Some nice DAO research here: Token House Missions - 🏹 Mission Proposals - Optimism Collective
Thanks for all this, @mitch! A lot to process. At the moment, I have two comments to share.
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Perhaps “Fundraising & Partnerships” could have a shorter, slicker name like “Collaboration” or “Engagement”.
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I’m still uncomfortable with this idea that select (who decides?) meetings are not billable, that voting become not billable or even Praise-dishing, etc. not billable. There are a few reasons for this including: 1) fracturing the unity of the DAO, 2) decrease in productivity 3) discrimination based on DAO-imposed productivity, 4) abuse of contributors’ time, 5) pressure to work/participate w/o compensation. Some thoughts on those:
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While “subdaoification” may be better for decentralization and structural & financial organization, it can easily produce a fracturing of the unity of the DAO by isolating contributors in their WGs and chapters, particularly if they are not encouraged/compensated to participate in the whole.
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If contributors are not encouraged/compensated to participate as they normally did (do) in the different facets of the DAO, productivity decreases when contributors become less knowledgeable about what is happening beyond their role-proposal-defined scope. We cannot do our work well if we are not fully participating in the DAO and all of its operations, but we simply cannot do that without compensation.
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In which case, contributors become forced to participate anyway in order to carry out their roles that require that knowledge to function well. Anyone who does not, becomes redundant and inadequate.
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This leads the DAO to an abuse of contributors’ time that requires them to work beyond their defined scope “on paper” without compensation to fully fulfill their role, since that does include such things as Praise, voting, joining community calls, and more.
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While it may be suggested that “you are not obligated to dish praise!”, you are actually obligated to dish Praise. It is the foundation of this DAO, and at the end of the day, we are doing this work because it is meaningful and it is a compensated MO, which includes Praise and more. Contributors would be pressured to continue to dish Praise (and more). This is paradoxical in that it is something built into the structure of the organization, but contributors would be expected to provide it outside of their role as compensated contributors. Obviously contributors will still do it because they are expected, because they want to, because others are doing it. Praise here is just one example, buddy review system another, the community call another. Does anyone join a morale-boosting, feel-good, updates-all-around work meeting for free? I don’t think so. Should they? Also no.
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While I love Giveth and what it is working to create through the DAO, we are still humans making a living, and anything that goes into the DAO is part of that working agreement. To remove that basic relationship is to undermine the forward-thinking philosophy of the Giveth mission and that underpins simple ethics of workers’ rights.
*(original, deleted reply had my numbering wrong.)
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I agree that using Clockify can provide valuable insights into how we allocate our efforts and stay accountable to our proposed work agreements. We have a Giveth Clockify workspace. I suggest that we use that existing workspace instead of each person tracking their time individually. This would allow us to have one place where all WG leads can look at hours, rather than each person submitting reports to each WG lead. There’s also an option to manually add your time in Clockify if it’s confusing to use the time tracker with all the switching between tasks.
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We saw the workspace! However its still configured for the old working group structure so that is why we chose to track individually this time. Were you the one that created the workspace? Maybe we can get together and restructure the categories and projects to reflect the new subDAOification. WGs…
I think the Working Group and Chapter design is GREAT, although the name “chapter” feels a little weird.
Comments are great and I won’t repeat things, what I want to speak to is this section, and what I see as a pretty big gap in strategy, budget planning and really the long-term health of the project.
There is something missing here that lies in-between contributor/manager feedback and Graviton/conflict resolution and @NikolaCreatrix brought a really great point to the table that speaks to this.
@karmaticacid, @mitch, @WhyldWanderer, @NikolaCreatrix … you are developing into amazing leaders – how did that happen?
Giveth was very small when you came onboard, and you received a lot of informal yet direct coaching, guidance, and support from @Griff and myself.
You’ve moved into leadership roles now and as Giveth has grown exponentially in the past 2 years. Your hands are full, and it’s not really possible to give all the newer contributors the 1:1 critical feedback, training time and personal development opportunities that is needed to cultivate new leaders.
How Do We Cultivate Excellence in Leadership?
My concern is that we are creating these Working Groups and Chapters, which require experience and skill for success at the personal and collective levels, without accounting for internal development and external training BEFORE there’s a performance issue.
Managing Leaders means Developing Leaders… let’s get some leadership development programming for everyone, and a performance improvement protocol for when feedback says it’s needed… before jumping to replacing them.
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@WhyldWanderer Yes! We can mark projects archived and start from scratch, and use the new subDAOification WGs categorization
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Some points to follow up on from our GOV call last week:
I’ll try my best to paraphrase the issues I heard on the call and provide my opinion on what I think we should do.
You can check out agenda and notes here 
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https://www.notion.so/giveth/GIVernance-WG-8-May-2023-21e13cde6dd841d0a73473daaad28593?pvs=4
Participating in the Giveth DAO
@Suga built more on her points during the call of how to attribute all of these sort of bigger DAO or cross-coordination tasks such as participating in the forum, showing up to calls in other WGs, voting, praising, peer review, being a buddy etc… If we as a DAO decide not to pay people for these things they could be considered as employee abuse and deteriorate the unity of the DAO by discouraging people to participate in other areas or go outside the bounds of doing WG related work.
My opinion
I hear these points, but I want to say that I really hope we can cut down on a lot of these DAO-wide activites. There aren’t great boundaries on the current way we handle all these DAO activities and my goal is to improve that and provide clear scope for contributors on how they spend their time contributing.
I don’t think we should encourage contributors as much as we have previously to contribute to other working groups on their own volition. This has led to a mess where people can sort of do whatever they want in whatever amount and the result is it doesn’t allow us to properly budget and prioritize strategically. I’m definitely guilty of contributing in too many places.
The above issue(s) manifest(s) in a few different ways currently:
- Contributors feeling encouraged or even obligated to read, understand, vote and/or comment on forum posts that they either don’t understand and/or aren’t able to provide good perspectives on.
- Contributors showing up to a myriad of calls “looking for work” or to listen in and comment. Then subsequently claiming those hours spent in calls as part of their paid contributions.
- Contributors joining other working groups or projects and insisting to take on tasks. The self-starter initiative is great but often the project actually doesn’t need anymore people working on it, or the contributor might not be a good fit for the role.
I can understand how this effort to contain nearly all of our work into WGs might seem threatening to certain contributors. Especially if you, as a contributor, lack direction or focus on how you think you should be contributing to Giveth.
THAT BEING SAID, right now nobody is going to stop getting paid for signing multisigs, voting or participating in the forum or participating in the buddy system. However, as mentioned we should strive to cut down on the work we do that isn’t related to a WG we participate in. Part of that is removing the feeling of obligation for everybody to engage in on something that really only a few people have the right skills/context to understand.
ALSO TO BE SAID, I don’t see this particular discussion as a blocker for WG leads to start estimating how much time they need from contributors/resources to run their WG. I would like to allow us to move forward with this process and in the meantime we can carry on this discussion concurrently.
Developing Leaders
I think @Danibelle sums it up very well in this comment:
This is great and I agree mostly with this idea. I want to highlight two things:
- I probably don’t have the faculties or bandwidth to contribute something useful in this area
- If someone(s) were to build something in this area I would like it to be something very, very minimal. The book has been written a thousand times in a thousand ways on developing leadership in workplaces. Let’s not break our heads reinventing the leadership wheel.
What I would like to see
I would love if @NikolaCreatrix @Danibelle @hanners717 and maybe @Nicbals or @freshelle could produce two things:
- A one page guide in Notion with links to external resources for people who want to invest their time in learning good workplace leadership.
- A leadership review typeform - Either integrated into our existing contributor typeform or separate.
These I think would be the bare basics of what we would need to address some of the above issues around leadership. To reiterate, I really don’t want to spend too much resources on building some sort of leadership training program… I don’t think Giveth is at the size or the capacity to justify such an effort.
Let’s spend less time on DAO Governance and more time building the Future of Giving!
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GM everyone! While I may be joining this conversation somewhat belatedly, I recently came across a research that is relevant to our ongoing discussion.
Here’s the link:
The document I’ve shared offers some interesting insights about treasury management within DAOs:
1. Most DAOs implement working groups (WGs) that resemble business units funded indefinitely to work within a specific domain. 80% of DAOs analyzed implemented some form of working group
2. WGs are often funded outside the context of an overall DAO budget individual WG budgets consolidate into an overall DAO budget that is unsustainable and up to 3x higher than traditional startup at comparable stage
3. Worse, these budgets tend to overfund non-core initiatives and underfund core or strategic initiatives
4. Some DAOs are now testing the hypothesis that funding could be more effective if it were tied to the DAO’s goals, rather than domain-specific working group
She also mention a recent development about flexible funding estructures in the Ethereum Name Service (ENS) that might interest you: Transitioning the DAO to an RFP model - Temp Check - ENS DAO Governance Forum
Drawing upon these insights, I propose the formulation of a strategic roadmap. This would serve as a valuable tool in crafting prioritization frameworks that align our initiatives with our established objectives seamlessly. Moreover, the concept of establishing a dedicated core team can potentially minimize the uncertainties faced by Giveth’s full-time contributors.
I appreciate your commitment to driving us towards a future of increased decentralization and efficiency. Thank you.
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@brichis this is incredible.
I’m reminded of some historical events and documents in the Giveth archives, from previous annual activities to update the Vision and Mission then set goals for the circles that are aligned to those overall organizational goals that map right down to each person’s role/s.
Giveth has the current Vision, Mission and Values on our About page.
As we transition from Circles to Chapters and Working Groups, this is a reformulation of HOW.
MVV is great, but what’s the plan to get there?
How each group is formed around targeted goals that will further Giveth on it’s mission, help the DAO and subDAO’s allocate funds toward activities that can have the greatest impact toward the vision, and how each person has roles designed around action steps toward those goals.
This kind of simple roadmap creates coherence within and between the different teams.
It’s critically important, because it helps team members prioritize their own work and value the work of others, while also instilling confidence in those who are considering partnerships, donations, and other forms of collaboration.
You can see the 2019 Circle Goals document here…
And, the Roles Sheet that corresponds to it here.
I’m excited to see how data being collected through Comms and Communitas can drive a strategic roadmap that clearly aligns everyone’s work toward a common goal and helps each person know exactly how they, and others, are doing that.
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I wanted to address some concerns from our last few GOV calls and some 1:1 discussions with a few of you.
There is still some lacking clarity around Comms and how do we implement them into these emerging product teams.
To paraphrase some of the concerns I hear, such as:
If comms as a chapter doesn’t have KPIs how will we measure it’s effectiveness?
WG leaders don’t know how to manage communications/marketing of their working groups.
The product teams aren’t aligned enough to develop a coherent communications/marketing strategy
I have a suggestion and would like to leave it open for more discussion if need be. Maybe the process needs a bit more detail so I will lay out how I think it will work.
The comms/marketing chapter is responsible for creating communications and marketing content, it has under it’s wing the discretion over what platforms, what content, messaging, outreach etc… they are lead by the chapter lead and do whatever they believe is the best manner for communicating and marketing.
But to understand what they need to communicate or to market it should be focused on what the goals of the WGs are.
Every WG understands they will need to communicate and possibly market the things they are working on, but this doesn’t assume they know how to go about it. The WG lead works with the comms chapter lead to communicate their needs and goals and the comms chapter develops a strategy for the WG to be successful. The WG has clear goals that informs comms, comms provides resources to the WG to implement their designed strategy or campaign.
Comms chapter can have it’s own internal goals to measure success, but it is not required to post 3 month budgets/deliverables that the DAO votes on, this allows it to be much more flexible in the way it supports other groups.
For example:
Let’s say the dApp is going to launch a new feature next month, projects can now launch NFT fundraisers right from the project page! WOW! (not a real feature, yet). The dApp lead knows they will need to communicate this and probably market it to get users to subscribe and use it.
The dApp lead reaches out to the comms lead and explains their needs, the overview of the feature and if the dApp is responsible for delivering any specific KPIs (e.g. 5 project NFT collections launched).
The comms lead then takes stock of their resources and develops a plan for this feature launch. This could include:
- Drafting and scheduling tweets
- Writing a blog
- Press Release
- Virtual hosted events
Comms lead presents the ideas, the WG lead discusses the details with comms and chooses to proceed. However this plan requires some things like design, platform statistics and details from developers. The WG lead, like any product manager, is responsible to remove blockers and provide all the information and resources comms needs to do their job.
They work together on setting deadlines and tracking progress, comms internally can track and share the effectiveness of their campaign or strategy and change their strategy, if needed, to be more effective in meeting the WG goals.
The feature launches, comms execute its plan and dialogue continues continuously with comms chapter lead and the dApp lead for any needs from either.
This I think is a better way of incorporating comms because instead of comms responsible for chasing everyone for everything - information, design, analytics - they offload the responsibility to the product manager who becomes the point person to provide clear, organized, information & resources for comms to use.
Lastly, we will be having as mentioned, bi-weekly stewards syncs to detail with the last mentioned issue, short 30 mins calls, which @Griff has agreed to lead, focused on syncing all the WG leaders on what we are working on for the next 1-3 months and aligning on priorities.
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