Proposal overview
We’re hoping that through the course of our funding proposal, you will see the Creative DAO has a unique and new approach for the future of the DAO, one which we believe will revolutionize the way we onboard members to the DAO, manage creative workloads whilst giving contributors a true open studio experience.
We hope with a new direction we can push the Creative DAO to exceed expectations and hope the information below will provide insight into the short history of the DAO, but more importantly the vision for the Creative DAO in the future.
Table of Contents
1.0 DAO Mandates
2.0 Previous deliverables and metrics
2.1 Issues with the previous deliverables and metrics
3.0 Term 1 Governors
4.0 Term 2 Signatories
5.0 Reporting
5.1 Multisig
5.2 DAO Expenditure
6.0 Governance votes
7.0 Lessons learned
8.0 New Structure and what we expect
8.1 Sustainability
8.2 Governors/Signatories?
8.3 Governance
9.0 New and improved deliverable and metrics
10.0 Funding proposal
1.0 Mandates:
Identity: Drive uniform branding in Harmony ecosystem. Promote cultural values and mission.
Create: Commission content to further awareness and amplify Harmony messages. Educate community through informative content.
Include: Reach for the un-included. Convert the crypto-curious.
2.0 Previous term deliverables and metrics to be replaced
Previous Deliverables
- Increase Harmony branding awareness with uniform content across the Harmony ecosystem
- Creation of creative content (Infographics, How-to videos, brand stickers, short form writing, long form writing that aligns with Harmony’s branding)
- Produce a SWOT analysis identifying Harmony’s position in the market
- Generate first community driven brand guide. Apply to website and existing collateral.
- Deploy $25K for creative-focused bounties.
- Produce market segmentation studies identifying communities of potential investors to target with marketing campaigns
Previous Metrics:
- 2-3 Weekly posts
- 1 weekly Video
- 1 weekly infographics
2.1 Issues with the previous deliverables and metrics
The deliverables and metrics for the first term originally came from the initial post requesting the formulation of the DAO, the main problem with them, they were incredibly short sighted, and even if they were all achieved and delivered, they would only achieve a small percentage of what’s possible with the Creative DAO.
The original call for candidates requested creators apply for positions, which caused immediate conflict as soon as governors were in seats, due to the main focus of the DAO being that creative content is completed by contributors. The deliverables were a conflict of what the DAO was supposed to be doing operationally.
3.0 Term 1 Governors
- Buythefndip
- HODLen
- Chris-Cheeky-Crypto
- The-Nurse-Greg
- Bricktop_ONE
- Globey-NFT
- Chris-Stakeridoo
- Loechii
- TheHighIndian
Due to the funding delays we had requested that the term be extended slightly to make up for time lost, which was granted by the community through a governance vote and accepted by DAO operations.
By the end of the first term, through various frustrations, the DAO was left with only TheNurseGreg, Bricktop_ONE and Cheeky Chris. There was a conscious decision to wait until funding was received before a call for more candidates for the duration of the first term, which never came.
4.0 Term 2 Signatories
After the election came to a close on April, 2022 00:18 AM UTC. We’re happy to announce the signatories for the next term.
- Michael Efemena
- Imran Khan
- Bricktop_ONE
- Loge
- Beeks Vybe
- Adamlawalbkr1
- Signifikante
- Arinze Ebuka
- Nwaobi Daniel
There were some issues during the election process which we highlighted in ‘6.0 Governance votes’. Due to the issues we reached out to community and DAO members with a poll to ensure we moved forward in the right way with a community consensus.
5.0 Reporting
A reporting deep dive can be found here: Reporting - Google Docs
Below you can find information regarding the Creative DAO Multi-sig treasury and DAO expenditure over the past term.
5.1 Multisig
Creative DAO Multi-Sig Address: 0x7c81E03cDCF8e0a65613fF856834054C2b7bC563
Creative DAO Multi-Sig Link: Harmony Multisig Wallet
The Creative DAO multisig was funded on January 18th 2022. Harmony Blockchain Explorer
5.2. Dao Expenditure
You will see through the below information that there was a peak in work done through the first month of the creation of the DAO, which started declining due to various issues. There were delays in funding, along with a lack of true direction for the DAO, leading to the demotivation of governors, with a lack of communication from various parties. This is explained more in 7.0 Lessons learned.
Hours worked November : 23 Hours 15 Minutes, Expenditure $1,744.82
Hours worked December : 144 hours 29 Minutes, Expenditure $10,836.75
Hours worked January: 110 Hours 6 minutes, Expenditure $8,257.96
Hours worked February: 105 Hours 22 minutes, Expenditure $7,902.75
Hours worked March: 61 Hours 37 Minutes, Expenditure $4621.40
November : $1,744.82
December: $10,836.75
January: $8,257.96
February: $7,902.75
March: $4621.40
6.0 Governance votes
Creative DAO Elections Q1 2021:
Retroactive payments and term extension: Snapshot
Discretionary Fund Proposal: Snapshot
Creative Bounty Program: Snapshot
Creative Dao Elections Q2 2022:
With the Creative Dao Elections Q2 2022 we had issues with the new Snapshot website, we raised concerns with the community during the election and ran a poll regarding the continuation of the elections which can be found here:
A new chapter and moving forward.
7.0 Lessons learned
First off, we believe the DAO was created prematurely with lack of proper planning, at this stage we hadn’t learned enough through mistakes and challenges of other core DAOs. There was still a major lack of decentralized tooling and right from the start, the Creative DAO suffered from a lack of direction leaving governors to wonder exactly what their goals or positions were. Along with this we realized that the cost of Governors alone making Creative content was extremely high, we started collecting information and signing creators up for the DAO, but at the time, we didn’t have access to proper tooling to help us manage contributors efficiently.
As the Creative DAO scrambled to navigate the tricky and sometimes political minefield of DAOs, governors struggled to build clear lines of communication with funding decision makers, and with bad timing and funding delays, tempers were rising, demotivation spread between governors which in turn caused more damage. Along with the uncertainty of governors being paid for the work they were doing, early on, Term 1’s fate was sealed.
We now understand that to achieve anything worthwhile with the Creative DAO, before we start running, we need to plan and strategize to ensure the success of the DAO. And that we have done. We have realized that we cannot do this on our own anymore, physically and mentally. We need help and we need to scale. We need to source the knowledge we need from the people that have already overcome the challenges that we face.
In the later stages of the DAO we started holding open working sessions with contributors, and we quickly realized that with the extra minds of the people helping in working sessions, tasks became much easier to achieve as we worked together with direct and immediate support. This is what we need to scale. Collaboration between contributing members. However it’s not just people that we need, we need to ensure that the information which flows through the DAO is properly collected to make any think-tanks beneficial. That information needs to be properly mined and explored and cast out to the wider community for further thought and consideration, and this is why we need all kinds of contributors, we don’t just need someone that can create beautiful graphics, we also need community consensus also, which contributors could help us achieve.
We need to decentralize the process from a great idea to the end product. And this is a DAO in its simplest form.
8.0 New Structure and what we expect.
With a new direction and structure, the Creative DAO can position itself as the Creative core of the Harmony ecosystem whilst serving many use cases, we plan to build and scale a thriving creative studios which will be at hand to create needed content. But how do we plan to do this?
First, we would like to formulate 3 creative studios covering-
- Video, Graphic Design, Music and NFTs
- Metaverse and Gaming
- Social media, Influencer and Creative writing
Each studio will be spearheaded by a community elected project manager, studios will have their own deliverables and budgets which will be decided through community, project manager and signatory based discussions, followed by governance voting for correct approvals.
Bounties will be served through DeWork, or other relevant decentralized applications. Creators will be separated into working groups based on their talents through Discord roles and bounties will be advertised to contributing members when made available. Their corresponding groups based on roles will be backed by channels in which community members can make suggestions for needed content and wider conversations can be had regarding the corresponding creative studios.
It will be suggested that each creative studio have its own branding profile, social media and discord channels within the Creative DAO Discord server and that necessary operational figures be sourced when there’s a need. On top of the main core of creators, when the studios are ready to be scaled there may be a need for contributors to fulfill strategist or PR roles etc within the studios.
We believe with the DAO being the center of creativity in the Harmony community, that the Creative DAO should be the first port of call when the community or projects in the space need creative work to be completed alongside the usual roles of the DAO, we will touch on this in the next chapter of the proposal.
8.1 Sustainability
There is no current source of ongoing funding other than funds requested and provided by the foundation, but we believe, much like other core DAOs, that the Creative DAO should aim to achieve long term sustainability as soon as possible without having to rely on funding from the foundation through DAO operations.
We’ll be exploring a system in which projects, DAOs or community members can come to the Creative DAO to source work through its contributing studios, which would potentially include a royalty system for creative work obtained through the Creative DAO to aid its treasury whilst also giving contributors the opportunity to be approached for work through a job/bounty board possibly managed on Dework.
The DAO should be open to partnerships and wider opportunities for the DAO at all times and be ready to scale through contributors when necessary.
The Creative DAO will be exploring other methods of income such as non fungible tokens in different formats, however, this is yet to be discussed with the community and we would preferably like to base a sustainability project, on something which also serves the community with utility.
8.2 Governors/Signatories?
Dao ops just sat up straight in their chairs seeing the title of this section. And quite rightly, we need to address this. Why did the name change from Governor to Signatory? Between Core DAOs and DAO operations there has been a rather taboo and at some points unspoken debate. Before the core DAOs become fully sustainable, the Harmony Foundation and DAO Operations are pushing the core DAOs in the direction which they feel truly represents a decentralized DAO, DAOs in which contributors do the bulk of the workload. The perfect DAO. Some DAOs with deliverables and metrics that are finely spread over vague and all-encompassing missions and paths struggle to achieve this. But we cannot argue, it is the ultimate goal. That being said, when we think about the potential structure of the Creative DAO, we believe this is easier to achieve than most with the Creative DAO. With its sole focus being content creation backed by a community which strives for more visual and creative material, this in theory should be easier to attain. The Creative DAO will strive to make this become a reality.
We, the community, contributors and as anybody with a realistic vision understands this won’t happen overnight, but this needs to be the main focus of the DAO, immediately, the main benefit of this is that it helps the DAO scale, and scale we must. For this we will need to call on the wealth of knowledge that can be found through people willing to help us achieve this. We need to adopt decentralized tooling, call on people such as DoDao to help us onboard correctly, keep a clear line of communication with DAO operations when we struggle to achieve goals, we must be transparent with struggles and discuss openly when we fail. As mentioned in the metrics, we need to set clear and defined structures for onboarding creatives and non-creative contributors, information which is readily available before people have to ask where to find it. People should know right from the start, this is their creative home, this is how you can work, and this is what we’re trying to achieve. This is something we will be using the DoDAO platform for to help us achieve this as it’s absolutely essential we onboard users correctly with our goals to scale the DAO.
8.3 Governance
Having recently faced issues with governance through snapshot laid out in our ‘6.0 Governance votes’ section of the proposal, we would like to avoid future issues. Technical issues aside, the Creative DAO would also like to move away from the usual ‘100 Harmony required to vote’ mechanism.
We believe for a true consensus concerning the Creative DAO, that we need to tokenize voting, we need a way in which contributing members and people that show real interest in the Creative DAO are the ones which make the decisions concerning the DAO. We need voters who understand the challenges, overall goals and the main focuses of the DAO, rather than the community at large. You wouldn’t need to be a creative to be eligible to vote, just to show you’re a participating member of the DAO and are trying to help it achieve what it strives to do in one way or another.
We are yet to finalize voting mechanisms, but this needs to be explored sooner rather than later. However we need to make this extremely clear, if we move to tokenized voting, this cannot and will not be done until the dispersal of voting tokens can be done in a decentralized manor and not handled by the signatories or people voted into positions, to ensure voting is fair, we need to ensure tokens are distributed to all that are eligible and not just to the people close to those who are related to operations or signatories.
We must also strive to come up with a process that ensures that each eligible voter receives just 1 voting. This is essentially for true decentralization of the Creative DAO, to ensure that no unwanted control over the Creative DAO can ever be achieved.
We must aim for true governance.
9.0 New and improved deliverable and metrics
Mandate: Identity: Drive uniform branding in Harmony ecosystem. Promote cultural values and mission.
Deliverables for Identity
- Create cohesive community branding profile for creators
- Keep the community educated and informed
- Amplify the Harmony foundation vision
- Promote the Harmony foundation and community culture, to bridge, not compete in a multi chain space
Mandate: Create: Commission content to further awareness and amplify Harmony messages. Educate the community through informative content.
Deliverables For Create
- Creation of creative content through contributors
- Amplify information surrounding Harmony events
- Revamp Harmony core content
- Rebrand the Creative DAO
- Serve as the Harmony creative core for the community, core team and ecosystem as a whole
Mandate: Include: Reach for the un-included. Convert the crypto-curious.
Deliverables for Identity
- Formulate community managed creative studios to serve the Harmony ecosystem
- Build an all encompassing ecosystem of creators
- Drive to bring web2 creatives into sub DAOs
Metrics
Scale the Creative DAO-
- DAO Creative production split into 3 creative studios making creation a simpler process with community elected project managers
- Creation of Video, Graphic Design, Music and NFT studio
- Creation of Metaverse and Gaming studio
- Creation of Social media, Influencer and creative writing studio
- Onboard 3 Project managers to oversee creative operations
- Onboard community manager
- Create a community controlled governance process for Contributor based position continuance
- Set deliverables and budgets for various DAO studios through community and signatory based discussions
- Creation of a clear and defined structure for contributor onboarding through DoDao
- Creation of a clear and defined guide how non-creatives can be of assistance and contribute to the DAO through DoDao
Content Creation -
- Monthly Creative DAO updates, keeping contributors and the community up to date about progress and next steps, goals and challenges for the DAO
- Amplify and revamp Harmony foundation content such as guides, information surrounding events, missions and roadmaps
- Provide the community with regular, informative and creative content regarding the ecosystem in various formats
DAO Structure -
- Creation of initial DAO charter which will be completed at the earliest opportunity
- A push for tokenized governance for contributors/DAO members
- Request that the creative studios manage the creation of a DAO sustainability project/projects
- Creative bounties open to all relevant creatives, managed with Dework with Discord bounty landing groups available to contributors with specifically assigned roles
- Serve the ecosystem at large and be open to all possible paths for the DAO to scale and aid the ecosystem with their creative needs
10.00 Funding proposal
The Harmony Creative DAO is requesting $100k funding for the Creative DAO treasury, we believe this will be necessary to scale the DAO, to create various studios and to properly incentivise contributors of the Creative DAO ecosystem which in turn, rapidly increase Harmony’s creative presence within the community and the blockchain ecosystem as a whole.
We would ask that the Creative DAO Q2 term starts officially in the event of funding. We will need time to achieve what the DAO sets out to achieve.
The current metrics for success offered is primarily focussed on the creation of the DAO and sub DAOs along with their first tranche of funding allocations which is the main focus of value, the Creative DAO aim to to creative the first Harmony Core DAO capable of truly becoming a contributor lead DAO, in which contributors do the bulk of the workload to achieve its goals.
Although a focus of content creation is needed, we need structure before this happens.
Thank you - Harmony Creative DAO
Here is a downloadable PDF version of this request due to requirements:
Harmony Creative DAO Social Media
Twitter: @OneCommunityDAO
Discord: Discord
