Grassroots DAOs onboarding procedure: V1 onboarding round is open

NEAR Digital Collective
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Dear Community!

House of Merit is happy to present the grassroots DAOs onboarding procedure:

Grassroots DAOs onboarding procedure

1. Submission of application - between the 13th and 19th of each month:
Grassroots DAO initiates the onboarding process by completing the provided form (Appendix 1) and submitting a proposal on the NEAR Government forum (Ecosystem, NDC);
2. Review and evaluation - between the 13th and 19th of each month:
House of Merit (HoM) conducts a comprehensive review of the submitted proposals and engages in necessary discussions or calls with the Grassroots DAO representatives;
3. On-chain proposal creation - executed on 20th of each month:
A HoM member (a Sponsor, not affiliated with the DAO), creates an on-chain proposal on behalf of the DAO to be present in Near Digital Collective;
4. On-Chain voting - between the 20th and 26th of each month:
House of Merit members participate in on-chain voting to finalize the onboarding decision for the Grassroots DAO.

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Dispute Resolution Process

1. Denial Notification:

In the event of a denial, the House of Merit (HoM) point of Contact is obligated to provide a detailed written explanation stating the reasons behind the denial. This ensures transparency and clarity in the decision-making process.

2. Reapplication Rights:

Applicants possess the right to reapply in the subsequent month. The reapplication process allows individuals to address any concerns raised during the initial evaluation and provides an opportunity for improvement. The House of Merit encourages applicants to consider the feedback provided and make necessary adjustments when reapplying.

This dispute resolution process aims to maintain fairness, open communication, and a structured approach to handling denials, empowering applicants to understand the rationale behind decisions and seek improvement for subsequent applications.

Conflicts of Interest

Disclosure: All members of the NDC Governance and individuals participating in decision-making processes within the organization are required to disclose any existing or potential conflicts of interest.

Identification of Conflicts: When a conflict of interest arises or is disclosed, the involved individual must furnish a comprehensive description of the conflict. This should include details of any pertinent financial or personal interests, relationships, or affiliations that might influence, or appear to influence, their decision-making or actions within the organization.

Recusal: Any individual with a conflict of interest in a specific matter must refrain from participating in its discussion, deliberation, or voting process. To maintain impartiality, they are obliged to excuse themselves from relevant meetings or portions thereof, mitigating the risk of perceived bias.

Appendix 1: “Near Digital Collective application form”

Section 1 - DAO/Project Information

  • Organization Name (e.g. DAO, project, initiative name)
  • Proposal Title
  • When was your DAO / Project established? If it is new, use today’s date.
  • DAO’s Category (Ecosystem/Gaming/NFT/Regional Development/Marketing)
  • Project’s Category (Community Led, Gaming/NFT/Defi etc)

Section 2. Previous Funding

  • Have you received funding for this project from any source?
  • Any source of funding. This may include NEAR Foundation Grants, and existing GDAOs, among others.

Section 3. DAO URLs

  • DAO / Project Website
  • Social Media Distribution Channels (Telegram (Group), Discord (Community), Twitter, Near.Social, Reddit, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, TikTok, YouTube, Medium, and others;
  • Is Your DAO/Project Targeting a Specific Country?
  • Which region will your DAO/ Project support? Usually, regions can be defined by their language. North American Central, South America & Caribbean (Spanish), South America (Portuguese), Europe, Asia, Africa, Asia Pacific, Middle East, or international by fact

Section 4. Applicant Information

  • Name of Point of Contact (The pseudonymous name the community knows you is acceptable. However, note that you will have to complete KYC to be able to receive funding from NDC)
  • Link to Governance Forum/near.social Profile
  • NEAR Wallet ID
  • Wallet ID that will be receiving funds
  • Country of Residence
  • Twitter, Telegram
  • LinkedIn
  • Additional Relevant Links (add any other links to resources that highlight your work or involvement with NEAR ecosystem. This may include your portfolio, GitHub, etc.)

Section 5. Team Members

  • Please provide information about Team Members. Information should include (name, roles, near.social profile handles)

Section 6. Experience

What related qualifications, experience, or track record does your team bring to this initiative?

  • Short Summary of Your and Team’s Professional Experience
  • List Web3 Projects You Have Completed
  • Live Links to Examples of Relevant Work
  • Relevant Data Points Showing Your Competencies

Section 7. DAO/Project Charter/White or Litepaper and Goals

  • Project Overview: Presentation with a short High-Level 6 bullet points summary:

(Mission, Vision, Core programs and how they align with NDC’s NDC CoA Vision, team, and requested budget for the next three months)

  • What Problem Are You Aiming to Solve?
  • DAO/Project Charter;
  • How can your DAO / Project achieve NDC priorities, goals, and KPIs?
  • Roadmap of your DAO/project, Milestones, and achievements

Section 8. Budget

  • Projected Budget for the next three months (In USD for each Task/Milestone)
  • Links to Similar Proposals from Near Foundation, existing GDAOs, Near ECO (if applicable)
  • What is the length of Commitment to Delivering Your Project? Will your team be working on this project full time?
  • Will your team be fully renumerated from this budget?

Section 9. Project/DAO longevity

  • Does your project/DAO require one-time or continuous funding?
  • Will your DAO/Project device way of sustaining itself after this round of funding?
  • What are the possible roadblocks to the success of your project/DAO?
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Near Digital Collective Core Values

  1. Empowering the ecosystem (for people by people)
  2. Respected by the ecosystem (fair, accountable, transparent, and reliable)
  3. Dedicated to ideas of decentralization (antifragile, scalable, with collective decision-making)
  4. Efficient operation (don’t be a burden; instead, help the Community to be more efficient)
  5. Continuous improvement via weekly iterations (plan, measure results, and adjust continuously)

Near Digital Collective Metrics

Metrics is how we measure things. They ensure that we collectively make meaningful progress. Metrics should be used for both tracking individual initiatives performance, and the whole NDC performance (based on the accumulated metrics from the supported initiatives). All the metrics must be attributable to the relevant project/initiative through on-chain activity + off-chain reporting, ensuring GDPR compliance and preserving privacy:

  1. Accounts retention after 1/2/4/8 weeks — the percentage of accounts who continue interacting on the chain over a given time period (higher is better)
  2. Account acquisition cost — budget divided by the number of accounts interacting through the funded initiative (lower is better)
  3. Median number of dApps used by P95 accounts retained for 1+ week (higher is better)
  4. Number of accounts retained for 1+ week using at least three dApps (higher is better)
  5. Social engagement score — some compound metric of the number of posts, likes, and followers/views in social media produced by the users.

Near Digital Collective Priorities

P-1: Widening Adoption of NEAR

P-1.1: Outreach to New Audiences

Continuous outreach to new audiences is the source of new community members and ideas. That’s why we believe this priority is a cornerstone for the NDC. There are many initiatives that fall into this category and we intentionally do not want to limit what is possible. However, here are some ideas that can be explored:

  1. Referral systems for the ecosystem;

  2. Demonstration of NEAR to non-blockchain communities:

a. TradFi apps seeking exposure to DeFi yield;

b. Traditional software companies seeking to offload security and risk to blockchain;

c. AI/ML data provenance;

d. Social apps with data privacy requirements and possible network effects.

  1. Education of the local communities, creators, influencers:

a. Local offline and online workshops or lectures in regional languages;

b. Catchy swag;

c. Referral programs;

d. Time-bound events: NEARtober fest, NEAR advent calendar.

  1. Activation of the protocol’s daily usage through gamification mechanics (for example, leaderboards).

P-1.2: Onboard Successful Projects

Blockchain is a platform where the users meet products. That’s why it is important to provide a good set of products off the shelf to the users. Successfully operated projects are the shortest path to widespread adoption. Here are some projects that can be onboarded:

  • Web3: Metamask, Brave, OpenSea, Etherscan;
  • Web2 and social: Medium, Reddit, WordPress (40% of the websites), Discourse

(standard for web3 governance), Discord, TickTok, Telegram — spam protection, anti-fake, user engagement;

  • Mass market: supermarket chains, clothes brands, restaurant chains — loyalty programs;

  • Entertainment: concerts organizers, sport events organizers, collectibles, Comicon — ticketing and gamification;

  • Online services: DuoLingo, AirBnB, Booking.com, Uber, Bolt, E-loop, FinTech - loyalty programs and gamification;

  • B2B: logistic companies, real estate, FinTech, TelCom — reduction of the costs and/or risks.

P-2: Public Goods

P-2.1: KYC Solution for Payments

Many projects in the NEAR ecosystem are facing the need to make payouts to third parties (grants, bug bounties, etc). Usually, such payouts are connected with the need of KYC procedures. At least one convenient solution for performing such KYC checks should be present in the NEAR ecosystem.

Deliverables:

  1. A legal entity that will serve the KYC solution;

  2. Signed KYC Provider (Fractal);

  3. Guidelines to use the KYC solution;

  4. Integrate NDC tooling with KYC provider.

Metrics:

  • Number of KYC’d contributors;
  • Projects on-boarded to the KYC solution;

P-2.2: Support Wallets to Become Sustainable

As a public blockchain NEAR must have at least two secure, robust and easy-to-use wallets. Each of those must have: web and mobile versions; own RPC nodes, decent customer support; win-win-win cooperations with other projects, working innovation framework to reach sustainability. However, NDC support must ensure fair competition in the wallet space.

Deliverables:

  • Wallet workgroup within NDC;
  • Established guidelines and processes for the wallet support program.

P-3: NDC Operations

P-3.1: Streamline NDC Operations

All of the NDC houses would benefit from operationalizing their work. This covers procedures for onboarding new members, charters/descriptions of zones of responsibility, access to the tools, recruitment procedures, comp&ben standards, etc.

Make things easy to transition into the future:

  • Conduct a detailed analysis of the current organizational structure, including accounting; to determine which processes can be improved and optimized;

  • Update and clarify the rights, risks and responsibilities of NDC councils.

Deliverables:

  1. Recruiting and orientation processes;

  2. Compensation guidelines based on the level of contribution;

  3. Efficient processes and tooling for governance and transparency;

  4. Efficient processes and tooling for accounting and funding.

P-3.2: Update the election procedure

The elections of the current cadence of NDC has faced a massive backlash from both the community and participants. The procedure must be updated with the following principles in mind:

  1. The voting should be robust/scalable;

  2. Voting process should be resistant to manipulation;

  3. Manual processes should be minimized;

  4. Voting should be open to any ecosystem member;

  5. Voting should be private.

Ideas to be considered during the design of the election process:

  • Attracting and promoting top candidates;
  • Consider not only full re-election, but also alternative models such as “rolling release”.

Deliverables:

  1. First milestone: a new election procedure, developed jointly by NDC members with

community participation, approved by CoA and HoM;

  1. Second milestone: implementation of the election procedure on the level of smart

contracts; its review and validation;

  1. Third milestone: preparation and implementation of the new procedure

within the next NDC elections;

  1. Fourth milestone: the proper handover of the NDC to the next cadence.
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Hi Dacha,

Hope all is well.

I’d like to go ahead and create a Near Community in Luxembourg that would be focused on bridging the divide between the corporate world and blockchain.

I’ll finalise the proposal in the next few days.

Just quick questions:

  • Aurora is now under this umbrella too? As in, I’d like also to showcase what is on Aurora as well as Near

  • Is there a standardised template for putting forth a proposal for creating a community?

Thanks,
Niall

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“Grassroots DAO initiates the onboarding process by completing the provided form (Appendix 1)”

haha sorry. In my excitement to get this off the ground I missed the first few lines of your post! :joy:

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Hello @Niall !! Sounds awesome! Welcome!

Yes, Aurora Community is moving to Near Digital Collective :smiley:

Please, join here: [Proposal] DAO Creation Initiative from the Aurora Community

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List of Applied DAOs:

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Proposers should be be able to answer questions and respond to potential misunderstandings and misinformation.

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I would like to understand more about the grassroots DAOs, it is a bit unclear what they are. Is there any material to read about it?

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Hi, what about individuals? I believe I read that individuals could also apply without being a DAO, is this correct? Also, do grassroots DAOs need to have a Council?