Governator Project Season 7 Proposal

Grants/Funding
1

Governator Project Season 7 Proposal

Project Champion: montgomery#8177
Squad: Tiki#0503, Sprinklesforwinners#1125, itszachnotzak#7632
Purpose: Revenue seeking public good
Affiliation: Dev, Ops, GC
Authors; Editors: jameswmontgomery.eth, SprinklesForWinners
Date created: 01/27/23
Date posted: 01/27/23
Funds requested: 1,195,000 BANK
Project wallet(s): 0x6A7E3Ce0eBd1C79A0cD895C7F370AAB9c43482dE (gnosis)
Own subDAO/Discord server: #governator channel in bdao Discord

PROJECT TEASER

Sybil-resistant, token-enabled voting - directly in Discord!

SUMMARY

Project Description

The project exists to serve the governance space in between the properness of Snapshot and the casual straw polls of Sesh (and sybil-prone Discourse). Governator exists to allow communities to use their tokens in voting directly in Discord with no need to sign with their ledger wallet every time they want their voices heard.

Past/preparatory activities

Coming from three seasons on the Grants Committee, leading the Dev Guild, and participating at the DAO since genesis, I have seen a really critical need for a web3 native solution for soft governance. Snapshot is too firm and Sesh/Discourse too soft. We need a way to allow users to votes super easily with their tokens; and so, Governator was born.

We’ve been funded by the GC before and have reached a critical point: launch! As of this proposal, we have officially accomplished our V1 goals and have launched a full-featured version of the product on the BanklessDAO Discord server. This critical step is the jumping off point for building amazing new features and, more importantly, our ability to reach out to other communities & DAOs.

Take a look at this demo:

RETROSPECTIVE

We had a retrospective that illustrated (along with market research) that we are building the right service with the right team. The biggest challenges we will face next will be revenue and prioritization.

FINANCIAL IMPLICATIONS

Project Breakdown

Category Amount
Roles 848,000
Infrastructure 70,000
Bounties 100,000
Buffer 100,000
Overage (debt from last 2 seasons) 77,000
1,195,000 BANK

Though our roles comprise the core expense, there will be a need for a flexible budget regarding outreach, integration, education, support, and partnership that can be spread between Bounties and Buffer line items. These may also extend our runway in between seasons as projects are not as well defined inside the seasonal scope as departments & guilds.

Infrastructure is currently a low cost at about $500/year which currently equates to about 70k BANK. As this project scales, this cost will rise considerably as the need for business-scale web3 APIs and hosting may become apparent. We will explore alternative funding needs when that becomes the case.

The Overage debt is from continuing operations without funding for 2 seasons - we stretched our Season 4 budget across 3 seasons and did not want to return to the DAO for funding until we had accomplished our objective, which we have!

Compensation Breakdown

We abide by the recommended 1k BANK/hr framework set by the GC for the following roles.

Role Weekly Total (13 weeks)
Champion 10 130,000
PM 10 130,000
Full Stack Dev 20 260,000
FE Dev 10 130,000
UI Designer 10 130,000
Ambassador 5 65,000
Treasurer - 3,000
848,000 BANK

SEASONAL KPI

Factor KPI Success Metric
Discord servers # of server installs # ≥ 5
Polls # polls created # ≥ 50

COMMITMENTS

  • BANK Utility - Use BANK in simple token gated & weighted polls directly in Discord.
  • BANK Fees - We will explore allowing BANK as payment for this product.
  • BANK Buyback - We will explore using part of our revenue to buy BANK.
  • tlBANK Support - We can easily support tlBANK, POAP, Otterspace, or any other integration/token that bDAO wishes to explore as a part of membership definition.

BRANDING

We believe that fair, accessible governance is key to the success of the web3 mission - in this way (among many others - we are deeply aligned with the BanklessDAO mission). We’ll use BanklessDAO as a submark in our web presence, just not as our primary brand identity. It will appear in our web footer and other information about the product.

FURTHER PROJECT CHANNELS

Poll

It’s a Governator poll in Discord, in the #polls channel!

5 Likes
2

Love the project but role remuneration seems quite high to me as they equal role expenses of more than 3 guilds in comparison.

And is there a possible way to self sovereignty and if so have you thought about a revenue split between project and DAO?

4 Likes
3

Are there role descriptions to reference? Some are self-explanatory but it would help to know more about the Champion, PM, and Ambassador.

Parts of the Project Notion Page seem out of date (e.g. the header reflects S3 funding)

Does the project keep detailed accounting from previous seasons that can be shared?

1 Like
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From what I know, James is the champion, Ivan was the PM, and Jaris was the project ambassador. Both PM and Ambassador had to be let go the last season or so due to funding, but i’m not the best person to clarify in-depth :slight_smile:

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I didn’t go into the budgeting process trying to be high, I’ve just identified the areas of need across the org, identified these roles - along with the team’s availability - and this is the outcome. Compared to guilds with minimal organizing force, I suppose it makes sense that it equals three.

As for self sovereignty, I believe this a possibility. In S7 we’ll make the first strides toward monetization and begin to gain an understanding of how much communities are willing to pay for this service. It’s certainly our goal to reach sovereignty, I’m just not armed with enough information to provide a timeline. Likewise with revenue split; I can promise you intent, but its seemingly too early to provide number or methodology.

Ah yes, they did seem self-explanatory. Let me color those in though:

  • Champion: This is the scope of my role: oversight, direction, reviewing code, support, grant applications, demos, etc. A catch-all leader (and also required for BanklessDAO funding).
  • PM: This role name maybe doesn’t fit exactly with a traditional Project Manager as the champion’s role so far is deeply ingrained in day-to-day execution of tech effort. The idea here is to have another pair of hands in the catch-all spot (which @Sprinklesforwinners has been great with) from generating support content, managing Asana & Notion, creating POAPs, making connections and moving forward likely doing some education & demos within the DAO.
  • Ambassador: This role will be purely outreach/sales type. I’ve reached out to @jarisjames to sit in this role as someone to take Governator to other DAOs and make intros.

True, Notion is always in perpetual need of dusting. It’s on our to-do list. I do have an accounting document that @Tinman has been working with me on for the past few seasons. It has an accurate record of the distributions to all contributors for the duration of the project. I can share it while we work on publishing it somehow, DM me.

Yeah the project was on temporary leave for about two months and the regrouping effort kept the team lean so we could finish this V1 product. I’m excited to renew the positions with the new funding though!

6 Likes
6

i really like the Governator project, the idea of it. And i really like you used your previous budget wisely. I check your multi-sig and you seem to be planned your budget very well until now.

but there are somethings i can ask about the proposal.

1- Roles consist of Champion, PM, Devs, Designer, Ambassador and Accountant. Looking at the working hours i think the role pay is normal.

While Champ is spending 10 hrs, PM is spending 20 which is pretty realistic since this is a software project. PM needs to do a lot of coordination, problem solving, planning etc. Devs already should be doing dev stuff and if they are spending the hours stated in the proposal it is normal. Accountant keeping the books for 1 txn per month, looks ok. And the ambassador will be doing the networking, not sure about the pay but it is a small portion in the ask so kind of ok.

That brings me the question, what does the champion do? as it is stated in a forum answer;
Champion: This is the scope of my role: oversight, direction, reviewing code, support, grant applications, demos, etc. (what is the etc?) A catch-all leader (and also required for BanklessDAO funding).

But we do not have an up to date notion page, or an accounting book that we can inspect. I think these should be very important tasks that the champion should do for the accountability with the DAO. Accountant role seems a bit vague while there is a champion stripped off from the PM and Ambassador duties and there is only 1 transaction per month.

2- Being a specific software project, i don’t see where the 100K for bounties can be spent. You have devs, you have designer, you have an accountant and an ambassador for networking that are paid by salaries. Everything is already paid.

With the bounties and the buffer, 200K surplus for what?

3- There is no new features or feature updates in the KPIs, so what are the Devs doing this season? Either the product is complete and you do not need that much of Dev hours (may be some for maintenance and bug fixing), or the project is not complete and in this case you need KPIs for devs since they have the highest pays and we need to know what they did or will do.

4- About the sovereignty, who are your competitors and how will you surpass them?

5- The dashboard is on web so it can be permanent but the bot is specific to discord, if we decide to move on to another communication channel in the future, what will happen to the bot? Will it be adjusted to the new comms medium for free?

3 Likes
7

Please see rolls/hours in the budget proposal. You may be mistaking the PM roll for Front Stack roll.

A entire notion revamp is incoming.

Originally, the plan was to connect the previous Notion pages and update them accordingly. However my access to the pages would change daily, so it became difficult.
https://governator.notion.site/Governator-Support-Center-2ebc542d891a4fbba9c014cef66a6d6

Please see KPI’s listed in the proposal. Please note that the project launched in the bDAO server last week. To meet the KPI - # of servers launched in, we will need to launch in four more. Dev’s are absolutely critical to do this.

2 Likes
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What does it mean that “Snapshot is too firm”? Will this offer the same functionality as Snapshot, just without having to leave Discord?

1 Like
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@brianl The Governator offers multiple different voting strategies (token weighted, NFT gated, roll gated). Voting strategies such as token weighted allows for voting to be calculated using on chain balances - Governator allows for this to be done directly in a community’s discord server! Voting remains shielded during the vote - the outcome is transparently provided when the poll has concluded.

1 Like
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I think this is a fair critique; much like the rest of the DAOs projects, we are moving quickly and Notion information becomes outdated. Recently, the focus has mainly been on shipping, and as such documentation falls through. So for a personal account of the past several weeks of the champion’s time (my time), here’s where that attention went:

  • Reviewing code & providing feedback on feedback on feedback for how things should be built. Additionally knowing when to stop the focus on things even when they are not in the best shape to ensure team is spending toward the goal of launching a usable product.
  • Putting together projects, roadmap, and vision for what we can build next - and then create this very Grants Proposal!
  • Meeting with potential partners like Disco or Sobol or Orange to see what we can do together.
  • Reviewing documentation so we have some level of help docs available to the people.
  • Organizing testers, reviewing feedback, distilling new directives for the product.
  • Testing it myself as new features roll through.
  • Presenting to the DAO & answering questions as they pop up all over the Discord.
  • Thinking about this product every single day.

Hope this can clarify how I spend my time and I’m available to discuss live you want to chat through it.

I can give a good example: I’m working with @stackthat.eth to consider how we could migrate Discourse and provide an in-post integration for Governator to replace our sybil-prone forum polls. This would be work outside of our current scope but would be a great candidate for a bounty.

Or funding education initiatives for teaching folks how to use the product.

Or bountying out the creation of new Voting Strategies for Disco, Otterspace, or more to augment our technical capability.

Or hiring Infosec to pen test our application to ensure it has some security.

This buffer offer the flexibility to pursue these efforts without promising any of them. To cede the point, it does require trust that we’ll not simply pocket it ourselves - though I hope publicizing our Tx history will help instill some trust & transparency in how we are distributing.

“New Features” is an odd KPI since it’s kinda like “% completed”, but I can see maybe negotiating a specific feature set with the GC in addition to what we have for adoption.

As for what we would build, I have an exhaustive appetite for new features we can bring, but have paired it down in our Roadmap:

  • Self-Service Onboarding
  • Freemium / Accept Payments
  • Redesign
  • FE Voting (on the website)
  • Disco.xyz integration
  • Outreach to other servers on our waitlist
  • Self-service token strategy creation
  • Infrastructure hardening
    • Permissions Systems
    • Oauth Migration
    • Open SDK (maybe)

Broad question, but I believe that one of the best chances we have to compete with both Sesh and Snapshot is to offer solutions for both web3 native organizations AND those communities that hate NFTs. Both. And we can serve both markets as they cannot.

The architecture is already setup to support any other platforms (if they can support us). For free? Unlikely. I’m also not convinced that migrating from Discord is a short or mid term possibility, so we can cross that bridge when we get there.

Snapshot is great at providing “official” polls - leveraging IPFS, requiring signatures, etc - and is widely regarding for large important decisions for DAOs. Governator is built to accommodate the more “day-to-day” use cases and offers broad publishing access. So for example not everyone can produce a Snapshot poll, only admins can do that. Governator allows really anyone to publish a poll and target it towards individual audiences and subDAOs without the pomp & circumstance of broad, inflexible Snapshot voting.

The aim isn’t to replace Snapshot in its current use at the DAO (though theoretically possible), but more to replace Discourse polls (which are terrible, yet inform ALL our funding).

3 Likes
11

Thank you for your answers, pretty explanatory.

i agree with

We can discuss on which features can be completed this season, so we better know what to expect at the end of the season. We can go with what you have already prioritized imo. Let’s see what others from the GC thinks.

1 Like
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i think a product development plan, revenue model, and revenue share agreement would be all i need to approve this high of a budget (doesn’t have to be too detailed). I am definitely going to be testing it out, ranked choice voting is the is the main voting strategy that i wish to see. IRoadmap would be nice to see what all the roles will be doing over the next 3- 6 months.

I can confirm that folks have been working hard for the last 2-3 seasons on this for sure.

1 Like
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poll results: https://www.governator.xyz/community/851552281249972254/polls/results/63d3f3f5f13e9ca83e268658

4 Likes