Creatives DAO Guidelines (Community Draft)

Creatives
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Dear NEAR Community,

I was thinking about some guidelines, which I shared in a comment in a post about NDC guidelines, and I would like to bring here, to our community, for us to think about. Please, would you give me your thoughts about this matter? Of course, this is not even the middle of our process to develop guidelines. The moderators are coming with a draft too, which must have much more details and that must be more deeply integrated with NEAR values, nevertheless I think there is still value and we think about these ideas. So if you can give some constructive criticism, all of us could benefit. Please, share your opinion, your doubts, and possible divergences with caring and love. We all want to build a better NEAR, and we can disagree in the process. There are humans beyond the screen - remember. Please, I also ask you to stay under the veil of ignorance and think about the proposal of the beginning guidelines to structure our community. If you think about better guidelines, please let us know. If u want to add or remove something, please comment. We need to build it together. I am not a moderator, but just a member of our community.

Guidelines for NEAR Creatives

  1. If you are new to NEAR, make an account at this forum and login: http://gov.near.org/
  2. Open a NEAR Wallet, like Sender Wallet or My NEAR Wallet: https://app.mynearwallet.com/
  3. Enter the Creatives DAO telegram: https://t.me/CreativeGuilds
  4. Make some friends and get in touch with people who share your interests.
  5. Send NEAR to your wallet or ask a friend to send you, to be able to make transactions, login in web3 sites, and customize your wallet.

Before thinking in opening a DAO

  1. Get in touch with the community and submit to a bounty or open call from an existing DAO at the forum.
  2. Submit a project to a DAO respecting the guidelines, and ask for resources to develop a project that satisfies the DAO’s mission and NEAR’s mission of increasing the community and growing the ecosystem. Make a successful report.
  3. Get in touch with the missions of the many DAOs on NEAR, and check if the mission of the DAO you intend to open does not exist yet. If there is a DAO with the mission you want to perform, please, approach the DAO and see if it is possible to develop activities in integration.
  4. If your DAO has a new mission on NEAR (or in case of inactivity of preview DAOs with the same mission), you are allowed to open a DAO. For doing so, you must get some trustfull people around that mission and write your DAO’s introduction at the forum. Tag the Creatives moderators and post the link on Creatives DAO’s telegram and discord.
  5. Introductions are not approved or rejected by the community, but moderators and members from the NEAR community can approach you in your introduction post, in order to request more explanations and suggest changes that could improve your chance of get funding. Follow the guidelines for introductions and present your team and their preview works inside the ecosystem (bounties and projects).
  6. Please, do not mix your Introduction with your Funding Proposal; these are 2 separate documents.
  7. The first funding proposal from your DAO must be requested to an already existing DAO, as a project submitted from one DAO to another. DAOs can only be funded for the first time if any of the already funded DAOs believes in the new DAO’s mission.
  8. Any DAO can fund a new DAO with 5% max of its own budget, in order for the new DAO to open an astrodao, onboard people on astrodao, open a store in a marketplace on NEAR, and make a small prototype project.

How to open a DAO

  1. If you had already been part of the ecosystem, through bounties, open calls, and proposals to DAOs, and if you have a team of people, a unique mission that improves NEAR community, an introduction at the forum, and a proposal accepted by a funded DAO, you can open your astrodao and start to add members.
  2. Your introduction, beyond respecting the guidelines for introductions, must contain the primary rules for your DAO: rules for the existing groups, for adding new people, for removing people, for council formation (or rotation if that applies). Each DAO is free to choose its own set of rules, but please try to build a path towards decentralization.
  3. Anyone can open a DAO on astrodao app, but only DAOs that start their projects with funding from another DAO have the initial acceptance and legitimacy to request for funding individually to the Creatives in the next months.
  4. If you open a DAO, you must be part of the council of this DAO. The council is a group thus defined inside astrodao, and/or it is the smallest group with broadest voting power within a DAO.
  5. You should not be a council member from more than 2 DAOs requesting for funding inside the NEAR ecosystem. You can be a member from multiple DAOs, but you cannot be a council member from more than 2 at the same time, and you cannot receive as a council from more than 2 DAOs.
  6. Council members cannot receive for projects funded by the DAOs in which they are council members. They can only receive their council grant (30%), but not for any action inside the funded projects. This is a measure to decentralize resources to the community and to stimulate the DAOs starting their activities with already many members.
  7. At least 5% of DAOs’ funds should be sent back to the community, through acceptance of projects submitted from the community members who are not members of the DAO on astrodao, in case there are these kinds of projects submitted to the DAO. If there are projects like this and they are not accepted by the DAO, the DAO must provide justification.
  8. Council members, beyond being the smallest group with broadest voting powers within a DAO, are also the people who manage the administrative life of the DAO, by answering in the forum, writing funding proposals and reports, and acting for the members when fast action is required. They are also the ones who will sign the agreement with NEAR in order for the DAO to receive the resources. And they should present themselves in a forum post, for the community to know them.
  9. All council members should pass through KYC with NEAR, in order to rotate the person who signs the agreement.
  10. All DAOs start with a budget from another DAO in the first month (max 250 usd), and if the report is successful, it can request a second funding proposal directly to the Creatives of 2000 usd max value. If the report from the 2000 funding is approved, the DAO can request for 3000 usd max value in the third month; 4000 usd for the fourth month and 5000 for fifth and following months, in case preview reports are all approved.

How to be a moderator from the Creatives DAO

  1. If you were voted to be a moderator and accepted the role, you must give up the council or member position in the DAOs in which you have these roles. No moderator should be a council member from a DAO, because no moderator should be able to vote for or against the DAOs in which s/he is a member. If the moderator were part of a DAO, beyond the decision concerning funding its own DAO, the moderator would be able to decide about his/her own work, report, and reward through the voting of the DAO, if this DAO were also council of the Creatives.
  2. Moderator role is a position of 6 months, which one can enter by being voted by the community. Only the ones with member status on the forum can vote.
  3. Any moderator must have at least 1 year (anniversary tag) and member role in the forum (level 2). This is requested because the moderator role is a difficult one and demands that the person is well known and knows a lot about the ecosystem. 1 year is necessary and maybe sufficient to show commitment and experience within the ecosystem.
  4. Moderators can be removed before a 6 month period by a proposal from any council of the Creatives DAO, passed through astrodao.
  5. Any DAO can propose to remove a moderator, but it must provide justification in the proposal. If the members of the Creatives DAO Council agree, they will vote accordingly. If a moderator is removed, the other moderators should open a call to a new moderator. No single person should have the power to propose to remove a moderator; but only DAOs.
  6. The role of a moderator is to analyze the proposals and reports, and give a technical approval or rejection on them. They also produce a monthly report about their activities and about the creative DAOs’ metrics, report which must be approved by the Creatives Council before their payout is requested. They also make the role of moderating disputes among members and helping new members to understand the community.

How to be a council from the Creatives DAO

  1. If your DAO is a council member from the Creatives DAO, you cannot be a member with broad voting power of any other DAO inside the Creatives Council; however, you can be part of a community group without voting power on administrative issues (no cfc voting allowed in that group for example). We want to decentralize decisions, and that each person together with its DAO has 1 DAO vote maximum inside the Creatives.
  2. If your DAO is a council member of the Creatives and you are a member or council from that DAO, you have a responsibility with analyzing proposals and voting for or against them in your DAO. If you did not vote, you must justify your lack of voting. If you are part of the community group (without voting power on adm issues), you don’t have a responsibility to vote in this case.
  3. If your DAO does not vote for a 2 consecutive months, the moderators should make a proposal to remove your DAO from the council. This DAO can return to the council by request, after a period of 6 months.
  4. Your DAO can only request to be a member of the Creatives DAO council when it has at least 6 months of approved reports. To be a council member of the Creatives is an important task, and the DAOs must be known by the community and know the ecosystem well before submitting to this higher position.

How to act when you feel unsatisfied

  1. If you are feeling bad with a message, post, or anything else, approach the moderators on telegram and ask them to send a DM. Or send a DM to a moderator in the forum. Talk privately first. And try always the path of constructive criticism, forgiveness, and growing the community.
  2. Flag any message in the forum that seems to be in violation with the guidelines.
  3. If the issue is with some moderator, please approach NEAR employees here in the forum, and talk to them by direct message.
  4. Do not use the forum improperly, remember that all written things are recorded forever and accessible for near community and the outside communities - sometimes they can be a shame for the NEAR community as a whole. Respect your partners from other DAOs in the ecosystem.

General NEAR Etiquette Guidelines:

http://gov.near.org/faq

NDC Code of Conduct:

NDC Community Engagement:

NDC Dispute resolution:

Check out some other Guidelines

About the Creatives DAO Funding:

How to submit a funding proposal to the Creatives DAO:

How to submit monthly reports:

How to submit reports (new):

Legal Implications

DAOs legal discussion:

https://wiki.near.org/governance/dao-legal-discussion

The legal Basics of DAOS:

https://nearlegal.com/the-legal-basics-of-daos/

More information

NEAR Wiki:

https://wiki.near.org/

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I dont know if you want to get involved in this debate, but I think you all are pretty honest and rational people, who are in a long time on NEAR and who I would love to hear the opinion, even if you disagree from me. Rational disagreement and caring and reasonable discussion is the basis of any growth in the middle of a plurality of conceptions, as John Rawls so brightly showed us in The Laws of Peoples. Please, @tabear, @chloe, @frnvpr, @vandal, @marianeu, @mecsbecs, @David_NEAR, if you could give us your opinion, this would be wonderful. I would also appreciate the opinions of our @creativesdao-mods, and the @marketingdao-council, who also has many experienced people. It would be really beautiful if all NEAR community could participate on this process with comments.

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The moderators brought this to our knowledge, after talk to NEAR staff:

NF Goals.pdf (45.5 KB)

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@beetlejuice @Tistu @jsc2022.near we could really improve the guidelines with your participation.

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hey!
happy to collab on this, even if different guidelines are being created with NF, it’s always positive to try and look for consensus, maybe this topic can be used to discuss different opinions on an hipothetical level. That might free up people to discuss without worrying about consequences.

About your suggestions, they encapsulate what has been considered ‘good practices’ so far, even if some of those things were not written everywhere.

I generally agree with those guidelines, however there are a couple of things I want to suggest.

First, that you consider applying a more ‘project-based’ view, instead of a ‘monthly-based’ continuum. I am pretty sure that as metrics become more important in deciding the flow of money, having a system in which DAOs are incentivized to fill a 5k cap will be rejected and a system in which DAOs are incentivized to create better projects will prevail.

Second, that you consider that one of the goals of NF is to incentivize existing projects, the bigger the better, to join our community, and that a path for those kind of entities must exist and be clear.

Therefore, there can’t be only 1 way into the community, but many, and there relies the issue we collectively have to answer. Guidelines must be flexible enough to allow diferent paths, but strict enought to increase positive output.

A note on moderators/council: I am not sure what will happen after talks with NF, but I do feel that a dedicated team is much more efficient than a council of DAOs (which is more interesting for other kind of decision making topics, such as global vision). The current system as historical reasons to exist (and they can be traced back, happy to explain to those who wan’t to know), but might be completely changed. If NF is able to set up a team that manages to be both fair and experienced, and more importantly, a team that has a direct communication channel with NF, that might be the best solution for now.

This would mean a lot of the guidelines expressed here would become obsolete. Either way, why not ask the community to present their prefered system in this topic, knowing it’s just a friendly chat?

My opinion about performance metrics:

preamble: the verticals exist in conjunction with other forms of financial support, such as Mintbase grants (10k and upwards), NF grants (10k and upwards) etc. The verticals ceiling touches these grants floor, therefore the only reasonable way of going over the cap is applying to one of these grants.

I won’t comment on metrics alone, because imho that must be submitted to some kind of funding tier; 5k for every DAO makes DAOs indistinguishable and metrics impossible to implement; therefore, some kind of tier system must exist in order to better apply metrics. this would make this community healthier, as clarity and clear goals is what makes people push harder.

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.

I would say this covers a lot of basics and some of these have created problems in the past (lack of clarity).

Concluding, I think we need guidelines like the ones you proposed, adapted to the new reality, but also clarity on what rules of engagement are. Plus, metrics associated with $ values, giving DAOs something to aim for.

Thanks for creating the platform for the discussion :wink:

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You always amaze me, @frnvp, with your power of analysis and synthesis. Thank u so much for these observations. Let me think a little bit more and bring more ideas that takes into account what you brought here.

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Thank you, just happy to help :slight_smile:

I forgot to add that it would also be interesting to think on the Creatives DAO metrics and not only individual DAOs metrics.

i think we all agree that the effort so far has been extraordinary, even if difficult to measure. Therefore, I think the new model will also have to deploy something like:

  • 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

This way, not only the NEAR ecosystem would be supporting these DAOs, but the allure of the ecosystem itselft would grow. Creatives DAO would stop being a simple vertical and would become a more active participant in the ecosystem, which is what was always intended, I think. These things take time, ofc, but maybe now it’s the time to start looking at the future.

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@frnvpr You are my favorite person at Near, always on point, never wrong :hugs:

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