I have been here in bankless dao for a couple of weeks, mostly surfing over the discord and to figure out what’s going on and the structure of bankless dao.
Traditional corporation mode has reached its limit, DAO is a great idea to explore a new way to release people’s productivity. That’s the reason I came here. I think lots of people want to contribute to this new approach and benefit from it.
However, we are spread all over the world and with different time zones, so it is extremely difficult to organize most of them to have an online meeting together. If people from a similar time zone as a meeting organizer, it is alright, but for people from a totally different time zone, especially when it is the middle night or earlier morning, it would be so frustrating to get up. If you are single, that might be alright. But if you are not, that would be a disturbance for your family or roommates.
I believe this is not only an issue for bankless dao, but for other online cooperation activities as well. Does anyone know how bankless DAO handle this issue at present? Thanks.
This is really frustrating according to my own experience.
I have been thinking this for a while and fetch some of my thoughts:
A meeting (main meeting) can be recorded and the secretary role can take notes. These records can be posted to a forum and link published in discord as we are currently doing.
In each guild, there is a ‘start-here’ section, there is a guideline notion with guild members as it is now. We can add more information on that table for people’s geographic location and time zone. People from similar time zones can find each other and group.
People from similar time zones can take a mini meeting if they want to discuss the proposals in the main meeting and then reply to the post with their agreement.
This is something like a main chain and its side chain. There is proposal on the main chain while there are many side chains have their thoughts.
In theory the sesh bot is helpful here. Discord knows your time zone, so you interact with sesh in your local time zone and it converts it before adding an event to the calendar. It also shows a timer next to calendar events, like “starts in 2 hours”.
As of now, SESH bot is the main way for scheduling meetings. Meeting minutes are also taken for each session. However, waking up to an important meeting with a potential contribution isn’t good for the contributor nor the DAO due to opportunity cost.
A potential way is to localise by region, much like how Index has set up an APAC group supported by the awesome @lee0007
That way timezones will be localised and only the leads have to coordinate their discussions.
" localise by region", I totally agree. This is something like a main chain and side chain. People can group close to each other and make a meeting to express their thoughts, after making a consensus, they can reply to the post by the main meeting organizer.
Research Guild had a quick look at this at request of Education Guild, and we approached the time zone issue from two angles:
Is there a somewhat decent time for all of us, across time zones? (Answer: not really, but these may be helpful):
UTC, Coordinated Universal Time: 9:00pm
PDT/PST, Pacific Daylight Time (US): 2:00pm
EDT/EST, Eastern Daylight Time (US): 5:00pm
AEST/AEDT, Australian Eastern Daylight Time: 8:00am
Singapore: 5:00am
IST, India Standard Time: 2:30am
UTC, Coordinated Universal Time: 12:30pm
PDT/PST, Pacific Daylight Time (US): 5:30am
EDT/EST, Eastern Daylight Time (US): 8:30am
AEST/AEDT, Australian Eastern Daylight Time: 11:30pm
Singapore: 8:30pm
IST, India Standard Time: 6pm
The second angle was whether we could figure a time that would suit folks in certain time zone ‘bands’ - however this really comes down to individual preference. We thought about running a survey but ultimately perhaps this is something that can be worked out if local groups do form.
Perhaps there’s no need for so many meetings. Isn’t that office-like culture?
Used to work in a global process, we called “follow the sun”, where one team just leave/pass instructions/requirements from one timezone to another…america/europe/asia. Works in development/production, not sure in others.
Because there are only that many ‘good’ times, we should reserve these timings for important meetings. How we define important will depend on what is priority to the DAO. I’d assume that Community Calls would then be prioritised. One way might be
Sunday: Bankless Townhalls
Monday: Guild community calls
Tuesday; Project update calls
Localised community calls like the Singapore meetup would just pick a time that’s great for the region
Individual projects should just pick times that work for them and adjust accordingly.
Furthermore, time is the only constrain for DAOs. Reserving/syncing certain timings would actually ensure that contributors stick to (and prioritise) projects so that time can definitely be allocated rather than hopping from project to project.
I saw there is “Geographies” category in discord channels. We can make use of this to sub divide to more regions, so that people within these regions can join and have a chance to initiate some meeting to discuss if they want.
Too many meetings are nightmare, this just give people close to each other an opportunity to group together to express their opinions.