With the launch of the token, Across has now become more than just a protocol - we are a DAO. In this season of the DAO’s growth, there will be a strong need for dedicated work on building and maintaining our socialware. If you’re not familiar with the term socialware, it’s a system that creates assurances through social relationships. This article by Orca (now Metropolis) is a great resource for interested readers. This isn’t to say that socialware is the ultimate and single focus of the DAO. We should always be using our social infrastructure to enable us to create new trustware infrastructure.
While I don’t think I should be the one to author this proposal, I do expect to contribute to it in whatever way I can. And so with that in mind, I’ve put together some components of a social DAO structure that are important to me as an ACX tokenholder.
Roles
Community moderation - this is more than making sure that folks speak appropriately in discord. To me, these are the people who will uphold the rules we’ve all agreed upon. That might mean doing things like keeping up with forum posts to help someone fix the format of a proposal, or leading a community call to review the results and efficacy of a social campaign. This group of individuals maintains the integrity and culture of Across across every platform
Dev Support - This is our protocol customer support. They’re the first point of contact for anyone that needs help using Across. In addition to being a technical resource, they also carry out some of the duties you’d typically assign to moderators. Dev support works with Risk Labs to make sure users get the best experience possible.
International language support - How do we bring the same level of experience to the international community? We should strive to break down the language barrier on the moderation and dev support front. Do we do this by having international mods + dev support, or maybe on-call translators?
Open Questions
Qualification - What’s the process by which someone earns a role with the DAO? How long will someone be able to hold a position before reevaluating? How do we evaluate performance? What does accountability look like?
Compensation - How do we value the work done by this social layer? For the people that have provided this service in the past, was their airdrop adequate compensation for the work done?
Expectations - How do we describe the necessary roles? For each role, what do we expect of those who hold the position? What is the work that they do? How do they do this work? Can we maximize both transparency and autonomy? How do we make sure we can improve upon these descriptions regularly?
Growth centered - How can we build a DAO structure that is modular enough to allow for growth opportunities? Can we prevent doing work that is likely to be broken down over time? How do we assess the way that our current needs compare to our perceived future needs?
My hope is that someone (or a small group) might take on the challenge of answering some of these hard questions and putting together a starting point for our DAO Structure.
A side note: Since the launch of the protocol, we’ve had several robust community members that have helped to lay the foundation of our social layer. As we work towards a formal DAO Structure, I’ll plan on recommending folks for certain positions based on their past performances with similar contributions.
I think a good direction would be to form a council that makes decisions around compensation to contributors. Given the state of the market we should be conservative with treasury funds while still paying out for needed contributions. In my opinion, council members should be required to have ACX holding to ensure they have aligned goals. We should have a combination of those who fill roles and are evaluated every quarter and those who are working on a specific task and being paid to do so. Would probably be nice to have some Risk Labs team members on the council if they have the time.
Thank you for putting all of this together @Britt , I think we can build a proper road map with the things aligned here, we can take each of the areas that need work and start building on them by having calls (maybe weekly, depending on everyone else’s time frame ) we can start a doc and address all ideas tabled, i can help with documentation on the calls and we can ask the neccessary questions and agree on things to move forward. What do you guys think?
Awesome @Britt
What do we think of a leadership role which would be a combination of moderator and also doing mainly outreach to get us integrated with other protocols and creating a higher engagement for social awareness and being able to identify new products Across can use and be part of?
@TheRealTuna_Across The council idea is an interesting one that I’ve been seeing more of in the space. Do you have any inspiration that you could draw from to add more details to this idea? I think that the more there is to discuss, the more people will be able to wrap their heads around the idea.
@Mide I think that having proper documentation here will be a key to success. Thank you for offering to facilitate that part of the process.
@nithin_shylendra This could be an interesting idea - definitely worth having more discussion around it.
It sounds to me like this is an Ambassador + moderator role. And while it’s not inherently obvious to me that this role needs to exist as a combination role, it could be necessary in the same way that our Dev Support team acts as Technical support + moderators. Maybe in order to be an effective ambassador you need to also be competent as a moderator.
I think what you’re describing here might lead to an outcome where any leadership position also includes some obligatory moderation duties. This suggests to me that our moderation model would be more of a culture than a job, which could also end up being a good thing.
I envision a council that can be voted in or out by the token holders that makes some decision surrounding compensation, grants, roles, managing discord, treasury strategizing and many other duties. In the past I have seen several DAO’s turn into too much of a free for all with everyone whipping up content and NFT’s and expecting payment for things that sometimes weren’t necessary for the growth of the protocol. The way I picture it the council would custody a small amount of funds at a time and make quarterly funds requests from the DAO in order to pay out compensation and grants. Having Risk Labs members on the council would be important to ensure a strong relationship between the community and the developers behind Across. The council works for the community and if the community is unhappy they can choose to halt funding.
Suggest to use Deworks / Rep3 for bounty . Let the Task be put across in the Deworks . The compensation can be given at the end of the month after the work submissions are done in the system. This will be fair for the community and avoids giving freebies to everyone. This gives an opportunity for people who wants to really take up the task and get the work done.
Moderators can take up the work of transcription as we have got AI/ Other tools which will automatically transcript the calls into written format , thereby documenting it.
Yes absolutely, maybe call it a lead ranger whose main goal is to build relationships with useful protocols which would have a positive impact on Across and make use of new and upcoming products in the web3 space that would benefit Across by increasing its volume, social engagement levels and LP.
thanks for the awesome information, my issue has been fixed. Let the Task be put across in the Deworks . The compensation can be given at the end of the month after the work submissions are done in the system. Having Risk Labs members on the council would be important to ensure a strong relationship between the community and the developers behind Across.