SubDAOification: Recommendations and a Path Forward

GIVernance
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Hey folks! I am starting a new thread to better follow our subDAOification path, if you need a refresher on where we’re at you can see the latest update I made in the old thread here:

And also a link to the subDAOification session (March 27) recording here:
https://youtube.com/live/OK3LsF93oP0

Based on the responses given during our session and preferences you signalled I put together a more concrete format and some rules to start putting together WGPs and how we can deal with issues.

Working Group Proposal Format

What should include in a Working Group Proposal

NOTE: WG leaders will get salary info for every team member requesting/added to their WG team from the Governance crew (DM @freshelle if you need info )

  1. Who are the people in the WG, what are their roles/tasks specifically?
    • Including who is the Leader/Manager
    • How much time monthly is each person on your team commiting?
  2. What are the high level goals/what does success look like for the WG?
  3. How will this benefit Giveth?
    • Crucial topics (for now) to consider addressing:
      • How does it bring more projects or donors to the platform?
      • How will it bring revenue to Giveth?
      • How will this help secure grants/investments?
  4. What will be your measurable deliverables/ROI/GPS Goals?
    • Whatever metrics or format you want to use, you should have some manner of quantifiable goals.
    • If you don’t have measurable deliverables you should say explicitly why. (e.g. Research focused WG)
  5. How long is this WGP for?
  6. What is your total budget for this period?
  7. What paid services/tools do you need?
    • Which ones are covered as Shared Services, which one is paid for by the WG. (More on Shared Services below)
    • If the WGP duration is over 6 months then require quarterly updates (more below).

Quarterly Updates

Working Groups should provide quarterly updates to their WGPs if the proposed duration is over 6 months.

A WG Update should include:

Required

  • Profits (if any)
  • Updates on your deliverables/GPS goals
  • Spending over the last quarter (totals from salaries and services)
  • Tasks for next quarter

Optional

  • WG Learnings/notes on progress
  • Modifying their deliverables - targets or types of tracked metric
  • (If applicable) Team changes
  • (If applicable) Budget changes
    • Increasing a projected budget requires DAO approval

Scenarios and concerns

Looking at your responses there was a lot of concerns and corner issues. This is how I think we should deal with them:

If a WG runs out of money

  • They retire the WG
  • They ask for more funds

Where the Giveth DAO needs to vote

  • Approving an Initial WGP (Snapshot)
  • Increasing projected budget (nrGIV)
  • Asking for more money (nrGIV)
  • Dissolve a WG ahead of it’s scheduled end (Snapshot)
    • In the case that a WGP has a really long duration and is performing poorly (e.g. not meeting goals, hostile behaviour).
    • The most extreme action the DAO could take.
    • Hopefully there is a conflict resolution or advice process well before this happens.

Costs that don’t fit into a WG

  • Contributors who budget “professional development” need to ask for that budget of their compensated time from a relevant WG. If a WG can’t afford it, can the DAO afford it?
  • Shared costs for services that multiple WGs benefit from can be classified as Shared Services - DAO pays for the cost outside of a WG. (e.g. Figma Pro, Notion, chatGPT vs. Orbit, Hubspot, Vercel)
    • Shared Services and their costs are tracked quarterly and published.
    • Since all paid services/tools are accounted for in WGPs we can see how many WGs are using certain tools
    • We can work out who pays for what (DAO vs. WG(s)) on a case by case basis if there’s any controversy.

Supporting WG Leaders

It’s a very intimidating process we are embarking on, so the Governance WG wants to create some regular spaces to work directly with WG leaders to setup their WGPs.

We will hold a regular space to meet and provide support for WG leaders to make their WGP. This could be known as SubDAOification Office Hours - hosted once a week.

  • Answer questions or uncertainties.
  • Gather issues to work out on larger, monthly progress sessions.

We’ll also schedule a subDAOification Session monthly to work out any larger issues amongst the whole group of WG leaders and the Governance WG.

Deadline for a Transition

Transition is defined as WGPs are in for all groups and are approved by the Giveth DAO via Snapshot.

A transition in this case does NOT include:

  • Updating Role Proposals
  • Reorganizing the Forum
  • Updating Calls
  • Updating Time Reporting (Coda)
  • Reorganizing Discord

We’ll work on the items above partly in tandem and as well after the dust has settled from reorganization.

The majority of attendees during the session signalled we should make the switch by end of Q2, early July, before ETH Barcelona.

We probably don’t want to deal with finalizing this during or right before ETH BCN. Let’s set our deadline at July 1st, 2023. If we get close to end of June and think we’re NGMI then we can always work something new out.

Next Steps

  • Gather feedback on this post
  • If you feel ready to lead, draft your WGP.
  • Governance to schedule a session for WGLs to work out a list of all products and operations that could become WGs.
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Thanks @mitch for gathering and ordering all the ideas and suggestions and turning them into clear recommendations.

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Technically, would I fit in this spot? Dont answer to any one person but the overall DAO itself, etc. im always a weird one out. :wink:

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You’re a PERSON not a TOOL :hammer:

Your role would probably fit under some community management WG I would imagine.

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Depends who you ask :wink: but ok cool :0

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Hey Giantkin!
I suppose we should decide if Discord moderation is considered part of the Communitas WG or part of operations. Which WG do you contribute your hours to when you fill out the typeform each month?

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just did the first one, i dont know what was prefilled.
I’ll do what /which ever. :slight_smile:

or if i have to do one alone, thats ok to. (or part of the ‘dao’ group instead)
tho, keeping reports etc, would dbl my hours used lol

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Some other activities that may create some debate about where the costs belong and some could be classified as professional development: regular buddy syncs / reviews, community call (and other weekly calls if not directly contributing), attending sessions like Giveth Essentials, MTM/GIV Talks. Should these be allocated to a budget and if so, which budget?

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That’s a good point - While I think these things are minor - attending MTM or GIVtalk might comprise 1-2 hours monthly per contributor - I guess if you don’t have a direct reason to be at those sessions then it shouldn’t be compensated?

I think it’s great to be passionate about Giveth and if you want to hang out in calls because it genuinely interests you then that’s perfect. However we can’t say it’s okay for people to join any calls all the time and expect to get paid for it.

We definitely don’t want to incentivize spending more time hanging out in calls than doing work, unless you’re a guy like @Griff who’s job it is to be in calls all day. :joy: :sob:

I would dare to say the same for the GOV and Community Calls - If you’re not actively presenting or engaging on behalf of your WG then do you have a purpose to be there? To stay informed I suppose, but the purpose of being informed must be related to work you do in a WG somewhere in Giveth.

Buddy calls are a bit trickier since they make up a big part of the social fabric of our contributors. Curious what people think. Myself I usually have a buddy call anywhere from bi-weekly to quarterly so my hours are almost negligible. I know some people commit to meeting with their buddy weekly, but is it mandatory? Should we pay for it or is it a nice to have?

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(Sorry - my post replied to the wrong message. Trying again…)

I’m not sure I agree with this assessment. It is in the best interest of Giveth for contributors to be in-the-know in more areas than where they are directly contributing. It cannot be seen as “free time” to be joining meetings (any regular meetings) and even events like MTM or GIVtalk, etc.

At that rate, Giveth would be asking contributors to give their free time to become more knowledgeable, engaged, promotional of Giveth, etc. Equally, contributors who could not “afford” to join meetings for free would be hugely disadvantaged in the short and long run by appearing as less valuable b/c less engaged, etc. and overtime becoming less in-the-know, etc.

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E.g., what would count as “a direct reason”?

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Thanks for this great and comprehensive post. I’m wondering if there’s a mechanism we can add into the proposal to allocate pay raises in the budget?

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I understand your point, and thanks for bringing it up!

The higher issue here is to address and sort any “floating hours” into WGs, there should be little to no contributors hours that aren’t attributed to a WG. Attributing it to a WG allows us to make better granular decisions. Keeping these floating hours charged to the DAO makes it really hard to assess contributors and doesn’t encourage good accountability.

My opinion is that there should be ZERO contributor hours billed directly to the DAO, it should be all accounted for inside of WGs.

We need some sort of oversight in the system where how much “work” people are doing vs. how many calls they are attending. If a contributor spends 8 hours a week in calls to do 2 hours of work then maybe that needs to be addressed.

A perfect example of how to attribute this hours is the work you do in fact. So in order to effectively write all the things in Giveth you need the context to do so, you could attribute all that time getting context in calls under a Communitas WG or some future iteration of a Comms/Marketing WG.

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Sure, do you have any ideas or do you want me to make something up?

Again to my comments above - I think it all needs to fit into WGs and not fall on the DAO to manage how much to pay contributors.

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Ah sorry. Thanks @mitch ! This totally makes sense. Got it. Sounds good.

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For those who are preparing their WG Proposal, here’s a spreadsheet on hours charged by contributors for Dec 2022 to Feb 2023. I’ll add the March 2023 hours once completed.

You can use this as a guide on identifying who will be part of the WG / team members.

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An update here!

Our next session is booked for April 12, 11am CST (Mexico) :calendar:


I did a bit of homework looking at DAOs of similar size and scope and they generally hover around 4-8 working groups. Again, we can choose what makes sense and strike a balance between accountability and agility.

Building a Methodology :bulb:

Ahead of our session on the 12th I took some feedback from @OyeAlmond and wanted to propose a “Scoring Method” - a series of questions and corresponding scoring metrics that I hope will help us identify reasonable working groups. I would like to apply this reasoning method during our session to empower DAO leaders to make decisions and move forward.

How this works: DAO leaders, with a small group of relevant contributors go through this methodology for each WG they identify and use the scoring guidelines below to arrive at a final score for each WG. If the WG score is above the threshold it, goes into the YES pile, if it’s below the threshold, it goes into the NO pile.

  • YES means it definitely should become a WG. :white_check_mark:
  • NO means it shouldn’t become a WG as is. (but will be dealt with) :no_entry_sign:

For all intents and purposes we’ll refer to Working Groups (WG) as a product/project/program/grouping of aligned tasks - either emergent or existing.

Here is the proposed methodology below, separated into three larger categories and the scoring logic for each response:

Roles and Teams

Max score: 4.5 | Min score: -3

Does it have a leader?

  • Is there a person who already leads this WG? (+1 score if yes, 0 if no)

Are there specific contributors who only work on it?

  • Can you define the people working on it clearly? (+0.5 if yes, 0 if no)
  • Is there a clear definition for the roles needed? (+1 if yes, 0 if no)

Does the leadership and team overlap with another WG?

  • Does it have the same leadership as another WG? (+1 if no, 0 if yes)
  • Is the team basically the same people as another WG? (i.e. more than 80% overlap) (-1 if yes, +1 if no overlap)
  • If there is overlap, are they filling the same skilled roles in this overlap? (-2 if yes, 0 if no)

Goals and Deliverables

Max score: 6.5 | Min score: -4

What are the high level goals?
Do they:

  • Bring revenue to Giveth? (+1 if yes, 0 if no)
  • Bring more donors, donations or projects to the platform? (+1 if yes, 0 if no)
  • Bring investments/grants? (+1 if yes, 0 if no)
  • Turn non-profits into micro-economies? (+1 if yes, 0 if no)
  • Overlap with another WG? (-2 if yes, -1 if partially, 0 if no)

What are the trackable ROI/GPS/Deliverables?
(We don’t need the number estimates but if you had measurable goals, what would they be?)

  • Does it have trackable/measurable goals? (+0.5 if yes, 0 if no)
  • Are they relevant to the high level goals? (+1 if yes, -1 if no, 0 if unsure)
  • Do they overlap with another WG? (-1 if yes, -0.5 for partial, +1 if no)

Duration and Budget

Max score: 5 | Min score: 0

Will it be expensive?

  • Will the WG use monthly more than 12% of the max budget? (+3 if yes, 0 if no)

Does it have an end date?

  • Is there a determined condition where this product/project/grouping of tasks will terminate?
    (i.e. product/features launches, social/marketing program ends, product planned retirement) (+2 if no, 0 if yes)

Scoring

  • Highest possible score: 16
  • Lowest possible score: -7

A WG needs a score of 7 or higher to be a YES (Sort of shooting in the dark but let’s see…)

Sorting the No WG List

Once we ascertain what our YES WG and NO WG groups are, we need to allocate the work somewhere. We should try to do 2 things:

  • Group multiple NO WGs into a single larger WG (& see if it passes the above methodology)
  • Put the NO WG under a larger YES WG

If we are unable to achieve either of the above then we retire the WG.

On another note,

I wanted to address some concerns and fears expressed by some of you with my perspective: :thinking:

We’re going to get slower and more bureaucratic!

Yes, we will. BUT we have the ability to choose how bureaucratic we become, how granular we make our working groups, how much detail we require in our WGPs. I would suggest for us to start simple, be nice to each other, and stay slim. I don’t think anyone is advocating for monster-sized budget requests and proposals. I hope the methodology posted above will help us find the right balance.

The guidelines for WGPs in my initial post only requires 7 points to be answered and 3 of them can be summarized in a single table. The GOV WG will offer 1:1 help for leaders to get the info they need and get their WGP draft up.

For my own concerns, I believe that we’ve been operating the last 2.5 years at a break-neck development pace with almost no accountability or spending control and often with little user research or community consensus. I hope adding a few speed-bumps will allow us to be more thoughtful with how we spend our funds and how we allocate resources. Yes, Giveth will operate slower, but maybe we need to slow down just a bit; work smarter, not faster.

How do we maintain consistency across skill sets?

A fair point, skilled roles like developers, designers, writers, marketers need to have some sort of space to sync and make sure their work is consistent with their peers.

I believe we can look to existing skill-focused leaders to provide organization. (i.e. @amin for developers, @markop for designers, @Cori for comms). I won’t dictate how they should organize but it might take form in a monthly call and dedicated channels for review and support.

To allocate this extra time in our budgeting, if there is no clear WG to put these hours, then a contributor can allocate this time under the WG where they spend the most relevant time or divided proportionally across all relevant WGs they contribute to.

*end of mitch perspectives*

Please, I’m very open to adjusting this methodology but I think this is the way we should go to not only sort out our immediate WG reorganization but provide guidelines for future WGs to emerge.

Also, we will need to prepare some information ahead of time in order to carry out this exercise on Wednesday: :construction:

  • List of WGs we think could exist (as defined above)
  • Rough estimation of team and budget (we already know how much we spend on existing WGs)
  • High level goals
  • Theoretical metrics

I hope we can get a minimum 6 sample WGs to work through on Wednesday and use to battle test the methodology above. GOV WG will reach out Monday/Tuesday and work 1:1 with anyone to help get this ready.

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This is great! Thank you so much for providing the step x step to make this process much smoother for all the wg. Excited to start!

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I hope we can focus on Products for the working groups, the metrics look great tho, I don’t think there is much else to change.

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Thank you for this great methodology, Mitch!

We could also look at the current WG list we have and see where people are charging their hours and work our way up. As a suggestion, it would be nice to be able to identify

  • which are Product WGs from the current WG charges
  • determine new Product WGs not yet in the list but are currently being worked on (maybe different products are charged to a single WG at the moment - like GIVeconomy/ Development/ Communications/ Design WGs), and
  • which are essential/shared services WGs if we want to go that path (Communitas, Governance, DevOps, etc)

We could then know who are the team members for each Product WG, then go through this methodology of YES/NO projects.