[NDC Funding Request] Creatives DAO | May 2023

CREATIVES DAO April & May Budget to NDC

Important links:

About the budget of CreativesDAO

CreativesDAO aims to empower every collective on NEAR to build a sustainable Web3 model and attract the best creative talent to innovate on-chain.

The budget will fund communities that develop innovative solutions for creativity on NEAR, and will be used for partnerships and awareness campaigns that bring meaningful Creatives to NEAR.

CreativesDAO supports the independence and growth of every DAO. The proposed budget covers funding for selected communities and operational costs, ensuring the long-term sustainability and growth of the Creatives Constellation on NEAR.

CreativesDAO selects and funds communities that meet the following criteria: decentralized governance, value proposition to NEAR, on-chain traffic and dApp interaction, community scalability, clear purpose, vision, roadmap, and team, building on NEAR, and onboarding existing Web2 creative communities into Web3.

See attached spreadsheet for a detailed breakdown.

April

Activities Amount Comments
Strategic Partnerships $1999 DAO Lens (Custom Development of Features for Creatives DAO)
Marketing, outreach & SMM $4000 Outreach for Creatives Communities and showcasing progress - candidates will be selected by an open call gov form
Retroactive Bounty for CreativesDAO Council and the Enforcer $17000 Bounty for the CreativesDAO Charter creation and Special Purpose Trust setup
NEAR Foundation Reimbursement $5000 Due to the high costs of Special Purpose Trust creation, NF would like to get a reimbursement of $5k
Buffer $500 1% contingency example - NEAR to USD conversion on ref.finance
Total $28,499

May

Activities Amount Comments
Community funding $24000 Approved Proposals for May
Strategic Partnerships $20000 ETH Milan
Marketing, outreach & SMM $4000 Outreach for Creatives Communities and showcasing progress - candidates will be selected by an open call gov form
Team Grants $17000 4K per council and 1k for Trust enforcer
Buffer $1000 1% contingency example - NEAR to USD conversion on ref.finance
Total $66,000

Stay Creatives!

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Creatives DAO is providing supporting to RCDAO to become an independent entity under NDC v1. As Creatives DAO we do not participate in RCDAO’s governance. We want to assist and empower every grassroots DAOs and communities to manage their own governance.

As they can’t get funding directly under NDC v0, we are only helping RCDAO fund various communities around the ecosystem by our surplus funds that can bring value to NEAR ecosystem.

We are waiting to get a final draft of their charter and other legal documents to ensure fund’s allocation is appropriately distributed to bring value to NEAR ecosystem.

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Congratulations again CDAO for getting the trust instrument set up, and for getting together this proposal to the NDC for funding. The proposal seems to cover many areas of creative community support which is wonderful to see.

The more “basic” line items like salaries, funds to distribute for grants, and marketing/SMM are quite clear, which is important because these seem to all be recurring items.

The doc with the addition info is very helpful, but it would be great to see more info on the “strategic partnerships” imo.

Being able to see:

  • planned metrics for the partnerships
  • road map beyond the initial partnership (so what exactly is the strategic part :ok_hand:t4:)
  • and potentially just ways that the CDAO community can support or get involved

Would all be great. Imo this could be achieved with pitch decks for each planned strategic partnership.

I’ve missed a couple recent CDAO calls so maybe there were presentations on these topics that I missed though :pray:t4::smiling_face_with_three_hearts:, if so, would love a link :eyes::revolving_hearts:.

… It seems maybe a bit premature to be supporting RCDAO in this proposal if final drafts of charters and legal docs are still being waited on? What happens if CDAO sends funds to RCDAO and those funds are used improperly BEFORE they have a trust instrument set up? Who is liable? Seems like CDAO would be? (I don’t know enough about the state of RCDAO to have a super strong opinion, just want to see CDAO last a loooong time :pray:t4:)


Anecdotal…

Last time around, Marma J Foundation didn’t actually receive their funding until AFTER the project was completed :sweat_smile:, so I’m greatly looking forward to a more streamlined funding process for the CDAO community :pray:t4::tada:.

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Thank you so much for your input,

As a core contributor to the RCWG who are working toward RCDAO V1. We will not hold any fund in our own because we are still a working group not a DAO. We are a channel to regional communities that are both restarting and just getting started (Newly) to get support. We will review, verify, and approve proposals that are either creative or marketing and align with the ecosystem’s goals and CDAO are the one who release the requested funding for the communities.

And we have process in place to measure success, and if a community fails to meet his KPIs and metrics during the first month of receiving funding, he will not be eligible for subsequent funding. Furthermore, we will not approve more than 2k monthly cap submissions. It’s more of experiments now looking at how communities just started with their activities after funding been halted for a while.

@IgbozeIsrael , James or @Ola will give further clarification.

Thank you once again.

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Thank you Chloe for your feedback :pray:t2:

The pitch decks for both partnerships are attached here:

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Hey hi Chloe

To address your concerns on the Cdao Support and Collaboration with RCDao in the Cdao budget

Kindly note that at this current state(V0), the Rcdao can not hold funds and will only be able to Hold funds in V1 according to the NDC timeline.
So all the funds approved by RCdao(RCWG) before V1 are distributed through our collaborations and partnerships with other grassroot Daos and in this particular case the CreativeDao.

This strategic collaborative process with the Grassroot Daos allows RCdao operate and give value to the ecosystem at its current state temporarily without the need to hold the said funds

To learn more about whats going on with RCDao, kindly join the NDC RC working chat.:point_down::point_down: will be happy to share more on our processes and road to V1​:blush:

Hope this helped in giving some clarity

https://t.me/c/1545563257/1

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Thanks: adding here for clarity mostly because took my more than a couple looks at the info to find:

DAO Lense Deck

ETH Milan Deck

I’ll go through the decs, but mostly wanted to make sure they were prominently viable for the community :smiling_face_with_three_hearts::pray:t4:.

As for the comments about RC DAO above, I’m already in the chats and all sounds good to me :woman_shrugging:t5:. I was mostly highlighting the fact that funding was asked for before final versions of important docs were seen by CDAO mods potentially? Glad generally that CDAO is able to support other groups in the eco :revolving_hearts:.

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Awesome.
To make things clear.

There is a charter for RCWG and RC-DAO. The later will be resleased shortly after the lawyers have had a review.

Thst of RCWG is up and understood. There was just little adjustments to be made based on CDAO’s focus.

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Does this mean that none of the proposals approved in April or May have been paid by the NEAR Foundation directly (as per old arrangement) and all those payouts are pending?

Also, I have several questions about RC DAO, some about the overlap in funding (M DAO is already paying for these proposals), but also about the retroactive nature of the request: we know already what proposals came in through RC DAO for the month of April and approved ones are already getting paid by M DAO.

I’ve messaged Sahil to discuss some of the nuance of RC DAO funding, but would appreciate clarification as to the backdating of all the items.

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Hi @Paul, thanks for sharing.

I’ve seen many of the efforts that exists around to order grassroots DAOs, NDC, working groups and others. At the same time I feel that this makes an overflow on communications, ideas, efforts. Some times there is a lot of noise around to know what is currently happening. Clarity is key on this.

Kindly pointing the following:

  • Is this a report or a request? As it is mentioned as the second, but the current post is looking to fund past proposals. In case this is a report, can we find the metrics, KPI’s, OKR’s and/or achievements during the period?
  • Based on past, the funding can be big or small, but is hard to know without metrics.
  • What happened with past proposals and why were not payed on time? 1. If people bootstrapped (thanks) in some way without funds, where they able to reach their goals on time and with quality? 2. Compromising funds without having those can be risky, reputation of the ecosystem can be affected if this causes a delay in timelines.

The best!

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Hi @satojandro & @cloudmex-alan, I’d love to incorporate your questions to this reply since some of them can be answered at the same:

This is a funding request we made for April and May for Creatives DAO treasury from the NDC community treasury (CDAO Treasury from now) . I agree that the request should have been put up earlier so it doesn’t look like a retro-active proposal. Due to the complexity of the process in this transition period, we needed more communication than normal waiting for the standardized funding procedure of the NDC.

=> For community’s April proposals, the funding process for some DAOs via NF has some delay. To ensure the smooth transition, we still ask from the community treasury in full (with exact number). We’ll work internally to report back which proposal got funding from NF and which got covered by CDAO treasury before proceed with the next proposal.

=> For community’s May proposals, every approved proposal will be covered by CDAO treasury, we expect to complete the transition from NF funding to NDC funding by this one proposal.

Since CDAO funding scheme is on a quarterly basis, we expect to report back KPIs for community funding only after collecting report from DAO members. Besides that, report for other items: Marketing & outreach/team report will be delivered every month.

The funding allocated to RC-DAO through this proposal will be exclusively used for their future proposals within the scope of their own charter, separate from MDAO’s management. We will ensure that the proposals approved by MDAO in April do not receive duplicate funding from the amount requested in this proposal. However, I agree that the process to help RC-DAO goes live needs more communication. :pray:

Please refer to Creatives DAO Charter to learn more about the metrics.

The issue arose because CDAO did not handle its treasury previously. Funding was facilitated by NF, and we relied on their assistance to distribute funds. This problem will be resolved when CDAO’s treasury becomes active. We have completed all the necessary preparations (legal and operational) to facilitate this change. The funding experience will surely be improved :heart:

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This seems misleading and inappropriate. You are requesting funds from Community Treasury that have already been paid out by NF. The next question is -

  • who has the discretion to utilise all the unspent money for the month of April.
  • why was this not disclosed on the original budget?

This creates an extremely onerous system where someone has to be digging through old proposals and things that were requested that don’t actually match the intended use.

Similar to the above - there is an issue here with funds being requested for April when there are no proposals to fund for that month. Budget is misleading as it is justifying large amounts of money for empty items and vague justifications on how the money will be used in the future which is inconsistent with original proposal.

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@satojandro
We’re not requesting the full amount for April’s proposal. NF has paid 5 out of 9, so 4 proposals are awaiting payment. Therefore, we are requesting $16,435 to clear the previous month. NF and NDC trustees are also aware of the situation.

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NF had paid a few DAOs for April and we didn’t have a list of the DAOs funded.

As AstroDAO had UX issue and USD deposits were not displayed for 24-48 hours, we were considering taking the full payment and transferring the remaining funds back to the NDC treasury in case of a surplus.

We recently got the data of the DAOs funded from NF for April and we made amends requesting only the amount for DAOs not funded.

Changes are reflecting in the post and the excel.

NF has paid out 5 DAOs

  1. AfroStar Guild - https://app.astrodao.com/dao/creativesdao.sputnik-dao.near/proposals/creativesdao.sputnik-dao.near-29

  2. VN Artists DAO - https://app.astrodao.com/dao/creativesdao.sputnik-dao.near/proposals/creativesdao.sputnik-dao.near-28

  3. MastermindsDAO - https://app.astrodao.com/dao/creativesdao.sputnik-dao.near/proposals/creativesdao.sputnik-dao.near-27

  4. 1MILLION NFTs - https://app.astrodao.com/dao/creativesdao.sputnik-dao.near/proposals/creativesdao.sputnik-dao.near-32

  5. Blaqk Stereo DAO - https://app.astrodao.com/dao/creativesdao.sputnik-dao.near/proposals/creativesdao.sputnik-dao.near-26

We are trying to support a RCDAO by our surplus funding as they don’t have their trust instrument to fund communities that require funding.

The amount asked is going to be utilised for proposals till June end or till the funds last as we cannot promise a line item for RCDAO every month.

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I think your post needs a better writing to clarify this.

In order to keep transparency for community. :slightly_smiling_face:

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We’ve had a collective group chat with CDAO, RCDAO, NF mods, GWG and MDAO.
Collectively we came to a consensus that CDAO will take the line items for RCWG out for April and May as some proposals were funded by MDAO and they will handle April and May funding for them through NF treasury.

April funding for CDAO community was partially paid by NF and now about 80% communities are cleared. NF will be funding the remaining DAOs for April.

Additionally, the trust instrument setup charges exceeded the cap. NF is paying the about 85% of the cost and has requested us to pay 5k USD which is added to the line items.

The new process for receiving funding will be shared with the community soon. It’s gonna be relatively straightforward and simple and we’ll create a new post for everyone’s perusal :pray:

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