[DAO:c7c01c4] DAO Governance Squad 1H2024 Budget Renewal

Governance
1

by 0x511a22cdd2c4ee8357bb02df2578037ffe8a4d8d (ginoct)

Should the following $133,399 grant in the Core Unit category be approved?

Abstract

Renew the budget to fund the operations of the GovSquad Core Unit for the next six months. This unit’s mission is to: Enable users to make better decisions by providing the information and technical infrastructure to do it in a quick, easy, and delightful way. They are responsible for maintaining and improving the DAO Governance dApp, TransparencyOS, and its ecosystem.

Grant size

133,399 USD in DAI

Project duration

6 months

Beneficiary address

0x3bf800b6F5c987b3738432068f789b7d131F1698

Email address

gino@decentraland.org

Description

Formed in January 2022 with a Community Grant from the Decentraland DAO, the DAO Governance Squad has evolved into a comprehensive product development team. Emphasizing open, agile methodologies, we engage with the community for feedback, enhancing the decentralized governance of the DAO, the Governance dApp, and its ecosystem. See how the platform looked back in January ‘22 when we started developing it and how it looks now to understand the value delivered by our team.

For this Grant period, following community input on Core Unit’s Grant proposals recently, we’ve decided to cut our budget by 25%. This decision stems from the recent downturn in the crypto and metaverse markets. While the situation is improving, we believe in building efficiently during this market conditions to prepare for the next bull run. Additionally, the Governance platform has reached a level of maturity that allows us to optimize our workload. Our focus now will be on implementing binding community decisions, improving existing features, maintaining critical platform aspects (like security and third-party integrations), and introducing some new features.

A team like us must exist to ensure the continuity, decentralization, and security of the DAO ops but at this point, the effort is not the same as it was so charging the DAO for the same workload that we had in the past looked unfair. The team will maintain all the current responsibilities towards the community and in the future might look into other promising projects in the ecosystem.

The team will follow agile development practices to ensure a lean implementation of DAO governance requirements and continuous improvement of such features. The team will update the community via Project Updates, gather feedback using Canny, and answer questions at the open DAO Town Hall meetings and Discord server. Monthly Demo recordings will be provided as well.

The same Grant operational conditions detailed in the original founding proposal still apply and the grant will be provided as a vesting contract in DAI assigned to 2-out-of-3 signatures wallet.

Check our changelog, our recorded demos, and the last project update with a recap of all things shipped in the previous 6 months here. Complete Financial Report of the team here.

Check the Transparency Dashboard here and the Governance homepage to see some key metrics of the DAO operations and community engagement.

Roadmap and milestones

Extended version in the Comments section

Engagement

  • Notifications v2
    • Expanding the DAO Notifications system to include new types, covering all possible actions by DAO members.
  • Projects View
    • Developing a new view for approved DAO-funded projects, separating them from proposals for clarity and easy access to crucial information.
  • Proposal Resubmission Flow
    • Introducing a formal process to link resubmitted proposals with previous ones, preserving transparency and discussion continuity.
  • Marvin Morning Brief
    • Utilizing AI to deliver daily briefs on the latest DAO proposals, updates, and Discord server discussions.

Governance Enablement

  • Multi-Delegation Strategy in Polygon
    • Continuing the development of this community-approved feature, overcoming technical challenges for successful deployment.
  • Binding Community Decisions
    • Assisting in the implementation of community decisions requiring development on Governance platforms.

Community Building

  • DAO Landing Page
    • Revamping the outdated DAO Landing page, integrating it with the DAO Homepage to better articulate the DAO’s value proposition.
  • Badges v2
    • Enhancing the DAO Badges system to bolster the social reputation mechanism, with plans for new badges and potential integration with VP calculations.
  • Proposal Format Editor
    • Implementing a user-friendly WYSIWYG tool to replace the current Markdown-based proposal creation tool, enhancing usability.
  • Support for In-World DAO HQ
    • Collaborating on the in-world DAO HQ project, ensuring integration of critical DAO actions within the Decentraland client.

Maintenance

  • Addressing security vulnerabilities.
  • Maintaining integrations and third-party services.
  • Focusing on infrastructure and deployment.

Vote on this proposal on the Decentraland DAO

View this proposal on Snapshot

1 Like
2

ROADMAP & MILESTONES (Extended)

Engagement

  • Notifications v2
    • After the first release of the Notifications system for the DAO (that comprises in-app and Discord notifications powered by Push), we will launch new notification types covering the entire set of actions DAO members can do.
  • Projects View
    • Currently, when a Grant or a Bid is passed, a lot of project-based information is attached to the original proposal, leading to confusion between ongoing projects and proposals. The idea is to generate a new view for DAO-funded projects that were approved so the most important information is easy to consume and not hidden below an old proposal.
  • Proposal Resubmission Flow
    • At the moment there is no formal process for Proposal resubmission, leading to a lack of transparency in the case a proposal is resubmitted because all the previous discussions around it get lost. The idea of this feature would be to link resubmitted proposals with previously rejected ones and let users resubmit a proposal after a certain time from the rejected one.
  • Marvin Morning Brief (Cascaded from the previous grant)
    • We will leverage AI technology to simplify the digestion of DAO-related information by crafting a daily brief with the latest proposals, project updates, and discussions on the Discord server.

Governance Enablement

  • Multi-Delegation Strategy in Polygon (Cascaded from the previous grant)

    • We already started working on the implementation of this feature approved by the community but there is still work to be done to successfully deploy this in production. This proved to be challenging due to several technical limitations and walkarounds we had to deal with Snapshot and our platform.

  • Binding Community Decisions

    • As always, the team will help to shape up and implement from a product and technical perspective community decisions that require any kind of development on the Governance platforms.

Community Building

  • DAO Landing Page
    • The current DAO Landing page on the main Decentraland website looks old and is very outdated. The plan is to revamp it and connect it with the DAO Homepage to state the value proposition of the DAO and
  • Badges v2
    • After the first release of the DAO Badges system, we would like to continue building the social reputation mechanism for the DAO on top of this. We plan to release several new badges and leave the feature ready to be integrated with the VP calculations in case the community decides to integrate the social reputation into the actual governance design as discussed several times in the Strategy Working Group recently.
  • Proposal Format Editor
    • Even though currently our proposal creation tool supports format and media embeds using Markdown, only ~10% of the proposals created in any given month take advantage of this. We believe this is probably because Markdown is not intuitive for the end user. We want to implement a simple WYSIWYG tool
  • Support for In-World DAO HQ
    • After the Bidding & Tendering project approved by the community to build an in-world experience for the DAO, we will save time in our roadmap to collaborate with the studio responsible for building the immersive DAO HQ and ensure that every critical DAO action can be made from within the DCL client.

Maintenance

  • Security Vulnerability Response
  • Integrations and Third-party Services Maintenance
  • Infrastructure & Deployment
2 Likes
3

Happy to see this proposal :slightly_smiling_face:

Supporting this Squad is more than just endorsing our impressive and one of the most complete, updated, technologically advanced, and visually attractive governance platforms, but also because they’re a highly skilled group of people.

As a contributor to one of the Squads, I can assure you that working with this team is very smooth and they’re always willing to help. As part of the community, it’s always a relief and a comfort to know that we have a group of people that are 100% trustworthy and committed to the DAO and the whole Decentraland ecosystem.

Currently working on the Community Pulse Q42023 Report, so I believe it’s a good opportunity to share with you an extract from the last round Community Pulse Q32023 Report:

“(…)The Governance Squad is viewed by DAO Community Members as the most important squad, receiving the highest overall importance score. Qualitative data additionally suggest that the governance squad has been proactive and efficient in enhancing the platform’s features, facilitating a better understanding of information for users. (…)”

Really hope this grant request gets approval, enabling the Governance Squad to continue adding value. I strongly believe they will also be crucial actors on two of my favorite projects coming in the following 6 months: DAO Headquarters and the incentives/reputation system.

Wish you the best of luck!

1 Like
4

Seems like a lot of $ when decentraland doesn’t have much left…

I see bigger problems in decentraland and the governance seems fine to me…

Can we get some stats on how much you guys have saved?

There has already been a huge reduction in grants…
So can you justify in what way we’ll be getting this money back?

1 Like
5

Hi BET! Thanks for taking the time to read our proposal.

Seems like a lot of $ when decentraland doesn’t have much left…

At the moment the DAO holds more than 24M USD on their treasury, more than 7.5M USD to be released on their vesting contract and more than 62M USD to be vested in the next 8 years. So in total, more than 93.5M USD is available at the current market rate. Our team has spent (In the last 24 months) 0.7% of all that.
Also, the community approved a Core Units Q1 24 budget of more than 300k USD. Our team is asking for 1/3 of the quarterly available budget to develop the entire toolset I just used to check this data.

I see bigger problems in decentraland and the governance seems fine to me…

Absolutely agree with this and thanks for the comment. The Governance mechanisms can improve but they are in pretty good shape. That’s why we are reducing by 25% our budget. Regarding the bigger problems we have in DCL, other actors like the Foundation and other Grant categories with way more budget than the Core Units category are there to allocate resources and money to solve them.

Can we get some stats on how much you guys have saved?

Could you clarify this question? I can tell you for example that we built the governance mechanisms, dashboards, and tools the units responsible for the follow-up of Grants use every day to take care of the DAO Treasury.

So can you justify in what way we’ll be getting this money back?

When you talk about getting the money back you are talking about an investment. A Grant it’s not an investment in terms of getting back money, but getting back value. Other Grant categories, like the Accelerator category, act as small investment funds expecting to earn money for the DAO. We won’t return money to the treasury, we will (we are) return value by building the platform in which the community makes decisions and also building the solutions the community votes regarding the Governance mechanisms.

Happy to discuss this further, my DMs are open!
G.

1 Like
6

Not trying to discourage you from proceeding with the project but I struggle to understand these valuations and think you should look in different directions. If you get the funding then I hope this post can be of value to you anyway.

If I’d of spent 0.7% of $93.5m ($655,500) in the last 24 months on a webpage and the developers are telling me that “the DAO Landing page outdated.”
I would probably cut my losses…
I don’t think $8k a month each for UI/UX work makes sense these days. This is 10x the average salary in Argentina according to a quick search… With this kind of value we could be launching a new start up in a newer language with a better technical goal like achieving a modular network or something.

  • Notifications v2
    • I don’t see why I need Notifications… I tried to do the V1 and got stuck.
  • Projects View
    • I don’t think they need to be separated or updated. Only a few people get this far anyway.
  • Proposal Resubmission Flow
    • People normally just post a link. That works for me. What else are you going to do? Post a link as well?
  • Marvin Morning Brief
    • This is fun but the DAO only has a few high valued investors to market this product to. Also I believe people should fully read proposals top to bottom especially if they’re going to be voting with high amounts of VP. It also requires ongoing funds forever to pay for the AI. Waste of money if you ask me.

Governance Enablement

  • Multi-Delegation Strategy in Polygon
    • I can understand why this would be harder than expected. For me that should mean going back to the community and asking if it’s really worth continuing. IMO probably not.
  • Binding Community Decisions
    • This is probably easier on the dao discord. Just create a #thread for each proposal that’s approved.

Community Building

  • DAO Landing Page
    • I think it works fine as it is.
  • Badges v2
    • Shouldn’t this be stored on the catalyst node?
  • Proposal Format Editor
    • If we’re going to improve markdown. Maybe we should look further ahead and start looking at using JS. It’s not exactly like people inherently know markdown. And with JS you can add some packages if you want to make it more exciting…
  • Support for In-World DAO HQ
    • Are you building or are you just supporting?
      Maintenance
      Cool…

There’s my 2 cents anyway. Hope you find it as enjoyable as I found writing it. :laughing:

1 Like
7

Absolutely, keep up the excellent work team. I look forward to your future contributions.
Jenn

3 Likes
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I completely agree with your point @ginoct @Fehz that the same workload should be compensated accordingly. But have you considered the situation of our volunteers voter? They also quietly contribute our precious time to the platform, spending a lot of time participating in the DAO and suggesting various directions. Therefore, I propose that everyone involved in the DAO should receive a salary. This approach would not only prevent corruption but also motivate people, making everyone more enthusiastic about our DCL DAO. I have some ideas, my method for calculating wages is very straightforward and crude: Vps (amount of vps) + TSIRP (time spent in reading proposals) + voting = MANA payment. I’m open to better suggestions and if anyone is interested in discussing this proposal, please feel free to contact me. my DMs are always open.

Team work makes Dream work !
Thank you!

2 Likes
9

I’m voted no it’s not because I don’t like the work done, but I would like to see such professional software teams take the lead in creating process maturity to facilitate the development of large in-world content projects. Right now the emergency is in in-world content we’re just not attracting the users enough.

First the problem I see - tons of small projects competing with each other and getting small results. When we look at the budget of the games we’re competing with they’re 1 million USD+ not 40k.

The solution - operate like a real software organization. Github repository set up on large intro game. Task board with tasks broken down into granular pieces. Documented development process. Weekly sprint teams. Opportunity for proven creators, especially
established gaming teams from weed farm robbery to KOA and yes even duel arena to pick up tasks, complete the work and get paid upon successful test. Categories of work - code creation, model creation, sound creation, wearable creation, animated character creation, test documentation, documentation creation. No corruption should be possible here to cheat and install do-nothing agents to loot - you get the work done and only then get paid when the test passes.

Here the DAO needs to only be involved in voting and proposing the overall game theme with no chance to corrupt.

1 Like
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Hi Bet, thanks again for your comments. Some thoughts:

If I’d of spent 0.7% of $93.5m ($655,500) in the last 24 months on a webpage and the developers are telling me that “the DAO Landing page outdated.”
I would probably cut my losses…

This team didn’t have ownership of that section until recently, this was built and previously maintained by a Foundation team because it was from the pre-maturity point of the DAO (No operations, no squads). We recently took ownership and since it’s the presentation letter of the DAO, we believe it should be more clear, with updated content and on-brand.

This is 10x the average salary in Argentina according to a quick search…

Not even the smartest economists would risk saying this so sure when talking about Argentina. With at least 5 different types of exchange rates between ARS and USD and a 210% inflation rate yearly is a pretty tough calculation. Not to mention that those calculations consider salaries with social security, healthcare, severance, not having to renew your job every 6 months via a DAO votation, etc.
Also, we are a remotely distributed team so some of us currently live in Argentina currently is just a contingency.
Finally, the conversation regarding hourly rates has been discussed in multiple proposals. I know how much my work and my teammates work costs, it’s up to the community via a public votation to decide if it’s worth it or not

With this kind of value we could be launching a new start-up in a newer language with a better technical goal like achieving a modular network or something.

My team will be the supporter N1 of any technical spin-off, regarding the DAO or DCL as a project. Let us know if we can help in any way.

Regarding your thoughts about the roadmap, my DMs are open if you want to talk. Also, you can use Canny to provide feedback.
If you have any issues with activating the Notifications please use the #support channel on the DAO Discord server so we can help you out. If you enable them, you will see they’re pretty useful.

1 Like
11

Hi OG!
Thanks for your comment!
I’d like to clarify that the DAO allocates funds based on certain categories already voted on and funded by the treasury. Our team is asking for the funds to operate as a Core Unit under the Core Unite category, with a budget already voted by the community.
Your idea is good, I’d suggest proposing this as a Bidding & Tendering process. We could help with this in the future as a working team but it’s not in the scope of the Governance Squad at the moment.

2 Likes
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Yes you caught me, I am not the smartest economist. :laughing:
Looks like I need to move to Argentina to retire early… :beach_umbrella: :penguin:

I would like to see more developments around core infrastructure and in-game content. If that’s something that your team can move towards?

Also some perspective on these suggestions…

  • Notifications v2
    • I don’t see why I need Notifications… I tried to do the V1 and got stuck.
  • Projects View
    • I don’t think they need to be separated or updated. Only a few people get this far anyway.
  • Proposal Resubmission Flow
    • People normally just post a link. That works for me. What else are you going to do? Post a link as well?
  • Marvin Morning Brief
    • This is fun but the DAO only has a few high valued investors to market this product to. Also I believe people should fully read proposals top to bottom especially if they’re going to be voting with high amounts of VP. It also requires ongoing funds forever to pay for the AI. Waste of money if you ask me.

Governance Enablement

  • Multi-Delegation Strategy in Polygon
    • I can understand why this would be harder than expected. For me that should mean going back to the community and asking if it’s really worth continuing. IMO probably not.
  • Binding Community Decisions
    • This is probably easier on the dao discord. Just create a #thread for each proposal that’s approved.

Community Building

  • DAO Landing Page
    • I think it works fine as it is.
  • Badges v2
    • Shouldn’t this be stored on the catalyst node?
  • Proposal Format Editor
    • If we’re going to improve markdown. Maybe we should look further ahead and start looking at using JS. It’s not exactly like people inherently know markdown. And with JS you can add some packages if you want to make it more exciting…
  • Support for In-World DAO HQ
    • Are you building or are you just supporting?
      Maintenance
      Cool…
1 Like
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I want to take a moment to express my strong support for the Governance Squad.
Throughout our interactions and their work on the GoVapp project, they have consistently demonstrated reliability, professionalism, and a solid commitment to resolving any issues.

One of the critical qualities that stands out about this Team is their dedication to improving the GoVapp, not only by showing a continuous commitment to enhancing its functionality and user experience, which is essential for the success of our Governance system, but also for their professionalism in responding to requests from the Grant Support Squad and the Community.
They have always approached these interactions with high responsibility and a genuine desire to collaborate effectively.

I believe that they have proven themselves to be valuable. I vote yes and look forward to see new contributions to our ecosystem.

Zino

14

50 usd an hour is a lot wherever you live.
You also got 5% of all of the grants money, I don’t think taking to whole treasury to compare is fair.

Not saying it’s not worth it, just saying the excuse of “we are in argentina with economy in shambles” is not valid when you are paid hourly as much as the countries with the higher GDP in the world.

I think the governance website is good enough for what we are doing with it so far, most of the new features don’t seem necessary right now.
Those features sounds like just ways to keep the jobs going. The governance website need to be marked completed at some point and just keep a person to maintain it. Keep adding non essentials features to keep the jobs is a waste of money that the DAO cannot handle right now sadly.

Marvin Morning Brief is useless, so are new badges. Most of the other features are just small day-to-day improvements but nothing substential.
Support for In-World DAO HQ → I do not believe that’s your role, they got 90k USD for a reason, we should not double spend on this.

1 Like
15

Kyllian, please, be humble.
Your hourly wage as a DAO Committee member is probably way over $300. A weekly meeting, some town halls (You don’t even update the community on them anymore), and a monthly core unit sync where you show up late?
You have one responsibility with the community of updating the quarterly budget for Grants once every three months and you did it 3 days late this quarter (You know who created the Calendar reminder so you don’t miss that? Yeap, our team).

I get you might be upset that you’re not part of the Foundation anymore and suddenly decided to troll and hate anything productive happening in the ecosystem, but that’s not my problem. Stop complaining, stop being cool in private and playing this badass role in public, and start doing something. For example: You don’t want to double spend on supporting the In-world DAO HQ? Be a good grantee, post your project update on this Grant you got a few months back, post the documentation or something somewhere so the community can benefit from the $1K they allocated in you.

I presented what we do in every Town Hall, we record demos, and you’re even at our private working channel! I never heard your complaints about our developments until now. We were the first ones to say that the Governance dApp is getting to a maturity point and that’s why we’re reducing our workload and budget. If you don’t feel our roadmap or our work is valuable, that’s good, vote against it or propose something new. I see you use the features we built recently, that’s enough for my little Product Manager’s heart.

16

Attacking HP for pointing out your flawed logic only demonstrates how insecure you are in your request.

1 Like
17

I never asked for it, not even voted for it.

My non Foundation mail address was not invited and I didn’t know it moved to bi weekly =)

Your team was not capable of creating a simple script to automatically generate that JSON every quarter… or give me permission to push to the repo, so I have to ask for it to be approved each time =) (Last one was done on the 2nd btw, not the 3rd, I’m also not the only one able to do that, despite being the only one to actually do it)

I decided to leave and I’m very happy with my decision =)
Don’t start talking about the Foundation when you are way too close to be called a “Community member” in a Summit selection committee and when you were placed at this position by the current Foundation CEO…

Yes, I thought it would mean going into maintenance mode.

Your work IS valuable, I just don’t know if the features proposed in the roadmap are necessary.

18

LOL, I guess it’s easier to redirect the attention elsewhere than to take accountability.

Feedback to this proposal below:

IMG_0784
IMG_07841284×952 181 KB

1 Like
19

Ser, you have become a troll. Congrats :tada:

20

Looks like the grant will pass so Congrats! I do not like the way that you replied to HP, you should be graceful in your replies and also grateful to continue with the grant no matter the question or who is asking.