Governance Department Retro No. 1

Governance
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Summary:

Following up with the post from the mult-sig last week (here), folks in the Governance Department have kickstarted conversations around the next steps. These start with a series of retrospectives about different aspects of the DAO. This post outlines the retro around the DAO mission. In the following weeks, the Governance Department will continue to run retros on various topics in order to understand how to best move forward. For folks who are unable to attend these retros, feel free to drop your comments below or share your thoughts during the CCs.

Specification

In order to revamp the DAO, we want to start with doing retros around some specific topics. These are:

  • Funding
  • Governance
    • Org units
    • Structures (like constitution)
  • Economics (tokenomics)
  • Vibes
  • Mission
  • Operations

In the latest governance meeting, we started to think about the DAO mission. The conversion went a bit off track, so we have divided the input into the above categories. In the following meeting we will brainstorm on the mission related aspects pointed out by the community. The full set of notes can be found here.

Here is the categorised input from the first retro. The highlighted text received support from multiple members.

Topic Stop Start Continue
Funding - Paying for everything, especially regardless of RoI - Unclear guidelines on token distribution - automatic funding - paying for microroles - paying for duplicate efforts (pods, Nls etc) - easier to do business with across projects (revenue & sponsors) - Retro-grant funding w/community voting on % - require funding requests to put up collateral (smart contract ie Raid Guild) - introduce some sort of KPIs to projects and initiatives funded - focus on products that can bring revenue to the DAO, have an ROI - Some form of funding for “lights on” - minim payment
Governance - Lack of coordination in brand usage - stop using the bankless brand - A token who’s only utility is conversion to fiat - Permissionless everything. Fair gates keep order. - Bankless Brand - make people accountable if damage was done to the DAO - thinking: what is actually $BANK token? - Governance to assist to Charter branding permissions
Org units - having 100 guilds for onboarding -
Constitution
Vibes - thinking that DAO work can replace tradWork - - DAOING for fun - community calls - Fun vibes and connection - irl events - DAOING for fun
Mission - onboarding new people to the DAO as mission - paying learners to learn - striving to make profit - maybe instead of “help the world go bankless”, we can approach from a “support financial self-sovereignty” angle - Become a Social DAO. That offers pathways to Web3 - with a mission that appeals to core contributors - intentional community building - Focusing on scalability of our mission & efforts - mission to differetiate us - make a clear, scoped list of actionable ways to address the mission - defining what we mean by education, media, and culture - creating onramps to the tech (rather than the dao) - thinking about the shortest mission statement possible - breaking our mission into operational parts - Helping people into web3 - Guiding people (communities) in Web3 tools and practices, especially in funding mechanisms
Operations - too much decentralization - Decentralization for the sake of it - Processes for the sake of having processes - make onboarding ded simple - Distributed systems over decentralized systems - more edu & promo spaces and audio events, webinars - more cross-collaboration efforts - aggregating existing resources (youtube videos, how to’s, etc) instead of recreating them internally - Keep Ops going Notion, Discord (lights on) - Educational tweets on MD social channels - Making room for experiments

Next steps:

  • Collect feedback from the community
  • Take this feedback as input for the next sync
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A few months ago I wrote a newsletter about how to be a Vitalik-style cypherpunk, with the intention of tackling the decentralisation stages of Ethereum in our day-to-day lives. Therefore, I believe we could apply the Ethereum Roadmap to our DAO’s reform mechanisms.

  • The Merge: So, right now we are all coming together to create a new, more robust DAO, where we join HQ or consolidate with independent cells of a living organism.
  • The Surge: By consolidating the number of participants, it will allow us to have a consensus and more trust between us.
  • The Scourge: I think the decision of the grants committee is great, we need to stop any cash extraction and now direct the effort to where it is needed.
  • The Verge: The creation of multiple bodies that allow us to make joint decisions, a greater number of projects that have something in common, giving something back to the DAO.
  • The Purge: Limit unnecessary projects and prioritise growth over implosion.
  • The Splurge: We will make everything beautiful and beautiful that comes next.
    I just make a proposal that it would do something magnificent if in each of our days we implement the improvement of a network as a policy of personal change. The feedback on retro will be fantastic, I’m sure, and we will learn a lot about what everyone wants.
    Best
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Everything looks good over all I think

I saw what I quoted above, and above that I see that you are mentioning that you want to stop considering DAO work as replacing tradfi work.

Could you maybe consider it as not a replacement, but a new paradigm? Which can give further credence to the idea of financial self sovereignty?

A lot of people tend to think self sovereignty as in you are financially independent. That may lead you back down the path of “be on a dao, you’re now financially independent. That’s obviously not the case. But perhaps it’s a matter of reimagining what independence means. (Through your membership in the DAO)

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I have long thought that the role of Treasury needs to be clearer. Too many people think about their own project when submitting proposals, and not that the wider community needs to benefit. Treasury should not be a handout centre, and folk submitting projects need to think about Market Assessment, and potential Market Impact.

I’ve been working with @Oakfloors for some months on a Market Assessment amendment to the Project Grants Template - the Governance Notion page currently quotes the outdated Project Funding Template - which looks to provide revenue where possible for the Treasury.

We need to look at Treasury Grants as investments that can and should repay the Treasury over time. Funding is a lovely idea, but typical funding still looks for payback and economic impact. And where it’s a true grant, that the initial payment is a one off, that any organisation created can slowly stand on its own two feet. Else it perishes.

Web 3 and decentralisation is still a fantastic goal to pursue, but we still need old fashioned Web 2 bottom line disciplines to ensure bDAO is sustainable longer term. This is the blend we seek between the world of tokens and Web 2 economics. #Tokenomics.

FYI @links @Oakfloors .

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Further to my comments above, a group of friends in Twitter have been using applied thinking to abstract situations, including a DAO with a depleting treasury, and considering the impact Market Assessments could have in guilds within a DAO.

The consensus using Gemini and this particular approach is that Market Assessments can go a long way towards reducing the threat in our current situation.

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