[Community Discussion] Achievements & Problems & Further Plan

[Paul]

Word of introduction

Please treat this proposal as a sample. We as a community are now making a song, and this proposal is only a short sound in a final track, that we’re trying to create.

CreativesDAO at this stage acts as a public good, supporting artists and cultures from all over the world. With that being said, the Creatives community is the one who creates also a demand for the new dapps, tools, and upgrades on the NEAR Protocol. Half of the Top 100 active DAOs on Astro are being supported by the CreativesDAO, where 52% of all submitted proposals by the top ones were generated by the Creatives, also 5% of all smart cotracts available on Mintbase comes from the DAOs affiliated with CreativesDAO.

People under their near wallets are also the testers, however, every entity has its own set of problems, and by properly identifying them, we’re able to fix current issues, deal with challenges, and upgrade processes.

Community Mods are looking forward to seeing constructive criticism and feedback in a pragmatic and good manner aligned with Community Guidelines till the 2022-10-09T10:00:00Z.
In the next week, community mods will gather the received feedback, and together with NF, we’ll try to set new processes within the DAO. Feel free to propose your observations to Creatives’ issues and root causes together with possible developments.

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Current problems of Creatives DAO:

1. Delivery of planned objectives by a DAO
   Root cause: Funding delays by NF payouts, a short period of time to fully deliver the objectives by a DAO (month).

2. The review process and voting transparency
   Root cause: Not clear review system, lacks scoring system.

3. Lacks control of distributed funds
   Root cause: lack of performance indicator of a DAO, lacks a monthly hard cap.

4. Performance indicator of a DAO
   Root cause: lack of evaluation of a DAO’s objectives/effectiveness, old tier system.

5. Community communication
   Root cause: lack of recognition of DAOs under CreativesDAO umbrella funding, lack of communication to the outside world about what we are doing and who we are.

6. Specifying what exactly CreativesDAO supports
   Root cause: lack of information on what projects can apply for funding.

7. Prompt review by mods
   Root cause: delays in funding, a long timeline for a DAO to submit report & proposal, not set deadlines for mod’s approval, proper onboarding.

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Solutions and Developments:

a) Proposals are divided into the following category: Music, Art, Film, and Culture. Each category has a hard cap of $50000 monthly. DAOs can request funding on a bimonthly basis.

Problems solved: 1, 3, and 6.

b) New people onboarded to the Moderator role should be evaluated based on their experience in the outlined categories above, which are: Music, Art, Film, and Culture. Based on feedback left by @ted.iv - [REPORT] Creatives DAO Moderator Role - ted.iv - #8 by ted.iv, one mod should be strictly responsible for PR/communication to the outside world (forum, social media, etc.) which won’t be taking part in the review process of the proposals. The total number of moderators should be eight (seven strictly related to proposals evaluation, one related to PR/communication).

• Monthly timeline:

  • Between the 1st and 3rd day of each month, DAOs have time to deliver their reports and funding proposals.
  • Between the 4th and 10th day of each month, Community Moderators/Contributors have time to evaluate and (if needed) communicate with a DAO, regarding any unclarity of its projects, etc. DAO’s reply must also fit in the provided timeframe (6 days),
  • On the 11th day of each month, the community mods/contributors have to communicate the decision of approval or closing,
  • Till the 23rd of each month, Community Moderators should share a copy of the workspace with the community as a form of the monthly CreativesDAO report.

Problems solved: 5 and 7.

c) Mods should work in Trello, where they will be leaving their votes, comments/observations, and scores. A copy of the workspace should be shared with the community as a monthly report. In order to set indicators of a DAO, mods should implement rating. As the hard cap is set at $50000, approval of a DAO should start from the ones who received the highest scores. As the old tier system doesn’t work as expected, CreativesDAO should have a new one.

Rating should be done based on:

• DAO interaction with NEAR dapps (From 1 to 5),
• Decentralization of a DAO - How many members are active? What other roles do councils hold in other DAOs? (From 1 to 5),
• Activities are focused on artists’ support (From 1 to 5),
• Variety of activities - Are the objectives riched in creativity? Are the objectives are realistic? (From 1 to 5),
• Clear and understandable reporting (From 1 to 5),
• Fair price table (From 1 to 5),
• Activities focused on DAO growth - Is a DAO aim for self-sustainability? Is it open for collaboration? Does it have a legal wrapper? (From 1 to 5).

Creatives Evaluation Matrix

Tier System:

• Tier 1: DAO can apply for $1000 bimonthly. DAO has to prove their on-chain activity for 4 months backward.
• Tier 2: DAO can apply for $3000 bimonthly. DAO has to prove their on-chain activity for 8 months backward.
• Tier 3: DAO can apply for $5000 bimonthly. DAO has to prove their on-chain activity for 12 months backward.

Problems solved: 2 and 4.

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Further Onboarding & Timeline

• On the 16th of October the old community mods will open a call for 6 new community mods with the decision to be held within the 30th of October. Please note that 1 person out of 6, will be strictly responsible for the PR/Communication and social media part and won’t have to take part in the evaluation of the proposals.

  • Applications interested in the position strictly affiliated with the evaluation of the proposals should have:

    • Proven experience, and share a portfolio in one of the following fields: Music, Art, Film, Culture,
    • At least 1 year of proven contribution to a DAO,
    • A clean forum activity (forum activity will be checked as an additional evaluation of an applicant, to make sure that a person acts and writes in a good manner, and can give constructive feedback or criticism).

  • Applications interested in the position strictly affiliated with the evaluation of the proposals will be responsible for:

    • Evaluation of the proposals based on the rating system,
    • Research of a DAO (on-chain & off-chain),
    • Deliver their votes, comments, and feedback based on the accepted time frame (check the evaluation process),
    • Further development of the Creatives DAO.

  • Applications interested in the position strictly affiliated with the PR/Communication/Social media should have

    • Good communication skills,
    • Good writing skills, with proven activity as a content creator and writer,
    • At least one year of the proven social media manager position.

  • Applications interested in the position strictly affiliated with the PR/Communication/Social media will be responsible for:

    • Sharing updates and reports done by Community Mods as a whole,
    • Communication with the leaders of the DAOs under the CreativesDAO umbrella, in order to create and prepare stories, updates, and announcements,
    • Social Media management with content creation & uploading,
    • Further development of the Creatives DAO

• On the 1st of November, the workspace with a prepared rating system will be presented to the new mods/contributors,

• On the 31st of November, the old mods/contributors will step down,

• In the month of March new community mods/contributors should be chosen with further development plans/upgrades.

[frnvpr]

Very happy with this effort in putting forward clear guidelines. I know this is still a work in progress and further material will come out, but I am definetly looking forward to a clearer and more organized system. Thank you @Paul

[Romanus]

A Mentor @Paul nice effort

[beetlejuice]

Hellow, Paul. Congratulations for the concise and easy reading texts

I just remain with one doubt (for now ). How a DAO change from tier to tier? Its with the evaluation? If yes, didnt found how many points the DAO need to be in each tier.

[Paul]

Hey @beetlejuice thanks for your question!
At this stage, I believe that this should be correlated with on-chain time activity.
Example: A DAO hasn’t applied for a Creatives’ support never before, but can prove its activity as a DAO on NEAR for 12 months backward, that means it’s under Tier 3.

[beetlejuice]

got it <3

Being super sincere, the 2 things that i want to point out to have more discussion over are:

• bimonthly funding. This idea of this propose is to give more time for the DAOs?
• the amount of money. hypothetically, if the DAO is tier 3 (the highest one) the amount of funding decreases for half of it. Why this amount was proposal, there was some NF indicator that they have a spending ceiling for creatives that is half of what the expend now?

Can you explain the idea behind those a little bit more?

[blusw]

@Paul

Music, Art, Film, and Culture.

Lets discuss better this categories?

@ritamaria @sarahkornfeld @pinkalsky @thaisampr @tabear @ted.iv

Maybe i can suggest some other 4 pilars:

Art/creation based Proposals ; Events ; Education ; Market based Proposals ;

[JulianaM]

Thank you @Paul for sharing your thoughts with the community. I think this sample is quite developed. [

I am particularly attracted to the idea of a tier system, it makes a differentiation between small/new and consistent DAOs. I’m wondering which criteria the new mods will be using to evaluate the quality of work done by the members.

Proven experience, and share a portfolio in one of the following fields: Music, Art, Film, Culture,

this is a nice one. I think up until now we were looking only at the type of activity made by and how active the member was in the ecosystem. But we were not considering past experience IRL, professional background and talent. That makes the whole process easier cause the more professional the better imho.

I suggest that the candidates add a formal CV + Portfolio in the application.

DAO interaction with NEAR dapps (From 1 to 5),

DAOs should be involved in web3 platforms and I guess this criteria would be the key one here. Involvement: using them or creating new ones.

Bi-monthly proposals sounds reasonable and easier to evaluate and to give feedback. Also for DAO members, it’s less pressure for the community.

[wizprince1]

Brilliant effort @Paul

[ritamaria]

Hello all!!
first of all, thank you Paul and Creatives-mods for all the efforts on join ideas, suggestions and opening this discussion topic.

we’ve been talking about it on Creatives chat just now, and I’d like to highlight somethings here, that think should be well discussed.

@Paul

a) Proposals are divided into the following category: Music, Art, Film, and Culture. Each category has a hard cap of $50000 monthly. DAOs can request funding on a bimonthly basis.

about this topic, I really think it’s difficult to put all we do in these boxes - for example, we have interdisciplinary activities, educational activities and also other kind of activities that does not fix in these boxes. We argued at the chat, and maybe it would be great to think out of the box. I also think that categorizing like this may lead us into a kind of competitive thinking, that is no healthy for the ecosystem as a hole. So, opening this discussion, my question is - how can we understand and categorize what we are doing in other scales, more related in direction of building community? I’d like to invite @sarahkornfeld to this point, who gave interesting inputs in the chat today.

in this direction, going to this point:

@Paul

b) New people onboarded to the Moderator role should be evaluated based on their experience in the outlined categories above, which are: Music, Art, Film, and Culture.

If these categories should be discussed, I wonder about the Moderator role. I understand that the first important thing is to have an intercultural group, form different countries and realities, and also that could be aware about the guidelines of evaluation. And because of this, I think that the guidelines could be more discussed and reviewed in order to contemplate the community thinking as much as possible, always in dialogue to the ecosystem.

@Paul

As the hard cap is set at $50000, approval of a DAO should start from the ones who received the highest scores. As the old tier system doesn’t work as expected, CreativesDAO should have a new one.

about this, I understand this sheet you shared as a good roadmap for DAOs to overview a way of growing inside the ecosystem, but I’m afraid about the competitive aspect that it can generate, if DAOs with highest scores should be approved. Does it really help other DAO’s growth? Or maybe how can Creatives DAO use this as a support to help DAOs growing, by promoting more interaction inside the ecosystem, by connecting DAOs and creating a collaborative ambient? And as saying Creatives DAO I am saying US, looking to each other.

I have some other inputs, but think that for now it’s a lot to think.
Thank you for opening this space of collective thinking
With best

[Ethereios]

Wonderful, I’m so glad these steps are being taken. Value and return of investment are important for communities too. In a way these problems have plagued anarchist and community governed systems for decades and certainly this is where lot of DAOs are going to fail. But the ones that work will lead the way for future systems.

[Paul]

Hey @beetlejuice, they’re good questions indeed!

@beetlejuice

bimonthly funding. This idea of this propose is to give more time for the DAOs?

Yes, it will allow a DAO to have more time for its objectives, and NF will have proper time to issue a payout/reward agreement.

@beetlejuice

the amount of money. hypothetically, if the DAO is tier 3 (the highest one) the amount of funding decreases for half of it. Why this amount was proposal, there was some NF indicator that they have a spending ceiling for creatives that is half of what the expend now?

NF has huge costs, we’re now in the bear market where conditions are hard, and Creatives are a public good at this stage. NF treasury is not unlimited, therefore we need to take proper steps to focus on quality, how we can measure that, the hard cap of available money to support, and its correlation between time and a DAO’s growth.
In the current circumstances, it will not be reasonable to stay with the same monthly hard cap of $5k, at least during the bear market. We could raise the hard cap in the near future, but this should be related to further CreativesDAO’s development and upgrades.

[Paul]

@blusw

Art/creation based Proposals ; Events

These two above sound good!

@blusw

Education

NF is offering grants related to Education, I’m not sure if Creatives should cover that.
Recently, the funding related to Education was put on hold, same as Creatives - Education grant applications paused. I believe it’ll be returned soon.

@blusw

Market based Proposals

Could you please elaborate more on this? What exactly “Market Based Proposals” should cover?

[Paul]

I believe that having a little healthy competitive spirit in the ecosystem won’t hurt anybody if this will be related to the value provided by a DAO to the NEAR. Thanks to that, we will be able to outline these DAOs that are the strongest ones, and that should work as motivators for others.
As the evaluation workspace will be shared with the community, a DAO will be able to see insights, feedback, and pros & cons left by CreativesDAO Moderators/Contributors. We need to develop solid questions related to the evaluation, which will be used during the rating of a DAO.

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@ritamaria

I really think it’s difficult to put all we do in these boxes

CreativesDAO has grown since its birth, and it’ll be even bigger if the community will move things forward, therefore it’ll be nice to have a few categories, without that, we may have a little chaos related to Problem No. 6 (Specifying what exactly CreativesDAO supports).

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@ritamaria

if DAOs with highest scores should be approved. Does it really help other DAO’s growth?

Yes, it does (or it should be ). It all depends on properly asked questions based on which Mods will be doing the evaluation. In theory, the questions should more or less orientate a DAO.

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@ritamaria

I really think it’s difficult to put all we do in these boxes - for example, we have interdisciplinary activities, educational activities and also other kind of activities that does not fix in these boxes.

NEAR has Education grants - About the Education category.

[frnvpr]

I think the categories should not try to cover ‘too much’. Education and Marketing as core activities should look to different verticals.
Maybe what is missing is a way for DAOs with a large batch of activities to understand how will they fit.

I have no brilliant proposal, but maybe looking at it the same way we always looked at the limit for council work, capped at 30%, is a way forward. I have written this in another Topic, but I believe having % in the guidelines for what is considered a core-activity or a non-core activity might help DAOs figure out where they fit.

@frnvpr

Rules of engagement:

• DAOs must exist on-chain
• DAOs must have on-chain payments
• DAOs must operate as organizations, and not projects-within-organizations (that is, if an organization grows and needs more than the Creatives DAO cap, must consider GRANTs in order to continue growing, instead of deploying more DAOs)
• DAOs must spend most of their funds (%) on web3 projects and to attract more people to web3 and the NEAR ecosystem; the goal is to bring those people in, not just show them what we do. Metrics will be very important here.
• DAOs can only spend a small (%) of their funds on non-web3 projects, and this will be, most of the times, money spent to create community engagement; a small dissipation of funds occurs due to the difficulty in on-boarding normies, i.e. sometimes it’s necessary to spend pizza money in order to get people’s attention
• DAOs must either use web3 platforms (like mintbase, 3xr, re.finance, metapool, paras, nearhubs, etc)
• or create their own
• DAOs must understand the several grants programs and respect the Creatives DAO cap.

For example, if a DAO has, as a core activity, something related to music, it might still be creating educational activities in order to grow the community; if a DAO is educational in its core activity, even if it uses art-related activities, it might be better of asking to the Education Vertical, if that is a thing.

And if a DAO has some art-related project as it’s core, but that is not web3, and only the educational projects are web3, that will also affect how the DAO fits in the system.

In the past, because this was the one Vertical that functioned really well, almost all DAOs presented themselves as ‘creative’, but if the ecosystem is properly functioning, than that would not be the case. Something to discuss and even talk to NF, I would say.

another quote from another topic, regarding metrics for the Creatives DAO itself:

@frnvpr

• Creatives DAO being responsible for the general metrics on the output of the community
• being responsible for managing some sort of tier system with the aim of producing better output
• being responsible for creating at least 1 NFT fair every quarter (can be in collaboration with specific DAOs)
• being responsible for at least 1 hackathon every year in order to attract developers (can be in collaboration with specific DAOs)
• helping DAOs that have reached full-potential (i.e. reached the cap but want to grow) go on to ask Grants
• having a more relevant presence on social media and even media platforms (we are one of the biggest collective of DAOs in the world)
• and probably a few more things

Responding to @ritamaria , who raised a very important question, regarding competition and how will smaller DAOs be able to grow.

Regarding competition, I think that will be the nature of the game, because in a output-focused environment that will always be the case (capitalism and all ), but we should definetly try to limit the negative impact of this.

I think the lower the tier, the more DAOs should be able to get support; from my experience, only a small handfull of DAOs will trully strive for the highest possible tier, since those will have agressive metrics, and I also think it’s normal that some DAOs who are able to achieve it will not be there all the time. @Paul Are you thinking of creating a cap for how many times a DAO can reach the highest tier? Or some sort of forced interruption, for example after a semester if a DAO has achieved the highest tier it must be lowered for x months?

Either way, I also think there are other ways of supporting DAOs other than the direct funding. For example, if the strongest DAOs help organize NFT Fair in which all can participate, or Hackathons with prizes for hacking but also for innovative projects in the ecocystem, this will create incentives for the smaller DAOs. Something to think about.

[frnvpr]

@Paul

a) Proposals are divided into the following category: Music, Art, Film, and Culture

Since the community is looking at this categories and unsure what they include, maybe we should work on them a little more. For clarification from @Paul , can you maybe add a note on what they include and use cases? Like a FAQ for what is and is not in each category.
I will try a first draft:

Music
(core activity)

• web3 concerts (events)
• music-NFT publishing
• web3 record labels
• NFT ticketing
• …
  (non core activity)
• live concerts with NEAR publicity (marketing)
• on-boarding new musiciais (educational)
  *…

Art
(core activity)

• web3 Art Fairs
• Any agency-like relationship with artists, selling, creating, showcasing, etc, NFTs
• web3 Art bounties
• …
  (non core activities)
• educational workshops
• web2 content (youtube, IG, etc)
• …

(note: by art, you mean visual arts, but also sculpture, generative art, photography, and what is generally considered art in the west?)

Film
(core activity)

• film-NFTs
• web3 video content platforms
• …
  (non core activity)
• web2 video content platforms
• …

Culture (I’m unsure of how to look at this category, maybe @adrianseneca can help here)
(core activities)

• NFTs or tokenization of cultural objects/practices?
• web3 live events
  (non core activities)
• live events with NEAR related publicity
• …

Being able to describe what is inside these categories is of great importance, and being able to recognize what is web3 and what is not is also crucial.

These kind of lists never include all possible activities, ofc, but they must be able to generically describe what is being supported by NF/Creatives DAO, otherwise we fall into ambiguity.

I propose that people try to edit this list and after it’s finalized moderators can use it as a guideline for evaluating proposals. IF a significant number of artistic activities are left outside, we do need a new category. If not, these suffice.

[Romanus]

This whole restructuring is really a good idea but coming up as a dao, there is a question being asked and i quote " As a Dao what are your sustainability goal " this is to be questioned upon as so many old daos have being receiving fund from NF and yet no sustainability goals have being achieved. There should be a time frame for sustainability not just forever funding and yet no sustainable goal achieved. I think new daos should be given the opportunities to grow and build. @Paul @ted.iv

[frnvpr]

@Romanus

many old daos have being receiving fund from NF and yet no sustainability goals have being achieved.

Those goals were not included in the discussion at the time (2021), so while I agree that generating revenue (which is what is discussed while discussing sustainability, right?) can be a reasonable goal for a lot of DAOs, there are also DAOs that can never produce revenue, for example those focused on on-boarding.

Plus, just on the matter of revenue, if it’s true that big platforms like Mintbase still get NF grants, it should be well thought out what it means to achieve sufficient revenue, because that might not be the case for anyone during a bear market.

Now that we have NF as part of the discussions it’s the time to put all those questions answered, so that we, as a community, know exactly what our value to the ecosystem is, and if that goal (sufficient revenue) is to be part of the tier system and how.

edit: There are many DAOs with revenue models that are applied outside of the web3 world; should those be considered sustainable models? Or only web3-related revenue is to be considered?

Example: if I get $ from NF and then ask for tickets on my live event, paid in fiat by people who are there but not using web3, is that considered?

I would try to focus as much as possible on expanding the possibilities of web3 to generate revenue, for sure, and would use that as a metric when looking at DAOs, but also with caution, because they are exploring territory: the users are not there yet.

[Hydriz1]

A welcome development. Nice one

[Romanus]

@frnvpr

There are many DAOs with revenue models that are applied outside of the web3 world; should those be considered sustainable models? Or only web3-related revenue is to be considered?

Sustainable is able to be maintained at a certain rate or level. As long as the goal of a dao is maintained on her own without external help whether be it outside web3 or Web3 so far her goal is in check with Near Protocol. It is considered Sustainable Model. Though sustainable goal wasn’t included in the year 2021 but A Dao for such a long term of $5k funding with proper management, Marketing and Business strategies should be big by now and not join upcoming daos for funding request. I just hope I’m not creating anger here. Just my thought and observation.

@frnvpr

I would try to focus as much as possible on expanding the possibilities of web3 to generate revenue, for sure, and would use that as a metric when looking at DAOs, but also with caution, because they are exploring territory: the users are not there yet.

Also focusing on expanding the possibilities of web3 to generate revenue would be use as metrics, that’s good but what about opportunities to the community? If a Dao can’t stand on it own, they cant be an opportunity and meanwhile it will be obvious that when NF stop funding, Most Dao will close. Upcoming Dao should see Old Daos as a movement.