Redefining Our Purpose

Governance DAO Transition
1

GM, friends!

This post is intended to guide a discussion and help us define our purpose and values going forward. I’d like for this discussion to be separate from branding and identity, which I hope to focus on later and shape from the feedback on this temp check.

Please share your opinions and ideas openly and respect the inputs of others. The Transition Council is looking for feedback from all perspectives. We understand there are different layers and levels of participation and contribution here, but I think more data is better and more voices will help inform a more inclusive approach.

First, which values do we share? Which values drew us to BanklessDAO in the first place? Which values continue to draw us toward each other in the absence of the old BanklessDAO shell and HQ’s influence? Which values do we want to take with us into the reboot?

Second, what do we want to do together with the network of talent and resources that we’ve assembled over the last few years? Do we want to continue championing the ideals of the Bankless™ movement without the brand name baggage? Or do we want to focus our efforts on something else? Do we want to be a large, publicly recognized organization? For what would you like us to be publicly recognized? What do you want to put your talents and energy toward here? What does web3 need? What does the world need?

This is what we work on defining, collectively, today.

Vote your voices, friends! :ballot_box::point_down:

Values Check

These are BanklessDAO’s official, publicly-stated values:

  • Education - We learn from each other. We seek to become a trusted guide that empowers people all over the globe to adopt decentralized finance by sharing accurate, truthful, and objective information.
  • Integrity - We operate transparently and build trust through radically public discourse and financial auditability.
  • Decentralized Governance - We put decision making into the hands of the collective. We create legitimacy through an environment where the best ideas win.
  • Culture - We reward action and embrace risk. We empower our community to continually drive new initiatives by providing a space to self-organize and quickly move from idea to action.

As we’re coming together to form this new organization, we should take the time to articulate why we’re working together, why we’re here in this space, and what makes this the place to be. What drives you? Select your five most important values from the list below or expand in the comments:

  • Education
  • Integrity
  • Decentralized governance
  • Culture
  • Self-sovereignty
  • Meaningful work
  • Financially-rewarding work
  • Vibes/fun
  • Social connections
  • Other(s) (please elaborate below)
0 voters

Purpose Check

These are BanklessDAO’s official, publicly-stated ideals, purpose, mission, and vision:

  • Bankless is a movement for pioneers seeking liberation from the tyranny of the traditional financial system. Going bankless means adopting decentralized, permissionless, and censorship-resistant technology. Through these means, we will achieve financial self-sovereignty, security, and prosperity.
  • BanklessDAO is a decentralized autonomous organization that acts as a steward of the bankless movement progressing the world towards a future of greater freedom.
  • Our mission is to help the world go bankless by creating user-friendly onramps for people to discover decentralized financial technologies through education, media, and culture.
  • Our vision is to live in a world where anyone with an internet connection has access to the financial tools needed to achieve financial independence.

Do these still resonate with you? Is it where you would like to see us put our collective energies?

While a rebranding can be a lot of work, it’s also a rare opportunity to realign, consolidate, and focus our collective resources on a shared goal. What do we want to do? How can we best provide value? What is a “re-born bDAO” best suited to do? Should we stay the course or change direction entirely? What do you feel we should focus on together? Select your top five:

  • Information
  • Education
  • Publishing
  • Curation
  • Content creation
  • Networking
  • Grant giving
  • Product development
  • Revenue generation
  • Social club / shared interests
  • Other (please elaborate in the comments below)
0 voters

Thank you!

If you have more time, please share further thoughts and perspectives in the comments below. These are nuanced discussions that surveys can’t fully capture, so the open forum piece is important, too.

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I love this post; thank you!

I am personally still fairly aligned with the original Values & Purpose and voted for my top 5 Values and top 4 (+ Other) Purposes in the above poll. Perhaps the only thing I would say we need to change is to stop using the term “bankless” and instead capture in our own words what that means to us (e.g. self-sovereign money, identify, etc; freedom from TradFi; freedom to transact without censorship, etc).

My Other Purpose would be: “Incubation”: Incubation of projects that align with our values and/or purpose. This goes beyond just content (e.g. information, publishing, curation) and into apps, businesses, and new organization (e.g. CryptoSapiens, bCard, Fight Club). I think it’s really cool we’ve incubated so many awesome projects and would love for that to continue. Admittedly, I did not initially vote for “Grant giving,” but I think incubation can include some kind of granting or investing alongside community support of the new projects.

What do others think about Incubation as a purpose?

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I resonate with you on this although I think this can come under shared interest. A project can be spawned up from the collective interest of various individuals. So I don’t know if it’s something we want to do as a stand alone. I feel this is something that should come as a result of our interactions rather than being a major purpose of the organisation.
Just my 2 cents tho.

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I think the essence of community development is that new people continue to join the organization and contribute to the development of the community.
So redefining the goals of the community or reshaping the brand should ultimately focus on two issues?

  1. How to inject fresh blood into the community and attract people to join continuously?
  2. How to retain new people who join the community and guide new people to contribute to the community?
    As for some of the options in the post, I think they are some of the content at the macro and value level, which is very important, but how to solve the above two problems, I think it is equally important.
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Besides the value I voted for, I’d like to add “be inclusive” to the list. You can say it belongs to the bDAO culture, but this has touched me since the Day I joined bDAO.

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Also a good suggestion for a name.

Pioneers DAO.

7

I agree with this sentiment.

And again, I want to return to the idea of Sustainable / Perpetual Bankless.

If we don’t consider product development as critical, then the treasury will simply be diminished, and the renamed DAO will suffer the same fate as bDAO.

It’s a fact of life that folk need to provide value to others to keep a place on the planet, and bDAO was almost at the point of doing that, and did in a few instances.

Meaning if we’ve done that once or more, and we can learn the things we did that gave us the fledgling project / product successes, we can apply that learning on a Guild by Guild basis, or whatever we decide to call Working Groups.

And we need to get away from blaming failures on naming conventions. Failures come from structural defects, and if the sustainability issue isn’t addressed, then the structural defect in bDAO persists, and any rebadging also ends up failing.

Sorry to those who find me abrupt.

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A lot of people put education, and we have discussed it at length at a couple of community calls, so I thought I would explain why I didn’t pick it myself.

BanklessDAO’s main purpose has been education. It’s true that we did other things as well, but the thing we spent more time effort was education. We were actually quite good at taking people new to the space, educating them on the technology, and in doing so helped them find their own path. Many BanklessDAO alumni have found their way working at high-profile orgs like Polygon, Uniswap, ZKSync, Matcha, and more.

That being said, educating people turned into a difficult, unsustainable, and thankless job. We educated people, yes, but many of those people left and never looked back. We created quality, multi-lingual education programs for the crypto industry, and they called us grifters. We provided valuable education for free, and never figured out a way to make it sustainable.

Let me offer another possible perspective - rather than a place to educate, what if this was a place to learn? That is, when new people come here, they don’t expect to learn by someone holding your hand, but expect to learn by watching and doing. This would work nicely with the value of self-sovereignty, and would like be more sustainable as well.

Ultimately I think starting with BanklessDAO’s purpose/values is limiting. Of course these values will be popular - it’s what brought people here in the first place. But these values also led us into an unsustainable place, and I think we need to reflect on that carefully.

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Great post Zfi.
Having had the benefit of today’s CC and TC discussions, I felt ready to add my votes.

I didn’t vote for education as a value or purpose because I agree with the sentiment links raised, which was expanded on during today’s CC: that education happens as a result of the activities of the community rather than as a pursuit through a formal curriculum.

I believe our strength lies in the fact we have a network of trusted people who can share their experience and expertise. People tend to seek information from trusted friends and colleagues before searching themselves, because of the volume of information on the web that they may not be able to verify. That’s not to say DYOR does not apply, but if we can provide a safe, non-shill space for our people to explore web3 I think that goes a long way towards the type of education I want to provide.

That brings me to the second point I want to make, which I raised in the TC meeting today: that while this post and the work we’re doing to identify a shared purpose is valuable, I see the role of the TC as providing a broad ‘six-lane highway’ to go forward on, rather than having to identify the one specific path that we will take. The discussion around the TC facilitating the transition towards a set of ideas that have broad consent, rather than trying to reach full consensus, helped me feel confident that we can proceed with other org changes and let the purpose and org name keep bubbling along for a bit.

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Thank you all for your votes and feedback so far! The original polls have now been closed.

Based on feedback here and from CC #166 on July 19, 2024, I’ve refined and defined more specific options in an attempt to capture values and purposes that might have been missed in the first polls. Please review these new options to help us articulate our positions more precisely.

Values Check, v2

Please select up to five.

  • Self-determination (the ability of an organization to set its own goals, make decisions, and manage its operations without external compulsion or interference)
  • Decentralized governance (operating without a central authority, with decisions made collectively by all empowered participants)
  • Vibes, fun, and social connections
  • Integrity and transparency (blockchain auditability and proof-of-work accountability)
  • Inclusion and diversity
  • Teamwork and collaboration
  • Curiosity
  • Sustainability
0 voters

Purpose Check, v2

Please select up to five.

  • Providing education to others
  • Curating educational materials and references generated by others
  • Supporting self-learning opportunities for members through experience and participation
  • Facilitating direct mentorship for onboarding individuals to web3
  • Creating content (written, design, audio, video, etc.)
  • Curating third party content
  • Facilitating formal networking (through organization of job boards, IRL events, etc.)
  • Incubating projects through grants from a treasury
  • Generating revenue to sustain operations and grants
  • Generating profit
  • Producing products or services
  • Growing and promoting a social club
0 voters
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I want to highlight something a few of us agreed with on the Community Call earlier, but I don’t know if this is consistently how most of the community feels:

To me, “Decentralized governance (operating without a central authority, with decisions made collectively by all empowered participants)” is exciting because of the blockchain technology that makes it more possible than it was previously, and in the ways that are uniquely possible because of blockchain technology. I’m not interested in an “off-chain DAO” (to me, that’s not even really a DAO, but that’s a separate issue), although I acknowledge that we don’t have to do everything on-chain and may choose to do some things the old fashioned way, either until the technology is ready or in perpetuity.

Since Decentralized Governance is (as of 8/2/2024) the most popular option in the Values Check V2 poll, I’d love to see what others think about this question.

Decentralized Governance Value Check

Please select the option that resonates most with you:

  • Decentralized governance is interesting and important to me for our DAO primarily as it relates to blockchain technology and what the technology makes possible
  • I am interested in decentralized governance for our DAO irrespective of its connection to or how it is enabled by blockchain technology
  • Other / don’t agree with the distinction / something else (please comment below!)
0 voters
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12

The v2 polls have now been closed! It was encouraging to see even more feedback on the v2 polls than the v1 polls and it makes me feel like we’re on the right track.

The goal here was to get a sense for our values and purposes going forward. I think we’ve done a pretty great job at beginning to shape and refine our vision for the future together.

@thethriller, I also appreciate the refinement poll regarding the blockchain tech angle! There’s a poll package coming for identity and branding soon that I hope to facilitate in a similar way as this discussion. If others feel so inclined to add options or refine options like this while the next v1 poll is up, we can shape an even more complete set of options for the next v2.

Results

From the poll results and community feedback, two-thirds or more of voters aligned around our highest-priority values being:

  • 87% - Decentralized governance (operating without a central authority, with decisions made collectively by all empowered participants)
  • 75% - Integrity and transparency (blockchain auditability and proof-of-work accountability)
  • 66% - Self-determination (the ability of an organization to set its own goals, make decisions, and manage its operations without external compulsion or interference)
  • 66% - Vibes, fun, and social connections

And half or more of voters aligned around working together for the purpose of:

  • 78% - Supporting self-learning opportunities for members through experience and participation
  • 73% - Generating revenue to sustain operations and grants
  • 65% - Facilitating formal networking (through organization of job boards, IRL events, etc.)
  • 56% - Incubating projects through grants from a treasury

Analysis

The poll results show a strong endorsement for decentralized governance, with an impressive 87% of voters supporting this value. This overwhelming preference underscores our commitment to a non-hierarchical and collaborative decision-making process. It reflects a core belief in the power of collective autonomy over centralized control, aligning closely with the foundational principles of DAOs, generally. The additional poll from @thethriller reflects a desire to leverage blockchain technology, specifically, to facilitate this decentralized governance.

Integrity and transparency also received strong support, with 75% of voters prioritizing these values. This highlights our focus on ethical operations and the importance of auditability and accountability, particularly through blockchain technologies. These principles are critical in maintaining trust and credibility within a decentralized framework, where traditional oversight mechanisms are absent.

Additionally, the emphasis on self-determination and social connectivity, both receiving 66% support, indicates a balanced approach to autonomy and community engagement within the DAO. The value placed on self-determination suggests a desire for organizational resilience and adaptability, while the appreciation for vibes, fun, and social connections points to the importance of a supportive and engaging community atmosphere. These values collectively suggest a strategic focus on building a sustainable and inclusive community that values both individual autonomy and collective wellbeing.

Analysis of the purpose-oriented poll results further outlines our vision for the operational and social dynamics of the DAO. The highest endorsement for supporting self-learning opportunities, with 78% approval, signifies a community-driven commitment to personal and collective growth. This strong emphasis on education and empowerment reflects a core objective of fostering an environment where members can learn and develop through active participation and experience. This approach not only enhances the capabilities of individual members, but also enriches the collective knowledge base.

Generating revenue to sustain operations and grants, endorsed by 73% of the voters, underscores a pragmatic approach to self-sufficiency. This strategic focus is vital for the DAO’s long-term viability, ensuring that it not only survives, but thrives, independently of external funding sources. By prioritizing financial sustainability, the community acknowledges the importance of having a stable economic foundation that supports continuous growth and innovation.

Furthermore, the focus on facilitating formal networking and incubating projects through grants, with 65% and 56% support respectively, reveals a proactive stance towards expanding influence and fostering innovation. These results indicate that the community values not just internal cohesion and sustainability but also external outreach and engagement, aiming to create a ripple effect of impact through collaborative projects and professional connections. These initiatives are crucial for integrating the DAO into broader networks and industries, enhancing its visibility and influence in various sectors.

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I agree, educating people is past tense.
Creating space, tools, and guidance for exploration, is the future.
Experiential exploration and discovery builds mastery, it’s a perfect foundation for advancement, and makes positive impact a reality.
This should definitely be a place where people come to discover “Bankless” opportunities for trade.
Whether people stay or not, acknowledge or not, it strengthens the learning experience when we can explore individually and collectively. Like being in a park.

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