Community-driven DAOs: Proposed Structure for Community Fund DAOs as of Jan 2022

[frnvpr]

@Grace

The proposed Governance

Each DAO will have 9 Council Members. Initially, there will be a maximum of 3 NF team members (⅓) in each DAO. The ultimate goal is for NF team members to remove themselves from all DAOs Council after the second quarter in 2022.

DAO Council members will be drawn from a pool of vetted candidates (criteria for vetting needs to be defined and published publicly) and rotated every three months (there must be at least a 6-month gap between two tenures across Community DAOs). This approach offers more opportunities for community members to serve as Council Members.

We propose two pools with a minimum of 20 candidates in each cool.

Hello @Grace! Awesome to see the community trying new and better forms of governance . Thank you!

I have some comments on a few of the things I read in this topic.

@Dacha

Councils from Community in Executive Pool should be independent persons, don’t have any relationships with NF, don’t be involved in management of guilds which asking money;

Hey @Dacha. The issue of impartiality is of extreme importance. I see 3 hurdles to solve.

• The first is that it’s extremely difficult to find people who don’t have skin in the game willing to do council work and engage with all the guidelines and community strategy. Right now, using the Creatives DAO (of which I am a part of) as an example, it’s common to have DAO (DAO’s under the vertical) members voting on proposals in which they are an interested part. I, for example, vote on proposals from Incubadora DAO and VR DAO, both of which I am a part of. However, there are not much people who are 1) not NF employees and 2) trully independent and engaged.

(so, this makes active DAO members become Vertical Council)

• The second hurdle is voting onchain vs voting offchain. I feel that, as long as proposals are being voted offchain (forum+TG+astrodao) , they are mainly verbal and demand some kind of consensus from council members. One thing does not derive from the other, i.e people could just vote and that’s it, but since voting happens in a context of traditional ‘power relations’ and ‘trust’, imo it’s problematic to have these Vertical Council Members be part of the DAOs which are being reviewed.

(so, active members become council, because they are the ones pushing the community forward; but then transparency suffers and the community becomes too dependant on their expertise)

• The third hurdle is time. Proposals should be approved or not approved in a resonable time frame. If there are too many council members, that is difficult to achieve and the system becomes too bureaucratic. If voting happens offchain, this problem will be, imo, aggravated.

(this also relates to the other 2 hurdles, since it obviously pushes for less people to make decisions in order to make them faster, again that being against decentralization).

@Dacha

Probably, some councils can decline their monthly payment as true Near believers and do work for free; Or spend money on charity;

An extra point on this, before I continue.

I don’t exactly understand what it means to be a ‘believer’. Does it mean that only ‘investers’ can be real NEAR believers? If someone thinks NEAR has a bright future should work for free, even though they can’t invest? So, where would they get NEAR in the meantime? They would not, right? So, I would love for you to explain a bit more your position on this matter. I think I get where you are coming from (people using NEAR to get rich without trully contributing), but I might be wrong, so would love to hear more

If council members do not get some sort of reward (I am of the opinion that many council positions are overpaid, but that is a slightly different matter), then

• council work has to be extremely soft, probably no more than half an hour per week,
• or only people who already have a lot of money and free TIME can be Council members.

The first option I would love to see happen, and it would not be difficult if council were large enough and voting happened onchain, but the second just seems super problematic to me. As someone who is an artist and represents other artists in the community, the idea of working for free, even in something that one ‘believes’ (I have big problems with the concept of believing, but let’s leave that out of the conversation), while at the same time struggling to survive, doest not make sense.

@JulianaM

About this: Incubadora submitted a challenge (Brutus) in the previous Metabuidl Hackathon, it might be interesting to implement something similar for Council Rotation.

I wrote Brutus right in the beginning, when I joined this community in May, and most of it’s ideas I still think could be useful for DAO governance.

I have some extra comments, based on the stuff I wrote above:

• I would like to see voting happening 100% onchain, with each council member simply ‘voting’ on astrodao. No place for lobbying.
• I would like to see a lot of council members for each Vertical. Agree with the proposal of 9 out of 20.
• Council should rotate every 3 months, as I suggested in Brutus.
• If timing becomes problematic, why not change funding periods from 1 month to 2 months or 3 months? That way, 2 or 3 weeks of processual timing would not make that much of a difference.

Thanks!