[DAO: QmZWXsM] DAO Governance Squad

Governance
1

by 0xd11a019a70986bd607cbc1c1f9ae221c78581f49 (Yemel#1f49)

Should the following Tier 5: up to $120,000 USD, 6 months vesting (1 month cliff) grant in the Platform Contributor category be approved?

Abstract

Hire a team to maintain and improve the Governance dApp and develop new tools (the “DAO Governance Squad”). The main goal is to increase the execution power of the DAO.

Previous Proposal: (Hire a dApps team to help build the DAO)[Hire a dApps team to help build the DAO]

Grant size

120,000 USD

Beneficiary address

0x3bf800b6F5c987b3738432068f789b7d131F1698

Description

This DAO Governance Squad will be the main contributor of the Governance dApp and will contribute to the creation of new tools that support the operation of the DAO.

This grant will set up a budget to run this team for the next 6 months, which term may be extended for one or more similar time periods upon a further decision of the DAO.

The proposed DAO Governance Squad will be implemented as a sole-purpose, non for profit Foundation. This provides a flexible vehicle to manage a budget with autonomy while still giving authority to the DAO to steer its direction.

Specification

The DAO Governance Squad will be set up as a Panama sole-purpose, Non-for-Profit Foundation. Costs associated with this set up are included in the Grant.

The grant will be provided as a vesting contract of stablecoins assigned to a 2-out-of-3 signatures Multisig. Participants are Gino Cingolani, Yemel Jardi and Manuel Araoz in their respective capacity as Squad Lead, DAO Committee Member and Trusted Community Member.

Conditions of the Grant

The Grant is conditioned to the satisfaction and fulfillment of each and all of the following:

  • The DAO Governance Squad shall use the funds from the Grant solely for the purpose of developing and maintaining the Governance dApp and tools to support the operations of the DAO, as described in below, in accordance with the guidelines and roadmap detailed below (“Roadmap and Milestones”).

  • The DAO Governance Squad shall set up a Multisig Wallet (the “MultiSig”), for purposes of receiving the Grant, with the signatories indicated above.
    Disbursements of the Grant shall be conditioned upon achieving the roadmap milestones and presented in the monthly reports within the timeframe set forth below.

  • The DAO Governance Squad will provide the DAO with the following information:

    • Within five (5) days of the beginning of each month, a Monthly Progress Report regarding the development of the Governance dApp and the achievement of Milestones will be presented to the DAO Committee and DAO Facilitator.

    • Within ten (10) days of the beginning of each month, Monthly Financial Report showing use of the proceeds of the Grant.

    • Within one hundred and twenty (120) days after the end of each fiscal year, a copy of the annual financial statements of the DAO Governance Squad in case there are more extensions of this Grant.

    • Representatives of the DAO Governance Squad shall meet with representatives of the Decentraland Foundation and/or DAO Committee, acting for the benefit and upon the implicit instruction of the DAO, to provide technical updates and answer legal and financial questions regarding the use of the Grant.

  • The Intellectual Property Rights over the Governance dApp shall be owned by the Decentraland Foundation, acting for the benefit of the LAND and MANA communities. In the event that in the future it is legally feasible for the DAO to hold the Intellectual Property Rights over the Governance dApp, theDAO Governance Squad or the Decentraland Foundation, as applicable, shall execute the relevant documents. For purposes hereof, “Intellectual Property Rights” means (whether or not registered in any jurisdiction) copyrights, trade secrets and patents, all other proprietary rights recognized under applicable law and all applications and registrations as well as the right to file all applications and registrations for, or relating to, all of the foregoing, in connection with the Governance dApp.

  • The Governance dApp must be compliant with the Terms of Use, Content Policy and Privacy Policy of Decentraland, as updated from time to time.

  • Upon failure to comply with any of the conditions of above by the DAO Governance Squead, the vesting contract will be revoked by the DAO, returning unvested funds.

Personnel

The proposed team of the DAO Governance Squad is the following:

  • Senior Product Manager - Gino Cingolani (Linkedin , Twitter)

  • Senior Product Designer - Juan Ruiz Echazu (Linkedin , Dribbble , Github)

  • Senior Full Stack Developer - Juan Pablo Arnaudo (Github , Linkedin)

  • Semi-senior Front-end Developer - To be defined

  • Semi-senior Technical Copywriter - To be defined

Total Hours: ~360 monthly hours or ~80 weekly hours.`
Budget: 20.000 USD per month, including payroll and operational expenses.

As stated above, this will be structured as a non-profit foundation so the DAO Governance Squad will basically cover the cost of providing this service.

The positions for Semi-senior Front-end Developer and Semi-senior Technical Writer are still open and we are looking for candidates. If you are interested, write to me via Discord or forum DM.

Roadmap and milestones

Initially, the team will focus on the following 3 points:

  • Engagement: Better ways to engage with the governance process.
  • Transparency: Provide more information and accountability.
  • Automation: Simplify recurrent tasks, reduce human operation.

These guidelines can be broken down into actionable steps like:

  • Automate generation of reports.
  • Ease and automate DAO Committee operations.
  • Add a Treasury page showing stats of the current treasury.
  • Add a Grants page showing all grants that have been or are being funded by the DAO.
  • Add a Members page listing current teams and members.
  • Load forum comments on the proposal to encourage discussion.
  • Implement automatic status updates of proposals in the forum.
  • Work on reports on technical viability about discussed proposals.
  • Implement content moderation tools for the community, DAO Facilitator, and DAO Committee to help filter out offensive, poorly defined, or spammy proposals.
  • Improve the proposal creation process by adding new proposal categories for common actions in the DAO.
  • Advance the grant program to include larger grants with a more robust vetting and oversight process.

The team will follow agile development practices to ensure the fast implementation of DAO governance requirements and the continuous improvement of such features. The team will host open meetings with members of the DAO to gather feedback, answer questions and provide updates at least every 90 days.

Vote on this proposal on the Decentraland DAO

View this proposal on Snapshot

1 Like
2

I’ll be part of the team if I can get some of that sweet $ :innocent:

3

Good initiative to help move adoption for DCL as a platform, increasing functionality for users will attract new users to the comunity as well. And i am with BET on the being part of the team … :slight_smile:

4

DAO Governance Squad

This proposal is now in status: PASSED.

Voting Results:

  • Yes 99% 11,021,206 VP (120 votes)
  • No 1% 54,325 VP (6 votes)
5

DAO Governance Squad

This proposal has been ENACTED by a DAO Committee Member (0xfe91c0c482e09600f2d1dbca10fd705bc6de60bc)

Vesting Contract

Funding Transaction

6

DAO Governance Squad Monthly Update #1

Context

A month ago a proposal to form the DAO Governance Squad was published and approved by the Decentraland community through the DAO. This is the first of the monthly updates that the squad as part of the grant will be publishing to communicate the work being done and the value delivered to the Decentraland DAO.

Roadmap Themes

Two weeks have passed since the approval of the Grant that funded this team and we can say that even though the team is not completely hired, we are working at full capacity (We actually started working even before the grant was approved). During the last few days we got to know each other and started laying out the foundations of our 6 month roadmap. As we stated on our proposal we will be focusing on three main areas:

-Increase the participation of the Decentraland community in the DAO by improving the user experience of our dApps and the overall governance process.

Someone posted on Twitter that DAO’s are like school projects where one or two people contribute and the rest are just complaining or doing nothing. This is exactly what we want to avoid with this roadmap theme. We believe that for a DAO to succeed, the participation must be high and the discussions should be valuable but we also know that users cannot spend countless hours trying to submit, vote or discuss a proposal because the interface is not intuitive or just wonky. We also know that there is room for improvement on the overall governance process to create a more equal status for VP holders. This theme is aimed to increase the quality of the proposals as a whole and the engagement level of the overall community by providing more context and tools to do so.

-Make the DAO operations more transparent by providing more data and accountability processes to the community.

The Decentraland DAO is the beneficiary of a 10-year vesting contract for a total of 222M of MANA (That’s 1.8M MANA/month), a lot of resources for multiple projects and grants. As we increase our execution power, we want to be very transparent on how the money (and the time) is being allocated, to who and with what goals in mind. For that we need to paint a clear picture with data and tools that makes it easier for everyone to understand the day to day operations of the DAO.

-Improve the efficiency of the DAO operational processes by simplifying or automating recurring tasks.

As we start to execute on multiple streams of work, it was made evident that we need to reduce the amount of effort being put on trivial work to focus on the high value initiatives. Right now the DAO relies a lot on manual operations performed by the DAO Committee, this leads to situations prone to human-errors, delays on execution and challenges to achieve the transparency that we are looking for. We have to find those suboptimal processes to fix them and make them more scalable, secure and faster.

This is the first draft of our roadmap themes and by the time our next monthly update gets published a clearer roadmap view will be published with more details on each one of the themes. For that to happen and for this project to succeed we need your participation so please chime in on the comments or use the DAO channel on the DCL DAO Discord to give us feedback.

Progress

Last but not least we would like to provide a list of all the things that has been shipped or we are actively working on:

Recently Shipped

  • Comments in proposal view

Now you can see the last 3 comments on the forum embedded right on the proposal view on the Governance dApp. This is the first of the improvements planned for the comments section and the goal is to keep improving this feature based on the community feedback.

  • Leading results in list view

We are experimenting with the concept of showing the leading result of a proposal directly on the list view. This is an experiment because we would like to analyze if this feature does not create a bias on the voting of the proposals. Expect this feature to evolve and change as we refine our voting mechanisms.

Leading Results
Leading Results1704×824 71.7 KB

  • Success page after proposal creation

Now a confirmation page is available when the proposal was successfully created prompting the user to perform actions to increase participation.

Success Page
Success Page1090×1158 73 KB

  • Add new grant tiers with custom thresholds and durations.

We improved the grants system by adding tiers and custom vesting schedules based on the complexity of the project. You can read more about this here.

  • Show list of voters on proposal page

Now you can take a look to see who voted on a proposal. This is also experimental and might change and evolve as we refine our voting mechanisms.

Voters
Voters1000×868 58.6 KB

  • Newsletter

We built a mailing system to send out a periodic newsletter with information about the DAO activity, proposals, grant updates and any other relevant information for the community. You can subscribe using the alert on the Governance dApp homepage

Newsletter
Newsletter2414×850 190 KB

In Progress

  • 3-stage proposal Process

To reduce the impact of spam and low quality proposals and increase time to assess implications and implementation pathways, we are implementing the three stage governance process proposed by the community. You can read more about this here.

  • POI Removal

Based on this proposal, we are building a new subcategory under the POI category to allow the removal of no-longer relevant POIs.

Coming up next

  • Transparency Dashboard and database

A page that displays critical information about the DAO, such as its treasury, income sources and regular expenses, active members, VP allocation and more. We will also publish a raw dataset so anyone can audit and build their own reports.

  • VP Delegation Dashboard

An easy way to see which members of the community are proposing themselves as VP Delegates. You can read more about VP delegation here.

  • Notifications

A notification system to not miss the beat of the proposals you created, the ones that you voted for and the grants that you backed.

We’ve been working on all of these things with a really small team and hearing the community feedback so we want more of that! We continue hearing you on the #dao channel on the Decentraland Discord server or on the newly created Decentraland DAO Discord server.
Also we are looking for an engineer to join our team, check the JD here and leave us your GH if you’re interested in applying.

1 Like
7

Governance Squad Update #2 February

It’s already March and we’re excited to share the progress we’ve done so far during February with the DAO Governance Squad!

As you might remember from our first update, we defined three main themes to tackle during the 6-month period of this grant. Those are: Engagement, Transparency and Automation. February was the month where we worked hard on Transparency with the launch of the TransparencyOS feature set. We could say that 70% of our time was spent working on this initiative and the rest was spent on hiring the rest of the team. As a result of that effort, we’re happy to announce that the last two positions we had open were filled with two engineers. Now the team is fully functional and formed with a Product Designer, three full stack developers, Yemel acting as the Engineering Lead and me as the Product Lead. We changed our original hiring plan and decided to prioritize hiring another engineer instead of the technical copywriter position we had on the original proposal. We are still looking for ways to bridge that knowledge gap.

In other news, as we stated in our initial plans, the Governance Squad was incorporated as a Panama sole-purpose, non-for-profit Foundation. This is a huge milestone since one of the main blockers for attracting talent to the DAOs space is the legal entity of this kind of organizations. Having a legal entity is useful to have work contracts, sign-up and get billed for services and digital products and other operational purposes.

Let’s dive into the details:

Recently Shipped

  • Transparency Report

We wrote an entire blogpost on this initiative that you can read here. As a high-level overview we shipped a public data set with calculated metrics and public dashboards so anyone can consume data and information straight from the sources to understand and audit our current DAO operations and status.

  • Newsletter

We shipped a weekly newsletter with updates on the DAO activity. We’re still tuning the frequency and the content but we’re happy with the progress so far. At the moment we have almost 300 subscribers and the open and click rates are healthy. Subscribe using the banner on the DAO Governance dApp and if you feel something is missing or have ideas for improving it send them our way!

In Progress

  • Mobile experience

30% of the Governance dApp traffic comes from mobile sources but the experience of navigating it right now is sub-optimal. We spent a couple of development cycles on improving the design and the overall UX of the application on mobile devices. Functionality wise there is more to do since we don’t yet support wallet sign-in from mobile.

  • Search experience

The DAO community asked for a way to search on the Governance dApp on this proposal and we listened. We’re about to ship a search experience so anyone can find old proposals, filter the current ones and navigate easier

  • Proposal Navigation

Are you an innate legislator? Do you sometimes get a governance rush and binge-vote 50 proposals? We are adding a small feature so you can navigate from one proposal to the next one without having to go back to the proposals list.

Coming up next

  • Grants visibility improvements

According to our Transparency Dashboard, the DAO granted more than 2.8M USD to 47 Grants since its inception but at the moment there is no easy way to handle all those grants, make the grant owners accountable for their progress and update the overall Decentraland community on how the money is being spent. We will be shipping multiple improvements on this front in the next couple of weeks. It will be easier to see the active grant projects and updates, see how the vesting contracts are being used and relevant project milestones from a simple UI.

  • VP Delegation Dashboard

An easy way to see which members of the community are proposing themselves as VP Delegates. You can read more about VP delegation here.

  • Notifications

A notification system to not miss the beat of the proposals you created, the ones that you voted for and the grants that you backed.

If you have feedback about any of this initiatives or want to collaborate with us in some way find us on Discord or join the next DAO Town Hall

Finally, we would like to thank the Decentraland Foundation for inviting us to their 2022 Offsite, where we had the chance to meet a lot of amazing people we interact with online, present the work that we are doing and have insightful conversations around the project and how the DAO could help to shape the future in the upcoming years.

1 Like
8

Governance Squad Update #3 March

Autumn is between us in the southern hemisphere and with it, we present our monthly update :slight_smile:

The highlight of this past month was the launch of the Search experience on the Governance dApp making it easier for our community to find and filter past and current proposals. Also, our team had an amazing 1-day offsite where the 6 of us met in person and defined working agreements and rules of engagement for our day-to-day operations.

On the legal side, as we said in the previous update, the Governance Squad was incorporated as a Panama sole-purpose, non-for-profit Foundation and during March team members received work contracts that are in the process of being signed.

Let’s dive into the details:

Recently Shipped

  • Mobile Experience Improvements
    30% of the Governance dApp traffic comes from mobile devices but the experience of navigating it was sub-optimal. We optimized the UX for smaller screens and touchscreen devices. In the future, we are planning to support a mobile login experience with WalletConnect.

  • Proposals Search Experience
    The DAO community asked for a way to search on the Governance dApp on this proposal and we listened. Now searching for a current or past proposal is simple by using the Search tool on the dApp.

  • Various improvements and enhancements
    -The ended date of a proposal was added to the Proposal list view
    -Grant Tiers are enforced when creating a Grant proposal

In Progress

  • Grant Updates
    According to our Transparency Dashboard , the DAO granted more than 3.1M USD to 50 Grants since its inception but at the moment there is no easy way to handle all those grants, make the grant owners accountable for their progress or update the overall Decentraland community on how the money is being spent. We will be shipping multiple improvements on this front in the next couple of weeks. It will be easier to see the active grant projects and updates, see how the vesting contracts are being used, and relevant project milestones from a simple UI.

  • VP Delegation Dashboard
    An easy way to see which members of the community are proposing themselves as VP Delegates. You can read more about VP delegation here .

Coming up next

  • Improvements to the performance of the Proposal publication flow
    If you tried to publish a proposal, high chances are that you suffered from one of the bugs or delays that are part of the current publication flow. We will do a technical deep dive to understand the issues and improve the experience so the act of clicking on the Publish button does not become a barrier for our users.

  • New Home
    Right now the Governance homepage it is not actionable nor easy to parse, active proposals get buried when new ones appear reducing the participation due to lack of visibility. We want to make a strategic switch and transform the home into a tactical dashboard for governance members.

If you have feedback about any of these initiatives or want to collaborate with us in some way find us on Discord or join the next DAO Town Hall

1 Like
9

Governance Squad Update #4 April

Starting now we will be taking advantage of a new feature this team built to allow grant owners to post status updates on the Proposal page itself. To read our April update please click here (Note that the title reads Update #1 just because is the first one posted that way and the title is autogenerated)

2 Likes