Financial Proposal: Community Rewards for a Technical Support Guild

Archive: AN DAO
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Proposal Information

Proposal Summary: A proposal for $40,000 USD to fund the bootstrapping of the Technical Support Guild for the first up to (3) months of operation

Previous work on the proposal area:
Currently, there is a SourceCred experiment running in Aragon’s community to reward engagement. The working group comprised of Daniel, Luca, Ben, and Ivan have concluded that SoruceCred is not suited for the specific needs of the Technical Support Guild where the value add and contribution are rather specific. Ben has done extensive research in incentive design and existing tooling in web3 published here.

Proposal description:

The proposal requests from the AN DAO $40,000 in funding for the bootstrapping of a Technical Support Guild to be deployed via Coordinape circle and bounties over a period of 3 months. The objectives of the initiative include:

  • Incentivise and attract a small number of members to catalyze a potential Technical Support Guild
  • Create a Coordinape Circle to reward these community contributors for helping build a more decentralized Aragon, and to provide other targeted rewards like Bounties for jobs to be done

The requested budget will only cover a narrowly-defined scope of technical support to help us validate the effectiveness of a decentralized support model with the Aragon community.

If the experiment is successful, the scope of the experiment will be expanded (in a new proposal). As part of the consequent proposal, the head/steward of the Technical Support Guild (to be hired) will provide an executive summary of the results of the experiment including a detailed overview of the spending of the funds.

The funds will be managed through a 2 out of 4 multisig comprised of the members of the working group. As the vested financial interest in the success of Aragon’s network of each member of the multisig outweighs the potential gain from mishandling of funds the risk of misconduct is minimal.

An alternative design would be for the funds to be managed through the executive sub-DAO. This could avoid the need for the creation of a disposable multisig. The working group considers that potential fund distribution to contributors would be most cost-efficient on a L2/scaling solution hence the need for the creation of another wallet is not completely avoidable.

Proposal Rationale:

The Aragon stack offers a range of solutions with many technical possibilities but equally many technical intricacies. DAO creators and DAO operators often encounter questions and technical challenges they are unable to address themselves, as well as malfunctions. Being able to provide high-quality customer support is thus necessary to offer a great user experience and thus help increase the number of active Aragon DAOs.

Currently, customer support is managed by the Aragon Association, with 5 core team engineers dedicating one day per week to handing support requests and tickets. This practice takes away engineers from their typical sprint cycles and decreases the efficiency of the several teams working on the Aragon stack and causing delays in product development.

Aragon has an opportunity, as a DAO that represents an existing product suite, to experiment and lead in new decentralized operating models. Technical support, with the scope of its services but also the relatively well-defined nature of operations involved seems like the best first experiment for Aragon in decentralizing core practices.

As such, the current proposal offers a balance between quickly setting a Technical Support function and starting a path for progressive decentralization of this area.

Limitations of any benefits mentioned above:

  • The amount of funds might not be sufficient for the pace of incoming support requests
  • It is possible that finding potential guild contributors and bootstrapping the operational and incentive structure could delay the process of launching the guild
  • The required time to train people to be autonomous in managing technical support tickets could delay the transition of ticket handling from the core team engineers to the guild

Expected duration or delivery date (if applicable):

3 months

Upon successful completion of the trial, the Technical Support Guild could be spun into a sub-DAO being funded by and reporting directly to the AN DAO. There would be a separate proposal regarding such action in due time.

Team Information

This is the list of the proposed multi-sign signers. Other members of Aragon’s team have substantial contributions towards the operational design of the future guild.

Funding Information

Amount of ANT requested: $40,000 (denominated in USDC/USDT/DAI)

More detailed description of how funds will be handled and used:

The breakdown of the direct budget for bootstrapping the Technical Support Guild:

  • $30,000 to be distributed to guild members through a Coordinape circle over 3 months
  • $10,000 for specific bounties related to bigger support tasks (including but not limited to prototyping/experimentation and creation of documentation)

The budget excludes non-direct spending such as bounties for referring guild members as well as potential transaction fees on ETH and/or other chains. Those indirect costs will be covered through the executive sub-DAO

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The proposal presents an important use-case, which would be needed in order to scale and enhance the user experience of the Aragon products.

Nevertheless, the compliance Sub-DAO envisages some issues with respect to the form of deployment.

Currently the AN DAO is formed by a Main DAO and 3 Sub-DAOs (Executive, Tech and Compliance).

Although Guilds have been created within the Discord channel as organizational units/talent pools, the AN DAO Charter does not consider the formation of a “Guild”, as the one presented in the proposal, but only allows the formation of additional Sub-DAOs or Sub-DAO spin-offs at page 15.

Here the relevant rule:

“ 3. Formation of new Sub-DAOs a.

The Main DAO can deploy a new Sub-DAO, be given control over an already deployed DAO, dissolve an existing Sub-DAO, or spin-off a Sub-DAO as an independent DAO at any point in time ”.

In the light of the above, given that the proposal entails the setting of an autonomous multisig, we believe that the “Technical Support Guild” should be presented as a new Sub-DAO or as a spin-off of the Tech Sub-DAO. We would suggest the latter solution, as it could entail a certain “quality control” by the Tech Sub-DAO on the members of the support team; or to abandon the intent of creating another Sub-DAO given that the Tech Sub-DAO could directly perform or organize the tasks indicated in the proposal.

In any case, according to the AN DAO charter (see pages 18 and 19), funding should always be provided by the Executive Sub-DAO in consideration of the work done and/or the achievement of well indicated milestones (see below)

The funding request seems not entirely clear.

We understand that the funding will be delivered to the team as a kind of salary. Coordinape is a great tool, but we believe that it would be easier for the community to decide on a funding proposal based on: a) milestones linked to the payment of the funding in installments supervised and approved by the exec- Sub-DAO; b) hourly rates calculated on previous support requests. Without this information, it is not possible to assess the funding request.

Do not hesitate to contact us for questions of information.

Eagle, Ronald, Tayy
(Compliance Sub-DAO)

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Hey, Compliance committee - much appreciate the feedback. We will be amending the proposal throughout the week. For transparency, I will be posting a comment here every time substantial changes are made to the text of the proposal

Initial amendments made:
Added: “An alternative design would be for the funds to be managed through the executive sub-DAO. This could avoid the need for the creation of a disposable multisig. The working group considers that potential fund distribution to contributors would be most cost-efficient on a L2/scaling solution hence the need for the creation of another wallet is not completely avoidable.”

Added: Upon successful completion of the trial, the Technical Support Guild could be spun into a sub-DAO being funded by and reporting directly to the AN DAO. There would be a separate proposal regarding such action in due time.

Added: This is the list of the proposed multi-sign signers. Other members of Aragon’s team have substantial contributions towards the operational design of the future guild

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This makes sense to me to amend the description from “Guild” to “Technical Support Sub-DAO” so that it matches the terminology of the charter.

According to the AN DAO Charter (p4) "Any ANT Holder can make proposals for Financial Proposals as
described in the Financial Proposals section of this AGP process document’ and as per section 5f detailing the process for financial proposals:

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]”)
2. Description of the Action
3. Description of why the author believes it will help to increase the number of Active Aragon DAOs
a. By default, all Financial Proposals involving a deliverable should use an Escrow (see Additional Definitions). In cases where the use of an Escrow is omitted, a justification must be included in the Description.
b. Greet.me shall be the default Escrow provider for Financial Proposals.
4. And suggested optional: ETH Wallet address of the author(s) and/or other identifiers

As such, I believe it to be within the realm of the charter for funding proposals to be made directly to the AN DAO and specifically not all funding proposals need to go through the Executive Sub-DAO. Teams wanting funding can either choose to have these funded by the AN DAO or via the Executive Sub-DAO.

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@fartunov - this part is problematic as according to the charter "By default, all Financial Proposals involving a deliverable should use an Escrow (see Additional Definitions). In cases where the use of an Escrow is omitted, a justification must be included in the Description.

If you are not planning to use an Escrow for this, a justification should be made in the proposal.

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Thank you for your comment.

With respect to the second part I was mislead by the wide wording used in the exec. SubDAO section of the charter and by the fact that its should “pay” members of the other SubDAOs. But the Process for Financial Proposals makes actually clear that everyone can propose and get funding. Apologies for the misunderstanding.

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I’d like to double check my understanding of the AN DAO charter with regards to the requirements for creating Sub-DAOs:

a) Does the creation of a new Sub-DAO require a change to the AN DAO charter? And if so, do we agree that the requirement for this is a “Majority (more than 50% in favour) vote, with a minimum quorum of 0.5% of ANT Holders” - p6 of AN DAO Charter.

b) In the event that a funding request is made to the AN DAO directly, do we agree that the formation of a Sub-DAO is not required?

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I agree.

The question remains with respect to Guilds. I would probably treat them as b) according to the current state of the charter.