Thanks all. Some quick reactions/clarifications and then my action items 
quick reactions/clarifications –
- "things are changing too fast/often…" - I know it’s been a moving target to keep funding for guilds and I sympathize. I hope this will be a simpler approach overall but I do acknowledge that it’s Yet Another Thing. That’s why I’d rather keep it small and simple at first and just deliver funding quickly. We can expand scope if it’s successful and helpful.
- "You ran the NF, what’s up?" Part of separating myself from the foundation was to be able to play more actively within the product and community space as an independent (and “on the ground”) member. I’m trying to fix some of the problems I see across the ecosystem with pragmatic solutions and I hope I can help get them implemented, including by using the knowledge and relationships I have from running the NF. Remember that the goal of the NF from the beginning has been to launch the ecosystem then step out of the way (over time). To do that, there has to be something there to catch that burden, so I’m trying to help make that happen. I hope I can help run experiments that move fast, learn fast, and can scale up to support the hundreds of millions or billions of dollars worth of capital allocations the ecosystem needs. You have to start small but think big.
- "Benevolent Dictator == Full control?" The voting members will be driving the distribution of funds and there’s no direct financial upside to the HoG structure itself (no carry % or anything). During early days, we’ll be using string and duct tape to hold it together so we’ll have to make some centralization shortcuts just to get it going but that’s how everything starts anyway. The experiments should start small enough to justify this and then as we get more controls (aka stronger/broader governance) in place we can scale them up.
- "This is fixed amount of funding / what about budgets?" Great observation! This is definitely different… rather than just funding a Guild’s fixed $1k budget, it’s pointing (for example) 10% of the $10k monthly staking allocation to that Guild. That works one month, but if the price of $NEAR fluctuates widely, there will be a mismatch between what the Guild needs and what’s being paid. This is the challenge with this proposal - it optimizes for easy decision making but is totally dependent (like all DAOs) on the underlying exchange rate of the currency and the number of eligible recipients in a given period. I think over time we’ll figure out better ways to smooth this out (eg with a $NEAR-based stablecoin) but for now we’ll have to ride the fluctuations and see how it goes.
- "the NF…" Not commenting on any NF-oriented stuff. That’s a separate thread. This is an independent proposal to help get Guilds funded, and it’s particularly relevant given that the NF working to help Guilds stand on their own at the same time. But I’d rather think of this as a new experiment.
- Y U No use Community DAO? I think that’s a great proposal and I’d love to run both in parallel to try them as different experiments. Despite the additional complexity of doing so, I think having more options (especially during early days of experimentation) is better than few. Let’s diversify the places that good community efforts can get funded! @Dasha1 what’s the best way to get involved in Community DAO?
- Guilds can vote for themselves? Yes, I think the benefits of having skin in the game where you must vote to receive funds is better than the disadvantage of having people able to vote for themselves. The algorithm can be simple but effective, eg removing the highest and lowest allocation outliers, rotating members and publicizing votes, to reduce the problem where people vote too much allocation to their own guilds.
Action items
Here are the things I’m working to do now. Some days it’s easier to create space to ship but I’m hoping to get all this sorted by end of week:
- Gather some small conversations to help answer questions and make this better. I’m working with Chronear to help get an AMA/call set up
- Find initial funding for this so we can get some $NEAR in the bank earning rewards for the first alpha vote.
- Spin up the wiki with some more detailed information about this
