Suggest an update to the Mission of the BanklessDAO

[angyts]

Dear BanklessDAO family.

Thank you for reading this post. I have been in BanklessDAO since June2021, and this felt like a long time. And i’ve been thinking about this for the longest time, and I finally have to say it. And here I go.

May I suggest we adopt the following as our mission instead:

“To be the premier media DAO in the metaverse”

Our current mission reads: “We will help the world go Bankless by creating user-friendly onramps for people to discover decentralized financial technologies through education, media, and culture.”

Or how we usually say “Onboard a billion people to Crypto”

This mission tends to cause a lot of confusion to us, because it is hard to know how much we actually contributed to this.

Let’s look at what are the main activities we are doing today?

Media related

Writing newsletters, blogs, articles
Creating podcasts, Crypto sapiens, podcast hatchery, AV content
Creating educational media, bankless academy, workshops
Creating NFTs, DAOpunks, emerging artist art, metafactory merch, NFT flipper tools
Perpetuating bankless culture, memes, satires, talk shows
International media nodes to spread the word

Social related

NFT club
Bankless whale club
Level 1 club
Vibe club and games

Further explanation

If we look deep into what we are doing today, we are a Media and Social DAO, and we should do these things with pride.

The old world cannot understand these metaversal and web3 things, and hence, cannot seem to come up with great content for this space. And that’s what we excel at, and we are the first mover.

Currently there could be 100-300 million metaverse citizens, when this number reaches 10x, there will be bigger demand for high quality media that BanklessDAO and LLC is currently providing.

People would want to listen, read, live and breath, great untainted, unfiltered content.

And this I feel should also form our main revenue stream. We can start gating our great content behind $BANK tokens, DAOpunk NFT, POAPs, or a small subscription.

Further TLDR:

I do not suggest we change any of our activities, just changing the mission to more clearly represent our current BanklessDAO activities.

This proposed mission makes all our lives so much easier, because we clearly know what we need to do now.

Why the use of metaverse?

We are living in the metaverse, interacting with people through the internet. I considered using web3 or other terms, but I came back to this term. Essentially this term has to encapsulate this new Bankless, web3 world we are now operating in.

Measurements of success?

This new mission is easier to measure success as well. We can count the percentage of metaverse citizens engaging with our content. We can count the percentage of DAOs engaging with us. We can find out which media company new DAOs first go to. Like what is their “go-to” media powerhouse.

Please let me know how you feel.

• Please adopt this new mission and bring it to snapshot
• I do not agree, keep the current one
• I do not agree, I suggest…

[jonvaljonathan]

I agree that the mission statement could and maybe should be updated and clarified.

I think the “To be the premier media DAO in the metaverse” excludes many current projects - First Quests, DEGEN, Bounty Board, Bankless Loans…

Maybe that’s by design though and bDAO should focus only on media creation and distribution?

But if that’s the case, what happens to these out of scope projects?

[SwoleChasse]

If you frame this as a long term ambtion, there are other steps or preconditions if you will, that lead us to that long term aim - With the right design, and iteratiion from the community, this could include these apsects as they lead to the mission being achieved - I’ve ran workshops designing department models that focus on this, and I think this could really deliver on a few of the posts made over the last couple of days regarding: Governance, DAO mission, project alingment etc - I will make a more detailed overview of what this looks like in the GSE application but happy to discuss with anyone that want’s to know more!

This post is very powerful angyts, I really appreciate your thought’s

[angyts]

First Quest, DEGEN, Bounty Board, appears to be “DAO tooling”, which seems to be more internal serving. These products tend not to become on the main mission at the start.

There are very important no doubt and we should continue building them.

For example, Amazon did books first, then shopping, then finally amazon web services. AWS came out from their internal use and tooling first. I don’t think they “set out” to do AWS right off the bat.

[jonvaljonathan]

Yes. That describes exactly how First Quest, DEGEN, and BB came to be.

I still think that changing the mission statement to what you said excludes excludes all those projects.

[Joey_magiA]

Thanks for making this proposal and starting a conversation about this.

Could we perhaps have a combination of both: Our mission at BanklessDAO is to onboard a billion people to crypto and help the world go Bankless by being the premier media outlet in the space".

Also to your point about the clarity of this mission statement, we then need to implement analytics to track the social impact of the projects and publications in this regard:

• number of podcast listeners
• number of newsletter subscribers
• affiliate partner sign-ups
• quarterly audience survey & snapshots
• DAO onboarding & engagement analytics
• etc

What do you think?

[samanthaj]

Thank you for opening up this necessary conversation. We’ve had this discussion in writers guild meetings before, wondering, what really IS our mission here?

I’m working on the bDAO website home page and this is what I’ve written about us:

[START]

"BanklessDAO is a media DAO onboarding 1 billion people to crypto.

We take a decentralized approach to:

MEDIA
Producing cutting-edge written, visual, and audio content.

CONSULTING
Providing blue-chip consulting services for other DAOs and Web3-native companies.

DAO TOOLING
Shipping products that are already changing the future of work.

COMING HOME
Creating a social homebase for artists, thought-leaders, builders, and innovators in the Web3 space."

[END]

Onboarding 1 billion people to crypto still feels relevant to me. I just think we do it in a lot of different ways than simply creating media. Also, I personally would push back on using the word “metaverse” in our public mission statement. This is because people are still figuring out what the metaverse is and most non-crypto-natives associate it with Facebook and VR headsets. I want to stay as far away from Zuckerberg and his toys as possible, as I’m sure we all do here in bDAO!

Personally, I’d edit the mission to something like this:

“BanklessDAO is a media and social DAO onboarding 1 billion people to crypto and building the future of work. We achieve this by taking a decentralized approach to media, consulting, and DAO tooling. We also provide a social and cultural home base for artists, thought-leaders, builders, and innovators in the Web3 space.”

Just my two bank Thanks for this post angyts!

[angyts]

I love this one! (except that it is long)

“BanklessDAO is a media and social DAO onboarding 1 billion people to crypto and building the future of work. We achieve this by taking a decentralized approach to media, consulting, and DAO tooling. We also provide a social and cultural home base for artists, thought-leaders, builders, and innovators in the Web3 space.” — Samanthaj

• I love this mission statement
• I don’t like this mission statement

[samanthaj]

Yes it could use some wordsmithing…I’ll get back to you

[samanthaj]

I’d also like to add that I think we should move slowly on this issue (do lots of iterations of the mission, get consensus in 1. discord polls, 2. here in forums, THEN 3. snapshot) because changing the mission is a really big deal and should require high voter participation and lots of time to think.

[angyts]

For sure! I just wanted to throw this out for discussion. Because this has been an issue that has popped up in many places.

As i grew more white hair, I start to appreciate more and more these stuff that I use to roll over when I was younger.

Organisations without clear visions and missions just struggle so much. So much pain!

[samanthaj]

Agreed. Excited to see where this convo goes, thanks for getting it started

[rotorless]

As person who has lead countless strategy teams here are a few thoughts:

The strategy of the organization is framed by its mission and vision, in between those two we find the goals and the objectives.

Normally we say the Mission is what the organization does and the Vision is the destination the organization wants to reach, and it gets there by aligning resources to take it from its mission to its vision.

The relationship looks like this:

                                      Mission    >  Objects & Goals    >     Vision

Mission statements are difficult and time consuming to craft. I have worked on dozens of mission statements on retreats and working groups over many years.

The main reason I joined this DAO in the first place was because it had a crystal clear mission statement. ( despite the fact that I have no media or culture skills can’t draw or sing)

The proposal “To be the premier DAO in the metaverse” describes a destination and in most circles would be considered a vision statement. Maybe we should be looking at revising the vision statement.

To be fair, I really tried with a critical eye to find support to review modify or change the mission statement.

From a strategy lens it is clever to choose to do media and culture to build an audience first (user base) so when the next onboard tools are developed there is already an audience for them. There have been millions of amazing products and services that die before they have a chance because the tool is built but nobody knows about it and then it cannot survive.

Bankless consulting, Ombuds office, and Legal Tax consultancy are not media related and all fall out of building tools to facilitate onboarding and have an audience waiting to consume the tools.

If we look at the mission statement: " through education, media, and culture"

and your list:

Writing newsletters, blogs, articles
Creating podcasts, Crypto sapiens, podcast hatchery, AV content
Creating educational media, bankless academy, workshops
Creating NFTs, DAOpunks, emerging artist art, metafactory merch, NFT flipper tools
Perpetuating bankless culture, memes, satires, talk shows
International media nodes to spread the word

On a balanced score card the organization would score very well for achieving its mission.

Because it can take a long time to “bake cakes”, organizations usually do not revisit mission statements unless there is an event or strategic pivot that threatens its existence. For example: it has tried to execute on the mission statement and it failed and it has no runway left or circumstances beyond its control alter the environment.

In contrast it would uncommon to change a mission statement for an organization that was successfully delivering on it.

Honest Regrets.

Happy to help a session to craft a new statement if you really want to.

[SwoleChasse]

I really hope this picture reads well - But here is an example of setting a vision and reverse engineering it into outputs. The timeframe outcomes is totally up to the pace in which the team or org works. It keeps it highlevel and ‘should’ be easy to digest for new starters. I delivered around 80 workshops in my organisation and then used this information to map all the medium term and long term outcomes against the organisation’s corporate plan AKA the political adminstation’s manifesto and promises to the residents. My thought process was that this would inform one of two things:

1. Ensure that the services are aligned in their delivery to the aims and ambitions of the organisation
2. Or, completely revamp the corporate plan with the common themes and outcomes that are shared by departments, shaping it’s design (In the case of the DAO, this could form our long term vision in a nice and punchy strapline with clear preconditions in how it will be met, whilst essentially being designed by the community)

I would love to deliver this as part of the GSE framework. Or failing that (I’m not successfull) go through this with some guilds or projects.

The important thing to note here, is that it’s not a final product and should be reviewed constantly and iterated to ensure:

1. It’s still relevant ‘have we achieved this now? What’s next?’
2. It’s reflective of any changes in service resource, budget and corporate steer from the local government political leaders? (In this case, changes in the DAO, community sentiment, bank treasury fund)

[angyts]

I guess, you can try to do this in the forum right? like here? we have decent engagement here.

Or does this require some kind of synchronous sessions?

[SwoleChasse]

Prefferably, I would like to deliver workshops throughout the DAO (from expereince it’s way better doing an interactive session with most of the team included, than messaging).

I’ve gone into a lot more detail in the GSE application, but regardless of the outcome, I will share in a forum post to gauge the communites appetite for it

[angyts]

would you like to bring this to the education guild instead? We can try to help you create an educational product around it?

[SwoleChasse]

I really like that idea I will wait and see if there is appetite for this in the GSE scope first then get in touch. I’m confident in delivering the workshops BUT it’s key to collaborate and I might pick up and thing or two from yourself

[intlcapitalist]

I think we should use the word Web3 instead of metaverse…
Ryan and David talk a lot about how crypto did a genius rebrand to “web3”… where Zuck has now tainted the word “metaverse”.

[NFThinker]

This is a great initiative, and it has flown under my radar until today. There is a clear need need to rethink our mission and our goals if we are going to sustain ourselves and protect our brand.

I have been talking with @Elemental, @twilight_pirate, @SwoleChasse, and others about this very thing. We have asynchronous forum posts, threads, and conversations discussing branding, missions, project scope, and so much more.

It’s time to collate all the great posts and comments found here, and here, and here, and here and elsewhere around the DAO, then arrange a round table stage to discuss them in front of the whole DAO.