Hello NEARians!
it’s been weeks of brainstorming to get it right with regional communities, and sequel to this initial post, and as follow up with this, I bring to us this strategy for community feedback. Below is the proposed strategy to revamp funding activities for regional communities.
The NEAR Digital Collective (NDC) is an ambitious project that brings together users, projects, stakeholders and partners of the NEAR ecosystem to create a radically new way of governing itself.
The NDC, originally envisioned by Illia Polosukhin, the co-founder of the NEAR Protocol, is now a fully-fledged movement led by the NEAR Community. Its goal is to establish a community treasury and governance model that allows the ecosystem to collectively make decisions on everything from funding to elected representatives and more. It’s a significant step towards creating a truly decentralized network. Details are found here
It is to this fact that the Regional Community DAO (RC-DAO) is formed by the community to help govern, and make funds available for regional communities to carry out activities that will expand NEAR in different regions of the world.
The Regional Community DAO (RC-DAO) is a fully decentralised DAO, and is community focused. This means the community makes all the decisions of this DAO.
The Regional Community DAO is a strategy that is focused on providing funds for regional communities by being a DAO of DAOs under the three grassroots DAOs (Marketing, Creatives, and Developer DAOs). This DAO also focuses on being a support system for regional communities to be able to achieve their goals and set KPIs. This is all towards the development and growth of NEAR. This DAO operates under the three grassroots DAOs in the V0 of the NDC governance framework
As seen above, This DAO stands between regional communities and the three grassroots DAOs to do the following activities.
- Receive funding from the three grassroots DAOs based on the area of activities of regional communities.
- Receives proposals from regional communities, assesses them and distributes funds appropriately to these communities.
- Submits detailed reports to the three grassroots DAOs based on the proposals submitted earlier.
WHY RC-DAO?
It is important to note that for easy access to funds, a DAO that helps in reducing the complexities and double spending ability in the community be reduced. RC-DAO hence helps to streamline all proposals from regional communities so as to allow the three grassroots DAOs to focus on topic-based communities or as the case may be. RC-DAO is thus a smooth bridge between regional communities and grassrootsDAOs.
HOW DECENTRALISED IS RC-DAO?
RC-DAO is fully decentralised and focused on regions or countries of the world. Hence, its model is to have council members from across every continent of the world. This means that RC-DAO will have seven (7) council members who are from across all continents. The RC-DAO shall be using this ASTRODAO account for her activities to enable decentralization.
REQUIREMENTS TO BE A MEMBER OF THE DAO COUNCIL
Council positions are open for community members to apply by a forum. Anyone willing to be a council member MUST fulfil the following requirements
- Has NEVER served in any NEAR FOUNDATION position
- Has NEVER been a council member of any of the Marketing, Creatives, or Developer DAOs. This helps to avoid recurring rotation of a selected few
- Has been within the NEAR ecosystem for more than a year with notable characters as displayed on the NEAR forum, and or her social handles
- Has NEVER been a member of the NEAR moderators
- Has NEVER been a member of the NEAR concierge team
- Has passed the NDC, and NEAR certified course to be developed by the GWG
- Has never been found wanting regarding mismanaging, breaking community guidelines or misappropriating community funds.
- Due to a conflict of interests doesn’t have any roles in NDC (governance bodies, working groups, CT, trustees)
- Councils can’t be involved in projects which get money from other Grassroots DAOs, and the NEAR FOUNDATION (Marketing, Creative, etc.).
WHO IS QUALIFIED TO BE A COUNCIL MEMBER
- Have a basic understanding of NEAR. This shall be graded by passing the future NEAR course, and NDC academy made available by the GWG
- Are enthusiastic about community goals and participation, as aligned with the goal of the NDC
- Understand the technological needs of their locations and are driven to source out persons who will take up NEAR’s technology to solve those needs. That is, to bring builders.
- Have shown a track record of leadership, transparency, and accountability within NEAR’s community.
- Are interested in helping people of their country or region understand the technology of NEAR, by translations into local languages.
DAO COUNCIL MEMBER SELECTION
- The DAO council shall consist of members cut across all continents of the world (North America, South America, Europe, Asia, Africa, Atlantica, and Australia).
- Council members MUST NOT be part of existing guild councils as this stops the continual rotation of the same people in the ecosystem.
- Must be people with notable experience in coding as to NEAR, community management, BD, marketing, etc
DUTIES OF RC-DAO COUNCIL MEMBERS ( This is the DAO that governs the Regional communities)
- Vet and approve proposals submitted by guild leaders. This shall be in line with the NDC goals
- Submit a concrete report of all Approved, Closed, and Declined proposals every month.
- Set specific KPIs (in terms of numbers) for communities to operate with.
- Have regular calls (at least weekly) with guild leaders to understand proposals verbally, and as proof of human strategy. This shall be prior to the approval, closure, and or decline of every proposal.
- Have regular calls with both existing and intending communities to help polish ideas and help the alignment of goals.
- Submit proposals to the grassrootsDAOs for community funding.
- Work with the Regional community DAO dashboard
- Track KPIs, and metrics
- Establish Near Ecosystem Community stream, (like Telegram: Contact @awesomeaurora), and push all significant Near Ecosystem news through all Near regional communities.
- Educate intending communities before proper onboarding (This onboarding could take a period of ONE MONTH. Ranging from the guild leader to every other guild core team member together.
- Engage with regional communities in making sure success is met.
- Build a dashboard that helps track all regional communities’ activities.
Based on number eleven above, DAO council members shall also be as a chatter that serves as help meets to communities. This means that they shall have constant calls with communities on budgets, achieving KPIs, and building strategies.
HOW WILL THINGS BE DONE WITH COMMUNITIES UNDER THIS DAO
- Build on the existing regional communities with notable growth for continuation. Or
- Give open room for other regional communities to be formed, or merge to become one.
- These communities are to be regional, or country-based and NOT topic based.
REQUIREMENT FOR REGIONAL COMMUNITIES TO BE FORMED OR ALLOWED TO OPERATE
- A level of knowledge about NEAR verified by passing NDC education and any NEAR-certified course that is none dev related.
- A certified NEAR developer on the team
- At least a member of the guild who has spent a minimum of one year within the NEAR ecosystem. This will be traced by the forum account’s activity to see if such a one is void of falling short of the community guidelines.
- Team members with experience in marketing, community management, business development, etc
KEY FOCUS AREAS FOR REGIONAL COMMUNITIES
- Local meetups (Offline or Online). This could be within universities, NGO organisations, etc
- Translation of materials to local languages
- Onboarding of more developers into the ecosystem through the sub-developer academy to be formed by guilds
- Onboarding of projects from other chains, web2, or new ones to NEAR. This shall further be scrutinized by the developer DAO. This means when new or existing projects on other chains are to be onboarded by the regional communities, the Developer DAO does the checking to determine if it’s a project that fits the goal of NEAR
- Local or regional partnerships for community growth.
- Open bounties for local community members to participate in
- Create educational avenues for community members to learn and understand Blockchain, cryptocurrency, and NEAR. an example is the Aurora Africa Academy.
- AMA, co-marketing, and other activities with Ecosystem projects.
WHAT COMMUNITY IS QUALIFIED TO TAKE FUNDING FOR ACTIVITIES?
Regional communities who are just getting started MUST meet the following criteria to be able to qualify to take funding for their own activities.
- Complete the onboarding process to be done by DAO councils
- Meet the criteria for (REQUIRED METRICS FOR LOCAL COMMUNITIES TO BE FORMED OR ALLOWED TO OPERATE) above
- Have core members of the team pass KYC
- Has filled out this form for documentation.
WHAT CAN BE CLASSIFIED AS A SUCCESSFUL REGIONAL COMMUNITY?
A regional community can be classified as a successful one, if or when the following goals or growth is reached
- Has trained xx number of NEAR developers
- Onboarded xx number of community members
- Held xx events with projected goals achieved.
- Held a hacknode or hackathon with proof of projects participated
- Translated xx number of developer materials for local onboarding. These are to be used by the sub-developer academies created by guilds.
- Has traceable on-chain activities by community members
NOTE:
- Council members are charged with the responsibility of breaking down these KPIs into numbers for the communities.
- This does not give room for individuals to take funding through this DAO as either Creatives or MArketing DAOs have made this possible. This DAO shall only focus on either the existing or the revamped guilds.
Budget:
The monthly hard cap is 50K; the Council’s remuneration is 2k; the total is 60k a month.
A monthly hard cap of 5k for each community as the proposals may permit or worth. This does not mean communities get a total of 5k for each month. It’s just an upper bound.
HOW TO APPLY TO BE A COUNCIL MEMBER OF THE RC-DAO
This position is open to anyone in the community who has met the requirements mentioned above.
Below are the guidelines on how to make our interests known.
- Make a forum post declaring your intention. The Forum post should contain
- Your name
- Country of origin and residence/continent
- Social media handles
- Near.social handle
- Qualification/Experience within the ecosystem and beyond
- Reasons for your interest in being a council member of RC-DAO
- NEAR wallet ID
- Fill out this form
Seeing that a DOA is needed and council members are needed for this DAO, we request community feedback on the best format to select the first council leaders for the RC-DAO. This is needed because the GWG has no power to govern any DAO.
A few options out of many possible solutions are here for polling. However, community members are open to suggesting the best practice.
- Should the community select about two to three trusted community members to oversee the first council members selection?
- Yes
- No
- I have a better idea
0 voters
- The entire community should oversee the open system of getting the first five council members.
- Yes
- No
- I have a better idea
0 voters
Special thanks to @jlwaugh, @Dacha, @sarahkornfeld, Kaz, @blaze and all other community members who contributed to bringing this up thus far.
Do have a great weekend and we hope to receive your feedback.
.