First of all, thank you to EVERYONE the replied. It touches my heart to see everyone so engaged with direction and strategy.
Okay, now to business.
On Priorities:
Reading these comments, prioritizing is hard. I threw some numbers up as a starting point, but somehow find creating a v2 is even more difficult.
Front of House
I think @0xRene, @links, and @intlcapitalist brought up good points on priorities, in that we need to stay aligned on mission and vision.
Our Mission reads:
We will help the world go Bankless by creating user-friendly onramps for people to discover decentralized financial technologies through education, media, and culture.
and Vision:
To live in a world where anyone with an internet connection has access to the financial tools needed to achieve financial independence
Perhaps our next objective should be to reorient back to these anchors.
As such, I think our FoH priorities can be prioritized as:
- Clear revenue generation and strict adherence to mission and vision (Bankless Consultancy)
- Strict adherence to mission and vision without clear revenue paths (Smart Contract Literacy)
- Clear revenue generation with loose adherence to mission and vision (Flipper.tool NFT)
- This is better than the previous prioritization
- This is worse than the previous prioritization
There will inevitably be problems around what strict vs loose adherence is. 
I welcome discussion on this point.
As an addendum, I want to surface what @addamsson said:
If we focus on revenue-generating projects only then infrastructure projects will have a problem and I think that they are essential because they enable projects building on top of them to be more efficient / productive
I agree here, but not sure how to qualify these projects. Projects like DEGEN, BB, and DAOdash account for a large chunk of funding but don’t fit neatly into the categories described above. I welcome discussion on this point .
Back of House
With the above said, I’m still seeing multiple people in this forum thread calling for slowing down to reduce clutter. I think there’s a trade-off between (1) Enabling new contributors to pursue projects vs (2) Keeping a clean interface that doesn’t immediately turn off new entrants to our DAO.
I’m going to take a strong stance here and say we should prioritize #2, which will let us scale #1. Taking from Adam’s point above, we are missing the infrastructure required to help projects be more efficient/productive.
To me, a clean interface means:
- Better onboarding
- Less noise in Discord
- Sobol integration (DAO Cartography)
- Notion standardization/clean up
- Easier ways to surface information about guilds and projects
- Dedicated community managers
Fortunately, we can easily measure these outcomes by doing regular surveys on how cluttered and confusing members think the DAO is.
As such, I’ll propose that we dedicate time, resources, and priorities to these objectives and be more stringent with funding new projects until our “Contributor Experience” score improves.
- Strongly Agree
- Agree
- Neutral
- Disagree
- Strongly Disagree
Membership Perks / Vibes
I think I misspoke when presenting Membership Perks. Membership perks are things like token alpha, exclusive drops, priority access to media, etc - exclusive perks for holding 35,000 BANK.
What I meant to refer to was Vibes. Events like:
- Moving showing
- JackBox games
- Poker nights
- D&D&DAO
- Mental health support meetings
These are aimed towards keeping morale up between core contributors that spend the majority of their day in the DAO. To me, this is an investment in the mental fitness of our most active contributors and creating spaces for bonding outside of work. But this requires coordination and compensation, though maybe closer to 5-10% of budget.
PS. I think there is some room to include IRL events, but that blends into membership perks. I’d like to see some brainstorming and proposals around standardizing funding.
- What events do fund? Local meetups vs parties during conferences.
- How do we vet event planners? (eg. @basil held multiple successful NYC events before asking for funding for NFT NYC.)
- Do we have a cap on funding per seasons and create a “Geographies” working group?
- Maybe we hold one-off hype events with a fee to recoup some of the costs of funding IRL events
Funding & GC
Do you agree with earmarking funds this way?
- Strongly Agree
- Agree
- Neutral
- Disagree
- Strongly Disagree
By earmarking funds, the Grants Committee will be able to make better decisions without having to use subjective judgement.
Earlier, I mentioned that GC should evaluate teams, not projects. Thinking more on this, I’m starting to think that we should not only be mindful of the quality of the team, but also the experience team members have had within the DAO. I’ve copied my reply to @jameswmontgomery.eth, which can be found in full further down:
But, I’m not sold on the idea that the “old guard” needs to step away so new members can thrive. What many guild leaders and project coordinators have in common is a shared experience - We cut our teeth in the DAO before we stepped into coordination roles.
This is a bull market, we are onboarding tons of talented & brilliant contributors; we need to put them to work and pay them so they stay.
I fully agree with you here. But I think the way to do this is to create inroads for guilds and existing projects as opposed to directing them to creating new projects. We’ve done that with contributors like @hashedMae, @samanthaj, @Brustkern, and others - all of which now occupy leadership roles in the DAO.
Should contribution to guilds/projects be considered when approving grants?
- Yes
- No
Directed Replies
That’s why I advocated for a re-work of our bDAO CCs to focus on keynote speakers rather than a firehose of project updates
When you have a moment, can you kick up a general forum post to continue this conversation?
Maybe the proposals for funding should be re-located to consensus mechanisms, such that it doesn’t fall upon any group of individuals?
I think this could be a unique opportunity for us to leverage a Mirror Token Race to determine the projects we want to prioritize on a Season by Season basis.
I’m in agreement with you both here. I want to decentralize the decision making power that GC has, but I don’t think know is the right time to do it. We’re still lacking a lot of information in proposals that allow us to make educated and informed decisions, such as:
- Squad’s ability to ship
- Relevant perspectives to inform voters on matters outside their domains (eg. Why a dev-centric proposal would have high costs for maintaining servers.)
- Variance in compensation plans (WIP)
Until we have solid guidelines for how proposals should be evaluated, I think a decentralized Grants model will allocate resources inefficiently.
Dude. Your reply made me think a lot, thank you! I think there definitely is some “letting go” that many L2s can benefit from and I’m generally in favor or new projects and new teams.
But, I’m not sold on the idea that the “old guard” needs to step away so new members can thrive. What many guild leaders and project coordinators have in common is a shared experience - We cut our teeth in the DAO before we stepped into coordination roles.
This is a bull market, we are onboarding tons of talented & brilliant contributors; we need to put them to work and pay them so they stay.
I fully agree with you here. But I think the way to do this is to create inroads for guilds and existing projects as opposed to directing them to creating new projects. We’ve done that with contributors like @hashedMae, @samanthaj, @Brustkern, and others - all of which now occupy leadership roles in the DAO.