DAO Project Committee

Proposals by Gotchi Gov'nuhs
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GM/GN DAOists! In this post I outline my thoughts on the DTF, my tenure as DPM so far, and begin a conversation on a path forward regarding DAO project management.

I would like to begin by thanking the OG DTF members and their commitment to the community. The DTF has helped frens throw cool events for the community, fund valuable community initiatives, and later crafted a DPM position which has allowed for much less friction with the funding process.

The points made in Dr.Wagmi’s post are part of an iterative process. I also agree we need to implement DAO management tools such as Wonderverse or Dework to be fully effective at the points he mentioned. The “weaknesses, opportunities, threats’’ outlined would be addressed through direct PM leadership, DAO tooling (Dework/Wonderverse), and a proposal review group.

With the DTF budget almost fully utilized, DTF lead stepping down, and the Aavegotchi DAO Foundation close to launch, it makes sense to discuss what exactly we are trying to achieve with satellite committees like the DTF. Based on my experience and opinion, a DAO Project funding group should:

  • Provide seed funding for projects trying to get to pre-Alpha or Alpha. Subsequent funding would be done through community fundraisers, Aavegotchi DAO proposals, Gitcoin grants, or relevant web3 funding groups.

  • Fund community-suggested bounties which the DAO would see valuable for the protocol (ex. Developing the Aavegotchi Respec potion)

  • Fund community initiatives which result in increased engagement with the protocol, awareness of Aavegotchi, or increase player enjoyment (ex. Guild or Scholar summits)

  • Review larger budget requests beyond the scope of the Project committee and “endorse ‘’ vetted proposals going through Aavegotchi DAO; a talented group of reviewers would be able to assess the feasibility of the proposal and advocate for it if the project passes the review.

DAO Project Committee Structure

Lead: DAO Project Manager

  • Maintaining up-to-date bounty board for things the DAO has decided to fund
  • Work with grants review team to endorse or review specific grants
  • Build and maintain relationships with individuals capable of completing bounties
  • Process Grant applications and ensuring applicants are replied to in a timely manner
  • Serve as a point of accountability for funded bounties and grants
  • Run or contribute to Sunday DAO meetings or other designated DAO meetings to review active projects, status of funded grants, active bounties, etc
  • Provide a written weekly DAO update and a Substack blog for its publication

Reviewers: Four Members with backgrounds in either Software development, Project planning, Accounting,or Data aggregation & Analytics

  • Sign Multi-Sig transactions once a week
  • 100 GHST a month base pay for signing transactions
  • Be available to take on Grant review bounties ranging from 25-300 GHST, based on the skills and time required to review the Grant
  • Endorse vetted Grants, advocate for vetted proposals at DAO meetings or async in Discord
  • Must attend at least one out of four DAO meetings per month

Contributor pool: Unlimited cap on how many members can join. Must have a relevant skill set tagged on a work platform (like Dework) to accept or apply for specific bounties.

  • Must maintain a clean standing with Aavegotchi DAO and adhere to the DAO code of conduct
  • Contributors are not required to take on a specific bounties, no strict requirements on accepting or rejecting a bounty by contributors
  • Once a bounty is claimed the individual must be able to complete the task within the agreed delivery window.
  • Contributor reputations can be tracked through DAO work platforms, individuals who take bounties and deliver high quality work will build a reputation. Top contributors on the Dework leaderboard could be awarded with DAO parcels, Custom FG cards or even Alchemica tokens
  • Regular DAO contributors are awarded bounties paid out over a 12 week period, followed by a review of the work completed, milestones accomplished, ect.
  • Regular contributor bounties can be applied for by new applicants when a current payee no longer delivers, no longer accepts bounties, or has reached a certain number of consecutive payouts

This is the model Dework is built around, so adopting their tooling would fit perfectly with this model. Specific roles I mentioned above would be assigned through Discord and imported into Dework, for example. I feel like the contributor leaderboard could be a huge hit.

The Budget:

The DAO Project Committee would request a budget to cover operational expenses, PM compensation for 12 months, and a budget to disburse towards community initiatives, Grants and Bounties

Project Manager:

Operational costs

  • Currently 300 GHST per week is disbursed to contributors for aggregating data, creating Miro boards, Live streaming, and maintaining a Podcast RSS feed for DAO meetings. I would like to leave room for adjustments. Allotting up to 400 GHST/week total at my discretion.

DAO Grants

  • Capped at 20,000 GHST drawdown per quarter
  • Comes from the 100,000 grants & bounties allotment
  • Used to seed-fund projects getting to proof-of-concept or early Alpha
  • Any organisation, guild, or project group may apply for funding. Approval is at the discretion of the PM and his/her designated review committee

Bounties

  • Capped at 2000 GHST drawdown per assignment
  • Comes from the 100,000 GHST grants & bounties allotment
  • Used to fund DAO related work such as reviewing grants (capped at 300 GHST)
  • May range from small requests ( DAO media kit) to large requests (Smart contract development for respec potion)
  • Bounties are typically issued by the DAO, with specific work to be done (suggestions welcome)

Total: 159,000 GHST

The total budget request would cover Project manager compensation, operational costs for one year, and 100,000 GHST to be used towards grant and bounty disbursements.

The Project Manager will provide a quarterly balance sheet during a Sunday DAO meeting, update the DAO on Grant and Bounty status,and share some highlights or “big wins”, as well as areas of improvement (if there are any).

Multi-Sig

  • Will use Gnosis Safe
  • Myself with four reviewers
  • The five of us will be doxed to PixelCraft
  • 4 out of 5 to sign off on txns

During my tenure over the last three months as DAO project manager, and being in various leadership roles for 10+ years, I’ve come to recognize the incredible value our community generates in the shadows, with no outside funding, spending their spare hours late at night or after work crafting something special for Gotchigang.

The grind shall continue. However, In the depths of these markets I hope the DAO Project committee can make you feel recognized for your time and effort put towards the protocol. Ultimately, we want to generate value for our protocol, and we’ll do that by valuing Gotchigang members building on top of Aavegotchi.

Thank you for taking the time to read this incredibly long post! Looking forward to hearing your responses.

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Just starting reading this… I hope that there are several proposals for this topic, like with the recent economic proposal show down. It is very healthy for the community to have several well thought out ideas to compare.

If any other armchair economists/managers would like a go at it, do it NOW, or it will be a lane duck idea(this is when you make an idea that will not end its sig prop before a competing idea make its core prop.)

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My thoughts also, I’m hoping we can discuss alternatives at the next DAO meeting to figure out what would serve us best

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Lets set a goal as a community to have all props related to this, posted on Friday, so they can be in the meeting, and have a whole week to cook.

Get your ideas in discussion ASAP, and post on friday, for optimal results.

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Looking forward to discussing this on Sunday, if anyone has suggested feedback on this framework I’d love to include it during the DAO discussion

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This is a solid framework to continue with. Questions: If the quarterly cap is at 20000 GHST, how are re-occurring grants handled? Do they have to re-apply for every quarter? Is a priority system in place for similar grant applications? Does the PM decide about the projects KPIs to measure success/failure?

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Great questions, the idea behind the quarterly cap is to have some constraints to fund the best ideas when there is an influx of large Grants. I’m open to sizing the capped amount to how much the DAO wants to spend on Grant disbursements per quarter

Anything deemed as ‘work’ like what the DAO media crew does would fall under a bounty offered by the DAO. Currently these are disbursed as recurring payments made over 12 weeks with a review of relevant KPI’s at the end. After so many consecutive payments there will be a challenge period for new applicants to apply for work unless one of the terms I mentioned in the OP are met

We would like to innovate on assessing projects and disbursing Grants. These are my early ideas and I’m open to feedback. If we decide to roll with this model we can change any or all the parameters to fit our needs.

From here we would build a funding model based on our experiences, on what worked best. I have spoken to @HARDKOR about a ‘Shark Tank’ model, a project Que similar to the FG one, and a Gitcoin style Quadratic funding model:

All exciting and promising paths we could take.

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Can we include a discussion around alternative forms of payment for bounties on Sunday?

There has been recent interest expressed around contributors receiving Alchemica as an alternative form of compensation to GHST. I feel it could work out well for some bounties

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Absolutely. I had thought Dr WAGMI was going to post it as a proposition last month, but it fell by the wayside. I believe someone didn’t like it, although I can’t remember why…
IMHO, whatever the DAO has to trade, should be on the table, with the DAI reserved for paying for things outside of the DAO.

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Thanks for clarifying!
Pushing "working"grants to bounties would solve the cap for reoccuring payments outside the operational costs.
Imo it is important to signal a certain funding stability to the proven projects, as loosing the grant/bounty would impact the project significantly.
Quadratic Funding, as well as Quadratic Voting, is worth looking at it more closely! Here is a Medium article with graphics that are easy to understand: How Can $1 Turn Into $27? Quadratic Funding Explained | by Finematics | Medium.
This is the Quadratic Funding Paper by Buterik/Hitzig/Weyl (Gets a bit nerdy, but worth scanning through):
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1809.06421.pdf
GitCoin is the leader for Etherium, pomelo.io is specialized towards the EOS ecosystem. https://clr.fund is for ETH as well, looking very promising. I am wondering why no quadratic funding platform exists for the Polygon ecosystem. Maybe a chance for the DAO to develop?

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This basically sounds like the DTF but with more defined funding parameters and a reduction from 7 to 4 members. It addresses some of my concerns outlined in the SWOT by defining funding parameters, but I don’t believe it’s the most effective way for our DAO to organize.

My general thought is that it’s strange to have a salaried project manager without defined leadership or projects designated as a priority by the DAO. I think a better design would be to have a DAO executive committee with the skillsets you outline. The DPM would then work with them to execute DAO led initiatives prioritized by DAO vote. I really worry about the lack of accountability and direction with the previous DTF model and this DPC model which is nearly identical. I also don’t think it adequately values the four “experts in software dev, project planning, finance, and data” by giving them 100 GHST/month vs >$30k/year for the DPM role.

An example:
The DAO needs better understanding of the implications of turning off the Bonding Curve. The DAO exec committee would define the data and technical implementations needed to perform this. If the members of that exec committee aren’t able to prepare it, the DPM would help post bounties and coordinate completion and funding of that work. The DPM would then present completed work to the DAO and update the blog post, etc.

Another example:
The DAO could vote quarterly on its top priorities. There are lots of options here including improvement in voting; a queue system for community developed wearables; better treasury management, etc. Likely, it would include multiple items which the community can vote on to prioritize. The DAO exec committee would apply the soon-to-be established DAO mission and vision as well as DAO vote/sentiment on priorities to outline a path to execution for that quarter’s projects. Some or most of the work would be accomplished by the DAO exec committee. What couldn’t be would be bountied to the community by the DPM with that work being defined and reviewed by the exec committee before hopefully also being executed by the exec committee in partnership with PC.

Funding example:
A project requests funding for building a series of dashboards or a new tool. The DPM would assign that submission to the tech lead on the DAO exec board for review. At regular intervals, the group would review all submitted work which was reviewed by respective DAO Exec Committee “experts”. The exec member would also define what measures and follow-up are needed which can be performed by the DPM.

I believe this model would help our DAO be more productive and execute on top DAO priorities. It maximizes the DPM role in providing leadership and accountability. It would allow for a more cohesive approach to protocol development by establishing a DAO roadmap with a native exec committee to lead the work and a community who is aware of the work being done and able to contribute through a more defined bounty system.

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I think this right here should be a key thing we do. We can easily do our budgeting by letting everyone allocate their vp towards whatever sectors they want to, and viola, you have a budget to deploy.

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Yeah for sure, my thoughts exactly with Bounties. These are tasks prioritized in collaboration with the DAO, and a priority list of work to be offered could be voted on quarterly.

Grants on the other hand are community generated proposals for projects of various sizes, and I agree there should be stability there for approved projects

Thanks for sharing the QF links! I love Finematics content

Maybe Aavegotchi DAO can develop a funding system similar to the FG que, where people could submit their project and the community could vote with their GHST using QV. The DAO would fund ideas the DAO wants most. A review team would vet the proposals before they hit the que and after they passed. Open to ideas on how we could do this

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I like the idea of the DPM collaborating with the exec community. I feel my model is only a few changes away from what you are talking about here.

Perhaps I implied I would be the sole decision maker in my OP but that wouldn’t be the case. Reviewer feedback from the “execs” would be part of the decision-making process. Having greater input from the DAO through a QV/QF model would be another validation layer for funding projects

The Aavegotchi DAO functions more like a multi-cellular organism than a corporate top-down structure.

You have entities like GMI, GFA, and other satellite communities who have their own project managers. Our job is not to manage their projects for them, rather vet projects providing the most potential value for the protocol, and award grants to those who deliver

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Like the multicellular organism, we need a strong central nervous system* that’s aware of, responds to, and directs things going on within the organism as well as external inputs. I think we should use this opportunity to establish a strong nucleus of exec members which will be guided by the Mission and Vision and report to the DAO. They should have the skillset to acquire and deliver on DAO priorities. This layer of accountability and competency can really move the DAO forward in a way that the DTF could not.

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This idea is really a gem that deserves its own topic. Successful organizations set priorities and move purposefully towards a goal. This is really challenging to do in a DAO setting where there are many ideas, a good deal of funds to get things done, but limited bandwidth of DAO builders to provide the execution.

One of the issues I see with the DAO’s productivity is that our current structure lends itself to building wide and shallow, rather than narrow and deep. In other words, we tend to tackle a lot of initiatives with minimal effort at the surface level, rather than honing in on the most important initiatives in a deep and thorough manner. Though we’ve seen that going deep and thorough is possible when clear objectives are defined and resources and funding are well allocated.

What if the DAO sets the agenda of which problems need tackling and which opportunities should be pursued via a quarterly weighted vote? A team of capable builders (ie: an executive committee) tasked with executing on the DAO’s agenda (either directly or by delegation via bounties) give life to the will of the DAO. A DAO vote provides the check and final approval of the work done by the executive committee and contributors, closing the accountability loop.

In this scenario, the DPM can be a valuable resource to grease the wheels, keeping everyone on task and on the same page.

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I 100% agree. I am putting together some meeting notes as we speak. I hope we can have a thoughtful discussion around this today, Will include our conversations from here and your other thread

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I made some modifications to the Org chart @stedari, yourself and I brainstormed awhile ago. Let me know If we feel this is on the right track.

According to the org chart the executive committee would consist of 3-4 members + the PM. I believe the PM role takes on some responsibility of a Liaison in a DAO, someone who can maintain continuity of information between all units of an organization (DAO Ex-Com, PC, ATF, Builder Community, External partners and Guilds). We are blessed to have tools like Dework. I have gotten familiar with the workflow and will be integrated into the main Aavegotchi Discord in the new year.

IMO the Signal proposal would be the creation of the DAO executive committee defined as a team of proven, capable builders who can execute on the voted priorities of the DAO, the defined budget for the committee, and compensation for the specific positions, including PM.

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The DTF beeing in his reinvention phase, I wanted to bring some ideas on the table as i think this organisation enpower greatly the creative process in the Aavegotchi Ecosystem.
As you know, the DTF receive submissions for project ideas or tasks that community member offer to deliver. This process is time-consuming for reviewers and also for submitters sometimes as the actual rules are beeing reshaped.

My reflexion is based upon the previous points prsented in this previous forum posts :wink:

You’ll find bellow a structure and process proposal I thought off while going through the DTF validation process recently.
It involves:

  • Project managers elected by the DAO (3 or 4 members elected as Executive DAO Comittee upon their skills) - GHST compensated
  • Aavegotchi Guilds and Media groups representatives as pillars of the Protocol animation and passion - No GHST compensated

Those reprensatives (1 per group designated by the PMs) would form the GUILD COUNCIL
PMs would provide their review of the incoming submissions (format and complete information provided) in an executive summary document batch before each GUILD COUNCIL meeting (2 per month).
This COUNCIL members would read this document and come to vote for Funding or not Those projects / Tasks.

This variation proposal for the Executive comittee organisation aims at :

  • Keep the decentralisation of the existing DTF
  • Gain efficacity in the process of review and management of DTF Projects submissions and deliverables
  • Having involved some of the most active groups in the community aka GUILDS and MEDIA groups

One important point in this proposal is the possibility for PMs to require a snapshot Vote (Single DAO vote without Quorum or XP distribution clearly identified as such) if they consider the last GUILD COUNCIL voting process isn’t matching some particular requirements (Doubt in legitimacy of the vote, suspicions of Conflict of Interest, …)

Here is the complete map for this proposal to be discussed and completed if it matches his audience :sunglasses:

Cheers Gotchigang :purple_heart:

DTF Executive Comittee variation - Guild Council
DTF Executive Comittee variation - Guild Council1920×1305 210 KB

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