Hey everyone! It took me a while since I wasn’t sure how to best approach a lot of the topics mentioned below but, here we go.
I’d like to revisit subDAO/DAO structures, their organization, management and responsibilities.
To start off, the situation as I perceive it right now:
We’ve got 7ish subDAOs that perform various tasks, some related, some not. They are managed however they see fit. Amazing things get done and value is created. However, each subDAO is mostly ‘fighting’ for itself. Some subDAOs police themselves and it works out well, others not so much. The only thing they really have in common though is, they get monthly emissions in order to stay functional and to be able to focus on their stuff.
It’s a bit exaggerated, true, but you catch my drift. And don’t get me wrong, I’m not criticizing one single subDAO, I just want to address the issues at hand that I feel we as a DAO didn’t acknowledge (enough) so far.
Therefore, I’m taking an excerpt from the Trello board I made, with things I think we need to focus on and of what our internal goals could look like:
- Mandatory assignment of (Skill) Roles to subDAOs/DAO - no role w/o a responsible party.
- Overview of all assigned roles issued by subDAOs/DAO and their entailed responsibilities.
- A regular and transparent update from subDAOs about member and role changes.
- A more streamlined exchange with and oversight of the subDAOs with regular, unified reports.
- Better resource coordination and communication between subDAOs.
- Pivot from a focus on content creation to project and product management.
- A per-subDAO project pipeline (e.g. Kanban board) with tasks shared in Discourse.
- An internal board with a high-level overview of goals and projects catering to those goals.
Most of those issues aren’t exactly new and a lot of them were already discussed, either in the DAO Board or in the DAO/subDAOs but there wasn’t that much progress. Many of them are also things the DAO Board was set up to address, we can’t solve them alone though.
The list is a bit scary, I know, BUT it’s also doable and we have more than enough capable people in our DAO to do it. We just need to work on everything step by step and start somewhere.
There are certainly many different ways to approach this and in some areas, we are already working towards it. At least one key aspect needs to be seen to though before we can really start - we need an alignment of the work we are already doing.
This could either be achieved by:
- the subDAOs reporting to the DAO Board on a regular basis, the Board then sharing an overview with the DAO and after sorting out issues, the Board gives directions to the subDAOs, or
- a dedicated subDAO/task force with oversight of all projects, doing it basically similar as in #1 but with the difference that this task force could be people who are product/project managers by trade and therefore have experience in the processes involved.
Either way, after being part of many conversations in the past months, and listening closely to the inherent issues discussed, I’m pretty sure that if we solve this crucial step first, many of our problems will either sort themselves out or we’ll at least be able to better address them.
No matter what we decide though, for me it’s clear that we need processes in place that assure the flow of information and facilitate issuing direction. Even after being part of the DAO Board for nearly a month, I still feel that we lack coherent, internal updates of what is going on and where we are headed - I’d really like to change that.
As always, I’m interested in your ideas, especially regarding possible solutions. It would be great if we could get input from at least every subDAO (board/leader) to be able to get things going.
