Preserve Our Precious bDAO Data

Governance DAO Transition
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Dear bDAO fam,

It honestly feels sad that bDAO needs to undergo this reset. I understand that this may be a painful but necessary step. Having joined bDAO in Season 2, I didn’t sell a single BANK token because I love this community. Over the past three years, I have participated in and witnessed the boom of guilds and projects, the vibes of over 200-person community calls, problem-solving discussions, project collaborations, fun conversations, even arguments, and the friendships built from these interactions. Reflecting on these moments, I realize they are precious memories that have become part of my life. I believe many bDAO members feel the same way. Most of our collaborations and outcomes are embedded in the data on Discord, Notion, and Discourse, which is why I think all this data should be archived instead of deleted.

bDAO is one of the earliest and most prominent DAOs, representing how humans explore new forms of community and governance. It is like a piece of history. All the data in Discord, Notion, and Discourse are part of our DAO history. It’s hard to believe this valuable information could be erased in a world where information and data are the new oil and gold.

These data are not just records; they embody the hard work, collaborations, and spirit of pioneers experimenting with decentralized governance. They capture happiness and sadness, laughter and challenging moments. They may seem invaluable today, but with AI and future tools, they may hold research and commercial value.

If we could look back from the future and study the pioneers who explored DAOs, we would certainly want to preserve this data. Who knows, these records of our early days could be the subject of future research and admiration.

I propose using the remaining treasury to save our data. To ensure its longevity, we could explore decentralized storage options.

There is still time for us to do something for all this data. Your thoughts are not just welcome; they are essential. What do you think? Please share your thoughts.

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I have the same sentiment as you, and want to suggest a pragmatic solution.

Guild members who care about the DAO can certainly copy the Notion database, by duplicating their top level page. The historians among us will likely act to save the history for some future date. We have two weeks now, I think.

I believe the Transition Council is supportive of such actions, and it then depends whether Guilds are still active, still paying attention, or have already moved on. Moving on at speed suggests less care about the DAO, more a need for income. Both are okay, and both are part of the broad DAO ecosystem.

Again, maybe not so visible, it’s clear in DAOs that typically there are Opportunity Makers, and Opportunity Takers. Opportunity Takers often have day to day needs to meet, and when that can’t be the case, they are compelled to move on quickly.

For the moment we are suspending Opportunity Making, but I sincerely hope once the decks are a bit clearer that we can recommence that aspect of bDAO / AF DAO.

And, FWIW, I also love the aspects of bDAO you mention, and IMO it’s worth preserving. In my corporate career, only one firm was like that, also employee owned, a rare situation, and I couldn’t get the high ups to write about the experience. Here we can preserve archives for future historians to dive into, if we can organise to do so.

FYI @brianl .

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On naming, maybe another option.

Opportunity DAO.

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To be clear, are you suggesting we stop funding future contributions to preserve past contributions?

First of all, that is unnecessary, because this proposal (which is currently in execution) will ensure we have enough money to pay for discourse/discord/notion in perpetuity: Snapshot

Second, enshrining “glory days” over current contributors is how you create a stagnant organization. I can see why you feel the data is important, but the life of the community is more important, IMHO.

Can I ask - why are you bringing this proposal forward? Is it because of the recent Discord/notion cleanup by the Transition Council?

I’m not part of that group, but I’m generally supportive of their archive efforts. Here are some thoughts on that:

  • Discord is and always has been ephemeral data. Anything of value there should have been ported to Notion/Discourse.
  • I think it’s important we optimize Discord for daily use (ie not archival use). It’s our main synchronous channel, and needs to help support our current efforts.
  • I think Notion should be durable - and in fact we have had regular archival and backup of Notion for awhile thanks to our Notion admin in the Ops Dept.
  • I think the way we were using Notion in the past was a bit unsustainable. Projects were uploading files and such to it and the backup sizes exceeded those that Notion could handle.
  • I think encouraging projects to run their own Notion/wiki is a good idea. It’s inherently more decentralized and sustainable than one org running Notion for many projects.
  • I think there is probably a way to allow projects limited use of Notion while still encouraging them to run their own. This will allow smaller projects to bootstrap and give them a path to self-sovereignty of their wiki

In general, I sympathize with wanting to preserve history, but prioritize our current needs over preserving history. That being said, I think we can accomplish both.

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I agree with putting some effort into being good keepers of our historical data, but I am shocked at the prospect of putting the entire remaining treasury towards this purpose. That seems like at least two orders of magnitude (e.g. 100x) too much effort to put on recording history.

I’d be open to supporting a proposal that sets aside a specific, small amount of money for specific actions that server historical purposes.

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It is valuable, and important!

Would you like to kick up a project to work on this?

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Thanks for your thoughtful questions. Let me address each point.

First, I want to clarify that my proposal to use the treasury for data storage costs does not exclude funding for future contributions. It’s encouraging to know that there are plans to invest in the treasury to cover recurring costs. My proposal specifically focuses on spending for data archives. If approved, the next step would be to identify a suitable storage solution and then approve the budget for it.

Regarding why I’m bringing this proposal forward, yes, it is because of the recent announcement that Notion and Discord data will be deleted. While there is a grace period for downloading the data, I believe it’s important for bDAO at the community level to retain a full copy of the data. I’m concerned that not every project has the budget to properly save their data.

Thank you for considering this proposal.

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Hi thethriller,

Sorry for any confusion. I should clarify that I’m proposing we allocate funds specifically for the storage solution, not the entire treasury. If you check the Bankless Vault, it currently holds about $900K worth of tokens, with around 40% in non-Bank tokens. It would be unreasonable to suggest spending all of this money on storage, and we don’t have that much data to justify such an expenditure. :sweat_smile:

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I’d love to help! However, I think it’s important that we first reach a consensus on this.

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@cryptodad, I love the passion and energy in this post! This is exactly what we need right now to catalyze our transition. Experiences like this are powerful, and I know there are definitely some stories here among the group of contributors we’ve got left.

Regarding the data, I admit I share some of your concerns, especially regarding the project work documented on the Notion, sometimes meticulously. The bottleneck isn’t storage cost, though – that’s essentially free, offered by generous contributors in the community. The real cost is the labor and difficulty to scale maintenance.

I might have an idea, though…

First, my thoughts on the Discord cleanup align with links’s comments.

Second, my thoughts on the Notion mostly align with links’s comments as well, but I want to add on a few points from experience.

The current logistical issue is that the Notion site has become so large that it cannot be exported in its entirety anymore. The full site is over 70GB and Notion’s backend doesn’t seem to generate a zip file larger than 50GB. Since the full site never finishes the 24-48 hour archival process, I never get a download link via email, and I have to go back in a few days later to export subgroups individually. Backups have become very clunky.

I completely agree! Our shared/main Notion could be a great place to get started, but as projects grow, they are likely to reach a stage where they can operate on their own, independent of our DAO site. Exporting from the bDAO site into another Notion site is an easy process we could help with when needed. This process should also allow for better security controls for both the main org and the project team. We’d be wise to define some kind of off-boarding/spin-offing/end-of-incubation transition process later.

Additionally, we’ve run into Notion’s limits for even their largest Enterprise tier offering, in terms of Guest user count. For the reboot, we’ll need to provide new guidelines on file storage limits and Guest user accounts so as to stay within Notion’s set limits for our plan/tier. Encouraging sustainable projects to spin off would be a great way to keep these things manageable.

So… Here’s an idea for the Notion…

Notion recently granted all paid users, including us, access to up to five Notion subdomains. (We currently use just one, bankless.notion.site.) Perhaps we leave bankless.notion.site alone, set all pages to view-only, and preserve it as a static public archive that doesn’t get changed, and therefore doesn’t need to be backed up on a regular basis.

Simultaneously, then, we could spin up a new Notion subdomain for our newly branded organization (e.g. newbrand.notion.site) and start there from scratch with the reboot. Anything still relevant and active from bankless.notion.site can be ported over to newbrand.notion.site with relative ease.

Would something like this feel like a sufficient fix? I have not actually done this before, but it seems like, from the Notion Admin perspective, the maintenance would be essentially zero and it wouldn’t impact our Notion plan’s monthly cost at all. I can do some testing if it sounds like a good idea.

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This makes complete sense. Great Idea! OxZFi.

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This looks like the most visible and workable plan to me. Its also cost efficient as well. Great idea @0xZFi.eth

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Great solution!