DAO-Map | Transparency & Accountability

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Authors: @Bpetes @0xJustice
Related Guild: Ops-Guild

TL;DR

  • Problem: A core DAO value is transparency but the BanklessDAO is losing transparency as it grows in size and complexity
  • Proposal: This proposal introduces the role of DAO Cartographer to mitigate this trend
  • Benefit: The DAO Cartographer would create and maintain a map of the DAO to support transparency, enhance accountability, improve onboarding, and reduce communication overhead.

Mission

  • Create a graphical map of the Bankless DAO to increase membership & organization visibility of our current (and ever-changing) structure and goals.
  • Train guild and project representatives to easily maintain their own local maps to aid in keeping things up to date.
  • Dramatically increase transparency and accountability across the entire community supporting the DAO’s goal of improving coordination efficiency and higher quality collective decisions.

Mission Aligned Role

The newly minted ops-guild role of ‘DAO Cartographer’ seeks to create this program with the accountabilities of:

  • Seeding and maintaining this graphical map of the DAO,
  • Training guild and project representatives to help manage accurate records of membership and participation; and
  • Facilitate maximum visibility for the evolving and growing BanklessDAO organizational graph.

Current Elected Role Holders: @0xJustice, @AboveAverageJoe , @Bpetes

“Cartography is the study and practice of making and using maps. Combining science, aesthetics, and technique, cartography builds on the premise that reality can be modeled in ways that communicate spatial information effectively.” - Wiki

Expected Benefits

  • Improved transparency – clear map of who does what and how they’re compensated
  • Enhanced accountability – commitments to each other made clear and progress towards shared goals tracked
  • Self-serve Onboarding – browse what’s happening in the DAO; find the spot that matches your passions and skills with DAO needs.

Mission KPIs

  • Monthly Active Users (MAU) of the Map
  • #of Map Edits/Updates per month.
  • #of Feedback & feature request tickets

Opportunities (aka. Challenges)

A number of interesting opportunities for improvement have emerged as our vibrant DAO has evolved and grown that the DAOCartography program seeks to tackle:

“Who is doing what?”

In Season 1 we rapidly decentralized the DAO. Autonomy was granted to guilds via their own seasonal funding and multi-sigs. Guilds were encouraged to create localized role and governance structures. The grants committee (GC) was formed with delegated powers to make ongoing fund distribution decisions. Additionally, some projects also matured to a state of local multi-sig, roles, and rewards models.

This has made the DAO quite nimble and things evolved quickly, but if you weren’t a member of the local team it became hard to see how things were changing. Emerging org patterns were shared mostly by chat in Discord by members who actively participated in multiple guilds. This word of mouth sharing impeded learning and borrowing from one another quickly. Some artifacts exist outlining who has been elected to do what, how they got into those positions, and what they’re accountable for… but it isn’t easy to piece the resulting picture together across disparate Discord chatter, Sesh polls, Discourse proposals, Snapshot votes, google docs, and Notion pages.

We are upholding the DAO value of being transparent, but it isn’t fulfilling the intended benefit. How might we make it easier to quickly get a clear picture of what’s going on and who’s helping to make that happen?

“What roles are compensated and for how much?”

A benefit of the decentralized approach to treasury management, 20 multi-sigs at time of writing, is that local patterns of rewards and rewards distribution have emerged. This allows each guild and project to experiment and find optimal patterns of talent engagement and coordination. A diversity of patterns emerged but it is not easy to get a sense of how compensation works across the DAO. Guidance was provided early in Season 1 of an approx. 1,000 BANK per hour of work; but this is only a guide and many remuneration patterns have emerged:

  • Roles with stable responsibilities have a “seasonal salary” elected in by Team (e.g. Ops Guild)
  • Local Coordinape Epoch at the end of a season or when project Milestones are achieved (e.g. DesignGuild, BountyBoard)
  • Bounty or tip culture layered in for well defined recurring work (Writers Guild, Design Guild)
  • Some have discussed a ‘basic income’ for those deemed ‘core contributors’ (BountyBoard)
  • Most are likely a hybrid of all of the above and other patterns the authors have not observed directly

This diversity and experimentation is a feature, not a bug. How might we make it easier to:

  1. Keep track of the local customs?
  2. Calibrate for ‘relative fairness’ across teams/guilds?
  3. Easily borrow from the patterns of other teams?

“Which projects can I work on?”

When new members join, aside from bounties, it’s not very easy to take a self-directed approach to finding ways to meaningfully contribute. Recently there’s both guild select and project select as a means of discovering at a high level what’s happening --unlocking the channels to attempt to uncover more. Correspondingly, it’s hard for projects to signal that they need help. What results is a very conversationally intensive (and slow) approach to coordination. New members introduce themselves, select channels, introduce themselves again in ‘start-here’, DM with peeps, then attend some calls if they can align to the standing call time, and only then possibly are they able to carve out a first task.

How might we make it easier to:

  1. See a catalogue of open ‘roles’ like an internal job hiring board?
  2. Search for members with specific skills who are open to DAO work?

“To Firehose or not to Firehose?”

In the corporate world there’s an org-chart; that notoriously nasty thing that’s a clear reminder of who has been given ‘power over’ you. DAOs delightfully flip this model on its head, but the absence of an org-chart and employee directory can make it hard to picture how a DAO is organized. Visualizations, maps, pictograms, and infographics are powerful communication tools that help the human mind embrace complicated and complex domains.

In the early days of a DAO ‘Discord as OrgChart’ was more or less fine. It has a simple structure of categories and channels arranged as an indented list. Enter Season1 and that indented list is absolutely huge and few can ‘drink from the firehose’ and actually build a picture of the DAO in their mind’s eye. Which leaves you with two bad choices: turn on the firehouse and be overwhelmed or turn it off and miss something.

Notion is even more flexible and unbounded which makes it great as a Wiki and guild or project knowledge repository but it doesn’t create a quick-to-understand picture of the DAO, it’s instead more of a rich knowledge repository of meeting notes, project and guild resources, etc. But only if you know which page to go to and/or win the Notion global search lottery.

How might we create:

  1. A visualization of the DAO that acts as a place to get a high-level picture?
  2. A better jumping off point into the richer knowledge repositories and coordination tools like Notion?
  3. The ability to guild- and project-select in Discord with better up-front context?

Proposed Solution

Discord and Notion aren’t scaling well. Especially as we rapidly grow and further decentralize ops and governance. The DAOCartographers recommend experimenting with augmenting our current tooling with a more purpose-built mapping and visualization solution. Discord is excellent for real-time communication and Notion is an extremely flexible Wiki / KnowledgeBase; but neither gives an easy to digest picture of the DAO’s structure and membership.

Sobol is a purpose-built tool for creating and editing maps of decentralized organizations. First introduced and utilized by Consensys and more recently adopted by DAOs. The stated aim is to give these types of vibrant and dynamic communities an easy to navigate and maintain map of how teams and members have agreed to work together. (Kinda like GitHub for your DAO-DNA)

Disclosure: @Bpetes is a founding member of the Sobol team in addition to participating in BanklessDAO since Season0 in ps-guild, design-guild, and bounty-board-project. Sobol has been offered up free to use for the DAO for Season 2 in exchange for feedback. If there’s interest after S2 and the DAO feels the tool was useful, a modest token stream of BANK to Sobol, commensurate with value discovered would be a welcomed discussion for Season3+.

Current State of BanklessDAO Map Prototype

1600×889 160 KB

1600×817 199 KB

How we could use this…

The following features are listed in proposed relative order of recommended adoption:

  • Visual DAO Structure Maps
    • Team & Role Profiles w/ treasury management, governance, and comp summary info. and links out to Notion/Gnosis/Snapshot etc. where helpful
  • Member Directory
    • Discord based automated User Provisioning & Login (no emails required)
    • User profiles with skill tags
    • Search/filters
  • Project ‘Heartbeat’ (cc: @Kouros @tommyolofsson we saw your awesome recent post related)
    • Milestone and KPI tracking dashboard for projects
    • Project Update ‘posts’ prompted automatically by DiscordBOT
  • OrgMap Widget
    • No login required interactive map of the DAO embedded on our bankless.community site
  • OpenAPI
    • Analytics Guild ‘DAO-dash’ project considering how this data can augment the social graph they’re building from all the other tools we’re using (cc: @saulthorin @paulapivat )

Proposed Program Roadmap

Right Now:

  • Set up an initial map of structure that can be used as a base to build from

Artifact:

  • Enable Discord integration to automatically provision members into Sobol directory
    • Install SobolBot
    • Create new Discord role tags ‘Sobol Admin’ and ‘Sobol Editor’
    • Proposed permission mapping is as follows:
      • Sobol Admin = Administrator access in Sobol
      • Level2 = Editor access in Sobol
      • Sobol Editor = Ability to give non-Level2s editor access in Sobol where needed
      • Level1 = Added to Member Directory in Sobol (can edit profile); otherwise, View Only access
      • All others can log in with Discord and browse Sobol in ‘guest mode’ but don’t have a member profile.
    • Setup member profile templates and encourage folks to log in and fill out.

UpNext:

  • Training material (sessions for guild/project reps who want to be editors)
    • How-to guides and vids (Notion)
    • Recruit from current guild reps and project rep roles
    • Set up a way to gather feedback on the program
  • DAOCartography Biweekly mapping AMAs (open to all and recorded)
  • Work with ‘first quests’ to get a link into the map in advance of guild/project select step so folks can select with more context
  • Work with Grant Committee and Project Leads to form agreement to experiment with milestone tracking and project updates in Sobol
  • Periodic (end of Season?) DAOwide feedback surveys with users and KPI share-out to continually evaluate the solution approach and adjust course

Excitement for the future

The Bankless community has been and continues to be the pioneer in Defi education, DAO innovation, and Web3 promotion and awareness. The community has consistently front-run the opportunity and this proposal is in keeping with this pattern.

While this proposition has an immediate benefit to the BanklessDAO, the implications of its approach and mindest have far reaching consequences. The challenges we face today relating to DAO visibility and scaling are being faced by all DAOs across the ecosystem. The timing could not be more critical as we have the chance to build and develop solution patterns and primitives that will be leveraged across all of Web3 in the years to come.

This includes advancing the cause and vision behind things like:

  1. Self-sovereign identity: The power to define your identity(s) and its connections.
  2. Web3 social networks: The opportunity to turn today’s vicious circle of digital feudalism into a virtuous circle of collaboration and cooperation.
  3. Digital Citizenry: If DAOs are the next evolution of digital nations, then its graph of members is the directory for the new world’s citizenry.

If Etherscan is the standard in on-chain transactional transparency, consider the potential power and value of a “Etherscan for layer zero”. By experimenting with @TeamSobol on this, Bankless is in a strong position to play ‘navigator’ on Sobol’s roadmap and pitch collaborations with bDAO tooling projects to make this possible. Such is the expansive vision and potential impact behind this proposal.

If you believe in the vision and power of Web3, then you know these things are inevitable, not just possible. The only question is whether we will play a significant part in building this vision and have the boldness to be a first mover.

This all starts with having a map of our own DAO. BanklessDAO cannot make precise decisions without a clear picture of how we operate, so we urge you to vote yes on the proposal.

POLL

  • YES - Let’s execute the program roadmap
  • NOT YET - Wrong timing or needs more definition
  • NO - Wrong solution defined

0 voters

10 Likes
2

I had a similar idea but you’ve put a lot more time and thought into it. I support this.

2 Likes
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This is awesome, if we join forces at a later stage we can get clear metrics for projects to get paid on as opposed to upfront payment prior to actual progress!

1 Like
4

Thx! Come join us; would be great to have our support. If interested reach out to @0xJustice in the coming week.

2 Likes
5

Totally down for this.

6

Awesome, I can’t wait to see it. Let me know if and how I can help.

1 Like
7

it is a great visual presentation that you made in this prototype, and we need better transparency and easier on-boarding

1 Like
8

The Sobol software looks good. My only concern is building something out now that becomes a useful tool to the DAO at a price to be determined later.

9

Love this. Wish we had it months ago :stuck_out_tongue:

1 Like
10

I am 100% in favor of the project and look forward to seeing it in action!

1 Like
11

I reviewed Sobol a few months ago and felt it was compelling for us to use. I think we are ready now!

Agree with @brianl about indeterminate pricing - especially since SaaS typically charges per seat… and we’re larger by the day.

12

Recently I helped transition my old company into the O2 framework (organic-organization/meta-agreements.md at master ¡ targetteal/organic-organization ¡ GitHub) which gives this clarity of roles and responsibilities, and we used a tool similar to Sobol: https://www.holaspirit.com/
I can attest to the usefulness of having this map of roles and responsibilities.

It goes a long way in terms of empowering people to make quick decisions without wondering if they’re stepping on someone’s toes. Also, it doubles as a map for getting people to the right point of contact when they have ideas, concerns, and so on.

I see Sobol is going on the same road as Holaspirit, and I would love if there were also plans to add support for structured meetings like in holaspirit, which makes it much easier to keep track of meeting notes and also allows for laser-focused discussion one topic a time (@Bpetes any alpha on this? :eyes: )

Count me in if you guys need any help implementing this (:

13

@brianl and @jameswmontgomery.eth Sobol is open to setting terms up front if Bankless community would prefer to do that. Would you be interested in taking lead in proposing or know who in the DAO would? Sobol team has indicated they are open to a token stream that’s not related to number of seats so DAO can comfortably grow without concerns – ‘X’ BANK per ‘time-period’

1 Like
14

Awesome idea @Bpetes and having had a glimpse of Sobol in action, it’d be a great tool to give Bankless DAO it’s first map!

15

Would the individuals who voted NOT YET be willing to share their reservations or concerns in this thread? Perhaps more information or modifications could be made to this proposal to make them change their vote to YES. We welcome the feedback and conversation.

1 Like
16

Nice, BANK tokens are what we’ve got! We could either do fixed BANK or maybe use a 30d moving average. What would satisfy your needs?

17

Brilliant question.
Sobol team is totally cool w/ something that rebases based on moving average vs. fixed.

Not aware of a solution that can read an oracle and do a subscription stream (but we’re talking with ETHSign + Superfluid to see if there’s interest in building something like this using Chainlink or similar). So perhaps in short-term we do 90 day terms (kinda aligned to bDAO seasons) that sets price based on moving average of previous period?

Thoughts & Advise?

I think tooling budget (e.g. Notion) is in ops-guild so also would love some advice on how to mature this aspect of the feedback on this post towards an agreement that perhaps that guild’s seasonal budget addresses? cc: @frogmonkee @AboveAverageJoe

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Not sure its worth a whole thing vs monthly, seasonal, or even yearly rebase. I’m aligned with a 90d test, but would love to have something longer negotiated so we’re not revisiting the contract so often. Maybe we trial and revisit?

2 Likes
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I totally agree with you , I joined in discord for several months as a new member for BanklessDAO , I still don’t know what 's the bank’s value, what’s the clear map of the BanklessDAO, because of every proposal is payoff with BANK to developer that is how to use it, I can’t get any messages about the project progress ，Who can tell me clearly！

1 Like
20

This is exactly the kind of thing I was thinking about when I quickly put together my pseudo-proposal in Figma ( Figma ). Ideally, once the channels are organized and onboarding is streamlined, I was thinking the next step would be to connect all notion/wiki pages to the respective guilds and channels so to create a comprehensive, accessible, and transparent map of the dao’s activities.

As for onboarding, is gating possible in sobol? I’ve explored Sobol a bit so far, but maybe I just can’t figure it out, or it’s a limitation of the Free Trial - I can’t tell (nor can I figure out how to put teams into subteams). Seeing the whole map for new members may be overwhelming as they’re going through the onboarding process.

As for a page for “open roles” in guilds: would it be possible to just aggregate the data into a single page?

1 Like