Community DAO Funding Request Q4 2021-Q1 2022

Governance DAO Proposals
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Application type

Community DAO

DAO Funding Request

Proposal overview

The Community DAO was formed to help onboard users from diverse communities and make sure everyone was heard. As the first official DAO established on Harmony, we can be viewed as the go-to example with DAOs on Harmony and should be expected to set a certain precedent.

The Community DAO would like to request being funded for at least three months (lasting the term). This would allow us to self-sustain all DAO activity during this period, and we believe that this is more of an approach representative to that of a DAO being decentralised.

We would like to publish our content through various platforms to include, medium, notion, gitbook and more, which therefore would require monthly expenses to the DAO, there is a strong need to educate the basics at this moment than to look further ahead, we have gauged sentiment from the Harmony Protocol Community through hosting Twitter spaces.

Our Deliverables for Q4:

  • Execute Community DAO Governance Structure. - COMPLETED

  • Produce a high-level of social engagement (retweets, shares, discussions) on Harmony activities during LisCon, NFT.NYC, DCentral and DayONE. - COMPLETED

  • Each governor will deliver a thread “What Harmony Means to Me”, amplifying the values of our community.” - COMPLETED

At this time only ONE council member that will have to submit their post, expected to have deliverables done by EOY. Social engagement during activities have just began and we will utilise and army of followers to share content.

Deliverables for Q1 2022:

  • Harmony certified Universal guides to be distributed to regional DAO to be translated and spread education throughout

  • Get Twitter account to 5k followers - Host Discord Open Mic Nights in Harmony server once a month

  • Establish blueprint for other DAOs being started for ease of work ie; participation plan

  • Begin thread on “What it’s like to DAO on Harmony”- Twitter- Reddit

  • Create newsletter and/or landing website for Community

  • Further mandates with vision from Core team

Team

Proposal ask

$100,000

Justification

The first funding of the Community DAO was mainly used to pay the Initial Term Council and the current DAO for two months of work. Since the first funding we have not asked for funds during the 2nd Term Council. For complete transparency the Council is using Clockify for a detailed Timesheet, which will be posted monthly including the transaction hash.

Pay out of Initial Harmony Community DAO

We now have a Discretionary fund in motion and would like to boost incentives for social engagement, to include giveaways and partnerships which we are looking for partners to provide their own collateral to increase our exposure and governance activity. However with the help of the community, and projects we have needs for translation and content in the blink of an eye and would like the resources available to do so. Snapshot.

Our balance is now at 9311.26953 ONE after two pending transactions clear

Metrics for success

  • HCIP-1 - KYC/ Age requirements - established what the community agreed was the appropriate course of action to remove KYC/ Age from governing document, with a good feedback from community, adn conversations that carried on for weeks, we pushed the vote to snapshot and succeeded.

  • HCIP-2 - Discretionary fund - we wanted to show appreciation for little things to members who contribute content for us. These small task go a long way and save the DAO from expending funds unnecessarily, this is also a good way to connect with community

  • HCIP-3 0 Community DAO Charter Ratification - Currently vote is underway, this is a standard that has to be followed we have thought about this document and this is the only way to proceed as a DAO

  • C-DAO Charter - We formed the structure set forth by the VDAO we believe this is the model for all other DAOs to be established, or missing a governing document. We plan to hand off the Participation Plan as if it were a relay race, the baton will be instead replaced with knowledge for future organisations to carry on and not be left behind.

  • Weekly Twitter Spaces on Friday & Sunday with different times and around 50 active Users and a good global representation, on average 60 people attending diverse crowd

  • Covering Media channels to include upcoming events and past events LiscCon, NFT.NYC & Dcentral, will be publishing content on Reddit, Twitter, considering Facebook and Instagram, Notion in our horizon

  • Increased participation on talk.harmony.one, have seen new threads take off from conversations from Twitter spaces

  • “What Harmony Means to Me” ongoing thread on talk.harmony.one , began as an internal request from Core team and the thread has taken off

  • Coordinating list of translators and assistants for DAOs to utilise talent pool, shared document we plan to have available to boost the spread of information

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Keep these folks funded!

Thank you all for the great work you’re doing to get the word out about our blockchain! :blue_heart:

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Update - the Q4 deliverable for “What Harmony Means To Me” has been completed.

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Is there anything we need to do in order to move this forward?

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I think you have done everything that’s needed @Harmonious_Dude from looking at your proposal.

We’re also waiting to be funded so It’s not just the Community DAO. Hopefully this will be done soon.

It’s great to see you have requested funding for a longer period, if these DAOs are to remain decentralized then i don’t think constant funding requests should have to be submitted or they’re still bound financially to the foundation.

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Agreed. Hopefully we can work towards a long term sustainable source of income for the dao so that eventually there isn’t a need for funding requests.

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how about standing up a validator for each DAO that can provide its own source of funding? limit the cap to a 5 million, just enough to get elected, but not enough to take over too much. Non-voting Validator but working towards a decentralized validator structure. Get initial funding from the newly established valditator support program until enough delegators from the community contribute so that its self sustaining. Just a thought. EACH DAO could help setup a source of income. Excess not spent goes to the treasure or gets burned.

Update: Limit to one BLS key and cap delegator contributions at 5million.

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I like the idea and staking has been discussed as a good potential source of income. The multisig wallet does not currently have staking abilities, unfortunately. As for running a validator, we have discussed this as well, but have not figured out the issue of who runs the validator and controls the keys to it? There always needs to be an individual controlling it, which could potentially bring issues in the future.

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Since it’s a communityDAO shouldn’t the community be involved to have a vote regarding a new funding request? I believe so!

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I suppose that would be a vote to decide if there should be a dao or not. We did not ask for the entire term to be funded up front to try to allow for market fluctuations, so really this is just a request to have the rest of our term funded

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Given the cost to run a node and 100% commission that would only generate $1000 monthly per governor after node costs are paid. That would leave a budget shortfall of $53k quarterly. It would take almost 15mil $one staked per node to cover at current $one pricing. Or $one needs to hold above 75 cents

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Let’s get this DAO funded. Come on now.

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How can we move forward with funding ?

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I really hope guys get funding for hard work you guys have done with community so far. Meaning full basic structure on Community DOAs.

Please Fund the Community DOA :blue_heart:

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Please fund my community DAO!

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Please fund the Community DAO !

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I’ve jumped in several of the twitter spaces. They are also extremely proactive when tackling all issues in the Harmony ecosystem. Help these individuals out with a little compensation for their efforts. In time, Harmony will get the exposure it deserves, and it will be because of people like them that have put in countless hours to improve our community.

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I agree about how important should be the involvement of the community here, especially being a “Community” DAO. And I have had some issues with this DAO proposal that I experienced myself, I will process to create a comment with experience and perspective about it here in the comments with the hope of some points to be clarified

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I can see some people I know and respect and even some I would call almost friends in the list of this DAO. So maybe I just wasn’t lucky enough, or whoever was using their official Twitter account had a bad day. I will consider every possibility, but after having assisted several times to their twitter spaces I have tried also several times to be in touch with this DAO (since I have vast experience dealing with big communities and I was interested in establishing some communication and even offer them selfless collaboration) but almost every time I got no reply or they left me talking alone at the start of the conversation for later just send me what I would consider almost link spam without even say “hello”

I think a community DAO is a very valuable concept since every one of us knows well how strong is the feeling of community in harmony and how that community is almost the base of everything we have.

But community means something than a “close group of friends who we like to listen and with whom we like to participate or interact”, a community means having the same sense of care, respect, and dedication towards every member conforming to it, being fair, and being equal with the ones we call friends and with the ones we don’t.

I have been watching and I know well that many people involved in this DAO are Harmony veterans, but if you are willing to receive a bit of critique, some of them might have a bit too much big an image of themselves in the community and might be existing in the harmony ecosystem being a tad disconnected about the current whole real harmony community which includes a lot of “new people”, and being them more focused just on their personal inner circles and their individual interests and values which I consider a mistake since the main goal of harmony should be to grow with new people and not only focus on whoever is already here.

Also, I want to mention that as a “community” DAO establishing a goal of having 5000 followers while you don’t follow back the people of the community that you are representing I think is very wrong.
A community DAO should be actively listening to the community and not just interacting with people who they already know. They should focus more on the idea of "following: than on the benefit of “being followed” to have some credibility as Community representatives

I know this might be just my personal perspective but since there are requests for funding and everyone seems to be very positive about it in the comments I want to add a different experience that I hope can be useful in some way to address the situation can’t say I had a good experience with this DAO

I would like to see the members of this DAO addressing these issues and considering the way they are interacting with the community, becoming more open, more polite, more friendly, better mannered, and more equal towards everyone else before being funded to avoid the risk of them being beneficial mostly just for themselves or their inner circles.

I will be here replying openly to whoever wants to talk, ask or mention me anything about this, also you can contact me in private if you need any proof about what I wrote here or any other comment.

Hope this feedback I leave here, that I understand might feel a bit discordant, can be also appreciated and helps all of us to have a better and more friendly and communicative community DAO at the service and interest of Everyone in the Harmony ecosystem, including the old members but also the new ones, helping and considering our friends but also those who are not our friends. And always under the idea of giving more than receiving.

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Sejin,

Thanks for your honest feedback. I would like to try to address your concerns and wanted to do so from my personal account so as not to speak for each individual on the dao.

" but almost every time I got no reply"
I am very sorry for this and took the time just now to review the personal messages you are referring to. It looks like only one comment was not met with a response (regarding the time of our spaces), but I did notice that a couple of times it took a couple of days to respond. I apologize for that and hopefully we can try and get more immediate responses to you in the future. Unfortunately we are still working on ways to engage the community more and have not figured out a way to properly utilize all willing volunteers. If there was a specific concern with one of the responses you did receive (or did not receive), please elaborate, so that we can try to better answer your concerns or questions in the future. There are multiple people that manage the account and perhaps we need to assign one or two people to better control the content and avoid being slightly disjointed in our response time, etc. Also, if you care to include any specific suggestions, I very much would like to hear them. I want to serve the community.

“later just send me what I would consider almost link spam without even say “hello””
Admittedly, this is not my favorite way to get word out for our tweets, but I have gone along with it (and even done it myself a couple of times) as the DAO came to a consensus to form an outreach team. We tried to be honest with the intention of it being to get retweets and that if anyone wishes to be removed from getting those tweets sent to them, then we would glady take them off of the outreach team. The reason for no ‘hello’ or other dialogue within these tweets is because we are sending them to quite a few people and writing individual messages to each person would be quite time consuming. I do agree this is not the most elegant way of communicating our message and perhaps needs to be reconsidered now that our follower count is climbing and our reach is expanding.

“more focused just on their personal inner circles and their individual interests and values”
I can promise you I speak for everyone on the DAO when I say that this is not at all our intention and I would love some elaboration on this point, so that I can look introspectively and see what I may personally be doing to give this impression. We may struggle in many ways, but we never wish to favor ourselves over others.

“establishing a goal of having 5000 followers while you don’t follow back the people of the community that you are representing I think is very wrong.”
Our main reason for this goal was to extend our reach so that any future initiatives or governance proposals can be made visible to as many people as possible. This seemed like a reasonable milestone for us, but I understand your point. Perhaps we should set a standard of following back everyone if you and others feel it is important. It would take some persistent legwork at this point given the limitations of twitter in that you can only follow a set number of accounts per day without being tagged as a spam account. Like I said, though, if this is seen as an important goal by the community, I think we can get to work on it.

“more polite, more friendly, better mannered, and more equal towards everyone else”
I do sincerely apologize if there is a way you feel poorly treated by the DAO and, if you are willing, would love to know more about why you feel this way.

I hope I’ve addressed your concerns at least a little and would like to continue the conversation with you to better ourselves. I’d like to take a moment to share some about our experience in trying to get this Community DAO functional and built for the future. Building it from scratch has proven to be quite difficult. There have been a few obstacles, most notably communication, within the council. While we all have faith in each other’s abilities, there has been some difficulty establishing constant communication with each other to get tasks completed. Several governors have not kept a constant line of communication open and have been difficult to reach for some time. In the interest of being transparent, the DAO has been primarily a team of 5 consistent contributors. Originally our plan had been to split into groups based on, mostly, similar time zones, but also interests and skill sets. This lack of contribution has forced the 5 of us to take on the majority of DAO work and has made it difficult to properly delegate tasks into smaller groups (and perhaps be more efficient) as the others either have outside obligations consuming their time, personal issues they are dealing with, etc. I would like to note, though, that DAO work is at will and no governor is under specific obligation to contribute a set amount of time. I would be lying if I didn’t say it has gotten frustrating as there are many capable and willing community members that would gladly make themselves more available and would be more ambitious to make this thing work.

With that being said, there are a some things I hope we are able to accomplish in the coming months. Being the first persistent council and elected to a 6 month term (future councils will serve 3 month terms), our main goals are to build an infrastructure that will allow transitions to future councils to be more seamless and to work to create future sustainability for the DAO. Firstly, we have composed and ratified our governing charter. This was a big undertaking because we wanted to make sure we built a document capable of providing a governing framework for future DAO councils to reference, removing some of the guessing regarding how to proceed in certain instances, such as passing HCIP proposals. Some other things we hope to achieve in this line of work would be to build a collection of documents and ‘learned experiences’ to hopefully ease the transition period of future councils. Being such a new endeavor, the initial period of this DAO was a little difficult in that we all had an introductory period where we were getting on our feet and figuring out how to proceed. That’s not to say we have things figured out now, but we think sharing any info we have can be valuable as the DAO builds for the future.

As to the second point of sustainability, we are hoping to make some headway towards building a DAO that can stand on its own feet and not be reliant on funding requests such as these. Ultimately it would be great to have funds that just need governance proposals to be passed in order to be used. As it stands, though, the governors putting in time now are left wondering if we will have a multisig wallet with funds in it. It is really beginning to affect productivity. I would say the biggest concern of ours is that we have had this request up for nearly a month now with no response from the team. Do we need to provide something else? Are there deliverables they wish to see us accomplish? Without any response at all we do not know how we are to proceed. To achieve sustainability, we have considered a number of things, but one thing we have gotten positive feedback about and would like to proceed with is giving functionality and use case to the crazy.one domains. When initially launched, it was stated that the funds collected from the purchase of these domains would be left to the Community DAO to manage. We do not have access to these funds at the moment. Currently, the only use case for these domains is showing your most recent tweet. We wish to explore options to allow for many features including, but not limited to, displaying NFTs, allowing personalization of the page, etc. We would love to see crazy.one domains be usable for many things, making them a desired purchase of any community member and thus provide for a sustainable DAO.

We do not wish to limit ourselves to infrastructure and sustainability, though. We have a number of community-requested initiatives we would like to explore and achieve. We must be funded if we hope to achieve any of these things, though. Harmony has put forth the goal of paying DAO contributors and have committed $1 million to help get the Community DAO up and running. We are simply asking for a ‘topping up’ of the multisig with a portion of these funds to help us achieve these things. We are willing to answer any of the core team’s questions or listen to their, or the community’s, input as to what we need to do in order to proceed.

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