Financial Proposal: Community Guild Proposal S2/S3 [Main DAO]

Archive: AN DAO
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Proposal Summary

Community Guild is driven to create an active, engaged, and informed community where new community members, DAO builders, and contributors are empowered and inspired to contribute to the Aragon community and its products.

We seek to secure 302k for 8 months of operations - 1 August 2022 through 31 March 2023 - to fund the AN DAO Community Guild to deliver on the following objectives:

  1. Internal Community Engagement
  2. Strategic Onboarding / Offboarding
  3. External Community Engagement
  4. Community Culture
  5. Guild Operations

We believe the Community Guild will help establish sustainable long-term growth of the AN DAO community. We seek to help grow the number of active DAO-Builders using Aragon’s products, grow the number of Aragon community members, support strategic alignment for the upcoming merger and product launch, and support the overall purpose of the DAO defined in the Aragon Network Charter.

Proposal Description

1. Internal Community Engagement

Lead: @Shawncubbedge

1.1. Discord Greeting & Engagement

Objective: Drive community engagement and awareness of Aragon initiatives through interactions in Discord, with a focus on the introduction and general channels.

Deliverables

  • Maintain a regular cadence of welcome greetings and first point of contact for new community and potential DAO builders as they enter the Discord
  • Promote and uphold Community Guidelines raising any misconduct with the responsible person as per the offboarding process
  • Moderate the Discord and other common areas to ensure Community Guidelines are followed
  • KPI: Sustain 22 percent retention rate in Discord
  • KPI: THE Deliverable

Details: Community Feedback

Contributors: @Blockchainlore @defidragon, ** Aaron Lewis**

1.2. Community Events

Objective: Increase community engagement and awareness of Aragon initiatives via community events.

Deliverables

  • Bi-weekly AN DAO All Hands
  • Community Roundtable
  • End of Season Jamboree
  • Self-Care with @Fabs
  • KPI: # of people attending

Contributors: @Blockchainlore @Shawncubbedge Aaron Lewis

2. External Community Engagement

Lead: @fmurphy

2.1. Ambassador Program

Objective: Empower community members to be representatives of Aragon in public spaces by creating an Ambassador program that teaches Ambassadors about Aragon DAO and its products, while also providing them with the tools and support needed to share this information with their local communities.

Deliverables

  • In coordination with Comms, develop the Aragon Ambassador training and tool-kit
  • Assisting Ambassadors with first meet-ups
  • Create a mentor system to help the program be self-sufficient
  • 4th Cohort of 10 Ambassadors
  • KPI: 5x Ambassador led meet-ups

Details: Aragon Ambassador Program.

Contributor: Aaron Lewis

2.2. AMA Events

Objective: Align with Comms to create and host AMA’s building good public relationships, creating interest for Aragon, and informing DAO-Builders.

Deliverables

  • Planning: Create and implement an AMA Roadmap to ensure topics align with the community’s needs and the direction of Aragon. S1 AMA Roadmap.
  • Coordination: Cross DAO speakers, questions and agenda, hosting and recording, pre-event promotion
  • Weekly AMA hosted on Twitter Spaces.
  • KPI: 100 listeners per AMA

Contributors: @Shawncubbedge

2.3. Community Generated Content

Objective: Incentivize the creation of community-generated content via contests and bounties.

Deliverables

  • Create and run bi-weekly contests
  • Develop monthly content calendar in coordination with Comms, maximizing visibility of community-relevant content
  • KPI: 2x Content bounties per month

Contributors: @fmurphy @phero

2.4. Social Media Moderation

Objective: Reflect the voice of the community in the Aragon brand and ensure continuity between the internal and external communications by creating moderation training, standards and resources.

Deliverables

  • Post, promote and foster follower dialogue from content calendar postings
  • Moderate channels to maintain positive and informative dialogue
  • Build on moderator efficiencies:
    • Continue to document and expand FAQ responses
    • Support moderators to undertake Ambassador training
    • Standardize response times and interact across social channels - telegram, Reddit, Twitter
  • KPI:Set the baseline for active number of users in S2 and maintain and grow during S3

Contributors: Ellis Liu @phero @fmurphy

3. Strategic Onboarding / Offboarding

Lead: @defidragon

3.1. DAO Experts

Objective: Maintain/promote the DAO Experts’ discovery pathway and facilitate the connection between DAO Experts and DAO builders.

Deliverables

  • Discover DAO builders in discord or through the Catapult application
  • Connect and host 1:1 with DAOs to assess the needs and the state of DAO
  • Provide support up to introducing the DAO with a service provider
  • Collect, summarise, and consolidate important information from DAO builders, contributing to Aragon User Research and spreading insights to the DAO.
  • KPI: Create a baseline metric and measure by that metric at the end of the season

Contributors: @defidragon @ShawnCubbedge

3.2. Community Onboarding

Objective: Develop a frictionless experience for new community members via a series of community onboarding touchpoints.

Deliverables

  • Weekly Community Welcome Call
  • Introduction to AN DAO Culture Call
  • Introduction to AN DAO Operations Call
  • 1:1 contributor calls
  • S2 & S3 contributor Cohort
  • Onboarding documentation
  • KPI: Increase community by 10 Percent per season

Contributors: @defidragon @Shawncubbedge

3.3. Community Offboarding

Objective: Design, document and implement an off-boarding process and raise awareness and understanding of the community guidelines that inform offboarding.

Deliverables

  • Create an MVP Offboarding process and deliver it on the forum for collective drafting by the end of S2
  • Implement the offboarding process S3 onwards
  • Embed awareness of offboarding processes within onboarding and community

Contributors: @Incandenza @Shawncubbedge

4. Community Culture

4.1. Community Wellbeing

Objective: Foster better communication, support psychological safety, improve contributor retention.

Deliverables

  • Facilitate community debates on relevant topics to find actionable solutions while improving communication culture.
  • Document and report on facilitated sessions with recommended next steps
  • Receive inputs from the community, provide and moderate spaces for discussing wellbeing-related topics
  • Identify communication best practices and create a communication handbook
  • Improve contributor retention, preventing offboarding related to burnout or other wellbeing issues

Contributors: @Incandenza

Details: Community Wellbeing Proposal

5. Community Guild Operations

Objective: To establish clear responsibility for all contributor roles, ensure transparency and accountability for the work undertaken, and operate as an efficient and effective team to deliver stated objectives.

Deliverables

  • Monthly forum updates for reporting (transparency)
  • Monthly Community Call for community feedback
  • Weekly reporting of hours and task progression (responsibility & accountability)
  • Notion reporting of work progress (transparency)
  • Weekly team meetings with agenda and record of meetings
  • Event agendas & recordings (transparency)
  • A review process at the end of S2 to set KPIs for S3

Lead:@ShawnCubbedge

Contributors: @fmurphy

6. Strategic Alignment

  • All AN DAO/AA teams for onboarding needs
  • AA Ecosystem for DAO Experts
  • AA Comms for Community Comms, Events, and Culture
  • AA Ambassador Program
  • dGov for Governance Workshops, AMA & Internal Community Engagement
  • Executive Sub DAO on conflict mediation
  • AA / AN DAO for work on CIPs

7. Foreseeable Limitations & Risks

  • Contributor competency and the quality vs quantity of contributors onboarded
  • Lack of communication culture, policy, and guidance in the DAO
  • Lack of awareness, communication, and shared understanding of the Community Guidelines and the documents that inform community behavior and offboarding procedures
  • Perceived lack of impact for proposed activity in relation to the core focus to establish product market fit
  • Scheduling across multiple time zones and weekend event scheduling of key events limits the inclusion and diversity of participants
  • Lack of documented strategy from the AA with which to clearly align all functions

8. Community Guild Contributors

Lead is the direct responsible individual. Core is executing and supporting.

Contributor Function - Focus Objective Reward Max Hrs Month
Shawnzywonzie#4546 Steward - Community Guild
Lead - [1.] Internal Community Engagement
Lead - [5.] Community Guild Operations		 6500 160
FMurphy#8381 Lead - [2.] External Community Engagement
Lead - [2.3.] Community Generated Content
Lead - [2.4.] Social Media Moderation
Core - [5.] Community Guild Operations		 6000 160
Blockchainlore#6080 Core - [1.1.] Discord Greeting & Engagement
Core - [1.2.] Community Events		 4000 120
Cdogg#1999 Lead - [3.] Strategic Onboarding / Offboarding
Core - [3.1.] DAO Experts
Core - [3.2.] Community Onboarding		 4000 120
Iamcraftycarl#7867 Core - [2.1.] Aragon Ambassadors 4000 120
Incandenza#1594 Core - [3.3.] Community Offboarding
Core - [4.1] Community Wellbeing		 2000 80
Ellisliu.x#0931 Core - [2.4.] Social Media Moderation 2000 80
phero#0347 Core - [2.4.] Social Media Moderation 2000 80

9. Additional Resources

Funding Information

This proposal aims to secure funding for 2 Seasons (8 months) of operations totaling $302,000 budgeted at $37,000 per month and distributed per the prevailing finance guidelines.

Monthly Expenses

  • Contributor rewards $30,500
  • Bounty Allocation $7,000

One-time Tooling and expense budget $2,000

Edit Made Aug 25th 2022: Correction to budget due to calculation error. Was calculated to a total of 332k. Actual amount was 302k.

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Very structured and detailed proposal :+1:

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Love that a whole lot is going on and there a big breakdown of each responsibility, leads and alignment :+1:, so far looks well put out to me

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Just a heads up the Charter Aragon Governance Proposal Process S 5 (f) states

f. Process for Financial Proposals and/or Other Proposals : in sequential order:
i. Public deliberation phase: A post with the draft of the proposal is posted in the Aragon
forum for a minimum of 7 days and maximum of 14 days with the format:

  1. Title of Proposal (in the format “Financial Proposal:[title]”)

@Shawncubbedge to avoid potential for veto on a compliance technicality please update the title to the required format Financial Proposal: Community Guild Proposal

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Whoops, thank you @lee0007. Fixing Now.

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Without the community there would be no DAO. Therefore a strong proposal for how we manage, onboard and value the community is one of the most important aspects of Seasons 2 and 3.

This proposal is it! I really like it and I am looking forward to see its results.

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Generally speaking I think it’s a fine proposal… there are some things I value more and other stuff not so much.

That said I am genuinely concerned you have undervalued deep democratic debates as a mechanism for resolving human issues in our community.

Getting spanish in to discord is an example of the actual efficiency of this mechanism. It’s been a sore subject in the community for months and even though we had surveys, public meetings for weeks, etc etc it wasn’t until we walked through the process in this way that we were able to finally have a multi-lingual discord space… Aragon 🦅 = ven a visitarnos :slight_smile:

I also believe that in the coming months we’re going to have an opportunity to revisit mediation and arbitration, and having a more full-time person available to provide this service could help speed this process forward. Please consider either adding to the budget in the proposal, or perhaps offering a choice in the vote to more fully fund this process?

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Congrats on a well structured and thorough proposal! I’m excited about the direction and initiatives of the Community Guild. As community and communications go hand in hand, I appreciate our collaborative approach to shaping these initiatives and look forward to working closely together. You have all put a lot of work into this and from a substantive point of view, you have my full support.

The main concern I need to flag at this stage is regarding the number of contributors and resulting budget ask (which, in my humble opinion, could put the proposal at risk). I can only provide an opinion and guidance from my perspective as a team lead in the AA, but one approach you could consider is bench-marking the number of contributors to analogous teams’ headcount/capacity/output. From our team’s perspective, I can offer the following points of reference : we have 1 full-time event coordinator for all internal and external events and 1 full-time content strategist managing comms channels. Using this as a benchmark, it would translate to roughly 2 full-time contributors (or 4 part-time contributors) to cover most of Sections 1 and 2. Sections 3 and 4 are beyond my scope to provide helpful benchmarks, but I do recommend a similar exercise with analogous teams/outputs.

For additional context and transparency, some initiatives (2.1, 2.2, 2.3, 2.4, 4.1, 4.2) will be in direct partnership and receive support from the comms team (estimating roughly 50/50 shared responsibility on joint initiatives). Although it has been coordinated and accounted for, just wanted to flag this to avoid duplication of capacity and resource allocation for the network as a whole.

I share this feedback with the intention of giving your proposal the highest likelihood of success. I welcome colleagues to provide feedback and context they feel might be helpful. Shawn has proven himself to be an incredible community leader and I fully trust him to lead an impactful team and initiatives for the Aragon Network. All the best!

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Thank you Shawn and team for the proposal. I think this is headed in the right direction and I have full confidence in Shawn as the steward of this guild. Shawn is an incredible asset to Aragon and the community and someone i’ve had a wonderful time collaborating with. Thus, I feel compelled to honestly give my feedback. I give honest feedback because I care deeply. My previous experience included managing a community and community team for 7+ years.

It goes without saying that there are excellent parts of this proposal but pragmatically I will point out the areas that I believe need adjustment.

3.1. DAO Experts - One of the most important aspects of the DAO Experts is that it is housed within the Aragon ecosystem (which we will continue to monitor and iterate) and thus as we’ve discussed, I believe you should include a deliverable:

  • collect, summarise, and consolidate important information from DAO builders, contributing to Aragon User Research and spreading insights to the DAO.

Love working with Shawn and cdogg on this impactful program and you are already doing the above recommendation! :slightly_smiling_face:

3.3. Community Offboarding - I struggle to see the ROI here for two members to be heavily involved and think it should be left to the steward Shawn. Once the system is in place, do we know how many community members are off-boarded per month? The activity of doing this should be negligible for a community member versus a full-time contributor (who should be off-boarded by their guild steward, alongside a professional).

4.1 Cultural Support and Alignment & 4.2 Strategic Alignment and Communication

I and many others I have spoken with believe culture should be built holistically by the hard working individuals attempting to build, ship, and market this ecosystem, as some of the most important stakeholders in it.

  1. I do not believe that any commitment to including AA in 4.1 or 4.2 should be included here and thus the scope greatly reduced or cut. After witnessing a few very strange and poorly facilitated interjections by the contributor in some all-hands AA/AL sessions, many members of the team (whom expressed this) were left completely confused and frustrated. It was poorly done. Due to prior events and interjections, there is lack of trust in our teams towards these contributors and their methodology. This is set up for failure and will not be a productive path forward. Furthermore many people have showed a complete lack of interest in this initiative and have deemed it noise, something we are trying to reduce for our builders as it’s a clear blocker in performance.

For the camp fires that have happened, how many individuals participated? How many were new members? How many were from AA/AL? How many were from a technical or product focused position? I brought up this issue months ago. Thus is a small group of people building a culture that others are not a part of or not interested in? Should these campfires/facilitations be paid per hour from an outside contractor, versus a 4000/month (part-time) salary?

  1. Umbrella Squad debacle: after witnessing the Umbrella squad receive criticism for previously mismanaging funds, not producing quality work, not reaching their goals, and furthermore mismanaging relations. I am disheartened to see requests for funds from both GravityDAO and the individuals from the defunded Umbrella Squad: The work of the umbrella squad was flagged as out of scope and harmful due to the noise it generated for our internal teams. We have to protect our builders from this kind of noise and I find it frustrating that we would fund this group at an even greater cost.

Furthermore, GravityDAO have requested funds for mediation: https://forum.aragon.org/t/proposal-for-s2-of-gravity-dao-mediation-services-aug-nov/3700,
and thus we are now paying (if they are accepted) a total of 7000USD/month on mediation, culture meetings for the DAO, and community well being. It’s not that I don’t think these are important, they are, but I would prefer to see it done differently, with trusted and respected leaders decided by ALL, and without funding past failures, or the total cost greatly reduced.

Risk: What I have said above is a risk: “continued noise blocking builders from working in a safe environment to ship products that create value to ANT and DAOs around the world.” In my opinion this is one of the most important risks we need to remove from our organisation.

I believe we need to be narrow-focused in reaching our goals, be honest when contributors don’t provide enough value or cause harm to the ecosystem and certainly not fund those that have shown poor performance in the past. As someone deeply concerned and on the front lines of this ecosystem, it would be irresponsible for me not to make comments until our delegate voting system is in place.

My recommendation is to remove 4.1 and 4.2 from this proposal as I do not think Shawn and his team’s work should be at risk of receiving funding on their proposal, nor have a section that raises eye-brows or questions. It’s simply not a risk worth taking.

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+100000 here… super important. Happy to help coordinate how to do this.

Is there a documented process for off-boarding? Also agree that having some metrics would help a lot better understand the effort there.

On 4.1 - Culture is SUPER hard, and trying to create or enforce it in a decentralized community will be super complicated. I think this should be a more organic effort from the whole DAO, and not from a specific guild. Meaning, agree with @Anthony.Leuts

On 4.2 - Culture syncs without culture indeed doesn’t seem to make sense. I might be biased on those topics, but I think we are putting much effort into topics that are not tackling our most pressure needs, which are getting the DAO to be productive and accruing value to ANT.

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I agree with @ramon and @Anthony.Leuts comments, and I would add that, regarding Vocdoni culture, we don’t require this position at the current stage.

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This is actually a PRETTY GOOD point @ferranrego .

Maybe we don’t need an overall DAO culture… Guilds/Squads could have their own… what we need is an overall strategy and vision of what the DAO should be doing.

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This cannot be overstated. I’d say ambiguity around the core mission and a lack of strategy / measurable objectives built around that are the biggest stumbling blocks for DAOs, leading to “activity sprawl” and ultimately inefficient use of resources. This is of course not unique to DAOs but a flat / distributed organizational structure that most DAOs aspire to can easily amplify the problem.

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Thank you @Anthony.Leuts for speaking to these pieces. It gives me an opportunity to clear some things up and to share my view.

As the main contributor to points 4.1 and 4.2 I’d like to respond to the various points raised here. Before responding directly however, I’ld like to share some general context I’m holding.

To start off I’d like to put in the space that the fragmentation between the AA and those in the DAO is very real and not to be underestimated. At the same time, we are not a divide group of people and are all working and building to provide value to Aragon - we are all part of the DAO.

We are all Aragon and are here to support this endeavour to thrive.

However the tensions between the different “teams” is being triggered all over the place and through these “cultural efforts” it’s becoming very visible. In situations where the environment is “uncertain”, when we are triggered and when we confuse information from people, we look to individuals or teams to blame; I see culture receiving some of this.

To be clear: I’m not here to “power through others” and to just “do my own thing”. I’m here to be in partnership with the network, as well as bring new ideas and perspectives from my experience.

“Culture” is a very different beast to develop than product; you can’t “see” it and you can’t create a roadmap to “make culture”. It’s the air we breath and the space that holds us. In no way am I under the impression that “I” (or any individual for that matter) could build culture alone. It’s not a “thing” that can be developed and given top-down to the whole network. Cultivating culture is an interactive and dynamic process that takes turns constantly.

This has always been my perspective and hasn’t changed since being in Aragon.

I fully agree and continue to see this as a process the whole DAO is in. Again not one single individual can “build” culture. Furthermore culture is already present - it’s not a thing “missing” but rather something to keep developing. I and any initiative is only one piece to the puzzle. Points 4.1. and 4.2. in service of continuing to develop cultural efforts more holistically. For this an overview is needed - this is what “alignment” efforts hopes to create.

  1. I do not believe that any commitment to including AA in 4.1 or 4.2 should be included here and thus the scope greatly reduced or cut.

Without including the AA in the culture building process, the divide between those working under the DAO and those under the AA will continue to stay and widen. Because there is little cross communication and alignment in strategy between these two groups, tensions, silos and misunderstandings are arising. This criticism of “Building Culture” and the “Umbrella Debacle” (see below) are just two examples of this.

After witnessing a few very strange and poorly facilitated interjections by the contributor in some all-hands AA/AL sessions, many members of the team (whom expressed this) were left completely confused and frustrated. It was poorly done. Due to prior events and interjections, there is lack of trust in our teams towards these contributors and their methodology. This is set up for failure and will not be a productive path forward.

There has been no feedback directly to me or other contributors regarding “poorly facilitated interjections”. I am completely unaware of which incidents you are referring to here and who these contributors are. This lack of feedback creates continued misunderstandings and confusion.

And as any proposal tries to do (to bring value to the whole network) the contributors are not the focus here. I see the proposed points as needed in Aragon and I have little attachment to if this position is filled by me or not. I’m a stand for Cultural efforts in Aragon. I would be very disappointed to the these efforts disappear or become implicit in the depths of the network - especially if the only reason for this would be that I am the contributor attached to the work.

Furthermore many people have showed a complete lack of interest in this initiative and have deemed it noise, something we are trying to reduce for our builders as it’s a clear blocker in performance.

Lack of interest is ok. Not all individuals in a DAO need to be interested in all aspects. Free choice in what we are interested in, to me, is a principle of DAOs.

Re “noise”: See response below.

For the camp fires that have happened, how many individuals participated? How many were new members? How many were from AA/AL? How many were from a technical or product focused position? I brought up this issue months ago. Thus is a small group of people building a culture that others are not a part of or not interested in? Should these campfires/facilitations be paid per hour from an outside contractor, versus a 4000/month (part-time) salary?

There have been three main “Campfires” (facilitated conversations) that we should consider here:

  1. The first (back then still called “Open Space”) was held exclusively for the AA to come together and talk about the “Transfer of Funds” proposal. This proposal created a lot of tension and emotions that didn’t have a place to go. The space facilitated a conversation to express these.
    We did not record attendance, but I recall that there were about 15-20 participants from the AA present. The feedback I received was very positive. The conversation created a sense of togetherness and mutual support. And from what I was told, supported the Off-Site in Croatia.

  2. dGov Campfire on Trust. To create more conversation on governance, dGov organised various ways to speak and converse on various topics related to governance. One of those ways was the “Campfires” - or one place where people could talk face to face. You can find a full report on the session here. 12 people participated, with at least 2 participating from the AA. This campfire outputted a report and a pol.is that was created for a-sync capturing and engaging of views.

  3. dGov Campfire on Community Rituals. The conversation was done in collaboration with RnDAO to get more input on their perspective of “Community Health”. This faciliated conversation had 20 participants. You can find all the notes and recording here. I’m still in the process of creating the report for this Campfire (as it was only hosted on Wednesday this week).

The facilitated conversation with the AA was created specifically for them, and I was asked to host this instead of the Friday Social.

The dGov Campfires where posted on the Calendar and Events channels, as well as announced in the “governance-general” channel in our Discord. Thus the accessibility was high.
Why little to no members from the AA attended, in my view, has little to do with the content, but rather the rift between the two spaces and the moment in time that we are currently in:A conversation on governance is less important when one’s livelihood is in question and product deadlines need to be met.

This also explains why the first “Campfires” that have been held have been community, governance and culture focused. We have at no point been asked to include or facilitate conversations around product or tech. I’d personally love to host spaces with that focus also. To be noted however, is that the communication tools (as shared through Umbrella) are starting to be used for tech and decisions: “Deep Democracy” tool started being used by dTech. There’s already the first output from these debates as to multi-lingual support in Aragon. See the result here.

Again, building a collaborative and coordinated working culture takes time and is a dynamic process. Why coordination is so “hard” is because there hasn’t and never will be a set recipe for how to do it - good coordination is a result of a group of individuals figuring out how they coordinate best.

This intimate link between coordination and culture was beautifully highlighted in a recent talk by Ivan at EthCC. See the video here.:
“Coordination and communication failures proliferate without strong culture, language, rituals and artifacts.”

I encourage anyone wondering about the link of culture and coordination to watch this.

  1. Umbrella Squad debacle: after witnessing the Umbrella squad receive criticism for previously mismanaging funds, not producing quality work, not reaching their goals, and furthermore mismanaging relations.

I’d like to clear this up, so that no further misunderstandings arise in the future.

  • The Umbrella team did not mismanage funds.
  • We stayed within budget and there were not “extra” expenses we had to ask from the ESD.
  • We produced the work that was expected of us.
  • We took over a proposal (not made by us) and delivered it fully.
  • We reached our goals.
  • We managed the relationship between Gravity and Aragon with the utmost respect and the relationship continues to be alive through the ESD funding. Please reach out to @JuankBell if you want to confirm this.
  • We didn’t bloat our scope and didn’t bloat the headcount. This might appear as such, as we did more work than we needed to, but this falls out of Umbrella scope and was done and funded independently of the funding provided through the ESD.

→ See the full EOS report here - with all three members from the ESD approving the report.

I am disheartened to see requests for funds from both GravityDAO and the individuals from the defunded Umbrella Squad

And Umbrella wasn’t “defunded” but rather the funding stopped with the deliverables hit. We choose not to propose for S2.

The work of the umbrella squad was flagged as out of scope and harmful due to the noise it generated for our internal teams. We have to protect our builders from this kind of noise and I find it frustrating that we would fund this group at an even greater cost.

Risk: What I have said above is a risk: “continued noise blocking builders from working in a safe environment to ship products that create value to ANT and DAOs around the world.” In my opinion this is one of the most important risks we need to remove from our organisation.

Regarding the “noise” Umbrella created. Could you be more explicit? Beside announcing events and offering spaces for conversation, where did the Umbrella Team distract the “internal teams”? I understand a DAO to be a place where various actors do various things - to me it’s part of being in a DAO to intentionally choose what to engage with and with what not. Help me understand how an initiative that was funded, doing its work, providing conversation and tools for better communication and coordination, is distracting to Aragon - keep in mind here that the “internal teams” are not the only ones in Aragon creating value.

And a major part of the reason why 4.1. and 4.2. exists is to understand and align on what the AA needs currently. From this information the DAO can align to the product teams and create an environment to be conducive to the AA. As this line of communication is still being built however, the DAO is left at arms-length and unable to work in service of the AA. Thus a team does something and it becomes an “issue” for another team and rather than this being clearly communicated (or bridged) it’s left untouched until the “noise” gets to loud and boundaries/walls have to be enforced.

But maybe I’m misunderstanding you and the “noise” refers to something else. Open to learning.

Fully agreed and this is the main focus of 4.1. and 4.2.: Strategic Alignment

Because independent of me as a contributor and the history of Umbrella:
Alignment work is needed and it’s not currently presently being worked in an OPEN and collaborative way. It’s not enough for a few individuals to have an idea of where the DAO is going, if no one else knows or is involved in supporting this movement.

Especially in the relationship between the AA and the DAO.

Part of creating this alignment is cultural documents sharing Mission, Vision and Values. Part of this is aligned onboarding. Part of this is cohesion between the teams. Part of this is open and collaborative communication. Part of this is inviting rather than pushing out. And part of this is staying curious and in partnership with each other.

I understand all of those as part of “Culture”.

Bottom line. I’m here to support Aragon to become a more effective, more cohesive, more aligned, psychologically safer, funner, free’er and loving organisation.

And if it’s not me that supports these efforts, no worries - I’m not dependant on this DAO for funds. That’s not why I am here.

And what is very very clear from being in Aragon over the last 3 month:

  • Aragon needs better culture and cohesion.
  • Aragon is a highly fragmented and opposing organisation.
  • Aragon is housed by absolutely awesome and loving individuals.

(Thank includes all those replying here - it’s super obvious that we all actually care for Aragon, we wouldn’t be having these conversations otherwise.)

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Although I can personally attest to the good intentions of the culture efforts, as well as the willingness to receive feedback and adjust course (I have had a great experience working together on the culture/comms overlap and I want this to be clear to colleagues), I do think concerns raised by colleagues need to be taken at heart. These exchanges have a bit of an adversarial tone (on both sides), and this concerns me as a foundation to build on. For these efforts to be productive, people need to give their consent and participate with their free will. If consent isn’t attainable, we should consider revising the viability and/or scope. It’s unfortunate, as I do agree with everyone that culture is important - particularly to community - and I am excited about the communications output we can create together. But this factor seriously needs to be evaluated and taken into account, at it is critical to the success of the efforts. I’m happy, as always, to support in working towards a solution. But I do think this foundational tension needs to be addressed in a manner where everyone feels comfortable.

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Thanks for the response Max, I stand by my recommendation that the vote should separate 4.1 and 4.2 from the rest. There is also an option of giving different levels of cultural support as AA & AL contributors have noted less/no interest, meaning a very small scope, opening up budget or methods for those guilds/teams to find what they are looking for.

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Speaking from the Core dev team perspective: it has cost us literally months to start assembling a dream team, we’ve done miracles trying to keep very talented engineers with us, to remove high amounts of constant noise, solving a never ending list of bleeding edge challenges, etc. Only to learn that some people had been organizing campfires to “let the Aragon culture emerge”. I’m still trying to rationalize that.

If Aragon is a tech startup and our goal is to ship a top notch, world class and rock solid DAO framework that great “doers” use to change the world, then I fail to see why a part-time culture contributor should be paid the equivalent/more than what some full-time senior blockchain developers had been paid.

My personal goal is to make everything on my hand to pave the way for developers to do their magic, and they do it. Create noise and distractions and they won’t. Tell them what their culture is and they won’t.

IMO, a project’s culture is defined by a project’s founders vision, and passed along to the rest in an organic way.

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Trust we can all agree on the need for an overall strategy.

However, we are still seeking Product Market Fit so it needs to be accepted - even within a DAO - that setting strategic direction is necessarily a top-down process developed by and communicated by those with the highest strategic oversight of the organisation. I trust @Joan_Arus will deliver this for Aragon so that we have a shared strategy to align the DAO.

Agree with @fartunov on this >>

“Coordination and communication failures proliferate without strong culture, language, rituals and artifacts.”

I believe we do need and already have a unifying cultural artifact - the Aragon Manifesto. And that it makes complete sense that beyond this, that culture should reflect the diversity of people and objectives we serve.

We won’t have a DAO without community and the cultural needs of the DAO community are likely different our product, research and development teams

I would suggest culture could narrow its remit to help us realign on the leading cultural artifact we have - the Aragon Manifesto - as the basis for developing a shared understanding of our purpose/vision mission and values.

  • Does it need to evolve? If so, how?
  • Are we living up to the mission and values it expressed?
  • How do we breathe life into the manifesto as our shared expression of culture?
  • How and where do we build and share cultural narratives and tell that stories that unify us?
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Awesome, I appreciate the guidance @jessicasmith I’ll get with the team this week and go over this. We’ve already done this to a certain extent in order to have 1 DRI for each section, however, we will go in and fine-tune this a bit more.

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Nicely put, adding this now. :slight_smile:

The idea behind this was to create a framework and then bring that framework to the forum to be discussed. However, this was assuming that we would also be offboarding contributors. I agree that this should be handled by an HR professional, although we started this before the placeholder proposal. I’ll redo this section, slim down contributors involved, and direct our efforts toward community offboarding.

Regarding all comments towards this section:

I believe there has been a misunderstanding regarding what is meant by “culture” and what we are attempting to accomplish here. I’ll attempt to explain this better, however, if after this explanation we still agree this is not fitting then I will remove it.

First off, I believe that when @MaxCaspar was brought into the DAO he was not given the proper context which led to some of the odd interactions that are mentioned. I wasn’t at those meetings so I can’t say what happened. However, he was operating under the assumption that there was no separation between the DAO and the AA, which just isn’t true. After learning about the wide gap between the two even Max admitted the way he was going about things was completely wrong. I’ve had extensive conversations with Max about “culture” and I feel the way he is thinking about this subject is necessary for bringing these two structures together.

This leads me to my next point and the next area in which there is a misunderstanding.

It seems as though people think we are trying to tell Aragon Association how to do “culture”. This simply is not true. Quite the opposite actually. We want to study the way that AA thinks, does rituals, hosts artifacts, etc. so that we can bring this into the community. I think we can all agree there is a difference in the way the community thinks and does things and how the AA does things. So instead of culture, let’s think of this initiative as “disseminating a particular way of thought into the community in order to create cohesion between the community and the AA.”

I believe this will attract and empower a community that can support Aragon and the product in a way that is beneficial to not only ourselves but the next 10,000 DAOs who use our product. The hope is that this will teach, encourage, and show people how to think about Governance, DAOs, and human coordination in a way that will mean the difference between, say, creating a meme contest about how awesome Aragon is or creating a meme contest on the difficulties of human coordination in DAOs. We want to empower a community to mirror Aragon out into the world and represent us in the ways that do us and our products justice.

I can tell everyone feels strongly on this topic and I’ll gladly remove the section if everyone still feels this way after reading this explanation. Although if anyone has an alternative I’m happy to hear it and integrate that into the proposal.

I’m adding a poll to this comment in order to gauge sentiment. Please vote here and we will use that vote to move forward:

Should we remove Culture from the Community Guild Proposal?

  • Yes remove section 4.1
  • Yes remove sections 4.1 and 4.2
  • No it can stay
  • I have another idea (please comment below)
0 voters

@ramon @ferranrego @mlphresearch @brickpop I appreciate your comments and contribution to the creation of this proposal. Hopefully we can find a solution that works best for the future of Aragon and the DAO. :slight_smile:

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