Hi Harmonauts,
As you know, the Harmony Foundation has been kickstarting DAOs on Harmony. We started this journey earlier this year and wanted to share our current thinking in this forum.
Today, any DAO can already form on Harmony with our snapshot voting. This post is specifically for DAOs that the Foundation will kickstart and support with funding.
Forming DAOs with the right mandates and processes will be the most important thing that the Foundation can do to ensure the long-term growth of our protocol and ecosystem.
Going forward for each of the core DAOs, the Foundation will set the initial three mandates and work with our community to recruit nine governors to ensure wide participation. For the Validator and Community DAOs we have already elected 5 governors for an interim period of three months. We will be working with the interim governors to recruit and elect 9 governors.
For each DAO, we set three mandates to represent the overall vision and mission of the DAO while the governors and community coordinate to drive planning and execution of the mandates. The Foundation will also ensure that mandates of the DAOs that we help form work in harmony with each other to avoid overlaps and conflicts.
Below we share the initial mandates for the Validator and Community DAOs.
#ONEValidatorDAO
Decentralization: bootstrap thousands of elected validators, grow diverse validator profiles
Security: support high staking rate, promote security practices and toolings
Participation: facilitate protocol upgrade proposals, recruit votes for improvements
#ONECommunityDAO
Growth: onboard users on missions and culture, pollinate values across communities
Engagement: amplify content of roadmap and milestones, creative campaigns of products
Diversity: solicit voices and votes in forums, reinforce strong governance participation
We also want to share our current thoughts on the process for starting and funding DAOs.
After setting three mandates, we will start recruiting governor candidates who have the expertise and vision to carry forth the three mandates and work with them to build community interest and recruit 9 or more governor candidates.
The governor candidate(s) during this initial period before the DAO is fully formed will receive a stipend of $[x]/hour up to 10 hours/week with public hours & tasks tracking. The stipend period is 6-weeks with the goal of finishing the initial DAO setup with 9 elected governors. Each governor candidate will post on talk.harmony.one and should receive at least 3 unique community members’ support in the thread.
Once there are at least 9 governor candidates, we will move towards an election by the community to launch the DAO.
We set forth the following recommendations for how these DAOs should operate. We have studied highly engaged DAOs such as Sushi. We believe these initial parameters will support the healthy functioning of a DAO though we could adjust them over time depending on our learnings.
- Election: the election should have a threshold of [z] million ONEs voting where [z] represents significant participation from our community. The threshold may be a different amount for different DAOs.
- Funding: we will fund an elected DAO with an initial $50,000 USD worth of ONE tokens. This is enough to get the DAOs started working and gives an opportunity for the community to see the DAO’s execution.
- Requirements: each DAO should set up a Twitter account for public updates and must use a multi-signature wallet to hold funds with 6/9 signatures to approve any spending.
- Compensation: we suggest compensating elected governors at $[y]/hours up to 10 hours/week with 1 lead governor working up to 15 hours/week.
- Review: each DAO should post weekly progress tweets and forum posts. It should write monthly newsletters with milestones and roadmap to the entire community.
- Re-election: re-elections should occur every 3 months initially to ensure fast iteration and strong consensus by the community on the governors’ execution of the DAO mandates. For the re-election, there should be more ONEs voting than the initial vote to clearly demonstrate growth in community support.
- Funding: for each future tranche of funding, the community should vote to approve the DAO’s progress towards its mandates. Each DAO should provide a report of its results to the community to seek continued funding.
This is our current thinking and we’ll grow together as we embark on this mission to set up DAOs to ensure the long-term sustainability of the entire Harmony ecosystem. Thank you ONE community!