Creatives DAO Charter

A lot of hard work and effort went into this
Great work @creativesdao-council

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Awesome approach from the @creativesdao-council

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Aim to reach more creators World Wide …Keepitup

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Thanks for sharing this Sahil.

There’s been many conversations in small groups and I’ve left extensive comments on the google doc, but for the sake of transparency and acknowledging that all those comments are one click away from disappearing (as my previous rounds of feedback have) I want to share my views publicly here.

I do not support the Creatives DAO moving forward with the current Charter.

The Creatives DAO has a troubled past, one that everyone is eager to forget, calling for the community to ‘focus on the future’. The issue is that the same people who were in charge then are in charge now and the current Charter doesn’t do enough to mitigate similar issues from arising again.

The NEAR Community is at a very dangerous cross-roads. The History of Community Funding is very long and I don’t want to dwell too much on past failures. However, we have to acknowledged the unusual setup we have:

  • NF constant changes with community funding have had serious negative impact on community. Resulting in many valuable members and projects to leave, become reluctant to engaging, losing confidence in leadership, among other negative outcomes.
  • NEAR Digital Collective has evolved into a once in a lifetime opportunity to the community to self-organise and unleash its true potential.
  • A diminished and battered community means that there aren’t many people left to participate in these discussions. Most people that remain are the direct beneficiaries of these programs (myself included).
  • This creates a scenario where it requires immense intellectual honesty and humility to acknowledge that we are the stewards of the ecosystem, and even if things work ‘well enough’ now, we have a duty to setup a resilient system that will support 100x more people, long after we are gone.
  • Creatives DAO is seeking feedback. And unless we burst the bubble now and invite an open discussion beyond the current echo chamber we will be missing a valuable opportunity to get community governance and funding right.
  • NDC is an experiment. Any scandals or failures will have a ripple effect on the rest of the network, undermining all the progress we’ve made so far.

An example of the contrived set of circumstances and variables defined above, and a question that many are asking is: why do the have a Creatives DAO but do not have a Startup DAO or Regional DAO? Both have been discussed, most of us can agree on the need and massive value they would unlock. Because NF failed to deal with Creatives DAO over a six month period, simply opting to defer the matter to the NDC.

The key point and the reason for writing this is - never take things for granted. The opportunity to get things right is NOW, but we must have honest, open conversations.

Back to my issues with the current Creatives DAO Charter.

Most of the issues with the Charter boil down to the Scoring Metric System - 9 points to become eligible for funding.

Points systems can be problematic as they tend to remove the discretionary powers and critical thinking duty from decision makers.

This would not be an issue IF the criteria for granting points is fair and well defined. However, this is currently not the case (see attachments below).

The current criteria lacks any connection to NEAR Strategic Goals and even the parameters mentioned such as the background of the team and previous achievements are then watered by by the ‘Scoring Metrics’. Watering down refers to a scenario where someone that may, using critical thinking, not have the right background or achievements, can still reach the minimum criteria for funding based on points.

Scoring Metric System

It should be clear to anyone paying attention that the current Scoring Metric System has issues that need addressing.

And this is part of the problem - people aren’t paying attention. The few that are paying attention tend to be the ones who would benefit from lax funding guidelines.

The only limitation that the Charter and renewed guidelines seem to impose is limits as to how much money the DAO can disburse and limits to the amount and frequency of proposals. However, lowering the threshold for poor allocation of funds does nothing to solve the issue. We already wasted $2m on the first experiment, no need to burn through another $600k to learn the same lesson.

This is why the Charter, and in particular, Scoring Metrics are so important. In the past, the justification for disbursing funds is that there were no guidelines from NF and no explicit expectations on the use of funds so technically there was no wrongdoing. Just naïveté and poor guidance. We are risking a similar scenario of a troubled bureaucracy but technically no wrongdoing.

As the screen captures above show, there are two main issues to look at to shape appropriate Metrics:

  1. What is eligible for funding? How to justify funding ‘creatives’ in en environment where everything from Wallet, AstroDAO, Regional Hubs, and even Education has been slashed by NF? In an environment where most validators are operating at a loss. Where most builders are struggling to find support. Here the key element missing is more robust connection between Creatives and NEAR Strategic Goals.
  2. Threshold for Funding. If a project or proposal has the required alignment with NEAR strategic goals, what are the objective metrics or guidelines that can be used to approve. We are way beyond mere ‘wallet creation’ or minimal ‘interaction with an app’.

Sadly, what we have right now is a painfully simplistic ‘Scoring Metric’ table hidden at the end of a neatly written 18 page document. What is the problem with the Metrics?

  1. Vanity Metrics. Focusing on the wrong things. Whether a team scores well or poorly on the proposed metrics is not a real indicator of the legitimacy of the project or the value it can create for NEAR. A test for this would be to look at a scam or low quality project which can become eligible and at a great project that is aligned with NEAR and can add value but it nos currently eligible. When there is that much discrepancy, there needs to be revision.
  2. Metrics easy to game. The threshold for meeting the maximum number of points for each metric is so low that, considering the amount of funding available, can easily be achieved by anyone that sets out to do it without much effort. Two of the metrics simply require a number of wallets on an AstroDAO and one metric simply requires to be on a Zoom call. This is utterly unacceptable. I’ve provided several suggestions on how these may be improved (see screenshots above). There are also issues with allocating the same amount of points to all metrics. Showing up for a community call should not be worth the same as the actual substance of the proposal, it’s alignment with NEAR and execution.

There are several other issues that are somewhat covered by the above and that I invite others to point out and add feedback to.

Great effort has been taken to write this post in a structured way that lays out points and feedback in a respectful way. I invite others joining the conversation to please aim for the same. Adherence to Community Guidelines is fundamental.

Final important note:

A healthy community should be able to agree to disagree on some issues. I am not against the Creatives DAO, I have only ever been very strongly against some of the very questionable use of funds in the past. I am willing to support the Creatives DAO going forward if the current framework can be revised and improved. Sahil and I will be meeting next week to discuss further.

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We have thoughts about this in the forming Transparency Commission and although I won’t “skip the queue” there will be much less pain in NEAR eco if these ethical problems can be addressed now, not retroactively. I would prefer not to be using TC as a bludgeon for unethical practices in NEAR eco, but that’ll just be me doing my community-nominated job.

Please read :point_up_2: :point_up_2: this long comment and understand that if Creative DAO doesn’t acknowledge its’ past and evolve now it will be outed for unethical practices in the future. There is no other way to scale an ecosystem than by doing things right.

Additionally, to double down: effectiveness & efficiency matter. Combining more qualitative and correlated quantitative data is needed, especially for Creatives DAO, so please consider using onchain tooling like Croncat to trigger notices (private messages) via ChatMe. If the solution to improve Creatives DAO is bloated with unpaid human effort the same dynamics and cough corruption will be normalized, inviting skepticism and challenges from the Transparency Commission. Efficiency comes from tools and planning, and without it no DAO lasts very long. Effectiveness is another story, but I’ll leave that up yall to decide the definition of an effective (ie successful) Creatives DAO.

Learm from Cosmos, learn from Polkadot, learn from ETH Foundation: everybody goes through this, but if you pretend it doesn’t exist, the problems become rot FAST in community settings.

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Thanks for commenting @satojandro,

Firstly, I appreciate your effort to write this :). However, your message appears to be heavily biased and contains numerous unfounded accusations without proper evidence to support them.

:point_right: Where did you get this from? Creatives DAO resumes its activities BEFORE the NDC Treasury is established. Besides, accusing the DAO as a matter to be deferred to the NDC is simply personal biased. To remind: Not only Creatives DAO was encouraged by NF to close its funding scheme and changing the approach, Marketing was asked the same.

By saying “NF failed to deal with Creatives DAO”, until more established claim is posted, I don’t agree with this.

:point_right: Elaborate this

:point_right: Prove this. Any document/confirmation from community or NF address this?

While it’s understandable to have different opinions on certain matters, it’s important to back up those opinions with facts and evidence. As a moderator, you must understand that making baseless claims only serves to undermine the credibility of the argument being made.

Thanks, but only when you can separate personal hate from your comment. No matter the feedback is for or against CDAO, we only welcome constructive one. Accusation written in fancy language is dangerous for the community. You’re also a community moderator, please come up with a more constructive feedback. Since it’s violates the community code of conduct (for the reasons above), I flagged the post for review @Alpar_NEAR.

FYI: @satojandro, you may need this: GWG/NDC Constructive Feedback

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Hi all,

Although I agree that there is a need to elaborate on certain points raised by @satojandro , I don’t think his post warrants moderation.

I think we all frequently fall short of presenting a perfect argument (both in style and content). Mistakes made in a previous post need not be edited, but may be corrected as part of the unfolding dialogue.

At this point, I’d only like to point out that based on second half of that sentence, I’m pretty sure he meant “I’m not against the Creatives DAO, I have only ever been…”.

I’d like to encourage you all to unpack and further discuss this. I’ll be reading and weighing in when necessary.

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HI William,

Thanks for picking up on an error. The last Quote should read ‘I am not against the Creatives DAO, just against the spending… etc.’ - must have made the mistake when I edited from ‘I have never been…’ I believe admins of the forum should be able to see the edit history? I apologise for this and adding an unnecessary variable to the mix.

As for everything else - the feedback is constructive? There are multiple suggestions on where to improve and many recommendations.

However, I do have to note that this is not the first time I make this recommendations. They’ve been rapidly dismissed in the past.

It is a symbol of the current state of the leadership that this could in any way be considered ‘hateful conduct’. Yet another sign of the censoring that has been taking place on the forum with a coordinated group of would be beneficiaries from Creatives DAO lax funding flagging everyone down.

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I also note that NOTHING on your response addresses the key issue at hand: the inadequate Scoring Metrics.

Every person I have spoken to within the NEAR Foundation, including meeting in person at NEARCON prompted the same response: Creatives DAO will resume funding IF/WHEN they figure out the new charter, guidelines, etc. (not exact words). There has always been a strong emphasis on the model going forward - isn’t that what the call for feedback is? I am simply saying that it is clear that few people have actually read this documents and we cannot be intellectually lazy and rubber stamp this ‘because someone at the NF said so’.

When I talk about this being kicked to NDC I am referring to the fact that the Charter and Purpose Trust needs to be reviewed by the community. At which point it is no longer the NF the deciding stakeholder.

You are drawing at strings here - let’s just focus on the document at hand and the actual issues raised within it.

I also support creating a Truth and Reconciliation Committee to look into what happened during the first year of operations. You want to disregard my feedback because I don’t have the ‘facts’ - let’s dive deep Sir. Full scope, diverse and non-partisan committee to create a report on how the $2m was disbursed, the success or failure of the DAO of DAO approach, etc. I’m sure this would be handy to NF as most of the current leadership was not around then.

Thanks for weighing in Alpar,

You are correct. As I explained to WilliamX above - I made a mistake when changing to ‘I am not’ from ‘I have never been’ (mostly grammatical). I believe you should have access to the edit logs (although I can’t remember if I edited before or after publishing). However, by reading the full paragraph it should become clear that not only am I not against the Creatives DAO, but that I am willing to support if it the right framework is in place.

This is a thread about the adequacy of the current framework. Any attempts to censor are malicious and most be condemned.

Okay, so this is a serious claim, with a fairly strong language, that should probably find a new home in a dedicated thread - backed up with a decent amount of examples and re-phrased.

In this form, it definitely doesn’t belong neither in this thread or the Forum.

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Hi there @sheadyyy ,

First off, your comment is - once again - in obvious violation of the Community Guidelines. Contains nothing but ad hominem.

Secondly, even if you’ve put your critique of @satojandro in a presentable and acceptable way, I’m not sure that someone with your post and moderation history is the one who should be throwing stones.

Since you are a long time and repeat offender, please consider this as a final warning.

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Is the flagging history only available to me because I have admin rights or is this feature also available to regular users?

We can definitely set up a commission to look into how many posts raise legitimate questions, concerns or even feedback about creatives DAO, how many of them get flagged down, and the ratio of the people flagging down to the ratio of people who have received funding in the past (which it would be fair to assume would also be eligible, and apply for funding in the future).

My initial post is already sitting at THREE red flags, two from current Creatives DAO moderators… I believe this would already qualify to hide it from view and maybe even lock further replies to thread, etc. - two from current Creatives DAO moderators…

Once again, thanks for stepping in @Alpar_NEAR to help moderate this.

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no, its not available to the REGULARS, I would have been flagging your hates down all time long,

so use ur power while you have it.

I’ll restrain for sharing screenshots of the said flagging history as I believe the moderators can handle this.

However, for the sake of public transparency, I’d like to clarify that while I have Moderator Rights I do not moderate or decide on the outcome of the Flags, specially flags raised on my own posts. Due to an obvious conflict of interest and abuse of power, all these Flags are left for other moderators to decide.

The history of which moderator took which action is also available on the forum so these claims can be verified.

To be specific, you have ‘Moderation’ rights, not ‘Admin’ rights.

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Thanks for this valuable clarification and insight. I have made the necessary corrections in original post. Nature of claims remains the same.

Can you also chime in on the core issue raised -

I’ll escalate this suggestion (along with the main points of the thread), but this is above the level of my decision-making.

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Thanks for the doc. I have left some comments, but mod Crawn rejected them in a regular CDAO manner without any explanation.

  1. Rejected proposal regarding people who are eligible to vote for Creative DAO councils. The doc limited Community members and established restrictions to the election, which go against NDC Constitution and Manifesto written by the Community. Only a certain number of members are eligible to participate in the voting.

  2. Rejected proposal about appeal right for Community members. With the last CDAO funding round report https://gov.near.org/t/report-creatives-dao-march-funding-report/33468/22 we got a lot of negative feedback regarding score system from Community members (@thephilosopher @GeminiRising @sheadyyy
    @reespect @Romanus @Supercoolkay), some of them were hidden by CDAO. I suggested having an independent body Transparency Commission to resolve these issues and give recommendations.

  3. Also, the doc imposes additional duties on community members to hold mandatory weekly meetings and work with POAP NFTs. In my opinion, this can not be required.

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But I’m only one of thousands of Community team member, and it’s my opinion. We need to ask the entire Community.

Should the Comminunity approve the CDAO charter in current edition?
  • Yes
  • No

0 voters

It would be great if @creativesdao-council will ask

to vote here.

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