Bankless DAO Success "Flywheel"

Bankless DAO Success "Flywheel"

Background: Intlcapitalist - Co-founder and CEO in Web 2.0. Intraguild Marketing Coordinator at BanklessDAO. Polygon Advocate. Member of the Secret Society of Whales NFT Club. TwoEggs - Bizdev Ninja at BanklessDAO. Startup founder, exec at VMware, McKinsey, prof at Haas, INSEAD.
 
Status: 10/24/21 edit by Twoeggs. For review by Intlcapitalist.
 
Next steps:
Assess Daolationships & other Bankless guild - how well do we follow these best practices?
What are key metrics for a healthy DAO? Does DAO Dash have any answers? Could we identify key metrics, then apply best practices and see if they improve?
 
Scope of work: develop a set of community management solutions that can help Bankless harness the power of their communities. Identify and leverage Bankless DAO best practices, including Bankless DAO products (such as the Degen Discord bot) and services (such as setting up and managing processes to recruit and onboarding DAO users). Initially test and refine these best practices within Bankless, with idea to offer "DAO-Ops" product offerings to other DAOs.
  • Attract: social media outreach that tells a compelling story, attracts people with the right skills and cultural fit for the DAO, sets realistic expectations.
  • Activate: process that creates meaningful, right-sized work to help new community members come up to speed, feel a sense of accomplishment and gain credibility.
  • Retain: regular formal assessments of member contributions with a particular focus on providing opportunities for new members to demonstrate skills. Continuously evaluate community activity, health, satisfaction, identify areas for improvement (retrospective)
 
notion image
Attracting DAO Members
  • Social media outreach that tells a compelling story, attracts people with the right skills and cultural fit for the DAO, is realistic about the requirements and rewards for participation.
  • Talent sourcing: finding good people is a constant problem. Having a strong brand through podcasts (e.g., Bankless), blogs, twitter and Instagram is critical to attract talent.
  • Have clear examples of the skills needed by each guild is important so people can tell where they are needed.
  • Process to create a positive set of initial experiences, quickly identify and engage new members with valuable skills and good culture fit.
  • Discord channel design is important. Most new people "poke around" for 15-30 minutes - if they can't get inspired and figure out how to get involved during that time, they won't stay.
    • #start-here: educates people on how to introduce themselves and get engaged
    • #first-quest or #get-involved provides opportunities for new members to contribute
    • #hype_and_recognition: enables leaders to recognize contributions and tip members
    • #bounty_board: enables members to self select projects that appeal to them
    • #mental_health, #no-stupid-questions: personal issues, noob questions, make friends
  • Publish calendars and meeting notes for each guild to allow newcomers to learn by lurking. Proof of attendance POAPs for attending meetings can be incentive for new members.
  • Community calls should have clear agendas and be run by strong communicators who run keep presenters on track. A lively community chat during the call can also be motivating.
  • Have project management on Notion that allows new people to see what is going on and ideally tag themselves to indicate their interest in helping out with a particular project.
  • Leaders should use tipping as a way to make new members feel special while motivating existing members to stay engaged.
Activating DAO Members
  • Immediate activation: need a seamless pipeline between recruiting, onboarding and activation. Each guild should have greeters who make personal contact with new members.
  • Process to create meaningful, bite-sized work to help new community members come up to speed, feel a sense of accomplishment and gain credibility. These can include note-taking, being responsible for welcoming other newcomers, reviewing and editing existing docs.
  • Discord can quickly become a high noise communication channel, the key is having community managers and channel owners to keep things organized and civil.
  • Communication tools
    • Internal wiki (Notion): serves as a good internal wiki for the DAO. Each guild can start organizing their documents here.
      • Notion GANTT Charts: Timeline view gives a really nice overview of project roadmaps. It's far superior to Google Calendar.
      • Notion Kanban Boards: This is a productivity / project management tool that allows you to see what needs to be done for a project at a glance.
    • External blog (Medium): for publishing important generated content. This empowers everyone to write for the DAO and be published.
    • Google Docs: is useful for word processing as most writers are accustomed to it.
    • Proofing (Grammarly): Premium is worth the money. DAOs are global and we have lots of non-native English speakers collaborating - this helps level the playing field.
    • Social media (Twitter, Instagram): important outreach tools to build brand and attract newcomers whose interests are aligned with the DAO.
  • Meeting Tools
    • Sesh Bot: is a useful Discord plugin that allows people to RSVP to an event by clicking an emoji and getting meeting invite placed on their calendar.
    • Lettuce Meet: Super Simple scheduling tool for people to select their availability across timezones for meetings.
  • DAO Ops Tools
    • DAO Bounties (Degen): a DAO tool from Bankless that manages bounties, automates POAP distribution, retrieves documents from Notion.
    • DAO Dashboard (DAO Dash): a DAO health monitoring dashboard, tracking areas like engagement, governance, engagement and compensation.
    • Gnosis Safe: Each guild has a multi-sig wallet. The BanklessDAO Treasury also has their own decision making comittee that is elected.
    • Snapshot: The top decentralized voting system. DAO Members spin up proposals and we vote on them all the time.
Retaining DAO Members
  • Regular formal assessments of contributions with particular focus on providing opportunities for new members to demonstrate skills
  • Need clear performance management and off-boarding/rage-kick policies to let go of underperforming people. This is particularly important for people with access to passwords:
    • Web site & social media passwords - who manages information such as the Twitter or Instagram login? Who gets access? How is that access rescinded?
    • Multi-sig roles - how to add and remove people from a multi-sig wallet?
  • Ombuds for members: DAO needs to have an impartial and confidential way for community members to address concerns that may arise while participating in the DAO.
  • DAO compensation: bounties can provide compensation to members for specific projects, while Coordinape allows members to allocate contribution rewards across the guild.
  • Taxation: DAO should provide high level guidence for members about how to handle DAO compensation (e.g., 1099 consulting requirements in US).
  • Mentoring: being part of a DAO is different than working for a corporation; DAOs aren't optimizing for output - they are optimizing for collective value. DAOs should have enough members so people can participate and still have ample time to take care of their health.
  • Clubs for passion projects: DAOs have a collective brainpower and energy that can help power passion projects for members, such as NFT or token investing. These can have an important effect on retention.
  • Continuous improvement: regularly evaluate community activity, health, satisfaction, identify areas for improvement (retrospective)
Implementing DAO-Ops at Bankless and other DAOs
This describes an approach to apply these DAO operations (DAO-Ops) best practices across Bankless. Ultimately this could be offered as a service to other DAOs
Assessment [Skills needed: would require Bankless member with skills to review another DAO against Bankless best practices. Tools needed: requires a Bankless best practices checklist]
  • Review DAO effectiveness at attracting, activating, and retaining members.
  • Propose process changes to bring DAO into alignment with Bankless DAO best practices, including process improvements, tool selection and configuration.
Setup [Skills needed: would require several Bankless member with platform skills in specific tools. Tools needed: requires a Bankless tools setup guide. ]
  • Initial setup for DAO of key communications and management platforms
    • Group Collaboration (Discord): set up and configure Discord channels. Install bots, including identity (collab.land), bounties (Degen), scheduling (Sesh), voting (Snapshot)
    • Wiki (Notion): set up and configure standard docs for each guild, including charter, roles descriptions, calendar, meeting agendas, projects,
    • Analytics (DAO Dash): set up and configure dashboards to visualize community engagement, health, governance, compensation.
    • Social media: creating effective posting and activation programs for Twitter, Instagram
  • Training for operating key DAO tools
Operations [Skills needed: ops support for Degen, DAO Dash. Tools needed: documentation for Degen, DAO Dash products]
  • Ongoing management of DAO operations - identify issues/alerts from DAO Dash, Discord analytics
  • Support for Bankless products Degen, DAO Dash
Bankless DAO Success "Flywheel"

Bankless DAO Success "Flywheel"

Background: Intlcapitalist - Co-founder and CEO in Web 2.0. Intraguild Marketing Coordinator at BanklessDAO. Polygon Advocate. Member of the Secret Society of Whales NFT Club. TwoEggs - Bizdev Ninja at BanklessDAO. Startup founder, exec at VMware, McKinsey, prof at Haas, INSEAD.
 
Status: 10/24/21 edit by Twoeggs. For review by Intlcapitalist.
 
Next steps:
Assess Daolationships & other Bankless guild - how well do we follow these best practices?
What are key metrics for a healthy DAO? Does DAO Dash have any answers? Could we identify key metrics, then apply best practices and see if they improve?
 
Scope of work: develop a set of community management solutions that can help Bankless harness the power of their communities. Identify and leverage Bankless DAO best practices, including Bankless DAO products (such as the Degen Discord bot) and services (such as setting up and managing processes to recruit and onboarding DAO users). Initially test and refine these best practices within Bankless, with idea to offer "DAO-Ops" product offerings to other DAOs.
  • Attract: social media outreach that tells a compelling story, attracts people with the right skills and cultural fit for the DAO, sets realistic expectations.
  • Activate: process that creates meaningful, right-sized work to help new community members come up to speed, feel a sense of accomplishment and gain credibility.
  • Retain: regular formal assessments of member contributions with a particular focus on providing opportunities for new members to demonstrate skills. Continuously evaluate community activity, health, satisfaction, identify areas for improvement (retrospective)
 
notion image
Attracting DAO Members
  • Social media outreach that tells a compelling story, attracts people with the right skills and cultural fit for the DAO, is realistic about the requirements and rewards for participation.
  • Talent sourcing: finding good people is a constant problem. Having a strong brand through podcasts (e.g., Bankless), blogs, twitter and Instagram is critical to attract talent.
  • Have clear examples of the skills needed by each guild is important so people can tell where they are needed.
  • Process to create a positive set of initial experiences, quickly identify and engage new members with valuable skills and good culture fit.
  • Discord channel design is important. Most new people "poke around" for 15-30 minutes - if they can't get inspired and figure out how to get involved during that time, they won't stay.
    • #start-here: educates people on how to introduce themselves and get engaged
    • #first-quest or #get-involved provides opportunities for new members to contribute
    • #hype_and_recognition: enables leaders to recognize contributions and tip members
    • #bounty_board: enables members to self select projects that appeal to them
    • #mental_health, #no-stupid-questions: personal issues, noob questions, make friends
  • Publish calendars and meeting notes for each guild to allow newcomers to learn by lurking. Proof of attendance POAPs for attending meetings can be incentive for new members.
  • Community calls should have clear agendas and be run by strong communicators who run keep presenters on track. A lively community chat during the call can also be motivating.
  • Have project management on Notion that allows new people to see what is going on and ideally tag themselves to indicate their interest in helping out with a particular project.
  • Leaders should use tipping as a way to make new members feel special while motivating existing members to stay engaged.
Activating DAO Members
  • Immediate activation: need a seamless pipeline between recruiting, onboarding and activation. Each guild should have greeters who make personal contact with new members.
  • Process to create meaningful, bite-sized work to help new community members come up to speed, feel a sense of accomplishment and gain credibility. These can include note-taking, being responsible for welcoming other newcomers, reviewing and editing existing docs.
  • Discord can quickly become a high noise communication channel, the key is having community managers and channel owners to keep things organized and civil.
  • Communication tools
    • Internal wiki (Notion): serves as a good internal wiki for the DAO. Each guild can start organizing their documents here.
      • Notion GANTT Charts: Timeline view gives a really nice overview of project roadmaps. It's far superior to Google Calendar.
      • Notion Kanban Boards: This is a productivity / project management tool that allows you to see what needs to be done for a project at a glance.
    • External blog (Medium): for publishing important generated content. This empowers everyone to write for the DAO and be published.
    • Google Docs: is useful for word processing as most writers are accustomed to it.
    • Proofing (Grammarly): Premium is worth the money. DAOs are global and we have lots of non-native English speakers collaborating - this helps level the playing field.
    • Social media (Twitter, Instagram): important outreach tools to build brand and attract newcomers whose interests are aligned with the DAO.
  • Meeting Tools
    • Sesh Bot: is a useful Discord plugin that allows people to RSVP to an event by clicking an emoji and getting meeting invite placed on their calendar.
    • Lettuce Meet: Super Simple scheduling tool for people to select their availability across timezones for meetings.
  • DAO Ops Tools
    • DAO Bounties (Degen): a DAO tool from Bankless that manages bounties, automates POAP distribution, retrieves documents from Notion.
    • DAO Dashboard (DAO Dash): a DAO health monitoring dashboard, tracking areas like engagement, governance, engagement and compensation.
    • Gnosis Safe: Each guild has a multi-sig wallet. The BanklessDAO Treasury also has their own decision making comittee that is elected.
    • Snapshot: The top decentralized voting system. DAO Members spin up proposals and we vote on them all the time.
Retaining DAO Members
  • Regular formal assessments of contributions with particular focus on providing opportunities for new members to demonstrate skills
  • Need clear performance management and off-boarding/rage-kick policies to let go of underperforming people. This is particularly important for people with access to passwords:
    • Web site & social media passwords - who manages information such as the Twitter or Instagram login? Who gets access? How is that access rescinded?
    • Multi-sig roles - how to add and remove people from a multi-sig wallet?
  • Ombuds for members: DAO needs to have an impartial and confidential way for community members to address concerns that may arise while participating in the DAO.
  • DAO compensation: bounties can provide compensation to members for specific projects, while Coordinape allows members to allocate contribution rewards across the guild.
  • Taxation: DAO should provide high level guidence for members about how to handle DAO compensation (e.g., 1099 consulting requirements in US).
  • Mentoring: being part of a DAO is different than working for a corporation; DAOs aren't optimizing for output - they are optimizing for collective value. DAOs should have enough members so people can participate and still have ample time to take care of their health.
  • Clubs for passion projects: DAOs have a collective brainpower and energy that can help power passion projects for members, such as NFT or token investing. These can have an important effect on retention.
  • Continuous improvement: regularly evaluate community activity, health, satisfaction, identify areas for improvement (retrospective)
Implementing DAO-Ops at Bankless and other DAOs
This describes an approach to apply these DAO operations (DAO-Ops) best practices across Bankless. Ultimately this could be offered as a service to other DAOs
Assessment [Skills needed: would require Bankless member with skills to review another DAO against Bankless best practices. Tools needed: requires a Bankless best practices checklist]
  • Review DAO effectiveness at attracting, activating, and retaining members.
  • Propose process changes to bring DAO into alignment with Bankless DAO best practices, including process improvements, tool selection and configuration.
Setup [Skills needed: would require several Bankless member with platform skills in specific tools. Tools needed: requires a Bankless tools setup guide. ]
  • Initial setup for DAO of key communications and management platforms
    • Group Collaboration (Discord): set up and configure Discord channels. Install bots, including identity (collab.land), bounties (Degen), scheduling (Sesh), voting (Snapshot)
    • Wiki (Notion): set up and configure standard docs for each guild, including charter, roles descriptions, calendar, meeting agendas, projects,
    • Analytics (DAO Dash): set up and configure dashboards to visualize community engagement, health, governance, compensation.
    • Social media: creating effective posting and activation programs for Twitter, Instagram
  • Training for operating key DAO tools
Operations [Skills needed: ops support for Degen, DAO Dash. Tools needed: documentation for Degen, DAO Dash products]
  • Ongoing management of DAO operations - identify issues/alerts from DAO Dash, Discord analytics
  • Support for Bankless products Degen, DAO Dash