Core DAO Operations - Funding proposal

We hope so. Re other metric related requests above, we have a bounty specific to metrics which we hope will advance our ability to provide evidence of progress and learning for others. For the duration of the 6 weeks under the funding request, we will provide a bi-weekly report on status/completion as part of approving payments

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I love the proposal and will wholeheartedly support it if there is enough budget across Main DAO and ESD budget that is not already committed to approved proposals (@AClay can we get a confirmation on this)

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@fartunov I can confirm there is budget available in the ESD for the full proposal.

Reference: Notion – The all-in-one workspace for your notes, tasks, wikis, and databases.

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Hey, I can see there is about $160k spear across Main DAO and ESD.
Is all of that going from the Main DAO into ESD and how much of that is not committed to proposals that are going to be completed (If I understand correctly the deployment of Court on Arbitrum was approved but will not be executed)?

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I am good with that answer, considering there are quite a few $100 bounties, and paying in ANT or a split for such amounts feels taxing on contributors. For larger amounts the split makes sense and I am happy with the proposal team to make the call on where it makes sense to split or not.

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Contingent on ESD having enough funds that are not committed to already approved proposals I am in support

@lee0007 what’s your final verdict?
@daniel-ospina your thoughts?

Strong support for this proposal.

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Hi,

I am writing to check if the proposal is still open. We would love to offer a solution to this.

Regards

Just for future reference for the team here @Anthony.Leuts you might like this too KPI Sub-DAO Structure — pet3rpan

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Wonderful, thank you! @lee0007

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Based on 2/3 support from @fartunov & @lee0007 we will start to execute on the work outlined in the proposal. Not sure what else is needed from ESD side to schedule the payment to multisig, but if you need to confer with @daniel-ospina I’d ask this happens soon to support first payment exactly 2 weeks from initiation (which will be today)

this proposal counts with 2/3 support from ESD members which is enough to approve it.
For the record, this proposal does not count with my support for the following reasons:

-it outlines the use of bounties for the community (on to itself a great step) but it does not outline how the bounties or amounts are defined.

  • it requests a very significant budget (to my knowledge above the current treasury of the ESD)

In so doing, the proposal actually centralises existing funds in the hands of staff employed by the Aragon Association. It’s sad to see this approved when there are other routes that would actually empower the community to define it’s own priorities instead of all funds being controlled by the AA.

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Question please @AClay @b3n @lion917 @Tayy. Other projects are on a monthly reporting cycle but as this project is only six weeks and given the much higher budget allocated here, I am acutely aware of the need for ESD to assess deliverables for the release of funding. Can you please feedback on reasonable reporting

My personal request is to be succinct and talk to the deliverables as stated in your proposal. Commentary is nice, but deliverables are what we are required to assess as per charter 6 Sub-DAO Agreements S2 (a) i 2 (c)

  1. Executive Sub-DAO
    a. Responsibilities i.
    In particular the Executive DAO has the following powers:
  2. Pay members of other Sub-DAOs 2.
  3. Make grants to other community members at their discretion, providing:
    a. Such transactions are disclosed transparently on the Aragon Forum website.
    b. An Escrow is used to hold funds until the completion of the agreed-upon deliverable.
    c. The deliverable has been fully assessed by the members of the Executive DAO

I’ve asked for a measure of “community involvement as a % of bounty uptake” and I would be keen also to see the inclusion of bounty KPI’s that are being developed during this sprint. Perhaps a list bounty name + primary KPI’s for measuring success.

To facilitate this communication, can I request that each bounty owner be given access to the related bounty notion page in order to develop/suggest/collaborate on KPI’s and report on progress, issues challenges related to the bounty? Consolidated information on each bounty can then be linked in reporting and we are leveraging the collaborative and async function of Notion.

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Hi @lee0007,

Believe the plan was to provide a report every two weeks of the proposal. Happy to take the metrics that you have mentioned in to that report.

It should be possible to give them access to report on there bounty in the page.

Hope this helps,

Thanks,

Alex

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It’s a pleasure to share this update on behalf of the 24 contributors now working on Core Ops for the AN DAO.

At the end of Block 1 (Weeks 1 & 2) of our Core DAO Operations work, we have allocated 88% of the genesis bounties to community contributors.

Some key items for summary:

  • 88% (24/27) of the genesis bounties have been allocated to new and existing community contributors
  • 18 contributors have made contributions due to be paid from this current block. The other contributors are onboarding and will have commenced this week
  • Most of these contributors have already defined 1 KPI and all will have KPIs by the end of Block 2.
  • Some deliverables that have already achieved the set KPI for individual contributors include such valuable work as:
    • Defined Payroll process & calendar, New Internal Newsletter, Interim analysis on moving contributor payments to lower cost L2 chain, and formation of small metrics squad to track KPIs and other metrics for the DAO.

Further details can be found in the full docs attached here and within:
https://www.notion.so/aragonorg/Core-Ops-Block-1-Update-Summary-50a1129bfe6547cd873eb4f93deecc62

If satisfied, we would request release of Block 1 payment from Exec Sub DAO Multisig to the Core Ops Multisig no later than Thursday 24th February.

Batch payment to contributors is due on the payment date of Friday 25th February.

Thanks for your continued support and we look forward to providing the next update in 2 weeks.

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@lee0007 @fartunov @daniel-ospina

linking here for your attention

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@lee0007 @fartunov @daniel-ospina

Please find status update 2 for the Core Ops funding proposal and community contributions to AN DAO.

At the end of Block 2 (Weeks 3&4) we now have all but 2 of the bounties allocated. These are for a Governance and Tech lead for the DAO and so it is understandable that these are taking a little longer to staff than other contributions.

Key items to add in summary for this update are:

  • 92% (25/27) of bounties have been allocated to new and existing community contributors
  • 32 individual contributors to be paid in current cycle
    Highlights for the current cycle of note are:
    • Evolution of the Internal Newsletter
    • Commencement of Coordinape Experiment
    • Weekly Contributor call ownership passed to the community
    • Finalisation of L2 payment chain proposal almost complete
    • Metrics Squad forming
    • First cross-DAO AMA with Super Uman’s from UMA protocol
    • Payroll reconciliation managed by community contributor

Further details can be found in the full docs attached here and within:

If satisfied, we would request release of Block 2 payment from Exec Sub DAO Multisig to the Core Ops Multisig no later than Friday 10th March. This is the also the payment date for contributors.

Our next update in 2 weeks will provide a complete review from the Core Ops proposal and outline of an evolution of Core Ops into an “Ops Guild”.

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Thanks ESD for your patience/lenience. Please find below the end of pre-season review and a statement of outcomes against the original proposal outlined above.

Outcomes & Success Criteria

The proposal broadly pursued the following aims, against which we have outlined whether it might be considered a success:

  1. Allocation of bounties for new contributors to help deliver core operations of the AN DAO
    Success: YES

  2. Emergence of a self-managing structure around core operations
    Success: YES

  3. Increased payment frequency via an Operations multisig funded from the ESD
    Success: YES

  4. Experimentation with Coordinape as a payment mechanism in the DAO
    Success: YES

  5. A set of continuing contributors to support core operations of AN DAO
    Success: YES

  6. Defined metrics and KPIs that demonstrate value created through these activities
    Success: NO

Please find detailed explanations below:

  1. Allocation of bounties for new contributors

In total there were 27 bounties to be allocated. We received over 40 applications and allocated 25 of the 27 bounties for greater than 90% success rate. Of these, we did not have any bounties dropped or contributors leave during the defined period and in fact we attracted more contributors to participate even without guarantees of compensation (with a special thankyou in particular to the Metrics squad who formed in this way and were one of the first groups to truly emerge as a collective).

We would also note that we made the conscious decision to not allocate the other 2 bounties based on pursuing highly qualified talent for these bounties. We are grateful to those who offered their skills but who were not allocated these tasks.

We believe this was a successful process as we now have:

  • A replicable bounty process that can be used for future bounty management with new contributors
  • Design of a DAO wide ops process as a key deliverable to be presented back to the DAO from community contributors
  • An understanding of the challenge of passively attracting the highest quality talent for very specialised roles (governance, technology as the examples)
  • A set of contributors who are onboarded and wish to continue supporting core operations of the AN DAO
  1. Emergence of a self-managing structure around core operations

The approach we pursued created a high level of atomisation of operations tasks in the hope that the right teaming and structures would emerge from collaboration rather than be defined or imposed by the proposers or members of Aragon core teams.

We believe this approach was a success as:

  • We saw numerous instances of teaming across tasks and bounties to get work done
  • We saw a Metrics squad emerge who have defined some immediate metrics for review within the DAO, as well as a broader architecture for how metrics might be delivered in AN DAO. They will make a proposal as such to begin this process
  • We saw a set of Media Mods, or what we might call a Growth/Content squad, emerge to share ideas and collaborate on messaging across the channels of Telegram, Twitter and Reddit. This team now meets on a regular cadence and is collaborating with the core Growth team on ambitions for Season 1 of AN DAO
  • We saw a small Finance & Treasury Squad emerge to share ideas and collaborate around payroll and use of the AN DAO treasury. This culminated with the squad making a proposal to the AN DAO to adopt a new payment chain (Polygon) to improve outcomes and reduce transaction costs for contributors paid by AN DAO, and who plan to continued as a squad beyond this period
  • We saw a number of people collaborate to bring the Coordinape experience to life. The bounty owner collaborated with the payroll bounty owner, as well as members of the technical support guild, to define and then execute this experiment.
  • These squads have been further conceptualised by the core ops coordinator, who is currently defining a proposal with these new squads to be funded for Season 1 of AN DAO. To be clear, this is a community defined proposal made on behalf of the community. It should not be lost that this was in essence the ultimate objective of this “pre-season” of the AN DAO around funding a community owned ops group

Numerous other examples exist and we are grateful to all contributors and bounty owners who drove this collaboration and teaming to deliver on behalf of AN DAO.

That said, while this was a success it did identify opportunities for us to improve in future seasons of AN DAO. Some contributors struggled in this environment of freedom and responsibility, and many sought further clarity around coordination leverage points and alignment between teams. Have deeper coordination mechanisms in place will likely be a major focus for Season 1.

  1. Increased payment frequency via an Operations multisig seeded from the ESD

Part of the experiment of this core ops group was to use a multisig to increase payment frequency to contributors. The objective here was to test the multisig structure, identify potential challenges, and explore the limitations of our ops infrastructure in its current form.

Over the 6 weeks of the proposal period the multisig was a success in that:

  • Payments were made on a bi-weekly basis
  • Transfer from ESD to Ops multisig worked well and was delivered on time
  • We made payment to a much larger group of contributors and understand that it is possible to scale this across the whole DAO. Ops should in fact take ownership for payroll across all working groups and squads to allow those teams to focus on execution
  • We identified challenges with a 2 week cycle around providing progress updates and pressure on ESD to execute quickly. It is mutually understood that now this has been tested we should revert to a monthly cycle
  1. Experimentation with Coordinape as a payment mechanism in the DAO

We committed to experimenting with Coordinape for value allocation and payment as part of the AN DAO. This was listed as a success as:

  • We did complete the Coordinape experiment
  • Contributors were paid based on the allocations of GIVE provided in Coordinape

It is the desire of the DAO Steward that we increase the participation in coordinape as a mechanism to enabled increasing participation within the AN DAO and to eliminate current barriers to contribution that “1 person : 1 bounty” create. More on this will be seen in future proposals to the AN DAO.

This experiment identified some challenges in that:

  • Some of our contributors were not familiar with the tool, and participation was not as high as we would like
  • Coordinape allocation was optional - there is a sense some people did not bother when they were still paid via their bounty
  • The messaging and time allocated to the experiment was less than would be necessary. Our use of Coordinape in future seasons will need more rigour and preparation.

Overall, we believe we have proved the concept for use of Coordinape but do still have some challenges to resolve (as, frankly, do other DAOs using this mechanism also)

  1. A set of continuing contributors to support core operations of AN DAO

The desire of the whole proposal was to identify and attract a set of contributors that can be accountable for Operations of the AN DAO.

We would say this was a successful part of the work completed so far because:

  • We did attract these new contributors at scale
  • None have expressed a desire to step back or away because of the environment we have created
  • Many have expressed a desire to contribute MORE to the AN DAO in future seasons than they contributed during pre-season
  • Many are now making proposals or defining scope for their continuing contribution
  • New squads are forming around the work to be done so that the impact of these contributions can be increased
  1. Understanding of Metrics that demonstrate value created through these activities

The final objective was to define the metrics that will demonstrate value creation from these activities. As yet, we do not have a final set of metrics or KPIs that adequately describe our success across the various workstreams within DAO Ops. The newly forming “metrics squad” have done a great job of starting to explore this, but for many of the individual bounty contributions we are not yet tracking progress. To use just one illustrative example - we do not know how many people are reading the weekly internal newsletter.

Even though anecdotal feedback is positive (more timely payment, increased activity in channels, etc) we do recognise this as a weakness of our work so far. We aim to resolve this through more detailed data in advance of continuing funding requests, as well as well defined KPIs and milestones when requesting this funding.

Further details around this work, specifics outcomes, individual bounties and the emergent squads can be found here:

Recommendations and next steps

Based on the work some key recommendations that myself and the proposers would make back to the community and ESD are:

  • That we continue to support the accountable talent within our community who made contributions to our Core Ops and helped us advance during this short sprint
  • That the emergent coordination groups and Squads start to take more ownership for their areas of expertise, including their own milestones and KPI, but coordinated under an Ops Guild
  • That we create more open space for community contributors through increased use of Coordinape circles which will allow more (permissionless) participation than bounties
  • That an ops multisig remains to support quick and agile payment (once approved) to contributors
  • That certain operational capabilities (such as payroll) be aligned across guilds under the scope of the Ops guild team to allow existing guild teams and the ESD itself to focus more on their core responsibility

As a next step, it is my understanding that such a proposal for an ops guild, and further definition of operating squads who will coordinate, is currently in definition and will be presented to the ESD soon.

Thanks for the opportunity to undertake this experimental proposal and to allow ownership and coordination to emerge from within the community.

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That works for me and I look forward to seeing the proposals that will emerge from a fantastic series of sprints. We are agreed that the fortnightly reporting and payment cadence is unsustainable, therefore my only request is that we all work together to set realistic expectations for contributors reward payments. We are not operating in a world of weekly salaries here. Payments fall due upon approval of monthly reporting and as per the finance statement to standardise payments cc @daniel-ospina @fartunov

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ESD General Meeting Monday 18 April UTC 1900: Unanimous agreement to complete funding with the expectation that all future ESD funded projects arising from this experiment will include SMART deliverables

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