testing, proposal by proposal. I even have a proposal like this brewing in the Project Management Guild, and the focus suggested there is very much one that looks at sustainability, project by project. If every project can stand on its own two feet, so will the DAO.
I made the observation a couple of years ago that there was a lack of diversity of business models. Being an “influencer” only works if you have an audience, preferably paying one otherwise no better than (digitally) busking for “tips”. Let’s have a look at the traffic volume from a greedy capitalist PoV
say you have 1 million readers each willing to pay $100/yr but if we push into developing country territory you need $10-100 million people willing to pay $1-$10 in gas+fee … recurrently … for information. How many years of compound growth say doubling every year from a base of ~6k BANK holders? We’re looking at 10+years … so this is what got into trouble in first place as token holders were trying to diversify their skills into consulting or amortising the same media across multiple chains (comparatively easier to find 100 firms at $1M a pop).
What demand drivers are there which is sticky and not subject to competition, afterall, coindesk and binance effectively give away their stories to drive the freed/fear cycle whereas truth and investigative journalism (+ quality courseware) seems to be in less demand.
This funding pause should focus attention on sustainable cashflow and to quote Benjamin Franklin …
When people hear the name “Bankless” I think they are attracted to it because of the fact that it’s flies in the face of status quo: the idea that ‘having a bank’ will make you feel financially secure.
But from a developing nation’s perspective, to be unbanked is the norm, and people dream of being financially included. I want to do my best to prevent tradfi from exploiting newcomers to global finance.
I fully support this proposal, since I believe that bDAO has grown and evolved as it’s aged, and with the changes in industry and market conditions, the contributors who remain with bDAO, and coming out of a bear market, right now, are the perfect time to consolidate and reduce our complexity and focus.
A revamp of focus and purpose is necessary, I believe to bring our DAO into its next stage of maturity and continuous longevity. We cannot continue to operate as a “status quo” and expect different results or outcomes.
I would support a much leaner-cleaner DAO. Less complex with a laser focus on specific activities that move the DAO forward on our mission.
To accomplish this, we must first identify what we are, and what we are good at - what moves the needle. Refine the mission to see if it still fully applies in today’s environment and the current maturity stage of bDAO.
Change is difficult for everyone, but I believe it’s becoming the collective realization that we need to do something that will resolve this issue. I feel that “ripping the bandage” off is the right action to get a focused consensus resolution, otherwise, we will continue to kick this problem down the road for the community to patch in the future.
Hi all, thanks for a very fruitful discussion that is difficult to summarize in one short response here.
I like the proposal and agree that a DAO wide discussion regarding who we are and what we want to be in the future is important.
I do not agree that the discussion should be removed from the organization that we know today. Why not start the discussion in the guilds and departments where we have our regular meetings with people we know. Psychological safety is important in these types of situations.
We want broad engagement so we should go where people are.
This doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t have working groups. I just think those should come second and not exclude the already existing organization.
I don’t understand how we can continue exploring legal questions in parallel with the identity crisis we’re currently in. This is probably due to my lack of knowledge regarding law so I’d appreciate some insights here. @DAOlexa
My experience with lawyers is that they generally refuse to explore my questions until I know precisely what question I need answered. It’s the chicken or egg discussion that I often find myself in.
I understand it is difficult to plan and lead this process. Change management is always difficult as the path forward is clouded in uncertainty. But there’s also a reason why it’s a field called Change management. The DAO way of organizing is fairly new but we’re still a group of people trying to figure out how to organize. That’s been going on for a while.
I would like to have a project plan to follow that meets our needs. A timeline and set agenda for the coming months will be difficult. But we can learn what steps need to be done from other processes and give estimates.
@Oakfloors , wrt your point #2 (legal how vs mission triage = why), I’m putting to the legal guild 2-4 IP models (hub+spoke, umbrella, snowflake, pool) but on the proviso that the legal experts follow the Japanese path of looking objectiving what would change to you/project/guild under each of the scenarios but not to compare pro-cons yet.
Once get a guestimate of IP tasks, then the 2-4 models will be exposed to bDAO and then within the possible choices, eliminate the implausible and come up with a finite set of preferences which can be legally reduced to a request for quote for the (hopefully consensual) projected future.
