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

Near Community and nodes
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TL;DR:
As of Jan 2022, we invite all NEAR Community members to join the various Community DAOs as Council Members. We welcome active community contributors aligned with the community values and vision to actively participate in the decision-making process on all matters related to our Community development and engagement. To achieve this, we will implement Astro DAO as a governance tool, allowing Council Members to assess proposals to the Community Fund. The rewards, however, will not be distributed by the DAOs but by the NF Operations team directly to the payee based on the vote results and the completion of the new KYC process.
The proposed DAOs structure is specific to the following DAOs:

  • Community DAO
  • Ecosystem Development DAO
  • Marketing DAO
  • Creatives DAO
  • ā€¦
    Among the next steps: Open Call for candidates to the Operating and Executive Council Pools, Vet candidates for the pool, develop a council rotation system and finalize the DAO governance guidelines.

Why a new structure?

The proposed structure will increase Community engagement, transparency, and direct participation from the Community on Proposals and Payouts. It is important to note that this structure meets the required level of compliance for the NF and Council members.

Moreover, the structure allows the Community members and NF Community team to leverage the functionalities of the DAO as a powerful governance tool. The DAOs will not be used to disburse funds but to make decisions on Community Proposals. [Link to DAOs Verticals]

The proposed Governance

Each DAO will have 9 Council Members. Initially, there will be a maximum of 3 NF team members (ā…“) 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 3-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.

Operating Council Pool

The mission of the Operating Council is to develop best practices for proposal creation and responsible for reviewing all proposals within an agreed timeframe.

All Operating Council members get a monthly reward in NEAR (TBD) for the time and effort. (rewards in accordance with the activity of the DAO)

Responsibilities

  • Source acceptable proposals: (that are ā€˜passedā€™ by a majority of Executive Council Members)
  • Develop the guidelines for proposal submission
  • Develop guidelines for reporting
  • Review proposals
  • Offer recommendations to the Executive Council
  • Incentivized the Community to submit high-quality proposals

Executive Council Pool

The mission of the Executive Council is to follow a process to discuss and vote on proposals. Proposals may include Guildā€™s monthly proposals for their work and Community governance proposals.

Responsibilities

  • Deliberate and Vote on Proposals to be funded
  • Deliberate and Vote Community best practices
  • Deliberate and Vote on proposals from the Operating Council (community best practices, guilds classifications, rewards, and incentives)

Implementation Plan

The implementation plan is as follow:

1- Publish proposal in the Forum by Dec 10 :white_check_mark:

2- Collect feedback from community members, clarify questions :white_check_mark:

3- Organize an AMA :white_check_mark:

4- Produce an iteration of the draft and publish the final proposal

5- Complete the guidelines for Council members

6- Open Call for candidates to the Operating Council Pool

7- Open Call for candidates to the Executive Council Pool

8- Form the Pools of vetted candidates

9- Develop a rotational System for council members

10- Community DAOs new structure live as of Jan 3, 2022

Essential Points for discussion/determine working groups

  • Guidelines for Council Members
  • Selection of candidates for both Pools
  • Council Rotating System
  • Governance pilot period
  • Success metrics (Quantitative and Qualitative )
  • DAO Council open syncs

As this proposed structure is still in draft mode, we welcome your feedback and any improvements we should consider to create a reliable, effective, and efficient governance system.

39 Likes
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I appreciate what it brings to Near as a Whole, and Transparency was one of our main loops. IMO, I think this is stepping towards a decentralized Community-oriented Ecosystem that will help us evolve exponentially. Thank you, @Grace, for this beautiful Initiative.

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Great. Glad to see that NF finally starting implementing it. Closely following the process and ready to be part of it.

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looking forward when you open call for candidates

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Great ideas.
I was thinking that each Guild needs to include a Business Angel (from NF) that will supervise and analyze the Guild work.
I have misunderstandings about the Guilds: I didnā€™t understand what does each guild doing (direction of work, current tasks/needs, evaluation of results, initiatives, communications, etc ), I didnā€™t understand how to become a member of the Guild how to propose ideas, etcā€¦

Also, I think NF needs auditors, that will check the reports on how the grants/payments were spent. I see that @Dacha did a great job in this direction. But NF needs many Dachas :slight_smile:

I am also want to be a part of it.

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Exciting to see that the governance of these NEAR DAOs will be moving towards more community participation. Itā€™s even more interesting that this change is happening around the same as chunk-only producers is introduced on Validator side of things (Become a Validator on NEAR Protocol).

Iā€™m now waiting patiently to see the final draft which will be made available just in time before the holidays. Exciting times ahead :blush:

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Couple thoughts:

  1. Councils from Community in Executive Pool should be independent persons, donā€™t have any relationships with NF, donā€™t be involved in management of guilds which asking money;
  2. Mandatory rotations every three months. I will check every persons for relationships with current councils members, it should be real rotation, not a substitute one council on his/her ā€œfriendā€. Very important to give equal access to all Near Community Members;
  3. Before to be selected, every council should write information about participation in Near guilds, groups, internal activities with NF and declare that will work independently and impartially;

Thanks

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  1. I think this was answered already. Although itā€™s still in WIP.
  1. It should ultimately depend on council members to decide what to do with council participation rewards.
  1. Agree with you on this one.
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  1. ā€œRelatedā€ people cannot to be councils in one DAO.

  2. and May be independent audit team who will review councils work, their involvement in the forum life (now as I see some people visit it couple times a week) , relationships between grantees, control money flow from idea to final results.

Thanks @simeon4real , @Monish016 , @mr_free for discussion. I hope everything will write their thoughts too.

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Based on conversations with @jlwaugh, it would be good to have a DAO specifically to Diversity & Inclusion projects (DAOversity?, as he suggested). Iā€™ve just created my DAO (TibiraDAO) and I am missing a vertical that could contemplate all specificities of projects related to the topic ā€“ which they pratically sit in the merge of all DAOs listed.

Is it possible to contemplate it in the new structure?

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Thanks @Grace for such a detailed explanation. Iā€™m looking fwd to see how these changes would help improving the ecosystem.

  • Council Rotating System

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

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hey there! I guess Diversity falls into Community, no? But I agree we need to put more eyes on this topic for sure!

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Great initiative! I see NF is taking huge steps towards more decentralization as stated before. People out there gotta see this :smiling_face_with_three_hearts:

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Not necessarily. TibiraDAO, for example, falls in Ecosystem, even though is working with the LGBTQIA+ community. It is better to think about diversity cross verticals instead of isolating it in one.

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

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

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

  • The first is that itā€™s extremely difficult to find people who donā€™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, itā€™s common to have DAO (DAOā€™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 thatā€™s it, but since voting happens in a context of traditional ā€˜power relationsā€™ and ā€˜trustā€™, imo itā€™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).

An extra point on this, before I continue.

I donā€™t exactly understand what it means to be a ā€˜believerā€™. Does it mean that only ā€˜investersā€™ can be real NEAR believers? If someone thinks NEAR has a bright future should work for free, even though they canā€™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 :wink:

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 ā€˜believesā€™ (I have big problems with the concept of believing, but letā€™s leave that out of the conversation), while at the same time struggling to survive, doest not make sense.

I wrote Brutus right in the beginning, when I joined this community in May, and most of itā€™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 ā€˜votingā€™ 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!

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It is great to see that what was once a vision now becomes true. I think this is the most important step towards a decentralized and most important community-oriented ecosystem. I will eagerly follow the process and looking forward when you open call for candidates. And thank @Grace for this great initiative which brings us closer to a decentralized future!

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Thanks to all for your feedback! Its nice to learn different points of view, it reaffirms that we are in this together and we seek the same purpose.

As mentioned. We will hold an AMA on Tuesday, Dec 21st. Here is the event link
Everyone is welcomed to join, share your thoughts or clarify any doubts or concerns you may have.

Hope you see you all there!

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Hey @Grace, the link doesnā€™t work, could you update it please? :pray:

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Had some struggle with the link too. Thanks for so much information and weā€™re looking forward to being here.

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should staking 1K stNEAR in Council Pool DAO(Initiated by NF) as credit