Reflections on L2 vibe check (Nov 18)

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I want to share some quick reflections on our most recent L2 vibe check as a listener in the audience.

The general vibe I caught was that we, Bankless DAO, are experiencing organizational growing pains, which is arguably normal for a rapidly growing 7-month old organization.

@frogmonkee mentioned the need for people who might devote time to big picture issues, meta-governance, decision-making aspects of where we as a DAO are going. He’s been shouldering much of this work through his writings/posts on the forums but perhaps more support is needed, as @JENetics pointed out.

Other observations that were brought up include:

  • The formation of silos.
  • The perception of cliques between membership levels.

We might recall issues brought up in the previous L2 vibe check (2 weeks ago) where we discussed how we might prioritize funding allocation based on whether a project is revenue generating, mission critical or, ideally, both. Since that meeting, @frogmonkee has elaborated some potential paths forward

There’s the sense that we could be more strategic in how we allocate resources. That our structure at Bankless DAO, while serving our work, could also contribute to feelings of disconnect between community members. And we may need more people focused on the larger big picture issues.

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One DAO that is recently undergoing a massive organization change effort is IndexCoop. They put out a 67-slide deck on their plans to revamp their Leadership, Governance and Decision-Making processes.

If you get a chance, I’d highly recommend everyone read through these slides. I think it’s incredible work they’re doing over there.

There are a couple points from that document that could be instructive for us at Bankless DAO to take note and apply to our own unique context:

  1. The first thing that stood out was their awareness of issues that needed to be addressed, from a governance structure that wasn’t working, no clear direction on how to fund new initiatives, not having the right decision-making framework, the need for revamps organizational design etc.
  2. This awareness appears to be the result of an effort to solicit community input through jamboards and perhaps other means. This allowed a team to identify issues the wider community felt needed to be addressed as it relates to Leadership, Governance and Decision-making.
  3. Their new organizational structure is designed around the concepts of Pods, Nests and Wise Owls, which is interesting on its own, but notable that it is designed to specifically address the issues raised from their information gathering.
  4. The have pre-defined decision-making “truths” as well as a spreadsheet of meticulously thought out list of decisions they need to make.
  5. There are aspects of IndexCoop that is unique for their context. Things such as:
    a. Low token ownership for contributors (side note: I’m not sure what this means and would love some context if anyone knows why this is the case)
    b. They are explicitly a service/product DAO (not a DeFi protocol)
    c. And more.

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Back to our most recent L2 vibe check,

I think we have a general sense of our pain points but I wonder if it may serve us well to go through a process of information gathering to identify themes for improvement.

In many organizations a diagnostic survey is used, typically aim at strategic enterprise-level themes (i.e., strategy, structure, leadership) or human capital themes (i.e., roles, jobs, tasks) or for comprehensiveness, both.

Regardless of the individual or group of individual(s) we ultimately pick to focus on these bigger issues, I think it’s worth considering having a healthy information gathering process to make sure we’re surfacing the concerns of the entire community and so that whatever solution is put forth, it matches the unique context of Bankless DAO as well as addresses concerns the community may have.

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I agree. I think we need to create roles, with specific responsibilities and compensation so people can have a clear picture of what it is expected of them. Get people for those roles to own it, otherwise we are always working in this cloudy space with no clear direction.

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Thank you very much. The post raises important issues that we need to tackle all together.

2 are the main issues to resolve in the near feature:
A. creation of remunerated roles for (ultra)core contributors (no more than 4-5 IMO);
B. deciding the Seasonal funding for Guilds’ roles and Grants.

As to A, I think that for the (ultra)core contributors we should present a proposal with the indication of given requirements and a close number of positions. People who consider to met the indicated requirements may apply. The Community will decide.

As to B, I would continue as in Season 2, with GC etc., but I would standardize 3 or 4 roles within Guilds in order to avoid inconsistencies + I would indicate clear parameter for the Grants requests (the most important elements should be value alignment and revenue generation). Moreover, I would split requests above 300k BANK in milestones connected to installments. This would ease the control over the different projects. In this regard, I think that a track and control mechanism of the projects should be established (Sobol could be a great help in this regard).

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