Consolidating Governance With DAOstewards | BanklessDAO Weekly Rollup
Catch Up With What Happened This Week in BanklessDAO
Dear Bankless Nation 🏴,
It’s been a busy week in governance! As we all know, governance is everyone’s responsibility, and there is never a better time to make our voices heard. Each season our attention is focused on the next cog in our governance machine. The current guest pass system has been under intense scrutiny over the last few months, with ongoing discussion as to how the system can be improved to properly incentivize participation in the DAO.
In a DAO with successfully decentralized governance, external influence on voting outcomes should be minimized. The Shielded Voting Proposal suggests that the DAO implement a system whereby Snapshot votes remain hidden until the end of the voting process. Please vote and add your comments.
Still in the spirit of governance, time is running out to decide whether to delegate the SAFE tokens on your multi-sig to DAOstewards. In the editorial this week, theconfusedcoin provides further insight into the DAOstewards group and why delegation of tokens to a dedicated team might better serve the DAO.
Token-weighted voting is coming soon to the BanklessDAO Discord server thanks to Governator, a new Discord bot developed by bDAO. When this goes live, it will replace good old sesh polls. Sorry sesh!
It’s once again time to share some appreciation for your fellow contributors in the DAO, with the Coordinape round live now. Go ahead and allocate GIVE, and don’t forget to leave a thank you note.
And finally, if you are feeling like giving to innovative fiat-space projects looking to make a big impact, please consider checking out Gitcoin’s partnership with UNICEF and consider donating during this special grants round.
Contributors: Warrior, KingIBK, Austin Foss theconfusedcoin, ab_colours, Lanksss, salmanneedsajob, WinVerse, Liquidiot, siddhearta, Trewkat, HiroKennelly
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Consolidating Governance With DAOstewards
Author: theconfusedcoin
Relationships between DAOs usually result in an exchange that involves a DAO’s token, meaning that a DAO pays for some good or service with its native token. It’s not unusual for these tokens to be issued to individual contributors or working groups, and this form of payment normally enables holders to participate in that DAO’s governance.
Since most people have limited bandwidth, it can be difficult to keep up with what’s happening in any DAO, let alone one where you are not actively contributing. Governance processes can become drawn out as proposals follow a lengthy exchange, after which a temp check is taken. By the time the proposal moves to a vote, many people have lost the line of discussion. This results in either non-participation or a vote of ignorance, which in turn affects the decentralization of DAO governance due to fewer voters and/or concentrated decision making.
Enter DAOstewards.
Who Are DAOstewards?
DAOstewards are a group of decentralized governance experts from BanklessDAO who specialize in solving the DAO governance trilemma:
Voter apathy: members are at times not interested in governance matters and prefer not to participate.
Ignorant voting: members do not fully understand the implications of certain decisions and in the end just go with the majority.
Plutocratic voting: members with the highest amount of tokens tend to sway decisions in their favor.
Why Do We Need Them?
The aim of DAOstewards is to ensure that BanklessDAO actively participates in the governance of those DAOs that have allocated some token-based voting power to our guilds and projects or to the DAO as a whole. The goal is to maximize the extent of bDAO’s voting power by concentrating it with the DAOstewards, who will participate in the governance of other DAOs.
How Will They Do This?
Where the originating DAO has enabled delegation, BanklessDAO members, guilds, or projects can choose to delegate the voting power associated with their tokens to the daostewards.eth ENS address. Ownership of delegated tokens remains with the wallet or multi-sig that delegates, but the voting power resides with DAOstewards.
What Is The Benefit?
Delegating our voting power to a representative group will help BanklessDAO to increase its presence in partner DAOs’ governance processes. The DAOstewards will look to carry forward the Bankless mission, and represent the interest of BanklessDAO and its members in the greater web3 ecosystem.
How Are the Members of DAOstewards Chosen?
DAOstewards will appoint delegates to represent bDAO after considering each applicant’s credentials. This process will be done transparently with each delegate posting their application in the #daostewards-general Discord channel. The delegate membership is fluid and the DAO or the founding delegates can add or remove members if they are inactive or not value aligned.
How Will DAOstewards Ensure That They Represent BanklessDAO’s Interests?
Each of the delegate members can express their opinion about a live proposal or Snapshot. An internal Discord poll will be run in the #DAOstewards Polls thread to gather internal consensus. BanklessDAO members can contribute in the discussion stage in case they feel the consensus arrived at by the DAOstewards is not in line with the broader intent of bDAO. This will ensure that decisions made are well reasoned and are aligned with our overall values. A record will also be kept of decisions made for BanklessDAO members to refer to in case any concerns need to be addressed.
Doesn’t This Seem Centralized?
At first glance, it might seem like a small central body is responsible for making decisions on behalf of BanklessDAO. However, there is the bigger picture to look at. Concentrated voting without clarity on why decisions are being made is centralized. In this case, while the actual vote is being delegated to one group, the decision-making process is decentralized. Every member will have the opportunity to voice their opinion about a decision being taken. Rather than not voting and giving up on our ability to further the web3 ecosystem, concentrated voting with decentralized decision making could prove to be the better option.
If I Delegate My Tokens, Do I Have To Pay Gas or Any Other Fee?
The delegation of tokens does not require groups to incur expenses. While claiming tokens and delegation requires payment of on-chain fees, this is covered by BanklessDAO’s gas refund policy.
Is There a Way To See This in Action?
As a test run, DAOstewards have proposed that the SafeDAO tokens allocated to BanklessDAO and its various guilds and projects should be delegated. This will give us an opportunity to test whether the purported benefits are achievable.
How Do We Know if It’s a Success?
In order to measure success, three KPIs have been developed:
Percentage of all proposals voted on.
Seasonal reporting of the rationale behind votes.
Revenue/perks generated for BanklessDAO.
There is a thin line between the abuse and the constructive use of power. With the advent of DAOs, we can finally democratize the decision-making process and ensure that the smallest voice in the room is heard. While decentralized governance has enabled greater participation, it has also resulted in the potential for decisions to be influenced by people’s uninformed opinions or by people not fully invested in the process. DAOstewards is attempting to achieve that perfect balance between effective decision making and community involvement.
🗓 Weekly Recap
Community Highlights
📺 Weekly Rollup Recap With Liquidiot
Join Liquidiot as he gives a recap on the Weekly Rollup. It’s a fun way to catch up on the previous week’s DAO news, and you can find all the previous episodes on the BanklessDAO YouTube Channel as produced by Liquidiot and WinVerse.
❤️ Gitcoin x UNICEF
You read that right — our favorite web3-based public goods funding protocol is teaming up with the world’s premier fiat-space philanthropic organization to explore “blockchain technology as a mechanism to test new resource allocation tools and provide greater efficiencies in public bureaucracies.”
According to Gitcoin’s blog post, “Between Dec. 9 - 21, 2022, Gitcoin will facilitate a Quadratic Funding grants round for a select group of 10 impact-focused, innovative projects from around the world — including Nepal, Kenya, Argentina, Brazil, and the Philippines.”
Please consider donating as little as you can, as the power of quadratic funding is in the number of donations, not in the dollar amount!
🌐 India Blockchain Week
Author: salmanneedsajob
This past week the city of Bangalore hosted India Blockchain Week, a series of events around the ETHIndia conference. ETHIndia 2022 was the biggest Ethereum Hackathon to date, staged over three days and hosting 2000 participants from 321 cities. There were 461 project submissions and many prizes to be won, including from event sponsors like Filecoin, ENS, and StackOS for building on their ecosystems.
Apart from ETHIndia, there were various side events, hacker houses, and meetups organized by renowned web3 projects, some of which were day-long / multi-day conferences in themselves like FIL Bangalore, Polygon Connect, Zero-to-DApp, and ReFi Summit. One of the major events on December 4 was Cosmos Night by Coinvise with BanklessDAO as a community partner.
During the closing ceremony of ETHIndia, the state of Telangana announced plans to set up a web3 regulatory sandbox in the state. This is meant to help web3 startups navigate the regulatory landscape in India and retain the best companies and startups in the web3 ecosystem.
👩⚖️ Governance Respect for BanklessDAO
Boardroom, one of web3’s most prominent governance platforms, ships a newsletter about — you guessed it — governance. In the most recent issue, BanklessDAO got some mad respect for our governance. You read that right! Great job frens! Among the gems: “BanklessDAO boasts one of the most well-documented governance processes”.
What’s New
📰 The Rug — Free Mint
This month The Rug brings us a special new edition of their throwback newspaper-style NFT. The Rug Vol. II Issue 1 is available for free minting for a limited time only. Go and grab one soon!
🎙️ AMA With DAOhaus
DAOhaus is a no-code platform for creating and managing a DAO under the Moloch framework. Moloch is a simple, open-source DAO framework that is used to increase security, usability, and extensibility. In this AMA, we're joined by Spencer Graham, Product Manager for DAOhaus, who explains how the Moloch DAO framework improves DAO coordination and governance.
Fresh Content
🎙 BanklessDAO Podcasts
🧠 Crypto Sapiens Podcast
🌍 Bankless Africa
🏹 Quorum
✍️ Bankless Publishing
🗞 The Rug Newsletter
👩🏼💼 Bankless Consulting
Get Involved
🙋🏻♂️ BanklessDAO Community Call Update
bDAO is creating a series of governance round table events where a handful of speakers, both external and internal, will be invited to speak at our weekly Community Calls. The idea for each event is to educate the bDAO community and address concerns on topics related to governance. Please take five minutes to fill in this survey so we can decide on a topic to discuss at the next round table session!
Learning Opportunities
🤼♂️ DAOlationships — Introduction to the CRM Database
DAOlationships uses a relational database to manage its cross-DAO collaborations, enabling better data management and improving their ability to scale. There are four primary bases in this system which include Products & Services, Accounts, Contacts, and Opportunities. If you wish to learn more about the CRM, join anointingthompson1.eth on Tuesday, December 13 at 14:00 UTC in the DAOlationships voice channel. To set a reminder, RSVP to the event.
🥷 BanklessDAO Notion Ninja Course
The third and final Notion Ninja Blue Belt Course is now open for beta testing. This advanced course, which covers the use of Notion’s database functionality, is for ninjas who have already completed the White and Orange Belt courses.
Completing each stage of the course earns each student a Bankless Ninja NFT. The latest NFT, the blue-belted Ninja, signifies some serious knowledge management skills and is the last step on the way to earning the fabulous red-belted Bankless Ninja wearable skin for use in Decentraland.
🌈 LEVEL UP Session — Premiere Pro
Do you want to learn more about some of the media tools used in the web2 and web3 space? If so, join anointingthompson1.eth on Wednesday, December 14 at 20:00, in the AV Guild’s upstage voice channel. The session will help you LEVEL UP your color grading game with Premiere Pro.
🎁 DAOlationship Demo — Forefront and DAOFolio
On Wednesday, December 14 at 19:00 UTC we'll be having a couple of exciting demos with Forefront and DAOFolio. Forefront will be showing us a couple of products called Terminal (a dashboard for tokenized communities), and Pulse (a web3 curation tool). DAOfolio is an on-chain and off-chain credentials tool. This demo will be held in the watercooler channel; come join us.
🗄️ How to Safe Session
Gnosis Safe is a smart contract wallet running on Ethereum which requires a minimum number of pre-designated people to approve a transaction before it can proceed. If you’d like to learn more, join Ernest_of_Gaia on Tuesday, December 14 at 14:00 UTC in the watercooler voice channel for a session on how to use Safe. To set a reminder, RSVP to the event.
📈 How to BANK (Tokenomics)
Are you curious about the tokenomics and management of the BANK token? Ernest-of-Gaia is ready to give you all the answers. Join the watercooler voice channel on Thursday, December 15 at 14:00 UTC. To set a reminder, RSVP to the event.
🏛 Governance
Proposals in Discussion
🎓 Proposal to Re-create the Education Guild Organizational Unit Within the DAO
The previous Education Guild members opted to transition into a department model following the changes to seasonal guild funding, resulting in dissolution of the Education Guild. Currently the Education Department is responsible for teaching bDAO members about DAO tooling and operations but this leaves a gap in talent development.
Education Guild version 2.0 would be responsible for providing a space where bDAO members can level up their teaching abilities with skills such as:
Presentation and communication
Slideshow design
Course design from templates
Feedback and self assessment
Basic event management
In order to fund this replacement guild, the team of 35 members is asking for a total of 623,000 BANK for Season 6.
✅ Action Items
🦍 GIVE: Coordinape GIVE allocation is live now and will close on December 14 at 16:00 UTC.
⛏️ Mint your Season 6 Participant Badge and Level 2 Badge from the Otterspace badge program.
📥 Vote on the Forum proposal which is seeking approval for shielded voting on Snapshot.
🏃♀️ Catch up: Review this week's Community Call notes or listen to the recordings.
