How Can Guilds Better Serve Contributors? | BanklessDAO Weekly Rollup
Catch Up With What Happened This Week in BanklessDAO
Dear Bankless Nation 🏴,
With the quorum matter settled we can now return to the previously stalled Governance Solutions Engineer (GSE) proposal. In this week’s Community Call, five BanklessDAO members who have submitted applications for the five available GSE roles shared their vision for what they want to bring to this new role.
Samantha moderated the round table discussion, investigating each of the applicants’ ideas — zeroing in on what each sees as the focus of the next few seasons and their priorities for the first month, should they be elected to the role. Membership, tokenomics, guilds vs projects, financial sustainability, a clearly defined mission for the DAO, and much more were all covered in detail.
There are five applicants so far, and five roles to fill, but there is still time to get your application in by March 11, 2022. Be sure to bring your time, energy, and new ideas.
Heavy stuff out of the way, here’s something to make you smile. This week’s NFT showcase features a fantastically chaotic mountain of Chippi by Perchy, and the next Coordinape round is imminent, so keep your eyes open and make sure to GIVE!
Contributors: Samanthaj, theconfusedcoin, AustinFoss, Trekwat, borisSchickedanz.eth, d0wnlore, siddhearta, hirokennelly.eth
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🗓 Weekly Recap
BanklessDAO Weekly NFT Showcase 🔥
🧑🎨 Artist: Perchy
🏦 Auction Type: Open edition
💰 Price: 0.033 ETH
Bankless Location #4: The Charts
The Charts are not for the faint of heart – their ever-shifting slopes change quickly and often, causing some portfolios to plummet, while launching others to the Moon.
Like a siren’s call, they attract the attention of many in the Bankless Nation.
Remember: when in doubt, zoom out.
Community Highlights
🚀 Bounty Board Launches Its First Campaign!
The BanklessDAO Bounty Board has officially joined the Twitter-verse through a collaboration with our very own Marketing Guild. You can follow @DAOBountyBoard to learn more about Bounty Board over the next few weeks.
Once you’ve done that, make sure to check out the Bounty Board project at their website. Hint hint: go get yourself some BANK by giving the project team some feedback.
🤩 BanklessDAO in Layer3’s List of 10 DAOs to Watch Out For
All the hard work and progress we have made both as a DAO and a community is being recognized! Layer 3, a popular blog that writes about developments in Web3, has included BanklessDAO in their list of the top 10 DAOs to watch out for in 2022. This list featured the likes of IndexCoop, OlympusDAO and SyndicateDAO — all pioneers in their own right.
What’s New
💰 Making Bank
Making Bank is a show for BanklessDAO by BanklessDAO where each week we highlight a project and a personality from inside the Bankless DAO We want to showcase the work that we do and the people who do it.
This week’s episode features a project update interview about Bankless Africa, followed by an interview discussing the the challenges of moving into DAO work while moving countries and raising kids. Closing out the episode is a discussion about the now approved and funded Governator Proposal.
If you’re a fan of the Making Bank podcast so far, don’t just rate them on your preferred platform but help promote the podcast by giving their Twitter a follow.
✍️ BanklessDAO on Medium
🤝 DappBack x BanklessDAO Partnership
BanklessDAO partnered with DappBack to bring you our Web3 Task Page. Now you can get rewarded for completing Web3 micro-tasks like joining our community, providing content, etc. More tasks, levels and rewards will continue to be released. Task away!
🙋♀️ #PowerWomxnDAO | Social Media Campaign
The International Media Nodes project decided to launch a social media campaign starting March 7, 2022, under the #PowerWomxnDAO hashtag! You can write or share a picture, anything you would like to share about our amazing and talented womxn in BanklessDAO!
HASHTAGS TO USE AND ACCOUNTS TO TAG: #PowerWomxnDAO @IMNbankless @banklessDAO @your language IMN (if applies) @your womxn friend(s)
A POAP for all campaign participants will be shared and a collage of all the tweets will be posted in our social media!
Get Involved
📈 Activity Metrics: A Closer Look
The Analytics Guild is seeking feedback from DAO members to help them make activity metrics more accessible. This will allow them to iterate on existing metrics and provide guidance as they build new dashboards. Through this conversation, they are hoping to both inform the community about the nuances in existing metrics, and their interpretation, while getting a better understanding of what the community wants.
💪 Understanding Coordinape
Coordinape is an important tool for BanklessDAO. It helps members recognise and reward each other for all the work they do beyond the usual. On Monday, March 7, 2022 at 12 midday UTC in the Watercooler voice channel, GPe is going to explain to exactly how this tool works. Do attend so that you can participate in Coordinape too!
⚠️ The Coordinape round for this month goes live soon! If you are new to Coordinape this is a great opportunity to level up and GIVE.
🙏 Sponsor: Balancer.fi — Automated Portfolio Manager and Trading Platform.
The Purpose of Guilds: How Guilds Can Better Serve Our Contributors
Author: Samanthaj
At their core, guilds exist to serve members. Projects, on the other hand, serve ideas. Projects live in the realm of “let’s build this and see where it goes.” Guilds live in the realm of “let’s build a culture of kick-ass contributors and keep them around.” Projects form and disband once their mission is completed, or they level-up into something new entirely. Projects are impermanent, flexible, squishy. Guilds are evergreen, deep-rooted, eternal.
Imagine a forest. Projects are the bushes that bear colorful fruit, the saplings that grow out of the soft earth, and the vines that snake up the trees. Guilds are the tall oak and maple trees that anchor the soil, drop carpets of leaves in autumn to nourish the land, and provide a home for the animals who live in them. Both are necessary for a healthy forest. Both are important. But they serve different purposes.
I don’t believe that guilds should be bureaucratic baggage; they can sit at the core of all we do. After our February 25 Community Call, I was inspired to aggregate some of the ideas shared by our speakers and propose a new purpose for guilds.
The Three Pillars of Guilds
Onboarding: Guilds are the “first touch” for most individuals coming into BanklessDAO. Getting acquainted with guilds and their respective talent scouts is as much a part of First Quest as signing up for the newsletters. Guilds are the “human” side of our onboarding process and the orientation for the journey of self-learning and discovery.
Education: Guilds facilitate the leveling-up of individuals with similar skillsets, so they can better serve our projects. Everyone can always learn and improve their craft to a higher skill level.
Community: Guilds hold space for the creation of a thriving community. Friendships are formed, experiences are shared, and good vibes are created. The cycle is complete.
Onboarding: The Human Side of First Quest
Guild membership has always been a key part of First Quest. Once contributors grab their guild tag, they rush off to the guild channels to start working. I remember my own excitement and nervousness when I first jumped into the Writers Guild. For me, joining a guild was the most memorable part of First Quest because it was the first real human contact I had.
Guilds are the first touch for new members. During my time as a talent scout, few members passed through looking for a specific project team — they were all looking for the guild. Our guilds are the best first way for new members to get their feet on the ground in the DAO. Contribution is the currency of DAOs. We absolutely must continue cultivating high-impact, highly-engaged contributors if BanklessDAO is gonna keep kickin’.
Ways to Measure Onboarding Efforts:
Number of contributors who stick around longer than a month (which typically seems to be the inflection point for new people, based purely off anecdotal data from when I was talent scout) vs. the number who were onboarded.
Qualitative feedback from individuals who were recently onboarded. For example, asking: “Do members feel supported in their personal journey within the guild, and within the DAO at large?”.
Number of people who complete a guild’s internal First Quest.
What We Can Do Now To Improve Onboarding Efforts in Our Guilds:
Put more resources toward talent scouts and internal “First Quests” for guilds.
Create better onboarding documentation, “start-here” information, and internal resources for new members.
Promote culture of tipping new people.
Design low-stakes first tasks for people to pick up before they’re super familiar with the guild or the projects associated with it.
Host new member sessions or “cohorts” for new guild members to get to know each other.
Create a culture of holding office hours — these don’t have to be held by role holders, anyone can host — so that new people can feel comfortable asking questions and getting to know people in a relaxed setting.
Education: Help Contributors Improve Their Craft, Learn How to Self-Manage, and Begin Making Consensus-Based Decisions
The Education Guild changed their mission and purpose to better serve the DAO, and the rest of our guilds could learn from them. Even though guilds are evergreen in status, they should constantly evolve to meet the needs of their members.
There have been many initiatives to educate guild members. The Design Guild has a #learning channel where they share tips and resources. The Developers Guild has held Solidity training for developers looking to get into smart contract development. The AV Guild held a copywriting session. The Writers Guild holds a weekly Writers Workshop, during which writing tips and tactics are shared with participants.
We’ve seen members across guilds express the desire and need for improving their skills and honing their craft. We just haven’t formally codified education as a key function of guilds yet.
Ways to Measure Education Efforts:
Number of participants attending the education effort/class/workshop.
Number of “graduating” participants who truly see a leveling-up of their skills. These graduates could be certified via unique POAPs.
Number of highly-skilled individuals who are ready to deploy into project work when necessary.
Quality of work coming from those guild members when they deploy into projects.
Feedback from individuals who have been part of education efforts.
What We Can Do Now To Increase Education Efforts Within Guilds:
Encourage guilds to create an “education” role within their governance ranks. This individual will kick-start and facilitate education efforts and gather feedback from people who are part of those initiatives.
Encourage guilds to have a bounty pool dedicated to funding contributors who want to host workshops, or a recurring series of classes, for their fellow members.
Create a public “Resources” list on the guild’s Notion page for contributors at beginner, moderate, and advanced skill levels to use for personal study.
Help contributors learn about self-managing and consensus-based decision making, not just about their craft or skill.
Create a culture of figuring stuff out — if you don’t know how to do it, ask your fellow contributors, find a mentor, and learn! You’re not told what to do, rather, you need to take the responsibility of figuring it out for yourself.
Build a mentorship program within the guild. This will also help build community because it forms strong bonds between new members and more seasoned ones.
Community: The Lifeblood of the Guild
While projects don’t need a community, guilds exist because of communities. Project “communities'' are people of different skillsets coming together to make something happen. For example, in the Website Project, we have writers, designers, developers, and project managers within one project. Our community there is professional — we work together, we celebrate the good work we do, and then we go back to our “homes,” or our guilds. We have a community of sorts, but the community exists to create a product.
In guilds, the vibe is different. I’m a Writers Guild member before I’m an Editing/Publishing Arm (EPA) member, or a Newsletter Team member, or a Website Project member. Even though all three of those projects are made up partially or entirely of Writers Guild members, the guild is my home.
For guilds to serve their members, they must be member-oriented always. I like to think of guilds as professional associations, but they’re also similar to social clubs. And those two organization types exist by and for the community. There’s no Writers Guild without a community of writers and there’s no community of writers without the Writers Guild.
Ways to Measure Community Building:
Number of highly active members and core contributors.
Turnover rate of people leaving the guild, or inactive members.
Number of engaged, skilled members who are ready for work when a new project comes knocking.
New roles and contributors per season.
What We Can Do Now To Increase Community in Our Guilds:
Hold casual meetings with no agenda, purely for the vibes.
Get feedback from contributors who stop contributing or stay on the fringes. A simple Tally form is all it takes!
Do personal one-on-one check-ins with new members.
Reiterate and redefine mission and vision often.
Create membership tiers within the guild. In the Writers Guild we’re creating a tiered system of 1. Pupil (just joined), 2. Scribbler (working their way in), and 3. Scribe (highest engagement, which comes with voting power and other high-trust indicators like acting as a signatory on the multisig).
Start tracking your community’s engagement with DAO Dash.
Praise and do shout-outs for people doing good work.
Activate an intra-guild tipping economy.
Create lots of opportunities for bountied work opportunities outside of role-holders.
The Challenge:
I challenge you to identify the purpose of your guild and build roles and processes which further that purpose. Then, I challenge you to write a forum post on your guild’s purpose — it can be short, just a couple of paragraphs. I’ll personally tip anyone who works with their guild to create a thoughtful forum post on the future purpose of their guild and how it will better serve our members.
The next question, of course, is where the money comes from. I have a couple of ideas on this. But I want to hear yours. Maybe it will even end up in another Weekly Rollup editorial? Stay tuned!
BanklessDAO strong!
❤️ Contributor Care
Authors: borisSchickedanz.eth
Readiness: It’s Not Just About You
The tools we choose to build have a direct influence on our readiness. Our choices can cause the following unwanted effects:
Frequent switching between many different sources of information
Bad usability, distracting from the essential work
Being caught up in repetitive tasks
Notification overflow
There are more, and they all have one thing in common: They really strain our mental capacity.
In Web3 we sometimes don’t have much choice: some tools are chosen because they are free, and some are chosen because they are on-chain — even if they are a pain in the butt.
But the worst thing that can happen, at least in our experience, is that a tool, programming language or library gets chosen because of personal preference. This might be out of familiarity, expertise, or interest in it, but without having long-term readiness in mind. We are speaking of the tool’s readiness, as well as that of the people who need to use it.
Some questions to ask are:
Has the tool been available for a long time?
Does it have tech support / a community of supporters?
Is it free of bugs?
And especially if people change frequently within a team:
Is it easy to learn?
How quickly can I onboard someone to the mechanics of this technology, so they can quickly work on things that really matter?
Yes, we really need to tame our ego here … we know, some came to Web3 to have fun, try out new things — this is all fine and good, and needs to be done — playing means creativity. But we need to keep in mind those that come after us. Because if learning the tools is already a high entry barrier, we will have trouble finding and keeping new and lasting members, talented and dedicated contributors, possibly resulting in a great project dying before it starts to come alive.
In the end, it might be better to use some very simple tools, languages, and libraries. We can use technology in a simple way, instead of in the most sophisticated manner we can think of … because it enables others to quickly onboard and keep or even raise their enthusiasm for our project, instead of having a disheartening effect.
We are here for our shared mission. Having the long-term readiness of our tools, teams and members in mind is the ultimate sign of our dedication to the DAO.
🎣 Phishing School
Authors: d0wnlore and the InfoSec Team
How to Do Quick Due Diligence on Discord DMs
Depending on your role in the DAO and Web3, you may get many direct messages (DMs) on Discord that require some due diligence to verify the legitimacy of those messages and the sender. Performing this due diligence can be done quickly with a set of questions and knowledge of our current situation and relationships with others.
Did We Expect a Message About the Topic Raised in the DM?
You received a DM about how you can help contribute to a DAO. Previously you had submitted a form with your Discord username to the DAO mentioned by the sender. In this case you knew someone from the DAO would DM you to follow up on your request. But you did not know exactly who would contact you.
Did We Expect a Message From the Sender?
You received a DM about a bounty reward for a code contribution you made to a DAO. Previously you made a Pull Request (PR) for a DAO’s GitHub repository. One of the repository owners merged your PR and left a comment saying that they will contact you on Discord to distribute a bounty reward. In this case you knew the person on GitHub would DM you. But you did not know whether the username of the person on GitHub would be the same as the one used on Discord that contacted you.
Are You Identified as Someone in a DAO That Should Be Contacted?
You received a DM from someone asking that their wallet address be added to the list of monthly token distributions, as they contributed content to the DAO. Previously it was announced on your DAO's Discord that all requests for adding wallet addresses for distributions should be sent to you through DM, as you perform the relevant administrative work. In this case you know you will get DMs from people you may not recognize and may not be entirely sure that the sender and wallet address is ultimately associated with the contributor deserving the token distribution.
Doing the Research
Depending on the circumstances, we may have enough information right now to tell if a DM is a scam or not, such as airdrop and pre/bonus mint scams. But if we still need to know more about the sender we can do some further research to verify that the sender is who they say they are:
Copy the full username of the sender, including the # number tag.
Go to the Discord server the sender is allegedly representing or contributing to.
Enter a search query to find all public messages from the sender, which should look like from: name#tag.
If there are results from the search query, you can perform some due diligence of the sender's past messages and view their Discord roles. Discord does not perform “fuzzy matching” on certain search queries. So results for searching from: d0wnlore#1050 will not appear in a search for from: d0wnlоre#1050. In the last search query, the username contains a Cyrillic character instead of a typical ASCII character, which is often used by scammers in what is called a homograph attack (Discord allows non-ASCII usernames).
If no results appear, and you did not expect the DM based on your situation and relationships, then the sender is likely an impersonator. Though there may be situations where a DM is legitimate but the sender has only lurked in a server, leaving no “paper trail” of messages to do due diligence on. If you cannot make the call on whether the DM is a scam or not, forward it to frens you trust and have been in Web3 for a while to get a second opinion on the matter. In our case with BanklessDAO you can follow-up with the InfoSec Team or report the DM in the #report-scams channel depending on how discreet the situation should be kept.
This advice can also be applied to other platforms, with some modifications. But scammers are also getting more creative with their tradecraft, slowly building relationships and offering opportunities that may short-circuit our ability to think critically about their offer. Take care to verify that such DMs are not part of a sophisticated spearfishing attack.
🏛 Governance
Proposals in Discussion
📣 New Announcements Channel Specifically for New Learning Opportunities
Educational opportunities within bDAO are abundant, offered by our different guilds. Currently, a lot of work goes into promoting new learning opportunities to the whole DAO community. To make it easier for anyone to find all educational opportunities in one place, a proposal has been put forward to create a new Discord channel dedicated to these announcements.
👷🏾♀️ Governance Solution Engineer Program: Re-Implementation
The original Governance Solution Engineer proposal did not pass because it didn’t meet quorum requirement. Since then, the quorum requirement has been removed and this proposal serves to refresh the DAO’s memory about the original.
The program seeks to activate groups of people to address two important challenges for the DAO: contributor incentives and strategic prioritization. The proposal outlines the need for these two problem spaces to have a dedicated team responsible for designing scalable solutions that align with the community’s sentiment.
📊 cNPS Survey Results: Month 1 of Season 3
From February 4-8, 2022, the community’s satisfaction with BanklessDAO was measured and achieved a Community Net Promoter Score (cNPS) of 52, a very high score. However, even this impressive number represents a drop of 10 points from the S2M3 score, and a 16 point drop from the S2M2 score.
Three qualitative questions were asked to the community to better understand what was behind the NPS quantitative measure. Lack of structure, alignment, governance and the value of BANK were the top concerns voiced by the community. However, this exercise also suggested that our community is extraordinarily enthusiastic, loyal and prepared to put in the hard work to make bDAO a defining organization in this emerging space.
💼 Guilds As Professional Associations: A New Funding Model
Our DAO currently views guilds as talent pools that must be funded through the Grants Committee. However, the DAO will quickly run the treasury dry if we fund guilds without question. This proposal aims to find a better way to look at guild funding. This will allow the Grants Committee to put more bandwidth toward identifying how to fund projects rather than stressing over Guild funding.
🗳 Election: New Ombuds Office Member
This forum post is for the election of a new Ombuds Office Member to substitute another member that had to leave. The candidacy phase began on February 14, 2022. The election will run for 1 week, until Monday, March 7, 2022. Candidate information can be found in the comments of the original forum post.
✅ Action Items
🗳 Vote for the new Ombuds Office Member.
📌 Give feedback to the Analytics Guild.
💰 Sign up for this month’s Coordinape round.
🏃♀️ Catch up: Review this week's Community Call notes or listen to the recording.
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Samanthaj, this "Purpose of Guilds" piece is wonderful. Your trees/forest metaphor really brought the relationship between guilds and projects alive for me. This post would have been a huge help to my seeing the forest through the bDAO trees (pun intended) early in the on-boarding process. Wondering if you can integrate it into said process going forward? Thank you for all your work.