Operations Department related work

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I have noticed too many threads related to bDAO’s season 7 that have had issues with their requests for funding, which have lead me to make this post.

What does the operations department really do?

“Main responsibilities include: bots, cartography, communications, tooling, DAO-wide member compensation (formerly via Coordinape), membership perks, community management, documenting efficiencies between Guilds and DAOs, seasonal planning, surveying and analyzing behaviors and sentiments within the DAO.”

The above is taken from the Operations Department S7 funding post. I seriously question the “community management” and “seasonal planning” aspects of the statement when I see what looks like a lack of oversight when it comes to this Grants Commitee post, this DAOVOZ post, my own post in the S7 Operations funding post has yet to be addressed.

I will be the first to admit that I may be out to lunch on what the Operations Department is all about and actually does. Although the name Operations Department usually inolves most, if not all of planning, organizing, and supervising operations to produce the desired outcome of a high-quality product or service.

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Happy to discuss the ever-expanding workload of the Ops Department. I probably won’t be able to get everything out in one shot because just as bDAO itself is too large for any one person to follow completely, the Ops Department has many work streams and it would be very time consuming for any individual to track everything. But from my own observations, here’s my best attempt to outline what Ops does:

  • Coordinates the weekly Community Call
  • Discord Administration
  • Discourse Administration
  • Notion Administration
  • DAO Cartography
  • Thrivecoin Management
  • cNPS Implementation
  • DASH Administration
  • Season Transitions

Honestly, there’s probably quite a bit more but a lot happens in threads and I can’t possibly read it all.

I’m not involved in the Season Transition, but I don’t understand your comment about that at all. Someone went to a conference and is asking for retroactive funding, and this itself is a failure of the Ops Department? I don’t follow. The other example is a discussion on a bonus for the Grants Committee. Again, not sure why this is failing of Ops.

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“Operations” is a catch-all term and the definition depends completely on the organization. In our case, the Operations Department mainly handles the administration of DAO tooling.

I’ve been part of the group for over a year, and the general sentiment seems to be that Ops is unopinionated when it comes to content, we just try to keep things running and let DAO governance handle a lot of decision-making (feel free to disagree, operators). We just became a department this season and are still trying to figure out what that means. Personally I think it means we have to be a bit more opinionated.

That being said, issues like Grants Committee pay and content of individual proposals is outside of the Ops Department mandate for sure. GC pay was set by the DAO in seasonal spec and one presumes the DAO would have to vote to change it. Any individual is allowed to post a grant request, and it’s up the the Grants Committee to decide whether or not the proposal is above-board.

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Hey @brianl I agree with you that Ops most likely does more than what you have listed. I know that I personally come to Ops with a question or two weekly, that someone responds to/appropriately directs me.
That actually brings me to my questions for this week, if you could point me in the right direction, I would appreciate it.

  1. What Discourse subscription plan does bDAO have?
    Who are the discourse admins?
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I don’t know about the plans.

The Admins are:
Icedcool
AboveAverageJoe
0x_Lucas Lucas
paulapivat

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And our subscription plan is currently standard.

If we want more fancy things we would have to either go up to Business or go to self hosting(which infosec could do).

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I want to thank those who have responded to my original post. As I’ve mentioned elsewhere and I will once again here: I have given up on Discord and use it as sparingly as I can. That platform is not one bit friendly in trying to have a conversation about a particular issue. I’m actually befuddled that bDAO continues to funnel possible new bDAO members towards it.

Maybe it’s an age thing, maybe it is just me. Regardless, I find it challenging and my current use of it indicates what I think of it!

To @brianl, as @links hits on in their followup post below yours, the word “operations” is quite encompassing, not just to myself, but to many. I readily admit that I did not and still likely do not have a full comprehension as to what the Ops department fully does. The issues that I highlighted in my original post, to myself, are things that a typical operations department would deal with in the real world. My bad for assuming similar was happening within bDAO. As you allude to in your post, bDAO is huge, too huge for just a few to catch all of these issues that do arise and likely will continue to do so.

Although the heading “Operations Department” is not entirely wrong in what the current Operations Department actually does, it is quite evident that the title is not entirely accurate neither.

May I suggest a name change to the BDCD? The bDAO “Coordination Department” From the outside this may be more accurate and better reflect what the “Operations Department” is currently involved with.

Tagging @Trewkat here to touch on something they mentioned in a different topic: You’re likely 100% correct in that my post would have been better served had it been posted in the bDAO Ops Discord. I have made my thoughts known on the use of Discord above and elsewhere. That platform is not friendly to all - myself especially.

Further, and why I am tagging @Icedcool @AboveAverageJoe @0x_Lucas & @paulapivat here now: We as a DAO want to promote use of both Discord and the forums here. Yet there are many who only use Discord, but do not use the forums here, and vice versa for others here at the forums, such as myself.

This is in and of itself an issue that needs to be addressed. I know that there has been chatter about the use of other platforms beyond Discord, but we never seem to get anywhere on that front. Regardless, even if we move on from Discord, we still have two different platforms, one for the refining and voting of proposals and another chat based platform for general use.

And we still haven’t touched on the lack of votes over on the third bDAO platform: Snapshot.

The picture is like this: We’re at an organized barbeque with several hundred bDAO folk. Yes there’s an overarching reason why we are all here at the event. But, we don’t end up interacting with one another because some don’t like smoked chicken, so they stay near the barbie that has kebabs. While those that like the side dishes stay near those tables to get away from the smoke of the charcoal that they so distaste.

We’re all here together for mostly the same reason, yet we’re all so very far apart from one another because there’s too much that seperates us.

Cheers all, keep up the great work, I know we’re all doing our best to try and figure this out :slightly_smiling_face:

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