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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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
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.