Governator Season 4 Budget Proposal
Authors: jameswmontgomery.eth, ivan7538, Tiki, ken, stradford, jarisjames
Date Created: April 19, 2022
Date Posted: April 19, 2022
SUMMARY
The Governator project would like to request funding for continuing its operations into Season 4, where the team will seek to complete the MVP and deliver a usable tool to the Discord server by the end of the season.
On top of the existing standard poll features we’ve built, we aim to add token voting and automatic recurring polls to the product, rounding out the product we feel we can truly bring to market for testing and potential revenue.
Ultimately, we aim to bring private token voting directly into Discord and automate as much as we can.
S4 FUNDING TOTAL
965,000 BANK + $500
SUMMARY OF ACTIVITIES IN SEASON 3
Per the original funding request in the middle of Season 3, the team sought to deliver a proof of concept product that:
- Allows a user to create a poll from a frontend web app
- Post that poll to a specific Discord channel
- Only allow users with certain tags the ability to vote
- Tally votes privately
- Post the result automatically after a time period
We are nearly there and hope to showcase what we’ve made at a CC soon.
1. 
Proof of Concept Progress
We’re all but there! The team is working to finalize the last pieces of our API and connect the dots for a fully functioning definitely-not-sesh poll bot.
Once the connection is good, we’ll push the code up to production and bring in some testers in the bot server.
Meanwhile, enjoy this demo video!
2. 
Guild Governance Research Acquired
In our original initiative, we sought to understand how the guilds are currently running their governance. Were there any opportunities to improve? How could we help via our tools?
Check out the results and takeaways.
TL;DR: Everything is manual and there is plenty of room for standardization and automation. Most notably, most of the guilds do not have a specific policy for removing role holders. 
3. 
Tech Migration
With DevOps spinning down, we had to migrate the codebases and servers on to our own accounts.
Mission successful 
4. 
Ecosystem Connections
Throughout the season, the team connected with a few different projects to start building bridges.
- Snapshot
- Polygon via Questbook
- Orange Protocol
- Disco
- Aavegotchi
We’ll start to see much more come from this side of things as we send our team into the wild to research and connect with other DAOs who might benefit from our tooling! 
5. 
Stealth Launched Website
Just getting started, but it’s something!
SEASON 4 PLANS AND SUCCESS METRICS
So what are we going to do in Season 4?
Objective #1: Finish the Proof of Concept
We’re putting the final touches on the base platform and will get that live for some beta testers. It won’t be mind bending tech, so it’s not really time to launch the coup on Seshbot on our server yet. Soon™
Objective #2: Token Weighted Discord Voting
We will evaluate some data partners and build on top of our existing platform to add:
- The ability to pair Ethereum accounts to your Discord account
- The ability to create polls that count token-weighted votes
- The ability to vote privately with your tokens directly from Discord with a single emoji vote
Objective #3: Recurring Polls
Once we feel token voting is in a solid place, we’ll move our attention to building features to support recurring polls.
Objective #4: Project Governance Research
In S3 we polled Guilds about their governance; in S4 we’ll turn our attention to the projects that are building within BanklessDAO to better assess their governance models and identify opportunities for our product to solve problems.
Objective #5: Design Everything
In S3 we took inspiration from some familiar products, but this can only take us so far.
In S4, we want to bring in the Design Guild to help:
- Give us a proper Brand Book
- Design a fresh UI/UX to support the new features we intend to build (and to help differentiate our product from you know who)
We’re still discussing this opportunity with the Design Guild, so we’ll save the larger Design Initiative and budget for a later proposal.
Providing Value to BanklessDAO
These sections are repurposed from the original spec and still hold very true.
BACKGROUND
Why are you making this proposal?
We are making this proposal to provide fair governance through the use of private voting on Discord. Private voting in elections guard against coercion (“positive” persuasion, neutral bias, and potentially negative consequences) and are essential to the integrity of the democratic process.
What problem or opportunity does this proposal target?
We have an opportunity to replace the need for Guild Organizer’s and Ops folks creating manual Sesh survey’s every season to run elections. (potentially add some details of the research we’ve accumulated about the manual process) Private voting will also encourage involvement in the governance process as the individual votes will not be visible to the majority. This fosters a fair and inclusive process to governance and is at the center of some of the issues we are tackling at the moment.
What are the driving factors behind why you think this is a good idea?
Fair governance and participation have been at the forefront of many of us here at BDAO. As our talent pool increases the need for more role holders will increase. The increase in role holders will require a more full-time/round the clock process to create voting polls, submit payment, change permissions and execute these in a timely manner. Being able to effectively manage this process will increase transparency which will encourage participation. Governator is not an answer to the greater opportunities we have in governance but it will create a simpler process that encourages participation in the process.
MISSION & VALUES ALIGNMENT
How does this project help the DAO achieve its mission and align with its values?
We need to automate governance systems to unlock contributor’s time and ultimately scale the DAO’s coordination mechanics. With a product dedicated to automating governance, we can actually look at scaling out.
Governator will help by creating a consistent, user-friendly governance automation tool to help people engage and discover the power of governance.
FINANCIAL IMPLICATIONS
Salaried roles
Champion @ 10h/wk
PM @ 10h/wk
FE Dev @ 15h/wk
BE Dev @ 25h/wk
Treasurer @ 5h/mo
Scribe @ 1h/wk
Total Role Funding:
66 hours / week x 13 weeks x 1000 BANK / hour = 808,000 BANK
Bounties & Other Costs:
Servers & Hosting = $500
Research = 50,000 BANK
Brand Book = 30,000 BANK
Monthly S4 Project Management Retrospective x 3mo = 12,000 BANK
Bounties = 50,000 BANK
S3 Overage = 15,000 BANK
157,000 BANK
$500 stables
Total Estimation for S4:
965,000 BANK + $500
Approve S4 Funding
- Approve
- No, needs modification (will comment)