What the Hell Are Governance Solutions Engineers? (Part II) | BanklessDAO Weekly Rollup
Catch Up With What Happened This Week in BanklessDAO
Dear Bankless Nation 🏴,
What a busy week for the DAO! We have elections, Coordinape, creative pursuits, deep-dive projects, and a slow burn into Season 4 ... Season 4! We’re almost a year old!!! LFG.
Governance is back in the news, with two Snapshot votes live and the GSE elections on the near-term horizon. The March Coordinape round kicks off today, so let’s be sure to give our GIVE and nurture those relationships that keep bDAO strong.
And we have NFTs! There are two NFTs for this week’s showcase, plus the inaugural DAO Heat competition has concluded and you can mint your DAO Heat NFT on Polygon! The DAO Dash team has been hard at work and has several new features for you to check out.
Today we say thanks and farewell to the Contributor Care section of the Weekly Rollup. Tigress and Boris have worked hard to give us tips on being well-balanced DAO contributors. The Readiness wheel has turned full circle, but please drop in to #mental-health-support to say hi.
But you know the drill: grab that coffee, soak up the Rollup, vote vote vote, and have a great weekend frens!
Contributors: theconfusedcoin, AustinFoss, Jake and Stake, Trewkat, tigress, borisSchickedanz.eth, d0wnlore, siddhearta, hirokennelly.eth, Cosmic Clancy
This is the official newsletter of BanklessDAO. To unsubscribe, edit your settings.
🗓 Weekly Recap
BanklessDAO Weekly NFT Showcase 🔥
🧑🎨 Artist: Brucethegoose
🏦 Auction Type: Open Edition, 1000 Total
💰 Price: 0.01 ETH
#1: I Ξ NFT
“Currently more relevant than ever before; we love NFTs, but must we throw all of our hard earned ETH at jpegs?”
🧑🎨 Artist: Brucethegoose
🏦 Auction Type: Auction
💰 Price: 1 ETH Reserve
“Inspired by the common metaphor used in reference to the frequency of hacks, security breaches, and smart contract exploits present in the Ethereum ecosystem; created as a defiant response to a recent wallet compromise which led to a substantial loss (and an overwhelming amount of support from the cryptoart community).”
Community Highlights
🚀 New Discord Channel: Learning Opportunities
Thanks to Manuel Maccou, we now have a very convenient one-stop-shop to find every educational opportunity offered in BanklessDAO. Missing a knowledge session in Discord is all too easy, but now all you have to do is check out the #learning-opportunities channel and make sure you have notifications set. Up only!
🤣 The Rug | Crypto News
This issue of The Rug is the penultimate issue in the OG Season, and it features articles breaking down OpenSea’s “shareholder” governance structure, an update on BlockFi’s traffic problems, and a preview of Web4! Web4! Just go for it and mint an edition. Only 69 available, frens.
💎 Shiny New MetaFactory Tee
A brand new, limited edition Diamond Hands Tee has been dropped by MetaFactory, but only until March 16, 2022! It’s a tee for the degens, apes, and HODLers who don’t even have the world “sell” in their vocabularies.
📊 New DAO Metrics
DAO Dash has been hard at work creating a new dashboard for BANK. Interestingly, the metrics show that total buying versus spending of BANK has remained essentially even over the last seven days.
The Guest Pass metrics are concerning, and we need to understand these lulls, but there has been a good increase in Guest Pass activation over the past couple of weeks.
In case you missed it: the Analytics Guild ran a Knowledge Session on OpSec Basics and have since posted a Twitter thread where you can find many helpful links.
🚀 Gitcoin Grants Round 13
Gitcoin Grants are live again, running March 9 - 24, 2022, for the 13th round. Bankless Academy has raised more than 32,000 USD to date and the matching pool has been especially beneficial.
Because Gitcoin Grants matches donations using quadratic funding, every donation is helpful. Remember that you can donate on zkSync and Polygon, so giving a few DAI is feasible. And just look at the upside for the Academy’s funding round! If you can’t contribute, please help support them by sharing their Gitcoin Grant link.
Bankless Academy is not the only team in our DAO to leverage the tremendous tool that is Gitcoin Grants. Crypto Sapiens has now applied and are awaiting review of the application. We can help get it approved by providing support at the bottom of the proposal in the comments.
What’s New
🧠 Crypto Sapiens Podcast
The latest episode features Jesse Johnson of Aavegotchi, discussing financial accessibility through gaming. This chat was recorded during ETHDenver 2022 at a café outside the Art Hotel. Brace for Alpha!
✍️ BanklessDAO on Medium
🔥 DAO Heat Winners and NFT
DAO Heat is a collaborative contest featuring the hottest writing and design. The contest involves two stages: writing followed by design. After the winning design is chosen, it will be minted into a limited edition collection of 50 NFTs.
The Design Contest ended recently and the winners have been chosen.
First Prize: kavishsethi#2327
Second Prize: Jenetics
Third Prize: 0xe8nicebot#6562
The winning design has been converted into 50 limited edition NFTs that are ON SALE NOW on OpenSea. Go and grab one to join the DAO Heat Club!
🪂 CitaDAO Airdrop
BANK holders whose wallets held 10,000 BANK or more on January 19, 2022 have qualified for an airdrop of CitaDAO’s KNIGHT token! Visit http://claim.citadao.io, connect your wallet, and check whether you’ve qualified. A bonus airdrop has been announced for BANK holders who participate in the IRO from now till 00:00 UTC on March 14, 2022: get 50% of your USDC contribution back in KNIGHT tokens instantly, capped at 10,000 KNIGHT tokens.
Important note: Before participating in the IRO, please check the\ legality of your participation according to your local regulations.
🌄 Blockchain Friends Forever NFT Giveaway
Blockchain Friends Forever (@MyBFF) wants to reward the Bankless community by airdropping 50 NFT bracelets. For the chance to win, please complete this form. To be eligible for the raffle, you must have held at least 35,000 BANK in the provided wallet at 11:00 UTC on Sunday, March 6, 2022. The submissions to the form close on Friday, March 18, 2022, and 50 addresses will be selected randomly. Good luck!
For more info about @MyBFF read this article.
Get Involved
🔒 Web3 Security Fundamentals Workshop
Are you concerned about falling for scams and losing all of your crypto? Do you want to learn how to better protect yourself and your family from online threats? If so, join our Web3 Security Fundamentals Workshop scheduled at 14:00 UTC on March 16, 2022.
🙋🏻♂️ New Joiners Session #4
New Joiners Session #4 is happening at 14:00 UTC on March 16, 2022. If you have completed your First Quest and want to know how to earn your 35K BANK, join this session! This is the last chance to get your S3 NJS Chippi artwork POAP!
🎙 AMA With Cityroots
Join the DAOlationships team this Monday for an AMA with @CityRootsNFT. Learn how Cityroots, a DAO-owned platform, is preventing scams and rug pulls in the burgeoning billion-dollar NFT marketplace, fostering DYOR education, and providing real earning potential through ecosystem engagement.
🌐 Language Roundtable
A new initiative has been launched by the Translators Guild: the Language Round Table. Our goal is to connect native language speakers with prospective learners and facilitate casual conversations, thus helping anyone interested in improving their second language skills.
Our first session is next week, 18:00 UTC/10:00 PST on March 15, 2022, in the Watercooler channel for a conversation in German. The native speakers will be paul.eth, Lany and Tschentsch.
This is going to be a weekly initiative and our next session will be in Spanish!
🙏 Sponsor: Balancer.fi — Automated Portfolio Manager and Trading Platform.
What the Hell Are Governance Solutions Engineers? (Part II)
Author: Jake and Stake
This is a revisiting of a previous issue, as the Governance Solutions Engineer program is being spun up again. What does this look like now that we’ve entered the bear market?
Many contributors in BanklessDAO have governance on the brain. For some of us, it’s really all that’s on the brain. And for good reason. After a few seasons of working in the DAO, it’s time to work on the DAO.
The DAO has evolved over the last ten months, and the framework that got us to this point must be recalibrated to set us up for the future.
Icedcool reminds us that the “impact of the macro-environment will continue to affect DAO-wide operations and vibes, but as we move into a more mature DAO lifecycle, we have a golden opportunity to move on long-term goals and strategies!”.
To his point, the number of projects proposed to the Grants Committee has decreased, possibly due to the decline in crypto prices. We’re not in danger of running out of funds, but the bear market won’t last forever. Now is the time to shape our governance processes and support our builders in preparation for the next bull market.
In truth, the original model we implemented was always meant to be a temporary solution. The Grants Committee was never meant to be permanent, and the 1000 BANK/hour compensation standard was implemented before BANK skyrocketed in price.
To put it simply, we’ve seen what an exponentially-growing DAO looks like, and for a while, we outgrew our operational model. It’s time to create anew, and this is why the Governance Solutions Engineer Program exists.
We are activating this program to solve two problems: strategic prioritization and contributor alignment.
Strategic Prioritization
Broadly speaking, strategic prioritization means figuring out what to fund. To do this, we need to create an evaluation framework for projects that request funding from the DAO Treasury and from the Grants Committee. As more projects are spun up, we must figure out how to strategically spend the limited funds we have at our disposal. We can break this down into the following questions:
How do we evaluate the benefits and costs of projects?
How do we decide what to fund based on this evaluation?
How can we do this in a decentralized manner?
We need to figure out what to say no to, how to say no, and processes which empower the community to make good decisions. Eventually, the projects that are funded will come back to the DAO for more funding. How should we re-evaluate them? What measures can we use to determine the value created in the long and short term?
Contributor Alignment
Contributor alignment concerns the problem of rewarding people who are consistently doing work in the DAO. In general, we need to know who is contributing, how to measure contributions (in time and value), standards for rewarding contribution (hourly rates, salaries, rewards for deliverables), and distribution mechanisms (Coordinape, multi-sig outflows). We can break this down into the following questions:
How do we identify who is an active contributor and who is not?
How do we account for the different skillsets people bring to the DAO?
How do we account for the different levels of time commitment?
How do we reward active contributors and smoothly offboard inactive members?
Global compensation mechanisms: standard compensation for work performed (coding, writing, design).
Local compensation mechanisms: how to let working groups, projects, and guilds reward each other.
This will entail changing the Guest Pass, L1, and L2 system. The focus is primarily on two problems:
What do we do about members who obtained L2 status early on in the DAO, but have since stopped contributing? When the DAO was started, L2 status was simply a social signal of how much value those members were contributing to the DAO, but as the DAO has grown, L2 status is a weaker signal of contribution than intended.
How do we reward Guest Pass holders who contribute regularly, but don’t have L2 status because of the BANK requirement for L1?
In general, we need a better way to evaluate the work people do, compensate them accordingly, and recognize them for their contributions.
How Do We Solve These Problems? (GSE Specifications)
This proposal calls for five elected members to lead efforts to solve these two problems. These Governance Solutions Engineers (GSEs) will prioritize solving these problems and will work with the community to implement and iterate on their solutions. The expected workload is 25-30 hours per week for each GSE. The final deliverable is an implementable solution for each problem by mid-Season 4 or at the start of Season 5.
Each GSE receives a 75,000 BANK salary for their efforts and as a team will deliver a recommended solution for each problem space. Each of the two recommendations will be voted on by the DAO using a rating scale of 1-5. The weighted average of responses will unlock bonuses for the GSEs. Each rating will unlock 75K in bonus compensation:
Bonus = 75K BANK
Bonus = 150K BANK
Bonus = 225K BANK
Bonus = 300K BANK
Bonus = 375K BANK
If votes are 80% 4s and 5s in favor, a follow up vote will be held to affirm implementation of the solutions (Yes/No).
In total, the GSEs are eligible to receive bonuses of 750K BANK to be split among the 5 GSEs. A maximum of 375K for the strategic prioritization solution and another 375K for the contributor alignment solution.
To help achieve community consensus, GSEs will be given 500K BANK to incentivize community participation. GSEs will not receive any of this 500K, but will instead use this money to fund working groups, create bounties, or otherwise incentivize DAO-wide feedback and research.
Two working groups can be created. One for strategic prioritization and another for contributor alignment. GSEs can allocate the 500K BANK in whatever way they see the most effective. Again, these groups may serve to provide a sounding board, give feedback, and perform DAO-wide research to aid the development of the GSEs proposed solutions.
GSEs will have to work publicly in these working groups, coordinate sessions, and lead initiatives. This means GSEs should be comfortable leading and managing projects, akin to a Guild Coordinator or Project Manager.
This is just one way to use the BANK. GSEs have the freedom to utilize this 500K in whatever way they find most effective, but (again) are ineligible to receive any funds from this pool.
Call to Action
So how can you get involved? Well GSE application submissions are now closed, so the best thing you can do is go to Snapshot and vote when the proposal is live. We will use the weighted voting mechanic to elect five members, so check out the applicants and figure out who you would like to see as a GSE.
If you’re interested in helping there are still many ways to contribute. You can start by participating in Forum discussions. This is where many of the deep conversations occur and Forum continues to be an important tool for reaching consensus. You do not need to hold 35K BANK to participate and vote on the Forum (or Snapshot). You can also join the GSE working groups. Governance is everyone’s responsibility, including yours!
Closing Thoughts
It’s important for our elected GSEs to think long-term and have a track record of shipping results. One of the benefits of being in DAOs is that we get to make it up as we go along! While it can be scary at times, we are blessed to have the freedom to experiment. In that light, GSEs should be able to move quickly and iterate. If each GSE is dedicating 30 hours a week to this role, updates should be made regularly and results should be transparent.
Long-term thinking is also critical. GSEs should think critically about how their decisions will impact the organization as we move from season to season. Short-term thinking is at best tactical and at worst a liability. What will this look like in a year? How about five years? How about 15 years?
We have a golden opportunity in this bear market to set ourselves up for the future. Luckily, we had a glimpse of what that exponential growth will look like and, in my humble opinion, the future is bright!
❤️ Contributor Care
Authors: Tigress, borisSchickedanz.eth
gm! We went full circle, so it’s time to roll up our Contributor Care Readiness series. Here is a summary and best-of.
DAOlife is not only about learning how to inhabit our freedom, but also to cultivate that readiness to be able to respond and engage with the intensity of the journey. - siddhearta
We need to BUIDL a system that helps us grow as human beings and helps us evolve as a community.
A New Mental Model for DAO Life
Let’s not only quit hard, non-fulfilling work, let’s quit this divisive mental model all round!
It’s time for a different mental model about DAO life. One that allows us to bring our whole self to work.
Routines and Inner Tools: Buckets of Readiness
We need to stop this! What we want is to create an upward spiral, which keeps the readiness buckets balanced.
If our personal wellbeing (physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual) is out of balance, we might enter a downward spiral unnoticed. As a result our readiness buckets become burned out. Here is a practice to stop this and increase your health.
Communication Style
... it is easy to feel offended, misunderstood, criticized — or to make other people feel this way, just because of our unconscious assumptions.
How you can increase your personal readiness to arrive at your keyboard with the best possible energy. Wired, not tired. Every day.
Tools, Technology and Decision Making
It’s not only about you ... [when it comes to tools and the tech stack] ... we really need to tame our ego here.
Five questions to challenge your thinking when you have to make a choice, especially when it’s about tools and the tech stack.
Culture Design and Operations
What would it mean if we designed and developed our operations and culture in a more conscious way to make contributor readiness part of the conversation?
Three ideas to explore that make readiness a part of your DAO’s culture and operations: Project Retrospectives, Vibe Checks, gm! and Three Breaths Meditation.
Intention and Intuition
... the more people in the DAO, the more people need to talk to each other.
We are limited in terms of the number of connections (Dunbar’s Number) we can make and maintain. In addition, Metcalfe’s Law is at play and creating a lot of pain. Here is new revolutionizing idea: intention and intuition can help to create aligned autonomy and link our thoughts to the same source!
Thank You!
Thank you so much for following our Readiness Rollups! Please come to the #mental-health-support channel and let us know what you think of these ideas, and if they have already made a change for you! How is your Readiness today?
🎣 Phishing School
Author: d0wnlore of the InfoSec Team
Protect Your Hardware Assets
In previous Phishing School entries we have gone through many security practices that would affect your security posture at the psychological or physical level: social engineering, common scams, and staying secure while traveling. This week we’ll take a quick look at protecting some of your most valuable assets outside your crypto bags: your devices, such as a laptop, personal computer or mobile phone.
In particular we’ll look at protecting your devices from misuse — **whether by opportunistic thieves and hackers, or malicious files that have found their way onto your device.
General Advice
Update your devices whenever a security update is released for your operating system. This is one of the key ways you can protect yourself from the scary viruses and malware you see in the news, by removing or reducing the vulnerabilities used by those exploits.
If you have a device and/or operating system that is no longer supported by the manufacturer and does not receive security updates, consider replacing that device with a recent model, or switching to an operating system that is guaranteed to have a longer support horizon. If the questionable device is a mobile phone, consider replacing it with a much older device that is likely to have a much lower attack surface than the complex mobile phones of today, such as a flip phone with a limited feature set.
Always lock or put your devices to sleep when not in use. You can play this by ear depending on your threat model, but locking devices should be considered your default choice in an environment where you are not sure it is safe, such as a co-working space.
Use a strong, unique password or passcode for each of your devices. Depending on your threat model you may want to disable biometric unlocking, such as Windows Hello or TouchID, due to the possibility of circumventing these authentication methods.
Computers
Regardless of your operating system, have antivirus or anti-malware software installed. The era of Linux and Mac users getting away with not being in the spotlight of exploit developers is gone. Everyone should be doing what they can to protect their devices against viruses and malware. Start with your operating system's built-in protection if available, such as Windows Security, or install one, such as ClamAV or another scanner that you can run at a regular schedule.
If you are trying to protect a device with a higher risk of being exposed to viruses and malware, such as a shared family computer or one being used by those that are not tech-savvy, look into paying for consumer-grade Endpoint Detection & Response (EDR) software, such as Malwarebytes or a paid upgrade to your existing virus/malware scanner if it is available. This will protect your operating system in real time, instead of on a schedule used by the typical free virus/malware scanner.
Turn on your operating system's firewall and tune its settings so that it gives you the best protection without disrupting your work. This will at least attempt to block inbound/outbound connections from software that has not been installed by you. While built-in firewalls for Windows and mac OS are limited, you can download one that has more features or targets specific methods of protecting your device.
Consider setting up virtual machine software so that you can perform potentially dangerous tasks in a sandbox environment, such as opening attachments from unknown senders. Harden the virtual machine's settings such as not allowing the virtual machine to read your host machine's clipboard and disabling its network connection. This will further reduce chances of an incident should the file you are opening prove to be dangerous.
Use a VPN, especially in an unknown, public environment such as café or library wireless networks. While the number of websites that enforce encrypted HTTPS traffic has grown enormously, not all of the web uses this protection. There can also be network hiccups and configuration issues that can lead to your traffic being sent unencrypted. VPNs and their secure tunnels reduce the probability of others on your local, public network eavesdropping on your traffic.
Mobile Phones
Reduce the amount of applications you have installed, especially chat and social networking programs. The reality is that certain categories of software are being looked at by malicious exploit developers and nation states so much that the chance of an unknown vulnerability being exploited — called a Zero-day — is getting higher, despite more money being put into securing these platforms.
Do an audit of the permissions you have given to applications on a regular basis. As you live your life and reassess your threat model, you may start rethinking about what kind of data you are willing to allow certain applications to collect. It is good to update these permissions as the comfort level of your security posture changes.
🏛 Governance
🚨 Snapshot Proposals
🧮 Tokenomics: Migrate DAO-Owned Liquidity to Uniswap V3
The Tokenomics Department is working on creating lending markets for BANK. This Snapshot vote is to decide whether we should migrate SushiSwap protocol-owned liquidity to Uniswap V3. This move will create a price oracle, allowing us to launch a Rari lending market and generate more revenue as the Uniswap position has fees defined at 1% (SushiSwap is 0.25%).
🌉 BalancerDAO’s Collaboration with BanklessDAO
BalancerDAO is offering to sponsor one BanklessDAO newsletter for the remainder of 2022 in exchange for a strong economic incentive in BAL for the BANK/WETH pool on Polygon. The difference from the previous Snapshot is that we will be migrating BanklessDAO owned Balancer liquidity from L1 to L2 to provide the liquidity needed for this Balancer pool. To do this, we will unpair the DAO-owned Balancer liquidity, migrate it to L2, then submit for L2 incentive distribution.
Proposals in Discussion
📱 bDAO Product Support Center Season 3 Proposal
BanklessDAO (bDAO) products are becoming powerful tools for supporting the growth of bDAO and other communities. These products are rapidly coming to market. Implementation in numerous servers necessitates having a place where users can reach out and find help in using these new products, suggest feedback, and help others to create a community of people enthusiastic about the growth of the product. This proposal is for the creation of a bDAO Product Support Center where users can get help with any bDAO product.
✅ Action Items
📥 Vote on BalancerDAO’s collaboration with BanklessDAO
🎉 Participate in the Coordinape round
🛫 Claim: Check your CitaDAO airdrop!
🏃♀️ Catch up: Review this week's Community Call notes or listen to the recording
🙏 Thanks to Our Sponsor
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