Establish and fund Department of Governance

Grants/Funding
1

Authors; @jengajojo
Editors: @ernest_of_gaia @Icedcool @links
Affiliation: None
Funds requested: 249,500 BANK + rewards program
Department wallet: TBD

SUMMARY

Department Description

The Governance Department stewards the governance conversation in BanklessDAO. The goals of the Department are:

  1. Governance ops
  • Ensure that all governance operations abide by consensus on snapshot or forum
    • Ensure that once proposals pass, that the constitution is updated
    • Ensures that proposal templates are up to date and easily accessible
    • Ensures that the dao governance processes are clearly stated
    • Ensures that membership rights and benefits are clearly stated
  • Ensure that the DAO operations follow the constitution
    • Transition the Handbook to be formatted as a Constitution
    • Ensure the updating of the constitution
    • Assist Units in the dao with understanding the Constitution
  • Ensure smooth process flow
  1. Governance strategy
  • Sense the governance bottlenecks in the DAO and suggest changes
  • Adapt the governance process for faster execution, sybil resistance and resistance to governance attacks
  • Assist the DAO in identifying it’s north star

Past activities

The DAOStewards project held regular governance meetings in the amphitheatre on mondays to collect feedback from the community on the state of governance and possible solutions to address some of the challenges in this area. Governance Department is an idea which came out of these conversations

MISSION & VALUE ALIGNMENT

The design space of governance is answering these two questions:

  1. Who makes decisions?
  2. How are these decisions made?

Good governance helps assure the DAO that decisions are made in a way which generates engagement and ownership over those decisions from the highest number of contributors. No org can hope to succeed long term without good governance. We will use these resources [one, two] as inspiration while building the department

FINANCIAL IMPLICATIONS

Budget Breakdown

Role holders: 149,500
Bounties 100,000
Governance Rewards Program [Poll Below]

Compensation Breakdown

Role Calculation Budget
Department Lead: 7000 BANK/ week x 13 weeks 91000
Admin 2000 BANK/week x 13 weeks 26000
Rewards Program Manager 1500 BANK/week x 13 weeks 19500
Accountant 1000 BANK/week x 13 weeks 13000
Bounties 100,000

SEASONAL KPI

Factor KPI Success Metric
Governance updates # number of proposals #≥1
Governance rewards # number of unique participants #≥10
FURTHER DEPARTMENT CHANNELS

Department Notion Page: TBD
Working agreement: TBD
Poll/grid capturing the guild affiliation of active community of outgoing season: TBD
Any other organisational information of interest:

Role Descriptions:

  1. Department Lead
  • Ensure that the department fulfils its overall mandate towards the DAO
  • Allow individual contributors to stay up to speed at a higher frequency than async updates.
  • Moderate discord channels in order to: Minimise silos and Encourage collaboration.
  • Co-Represent the department during DAO Community Calls
  • Welcome & direct new members.
  • Facilitate weekly department meetings, moderating meeting flow & agenda
  • Coordinate all activities in the Governance Department
  1. Admin
  • Own end to end notion and discord administration
  • Create agenda template and record meeting notes
  1. Accountant
  • Create the seasonal budget
  • Create and record all Tx according the accounting principles followed within the DAO
  1. Rewards Program Manager:
  • Work with the department to ideate and test different strategies for governance mining rewards
  • Suggest a program outline for the next season based on

POLL

1. How much BANK shall we allocate towards a Governance Rewards Program in S7?

  • 250,000 BANK
  • 500,000 BANK
  • 750,000 BANK
  • 1,000,000 BANK

0 voters

2. Which tools would you advise we use for the rewards program?

  • Thrive Coin for active commenters and proposers
  • Coordinpe for all governance participants on forum
  • Fixed rewards per forum post or comment
  • Rank contributors by engagement of their forum posts
  • Other options [comment below]

0 voters

NEXT STEPS

  1. Create department channels and notion page
  2. Elect role holders
  3. Design and deploy a governance rewards program

POLL

Do you accept the formation of a governance department and funding it with the ask as outlined in this proposal?

  • Yes
  • No

0 voters

1 Like
2

legend has it, this proposal was supposed to be shipped before the dawn of time! thanks for finally shipping it frens.

3 Likes
3

Interesting proposal, have a few questions:
What does “ensure” mean here - how and with what means is the mandate ensured?
The department lead roleholder salary is very high. How did you reach this and how will the roleholder be elected - only by the department or by the entire DAO?
What aspects will the rewards program fund? I may have missed the specifics there.
Department Notion Page, working agreement etc, all TBD. Would it not be hepful to have more of an outline there?

This aside, its good that governance is being adressed!

1 Like
4

Thanks @Bananachain .

  • The mandate is judged by the KPIs.
  • The salary is inline with all other department lead salaries according to S6 grant requests
  • We have some people interested in these roles, we will discuss this further on the Monday Governance Meetings
  • The rewards program will, atleast in the beginning, fund comments and proposals.
  • TBD because we don’t have a team in place yet, but it should be fixed before the grants review process
5

Upfront I should say: good that governance is addressed!

However, I am not convinced that setting up a department is the right approach to take at this stage. The most concrete aspects I see in this proposal are roleholders and salaries.

As you said, there is not a team in place yet to work through the different aspects that need to be addressed. This, though, should be a prerequisit before even considering setting up an entire department, as this goal can be achieved with a far smaller group, quicker and cheaper, by following a project or working group approach with far less overhead to deal with to start upfront.

To my knowledge the initiative is based on regular meetings. I would think the logical next step is to establish a small group first who complete the TBD groundwork first. For this I would see “funding for a purpose”. In the current shape I fear it could be a white elephant being set up for which, going forward and irrespective of outcome, the sentiment then may be to find a role for the entity since by that time so much funds would have been allocated to it.

2 Likes
6

The proposal is an output from these discussions.

  • There is a 100,000 BANK coordinape for it’s participants in S6.
  • Analytics shows high forum activity in this duration

Clearly, incentivising governance has shown positive engagement in the DAO. Now we should channel this engagement into beneficial outcomes for everyone and that is something the people who have been active in this workstream have already demonstrated. We have some good candidates for the initial squad and we can add it to this proposal once we have the final outcome

7

my biggest complaint, “ensure” is not a good word to use.

8

The poll for choosing role holders is live now Discord

1 Like
9

Based on the poll results and KPIs, it kind of feels like this department is being paid to run a governance rewards program.

Ok that’s cool. But roleholder salaries are ~250k BANK and the governance rewards are ~250k BANK. Feels like a lot of bureaucracy to distribute rewards. Can we reduce this ratio somehow?

2 Likes
10

Thank you for the comment links. The roleholder costs are actually 150k since the remaining is distributed as bounties. The current ratio comes out to be 150/350 = 0.42 One way to improve this ratio is for more people to click on the higher BANK rewards. Now ofcourse one can argue why not offer the option to poll role holder salaries? In which case one can argue why do salary polls for only one department and not all of them?

Can you please offer a more objective analysis as to why this “feels” like “department is being paid to run a governance rewards program”? How do we as a DAO objectively come to consensus instead of coming to consensus on vibes?