SubDAOification: Recommendations and a Path Forward

GIVernance
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Thanks for these guidelines @mitch - provides further focus for our discussions. I’m making a suggestion for the treatment of a large proportion of ‘shared services’ and to continue the discussion.

@Cori made a good point in Governance call today: there are aspects of Comms that don’t align with a specific product and are focussed on the growth of Giveth as a whole.

Broadly speaking, other current WGs (Communitas, Fundraising) also carry-out growth-focussed activities, not associated with a product eg. bringing more donors, securing funding etc. All these growth-focussed activities could be incorporated under a ‘Growth’ working group budget.

Potential additional benefits to creating this working group include:

  • eliminating the often-referred-to overlap between Comms and Community
  • maximising synergies between Community network growth and funding opportunities
  • adding further cohesion end-to-end in fundraising strategy

This structure would enable:

  • clear goal definition around growth activities/campaigns
  • metrics related to growth
  • clear understanding of what activities/campaigns are successful / less successful for the DAO

This would give us one working group, which could:

  • satisfy the ‘agile’ framework, even though the activities would not have a technical development focus (@MoeNick wdyt?)
  • organise itself around growth / funding campaigns
  • satisfy the scoring system suggested by @mitch above

imo the costs associated with these tasks do not need to be charged/shared to other working groups. Conceptually, these activities are more like product-aligned working groups because they are focussed on activities/campaigns that have a lifecycle and are associated with bringing donors, funding, projects (bringing donors) etc.

We would still need to consider what happens with activities like DevOps/Security/Moderation.

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23

Just to mention an aspect heard during the call.
when one group is tasked with one item (comms for example)
they dont need to be a part of another group, to do their job. it would be them that would send a rep, to work with that other group, answer questions/ask etc. and bring back to their main group and report, discuss etc.

Even saying that, i still see some odd ones out. (like others have mentioned). maybe another subdao spin up, that could encompass those directly.
Not sure which is better etc :slight_smile: but always fun to see things form.

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As mentioned on the GOV call this week, I have had great feedback and I have learned a lot from listening to all of you, either 1:1 or during our group sessions. I have a pretty confident idea of how we can move forward and I’m gonna make my best effort to propose a structure for our SubDAOs. I hope we can take a look at this and bring to a discussion here and in our subsequent gatherings as well.

Catch up on the Recording of our last session here:

Part :one:

Part :two:

Giveth Chapters: Business in the front, Party in the back.

I got this message from different people so I will try to summarize the problem and a theory solution to a bigger structure of our contributors.

Considering that we can have many WGs running simultaneously all leveraging different skill sets within their teams to achieve independent goals we need a structure or group that runs in the background that provides support and/or centralized resource planning for skill-based groups of contributors to make sure on a higher level things are working out smooth. Groups of contributors based on skills/roles can be identified as Chapters (open to changing the name).

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Chapters can operate under any format they wish. Organize meetings, manage their workloads, provide peer review, cover each other in case of absences etc… They are not required to post a formal Working Group Proposal and should be able to operate with a minimal or no amount of funding. If they do need funding, either one-time or recurring they can outline a proposal with the details of the duration and use of funding. I’ll keep guidelines fluid for now in regards to that. The DAO has the opportunity to review and subsequently critique, approve or reject any funding request for a Chapter.

Contributors could be in any amount of Chapters and don’t require a role proposal to do so. However, hours are accounted for inside of the WGs they work on, not the Chapters to which they belong. The only exception to this is if there is a Chapter Lead and they contribute a notable portion of their time to managing the Chapter (e.g. scrum planning, meeting facilitation etc…).

I do not believe every Chapter needs a lead as a requirement and we should deal with it case by case.

I have heard some ideas about paying a tax or service fee to Chapters from WGs that use their services and it’s an interesting idea but I think we should keep it in the backlog and reduce complexity for now.

How Chapters interact with WGs

WGs can plan their projects and estimate what kind and how much of a resource they need (e.g. 20 hours monthly of back-end development, 5 hours monthly of marketing, 30 hours monthly of design etc…)

WG Leads work with Chapters and/or Chapter leads to check if there are people available to help them and estimate the effort required. Chapters might also have an averaged per-hour rate that can help WG Leads estimate the cost of their product, again up to Chapters to decide.

Planning Structure

Some very good points were raised by others about our ability to estimate costs and doing analysis ahead of launching a new product or program. This is very important for us to be able to estimate how much of our time and funding will be spent on building something, and to make a decision if the endeavour is worthwhile.

As mentioned, anyone taking the lead on a WG will need to work with Chapters to estimate if their project is feasible, based on who’s available actually to work on it, what will the costs be and at least provide a clear case that justifies the proposed work.

WG Proposers can even break projects into sections and deal with estimating costs in chunks rather than all at the beginning. This could be in the form of a Research Phase, Build Phase and Maintenance Phase letting WGs evolve over time and adjust their estimated costs and durations accordingly.

It would be unreasonable for a WG proposer to know all the costs and timelines before beginning a project, so we can allow them to split it up into chunks and deal with them sequentially. The important part is we have proper cost and effort estimation for each chunk and the DAO feels aligned with the WGs mission at each point of evolution.

Clear WGs :hammer_and_wrench:

What I hear from @Griff and others is that we should try to define WGs centered around a product and that aren’t so huge that the DAO couldn’t reasonably stop funding them without stopping the whole show.

Based on processing your responses and doing some independent thought I think these WGs make the most sense for Giveth as mostly autonomous units:

DApp :desktop_computer:

  • Deals with mainly Projects and Donors
  • Testing
  • DevOps
  • Design
  • User Support
  • Project Verification
  • Marketing Campaigns
  • Manage small features (i18n integration, project page overhaul, Multi-chain support for projects & donors)
  • Folds in related products post-launch for upkeep and maintenance (PFP Collection, QF, GIVfi)

GIVeconomy :giv:

  • Deals with anything related to the GIV token
  • GIVbacks Review, Calculation and Distribution
  • GIVstream
  • GIVpower
  • User Support
  • Marketing
  • Tokenomics Research
  • Design
  • DevOps
  • Testing
  • Folds in related products post-launch for upkeep and maintenance (Referral Program, GURVES, Giveth Pro)

Rewards :sparkles:

  • Deals with distributing retroactive rewards using Praise or any future system
  • works out of the Praise Dashboard, Spreadsheets and an Aragon DAO
  • DevOps
  • Community Management

DAO Ops :bank: :people_hugging:

I imagine one of this working group’s goals will be to slowly decentralize its processes to Chapters and WGs. The end goal might be to delegate all its responsibilities and functions to where DAO Ops as a WG can cease to exist.

  • Maintain all the voting apps, including the GIVgarden
  • Upgrading apps and voting mechanisms
  • Maintain the buddy system
  • Conflict Resolution
  • Treasury Management
  • Vesting Distribution
  • Centralized Accounting (for now)
  • DAO Transition Support

Communitas (Community Events) :earth_americas:

  • Deals mostly with humans and organizing promotion of Giveth as a whole
  • Not User Support
  • Meet The Makers
  • Ambassador Program
  • Twitter Spaces
  • GM podcast
  • GIVtalks
  • Giveth Essentials
  • Discord/Forum Moderation
  • Needs Design
  • Needs some DevOps
  • Needs Marketing
  • Referral Program??
  • Swag shop??

Fundraising and Partnerships :money_with_wings: :handshake:

  • Deals with grant writing and applications
  • Business Development
  • Handles partnership inquiries
  • Manages and earns revenue from offering fundraising as a service to other DAOs
  • Interfaces with other WGs to spec out grant requirements and feasability.
  • Marketing
  • Ad-hoc analytics and data gathering

We can also include a few examples of specific product/feature WGs that remain independent for a while until they launch and could either dissolve or merge into one of the listed WGs above:

  • GIVfi
  • Quadratic Funding
  • Referral Program
  • IRL Events (ETH Denver, ETH Barcelona, Devcon…)

Clear Chapters :books:

Again, based on some independent thought and what I have heard thus far. I see these Chapters within Giveth:

  • Development
  • Communications/Marketing
  • Design
  • DevOps
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It has been a solid 2 weeks since this last update and I have collected a lot of feedback outside of the Forum from all of you!

I think based on everyone’s comments or lack there of I can say with 95% confidence this will be the new organization of the Giveth DAO and its WGs:

We will reform our current :one: :seven: informal working groups into just :six: workings groups, this will be Dapp, GIVeconomy, Rewards, Communitas, Fundraising & Partnerships, and DAO Ops.

We’ll also have 5 Chapters to begin with, which will be gathering places for contributors of similar skills and maybe handle important tasks like resource planning and assignment for Working Groups. The 5 Chapters will be Development, Communications, DevOps, Design, Roadmap & Strategy.

If you just want the TL;DR :newspaper: —> Next Steps :fast_forward:

Working Groups in detail

DApp :desktop_computer:

Lead: @MoeNick (Although I think he has suggested someone else take the role)

  • Deals with mainly Projects and Donors
  • Handles Project Verification
  • Provides User Support for existing Donors and Projects
  • Maintenance of the Dapp
  • Release & Version planning for DApp (Handles final schedule for deploying new features)
  • Works on minor features and products (i.e. i18n integration, Notification center, Multi-chain donations & project addresses)

Requires:

  • Testers
  • Product Managers
  • DevOps
  • Designers
  • Communications & Marketing
  • Community Outreach
  • Developers (of all flavours)

GIVeconomy :coin:

Lead: @karmaticacid

  • Deals with anything related to the GIV token
  • Handles GIVbacks Review, Calculation and Distribution
  • GIVstream
  • GIVfarms
  • GIVpower
  • Provides User Support for GIVeconomy products
  • Works closely with DApp to implement and maintain features
  • Maintenance of GIVeconomy sub-products
  • Works internally on minor features and products (Giveth Pro, Instant Boosting, Referral Program)

Requires

  • Communications
  • Product Managers
  • Development
  • Ad-hoc Tokenomics Research
  • Design
  • Community Outreach
  • DevOps
  • Testers

Rewards :sparkles:

Lead: @Franco

  • Deals with distributing retroactive rewards using Praise or any future system
  • works out of the Praise Dashboard, Spreadsheets and an Aragon DAO

What skills do they need?

  • DevOps
  • Community Outreach

DAO Ops :bank: :people_hugging:

Lead: @mitch

  • Maintain all the voting apps, including the GIVgarden
  • Upgrading apps and voting mechanisms
  • Maintain the buddy system
  • Conflict Resolution
  • Treasury Management
  • Vesting Distribution
  • Centralized Accounting (for now)
  • DAO Transition Support

Requires:

  • Gravitons
  • Accountants
  • HR
  • DevOps
  • Ethereum/DeFi Experts
  • Governance Leadership

Communitas :earth_americas:

Lead: @WhyldWanderer

  • Deals mostly with humans and organizing promotion of Giveth as a whole
  • Onboarding new and potential Projects and Donors
  • Meet The Makers
  • Ambassador Program
  • Twitter Spaces
  • GM podcast
  • GIVtalks
  • Giveth Essentials
  • Discord/Forum Moderation
  • Swag Shop???

Requires

  • Design
  • DevOps
  • Communications
  • Community Managers

Fundraising & Partnerships :money_with_wings::handshake:

@hanners717 and/or @yass ???
Still some ongoing discussion on how to abstract the parts that are Giveth from the parts that are General Magic

  • Deals with grant writing and applications
  • Business Development
  • Handles partnership inquiries
  • Interfaces with other WGs & Chapters (Such as Dapp, GIVeconomy and Strategy Chapter) to spec out grant requirements and feasibility.
  • Ad-hoc analytics and data gathering for drafting grants & fundraising purposes

Requires:

  • Communications
  • Business Developers
  • Writers
  • Community Managers
  • Fundraising Experts

Chapters

Communications :mega:

Lead: @Cori

  • Handles resources planning for WGs that need Communications work
  • Managing Twitter content
  • Peer review of content
  • Has regular meetings
  • Maintain cohesion of overall strategy and narrative of Giveth
  • WG communicates with comms lead to find their needs and the comms lead allocates the right type of contributor to work with WG Leads

Development :ninja: :keyboard:

Lead: @MoeNick

  • Handles resource planning for WGs that need Development work
  • has regular meetings
  • Reviews PRs and code
  • Maintain cohesion of development processes and architectures
  • WG communicates with development lead to find their needs, development lead allocates the right type of contributor to work with WG Leads.

Design :artist: :framed_picture:

No lead?? @Tossynee @msaeedi

  • Individual Designers assign themselves to tasks as requests come in from WG leads
  • Do they have regular meetings??
  • Maintain consistency on design, branding, UI and UX

DevOps :closed_lock_with_key: :saluting_face:

No lead?? @MoeShehab @geleeroyale

  • Keeps Giveth Secure
  • 24 hour monitoring of Giveth Applications & services for emergencies & outages
  • Provides DevOps services to WGs
  • Handles Access Management to Giveth infrastructure and services
  • Has regular meetings

Strategy :office_worker: :motorway:

No lead

  • High level prioritization of products
  • Sort out issues as they arise in the Tokenlog & from Fundraising
  • Has regular meetings
  • Product Managers coordinate their timelines & how to share resources

Working Group Proposal Format :bookmark_tabs:

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. What resources are needed and/or which specific contributors in the WG.

Resources are defined as skills, i.e. Back-End Development, UX Design, Blog Writing, Tokenomics Research

  • If there are specific contributors, what are their roles/tasks specifically?
  • Include who is the Leader/Manager
  • How much time monthly does the WG require from a person/resource?

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/KPI 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? Is it foreseeably infinite or finite in duration?

6. What is your total budget for this period?

  • A good practice would be to budget yourself a small amount of extra funding to handle the unexpected. This doesn’t need to be in every budget but you should always keep a small float of funding for emergencies.

7. What paid services/tools do you need?

  • Which ones are covered as part of Chapter costs, which one is paid for by the WG.
  • If the WGP duration is over 6 months then require regular budget approvals (more below).

Regular Budgets Approvals :white_check_mark:

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

Apart from the requirements below the WG will need to outline its budget for the next 3 months (will eventually extend to every 6 months). It should provide three budget options for the DAO to vote on:

Grow: A larger budget than previous

  • Details on what the WG would be able to take on with a bigger budget.
  • A number estimate of the grow budget for a given period

Sustain: Maintain the current budget

  • What the WG will continue to deliver with no change in the current budget.

Shrink: Lower the current budget

  • What could the WG cut from scope to lower its budget.
  • A number estimate of the shrink budget for a given period

In addition to this, a WG Budget should include:

Other Required Info

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

Optional Info

  • 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

Managing Leadership

This area is still a bit fuzzy, the idea is we need a feedback mechanism and a way to replace leaders if need be.

We could append our flow on the contributors typeform adding a conditional section for leaving feedback for WG Leaders. We can gather specific feedback on how leaders are doing and get some number weighted scores (i.e. on a scale of 1-10…) to critical questions related to the leader’s performance. Curious what you think @NikolaCreatrix @hanners717 or anyone else?

If the average of the number weighted scores is below a certain threshold then we open the WG for lead nominations, vote on a new WG lead with nrGIV (or maybe eventually just GIV).

Managing Contributors

Mentioned during the stewards call was the idea of WG Leads working as mini-CEOs, having a lot of autonomy over how to manage their WG, including on-boarding and off-boarding contributors. DAO Ops provides support to WG Leads with HR, Accounting and Conflict Resolution services as the need arises.

I’d like to leave it open to each WG Lead to decide if they want their own proper DAO or token-weighted voting system for making decisions (such as on-boarding and off-boarding). DAO Ops can provide support in setting that up as well.

WG Leads, while having a lot of authority are still beholden to the larger DAO. If they do a poor job or become tyrants they can be checked by the “Managing Leadership” process defined above.

Next Steps :fast_forward:

Working Groups

  1. Find out what resources and/or contributors you need and estimate how much monthly of each
  2. Work with DevOps & Accounting to find out what kind of services and subscriptions you need & how much they cost
  3. Work with Chapters & Accounting to estimate a monthly cost for your resources & contributors
  4. Craft your high level mission
  5. Set your KPIs/Deliverables for the next 3 months
  6. Draft WGP???

Chapters

  • Review info above on Chapters and decide what your scope is (please comment!)
  • Work with Accounting & define a resource cost rate for each type of resource you need to allocate to WGs
  • Setup your resource planning structure, if any
  • Organize any regular meetings you need to have with your chapter
  • Work with DevOps & Accounting to Identify any subscription services that you need to pay for.
  • Establish if you need a budget for Chapter Lead costs and/or subscription service costs
  • Draft monthly budget estimate

DAO

  • Setup regular hack sessions weekly with Governance crew to support leaders.
  • Comment and resolve edge cases.
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Wow @mitch ! :heart_eyes: This is super well organized, thanks for putting it together. I’m happy to see the new DAO is already taking shape! @clara_gr already worked on a draft for the Rewards WG proposal, we’ll finish it soon to have something to start with!

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I am getting excited seeing how the new structure is starting to take clear shape!

Thanks for your question @mitch, this is awesome timing. :slight_smile: I do have an opinion for both Managing Leadership as well as Managing Contributors.

IMO, being a leader takes certain skill sets and abilities, and certainly way more responsibility. In my mind, it makes sense that we develop a different Typeform. This Typeform will be focused on evaluating the leader’s performance, proactiveness, leadership skills, interpersonal skills, management skills, etc. Using a scale is great. I would like to see less radicle approach than this "

I think this should be the last option. I am fun of 2 warnings before nominating or looking to hire a new leader. I think we can develop a reasonable formula for this process. Give leaders the space to improve but also frame the process within a reasonable time frame. Any opinions?

For the other part:

Yes, I want to support this idea of Leaders having the autonomy and responsibility for on-boarding as well as off-boarding. Again 3 Steps Off-boarding process sounds like a good scale. As a Conflict Resolution Steward, I have noticed that literally 100% of cases landing in the gravity box are related to the contributor’s performance and therefore we need to develop a better distinction between interpersonal conflicts and contributor’s performance and a clear system for leader to be able to address these issues.

Also, more thought needs to go into this as I am seeing that thanks to the fact that one contributor may be contributing in several different groups, leaders should go evaluate their concerns with all the other leaders that may be working with the contributor and definitely speak to other team members who work closely and ideally report the whole process and file it. And that’s how we can practice the scale.

These are my thoughts so far. And I am all about helping to develop this into a more detailed protocol…

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Awesome! Thank you for taking the time to read through and provide the perspective from a Conflict Resolution stand point

I also see sort of value in this but I want to clarify that WG Leads only have the power to off-board a contributor from the Working Group they lead. This is how ShapeShift handles it (or at least when I talked to @willy last year). Rather than having the whole DAO have to engage to remove a single contributor from the whole DAO we can scope these decisions to leaders and groups that have the best context and make these consequences more specific than absolute.

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As we continue to take steps toward reaching our subDAOification goals, I can see how this will be so beneficial for our DAO and organization as a whole and I am looking forward to the realization!! Thanks so much @mitch for the effort you have put forth to lead this initiative, schedule and host calls, and package the outcome of those calls in such a concise and clear way. You rock! :metal:

Yesterday in the Community Building sync we discussed the next steps for our working group in this process and I wanted to give an update here.

:footprints: Communitas next steps

Many of the tasks that used to be considered Communitas tasks will now be considered parts of other WGs as outlined above. I think that the reorganization makes sense and feel good about allocating it in this fashion. However, this makes it difficult to use data collected by Coda to come up with a realistic idea for what our budget will look like for the proposal. Because of this, Communitas contributors will use Clockify for the month of May to track their hours under the new Working Group structure presented above.

Once we have an idea of where everyone’s time is being spent I will be able to easily formulate a budget for Communitas as well as provide other WG Stewards of the budget required for newly acquired tasks in their WG.
eg. User support will no longer be a task included in the Communitas WG, it will now be in the DApp or GIVeconomy WG respectively. By tracking contributor hours, we will be able to provide an estimate to those WGs of how many hours on avg are spent providing that service etc.

:bar_chart: Here is how we laid it out…

We have created categories for each of the new working groups in Clockify and will start to track our hours based on the new structure. At the end of May, each Communitas contributor will send a report of tasks and WG’s that they worked on.

I created this document for contributors to reference in setting up Clockify for themselves and Im happy to show anyone else who may find it useful how we set it up so that you may also take advantage of the bigger picture and accountability that this method will provide.

I also took our old WG Document that was made by @freshelle and @clara_gr and I hacked it apart to show those same tasks under the new working groups. I hope that this is helpful for anyone wondering which working group their tasks will be billed to.

You can find the new document here.
Feel free to add comments or other tasks that I forgot that should be included in your working group.

:thought_balloon: Insights

I thought that it would be a lot of overhead to track my hours as a do a ton of multi-tasking and switching between projects etc. However I am already seeing the benefits of using this tool. Clockify has helped me gain a lot of understanding of how I manage my time. From being able to visualize how my time is being spent, helping me stay focused when I start a task, and also keep me accountable to my proposed work agreement. I hope that others can find it as a useful tool to see where we as contributors are spending our time.

I will keep you all updated as we go through this process and start to formulate the Communitas proposal when we have the data. :pray:

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While going through this process I have come across some questions as to how some things will change by switching to the new WG structure.

My questions are:

  • As we will no longer have a ‘Governance’ or ‘DAO’ working group, will we still have weekly governance calls where we discuss proposals currently in the advice process?
    As I actively participate on all of our DAO platforms, the time that it takes to keep up with proposals in the forum, vote on those proposals when they go to the DAO, vote in Snapshot, sign on multi-sig transactions, etc. will this time no longer be compensated? If it is, which WG budget will I be billing those hours to? I think we already have a hard time getting people to participate in the forum and in governance that if we stop compensating them in their monthly payments, it may negatively affect our participation rate.

  • Attending the weekly Community Call? I have noticed that people have been claiming this time in Coda under the Communitas budget… is this something I should be accounting for in my WG proposal? If we stop compensating people for the time spent at the Community Call and only compensate those required for updates, I assume those hours would be billed to the respective WG that is being represented. I fear that people will no longer come to the community call if they are not paid to be there and it could negatively affect team morale.

  • Everything involving the buddy system will be included in DAO ops? Review calls, buddy sync calls, filling out feedback forms for contributors, etc?

  • Not to be picky here but I can see this being a thing… what about time spent typing praise in the channel… is that something that people would bill to the Rewards working group? Should @Franco be prepared for that? I just think its better to answer and clarify these things since I think contributors will be asking me for support on this stuff…

  • For chapters… does the contributor bill their hours to the respective Chapter and then the chapter lead will then bill it to the product groups (WGs) or do I bill my ours straight to the product team that I was working for in respect to the chapter?

  • Need to explore the swag shop and referral program being a part of Communitas more. I will need to understand the requirements on maintenance etc in order to budget for it correctly.

These are so far a few of the questions that I have…

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This is a great proposal @mitch & l love @nikola’s suggestions on managing leadership & contributors & @whyldwanderer’s clockify initative.

Are we going to set some deadlines for WG proposaln submission?

Also - would love to mention, Comms is going through somewhat of a strategy overhaul… being led by @aabugosh & advised by @cori, myself & other comms folk. We’re working on taking more of a growth/marketing approach… and I’m thinking that… with the current proposal… this sounds like it falls under the scope of Communitas. Is that right? @mitch @WhyldWanderer ?

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I think it would be a lot to ask Communitas to take on everything that was once Comms…
Are there calls that I could join that are discussing the changes and overhaul? I could help provide insight and we can see how we can best work together…

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do you have another suggestion then? next week’s comms call is a good one to join to discuss it.

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I was under the impression that it would be a Chapter that provides services to the other working groups like we discussed in the Stewards call. Maybe I am not understanding all the nuances though so I’ll join the comms call for further discussion and clarification. Thanks Lauren!

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Some good questions indeed! Let me work through these point by point:

Governance, Forum and Voting

I think we will still have a Governance call for now, but I hope to move a lot of these DAO wide decisions into WGs - Empowering WGs to make decisions autonomously and/or periodically getting consensus from GIV token holders.

Hopefully then a lot of the live advice process can happen then inside of WG calls rather than making the whole DAO come to the decision table on things. We of course will have some things everyone needs to weigh in on but I hope to reduce the time we need to spend doing that to a basically negligible amount monthly. I do understand people might spend a lot of time reading stuff and gathering context - it should all be related to some WG of Giveth they contribute in so they could, within reason, claim the hours there.

Second point, voting. I think billing hours to vote on stuff should be done away with. Again, moving decision making into WGs we can move a lot of the voting process to subDAOs and GIV token holders, which are not just explicitly (however they are a majority) paid contributors. I would also like to retire, at some point, the nrGIV in favour of GIV and subDAO governance, but we’ll leave that out of the convo for now.

Attending Community Call

I don’t think anyone is obligated to come to the community call unless they are presenting updates for a WG. My opinion is people shouldn’t get paid for this. If 95% of CC attendees are paid contributors then it seems like a bit of a farce anyway, doesn’t it?

Buddy system stuff

I don’t have a great solution for this, I’m open to ideas. I don’t think it’s a robust solution that the whole team would claim time to DAO Ops for filling out typeforms and having their buddy calls, this really dilutes the scope of the WG. But the time @Nicbals and @freshelle spend helping people get organized should be attributed to DAO Ops.

Dishing Praise

I mean this does seem really niche. No we don’t pay people for dishing praise, it’s a culture of gratitude and you are not obligated to dish praise!

Attributing Hours

Ideally, Contributors attribute as much their hours to WGs, not Chapters, as possible. When you do your time report at the end of the month you should be able to say what WGs you worked for and how much time you spent there, not the Chapters to which you belong.

However I can see that people might spend time coordinating with their Chapter, and the work is specifically related to the Chapter. The problem with attributing hours to Chapters is that Chapters don’t have clear boundaries on their scope or the exact resources/humans that it is budgeted for. Allowing everyone to allocate hours to Chapters will probably lead us back into the current issue of not having clarity on where people spend their time.

I’m open to ideas on this one, but ideally all contributors, outside of a few Chapter leads should attribute 100% of their time to WGs so we can have clear boundaries and accountability.

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Shapeshift was brought up. so ill stick my nose once again…
(We have ‘office hours’ for each WS, some tried once a week, but most now do every other week for updates, Marketing kpi stuff, and whats coming up next, if things line up, product (the Roadmap etc) and so on .
we have a weekly Gov call, focus on any Voting items, forum discussions, diff ppl talk (guests etc) if your in that discord, theres an audio recording of everything there.

sometimes takes the full hour, but closer to 45min the last few weeks. (few proposals etc)
For the GOV call, only the presenters of each WS have to be there. all else is just to keep up.
)office hours, ofc thats up to those in it.

I dont assume im getting any pay to be listening to any meeting. (unless its directly about me/my goals etc)
Some of whats being setup makes complete sense. not sure how itlll work out in the details tho :slight_smile:

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Hmm… I agree that the Admin work for the buddy system should go in DAO ops…
Since buddy calls are related to keeping the community healthy, maybe the execution of buddy reviews and filling out feedback could be part of Communitas?

Or maybe we can incorporate it into Gravity?.. with feedback/escalated feedback and strengthening relationships between contributors, resolving conflicts, etc. Wdyt @NikolaCreatrix ?
And maybe there is kind of a max amount of time you can bill for doing these tasks depending on how many buddies you have?

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Hey @mitch I really like having a mechanism to review leaders of working groups; maybe biannual or quarterly?

Right now we only have the generalized peer review process, which doesn’t address character traits and responsibilities specifically for those in a leadership position. If we decide to go ahead with this initiative, I can develop a leadership review form after my vacation, and send it to a some contributors and leaders to review.

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Yep, I’m down to have a more complete version of a feedback form for leaders. I would suggest only to keep it in a single typeform so it isn’t forgotten when people are doing their regular quarterly peer reviews. I think quarterly is a great cadence so leaders are getting regular feedback and the org can be quicker to react if a leader is doing a bad job.

I would advocate also for keeping it into a single typeform so it isn’t another separate thing we have to remember to do. At your discretion however.

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I wouldn’t want people to do their buddy system stuff under Communitas either cause then that WG would become diluted as well, it will be hard for the WG lead to really understand where people are spending their time if the hours are inflated by buddy stuff from all ~40 contributors.

I put some thought into it and for now I think we can make a separate category in Coda - call it “Buddy Review” or something like that and we can report those hours there. People will still get paid for that time, it’s important and maybe we can in the meantime think of a way to account for those funds - I know @Griff had an idea for a “Chapter Tax” on WGs that could also be implemented similarly.

Until we have our own decent runway of funds I don’t think it’s worth the effort of making our accounting too complex for now.

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I think we said in the first SubDAO session we would set it for 1st of July - We’re just under 2 months away from that deadline but I think we can get 'er done for a mere 6 WGs.

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