This is the Grant proposal we are planning to publish with the goal of renewing the Grant that funds the DAO Governance Squad. Prior to the actual proposal creation we wanted to share it here so the community can take a look and provide feedback or propose changes.
DAO Governance Squad 2H2022 Renewal
ABSTRACT
Renew and expand the previously passed Grant to fund the team responsible for maintaining and improving the DAO Governance dApp.
Previous Grant: https://governance.decentraland.org/proposal/?id=ed53e850-5e70-11ec-8188-4352ce3d30e7
GRANT SIZE
(Tier 6) Proposal: $172,000
BENEFICIARY ADDRESS
0x3bf800b6F5c987b3738432068f789b7d131F1698
DESCRIPTION
The DAO Governance Squad has been created in January 2022 as a result of a Community Grant given by the Decentraland DAO. From its inception, it has grown into a fully-featured product development team working in an open and agile way, focused on improving the capabilities of the main governance platform of the Decentraland DAO, the Governance dApp, and its ecosystem.
In the last 4 1/2 months (There is 1 1/2 months left in the current Grant period) it has achieved:
Engagement
- Proposal comments improvements - Improved the way the comments from the Forum are shown on the Governance dApp fostering an informed approach to voting and discussion between community members.
- DAO Newsletter - A weekly newsletter with updates, notable proposals, and announcements from the DAO. Right now the audience is composed of 460 subscribers with a 40% average open rate and a 4% average click-through rate.
- 3-Stage Proposal Process - Implemented the new Governance process approved by the DAO on this proposal.
- Mobile Navigation Improvements - Taking into account that more than 30% of the web traffic to the Governance dApp comes from mobile devices we worked on improving the UX and fixed some basic functionality that was broken for smaller screen sizes.
- Search Experience - Attending a proposal published in the DAO by the community, we added search functionality for proposals into the dApp.
- [WIP] VP Delegation Dashboard -
Transparency
- Transparency OS Project - Improving awareness and transparency of the DAO operations and activity by building a Transparency page, a data dashboard, and a public repo and dataset so everyone can contribute and do their own research.
- Vesting Page Improvements - Improved the capabilities of the Vesting Contract pages, making them work for non-MANA grants, connecting them with DAO proposals, and adding a timeline view for the duration of the vesting.
- Grant Updates on the Proposal view - An easier way for grantees to post their project updates and for the DAO members to follow up and audit community-funded projects.
Automation
- Programmatic calculation of the Curators Committee’s compensation.
- First prototype of initiating transactions on Gnosis Safes via scripting.
- Proof of Concept of migration of POI, Catalysts, and BanNames contracts to Polygon.
Operations
- Hiring 2 full-stack engineers - We passed 4 candidates to the hiring pipeline and hired 2 of them for the team fulfilling all open positions.
- Linked-Wearables Registry Category - We implemented a new category to allow third-party NFT communities to submit their proposals to be accepted by the DAO to the Linked Wearables registry. By being on this registry they can upload a Decentraland representation of their NFTs to be used by their holders in the virtual world. Until now 15 proposals have been created under this category.
- Staging Server - We set up a testing environment to use during the development and quality assurance process.
- POI Removal Subcategory - Until now the DAO didn’t have a way to remove previously voted POIs so a new subcategory was created to remove items from the list.
- Multiple Improvements and Bugfixes - For an in-depth view please check our Github repo.
Check the changelog here and the thread with monthly updates here.
Check the Transparency Dashboard to see some key metrics of the DAO operations here.
This Grant proposal aims to continue this development path taking into account the needs of the Decentraland DAO community and its multiple stakeholders for the upcoming 6 months. A detailed view of the objectives can be found in the Roadmap and Milestones section of this proposal.
SPECIFICATION
This grant will set up a budget to run this team for the next 6 months. This grant could be extended upon a further decision of the DAO if the grant succeeds in its objectives.
The DAO Governance Squad has been set up as a Panama sole-purpose, Non-for-Profit Foundation. The costs associated with maintaining the foundation are included in this Grant. The same Conditions of the Grant detailed in the previous proposal still apply.
The grant will be provided as a vesting contract of stable coins assigned to a 2-out-of-3 signatures wallet. The key holders are Gino Cingolani, Yemel Jardi, and Manuel Araoz in their respective capacities as Squad Lead, DAO Committee Member, and Trusted Community Member.
PERSONNEL
The proposed team of the DAO Governance Squad is the following:
- Senior Product Manager - Gino Cingolani (Linkedin, Twitter)
- Senior Product Designer - Juani Ruiz Echazu (Linkedin, Dribbble, Github)
- Senior Full Stack Developer - JP Arnaudo (Github, Linkedin)
- Senior Full Stack Developer - Andy Espagnolo (Github, Linkedin)
- Junior Full Stack Developer - Nico Comerci (Github, Linkedin)
Note: This is the current team structure, we’re not planning to add new team members in this grant period.
Time Investment: ~480 monthly hours or ~120 weekly hours. (33% workload increase from previous grant project)
Budget: $28,660 USD per month or a grand total of $172,000 USD.
This budget includes:
- Team salaries: $146,000
- Operational expenses: $6,000
- Travel and accommodation expenses for an industry-related event attendance: $20,000
Financial report of the previous Grant here.
ROADMAP & MILESTONES
All the work the team is currently doing is visible on this Github Project.
Our north star remains the same: We will continue improving the mechanisms for which the DAO Community engages with the governance process to lower the friction and increase the quality and frequency of contributions to the DAO. Those contributions could take the form of participation in proposal voting and discussion, engagement with grants or ongoing projects, and discussions in working groups or public spaces such as Discord and the Forum.
The work planned ahead is organized on three main themes that will guide the development journey. Some of the themes are a continuation of the previous grant and some of them are new.
Engagement
This is a theme we will continue to work on from the previous grant period. We believe that a solid governance process is a process that is evolving continuously to generate better ways for the community to engage and contribute.
- More visibility into the overall Decentraland ecosystem projects (Foundation and Community)
- Notifications in-app to be aware of Proposal updates
- Actionable landing page highlighting important proposals and voting periods useful for new and experienced DAO members.
Community Building Tools
Governance processes around DAOs do not only occur in the context of the voting platform itself. There are multiple parts of the ecosystem (some of them third-party) that are part of the day-to-day activities of the DAO: Threads on the Discord server, discussions on the Forum, working groups, and so on. Right now all those experiences are not well threaded to each other and sometimes dissipate the discussion in multiple contexts. Some of the initiatives we’re thinking around this topic are:
- Discord onboarding experience
- Social Recognition
- Comment creation inside the Governance dApp
- Autopost on Discord channels new proposals and status changes
- Improvements to the Town Hall dynamics
- Links between the Decentraland world explorer and the DAO.
Development Experience
In the last 5 months, the development team encountered multiple improvements to be made to the Governance dApp codebase to accelerate the delivery time, testing, deployment, and the overall end-user experience. We decided to tackle just the bare minimum to move forward because this wasn’t part of the previous Grant proposal but if we want to scale our efforts and make sure that the codebase is easy to understand and simple enough to allow community contributions we need to make this effort.
- Better testing infrastructure
- Own our deploy pipeline (Right now tightly coupled with Foundation’s infra deploy)
- Metrics (Anonymized product analytics and code performance metrics)
- UI Kit for faster front-end development
- Improve repository documentation and organization to foster community contributions
- Legacy code refactoring
Note: This theme will be capped to at most 20% of the team workload capacity.
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 provide updates to the community, gather feedback and answer questions at the open DAO Town Hall meetings.