Building a Sustainable Governance Model | BanklessDAO Weekly Rollup
Catch Up With What Happened This Week in BanklessDAO
Dear Bankless Nation 🏴,
The Snapshot vote for BANK-holders to ratify the Transition Council's authority is live! This vote is your chance to weigh in on the TC’s power to make key changes, as outlined on Snapshot. Important note: the TC had to repost the vote because the initial version mistakenly set a 3-day timeline instead of seven days. If you voted before 17:59 UTC on October 25, please re-cast your vote on the new link to make sure it counts. Voting closes on November 1.
BCard, a valuable community project, has just launched OpenMedF on its platform. By signing up, you can support OpenMedF’s fresh, collaborative approach to research on ME/CFS and long COVID. OpenMedF is not only funding research but also connecting specialized research hubs around the globe and building a powerful network to tackle these issues. Learn more and support the mission on BCard!
This week’s article recaps highlights from this week’s Community Call, where members discussed building a sustainable membership and governance model. There was also discussion about the type of membership structure we might adopt and the qualities we value in contributors that can help align us with our purpose. A strong takeaway is the clear value a strong membership brings to any model we decide to adopt.
Have a great weekend, frens!
Contributors: Lucent, Tonytad, Angelspeaks, Boluwatife, Kornekt, WinVerse
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🏃♀️ Catch up: Listen to this week's Community Call recording.
Snapshot Votes
Building a Sustainable Governance Model
Author: Lucent
With a new name and purpose, we aim to build a sustainable governance model that reflects that purpose and supports us long term. Membership will play a big part in this, and yesterday’s community call brought lots of perspectives on how we could shape it.
A Simpler Membership Structure
One suggestion was to simplify the membership structure to make it easier to adopt, with everyone having a clear understanding of what it takes to become a community member. This model would focus on two principal components:
Economic Buy-in
New members would join by contributing financially. This buy-in would go into a pooled contract, where the yield would help fund DAO operations. This approach allows us to meet the financial needs of membership while generating revenue on a long-term basis. In other words, we adopt a permissionless entry model with a built-in way to support the community financially.
Current Member Ratification
To balance the open entry, the model would add a social layer through onchain voting. Members could then vet and approve other members who want to advance to higher levels of membership. This way, we can maintain the community vibe and align on values. We would still need to iron out some questions, such as determining the buy-in amount, identifying the tokens or NFTs involved, and assigning voting power. However, it's worth noting that this suggestion is still preliminary, and we haven't finalized anything yet.
The NOUNS DAO Model: Should we ‘fork’ it?
NOUNS DAO came up during yesterday’s call as an example of a community with sustainable governance, where communities or projects can use the infrastructure they provide to establish their own governance and operational frameworks, with Purple DAO and Builder DAO as case studies. We could learn a lot from NOUNS DAO about how they use their NOUNS token for membership and governance. While we aren't currently considering running NFT auctions, NOUNS DAO can provide us with insights on the adoption of accessible membership tokens and NFTs in issues of membership, voting, and community culture. Other DAOs have already forked NOUNS, and from the call, it seems some of our members might be interested in exploring a similar path.
Grants DAO Model?
The question to be answered here is: should we be open to rewarding value-aligned projects to co-build? In our previous DAO, we were quite open to giving out grants, but according to some reactions from the call, many would prefer we move away from that. This is also evident from the results of the poll in the purpose post on the Forum where grants giving got 5% of the total votes from community members. This implies that to build a sustainable governance model, we must engage in thorough discussions about moving forward with this. If we want to continue being a community that supports value-aligned projects through grants, we need to adopt a balanced approach to avoid repeating past mistakes.
Clarifying Membership Intent
This might arguably be the most important aspect in our quest to build a sustainable governance model, as this can help the Transition Council adopt the best membership model that suits our community. It is one thing to know the membership structure and another to know who we want that structure to attract. There should be qualities to see in members that can set them up to be voted into other membership levels if we end up with a multi-layered membership model. We need collaborative, honest, action-oriented members who can agree and reasonably show their disagreements to the community. Members who can put themselves out there without the fear of planting the black flag in public.
It’s also important to reflect on what motivates us as individual contributors. What is your primary goal for being here? We want a community that's here to build, fund, and innovate within the ecosystem. To make that happen, we need members ready to contribute ideas, support each other, and take an active role in pushing things forward. That’s what Black Flag DAO is all about.
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