Thanks for posting this @kyle - I appreciate the thinking here and want to comment on a few points and raise some questions.
Community engagement
My recent post on what MMM has learned re: community engagement details the “need to better define personas and the communities we want to cultivate” and other needs as they relate to clarifying and expanding our community engagement efforts.
It was my personal opinion that the two groups you outlined here i.e., “a community of developers who want to build on our protocols, and a community of regen maxis who want to help us fund public goods” are the communities we want to actively put resources towards.
However, how the second camp (“regen maxis who want to help us fund public goods”) is distinguished and engaged with is very ambiguous.
After conducting community research late S15 & early s16, we’re currently unsure how large this group actually is. Moreover, it was first hypothesized that donors would fall into this camp but recent research done by @umarkhaneth has made us think twice about that initial assumption. Dare I share an unpopular hypothesis: the majority of donors mostly fall into the camp of “friends of grantees” and “airdrop farmers”. If this is the case, how might it impact our community growth strategy? Might we invest more or less into category creation (i.e., green-pilling ppl)
I’m with you in your thinking that the majority of grantees are beneficiaries of our program vs. community members - some grantees care about (and will work towards) Gitcoin’s success but most are understandably focused on building their own projects.
All that to say, MUCH more thinking and strategy building needs to be done on the community front and I’m curious what the DAO’s appetite to fund said needs are (especially in a bear market). I think if we built a DAO strategy that clearly outlines how community engagement intends to serve our essential intents, we could make a strong case for it, but, as outlined in my post linked above, I do feel there is some foundational work needed to be done to even get to a place where we might start to do productive imagining together.
Organization for the next era
I made a diagram to make more sense of your proposal:
There’s a lot to say on this as it relates to marketing functions. I want to preface the following by calling out that I’m aware that these proposed changes directly impact my work at the DAO–I did my best to assess this proposal with my “steward hat” on vs. my “MMM lead hat”.
My first question is: What do you hope to achieve with a re-org?
What does “narrow[ing] our focus to only the most critical of areas” hope to achieve?
Is it about cost-cutting?
Clarifying our strategic focus?
Enabling more seamless cross-functional support for our products?
Creating a better/easier budgeting process?
What I gathered from your post so far was:
Lmk if I missed anything that answers the above questions.
Personally, I like the overall direction of thin workstreams but, similar to @ceresstation, I’m left wondering if the proposed structure is the right approach.
Moreover, I have some hesitations around completely decentralizing a marketing function for a few reasons:
Composable scopes of work and freelance work @ MMM
The way MMM works is VERY different from the other workstreams. We are holocratic in nature, meaning our roles are modular/composable and even a bit fluid. Any given person on our team can hold multiple roles at any given time.
For instance, our content manager, Mathilda, is also managing the Gitcoin Alpha Round campaign–and therefore operating as an internal account manager to PGF atm. She is also our knowledgebase writer and content editor.
@garysheng has shifted his focus to passport marketing but also heavily consults as a content and social media strategist to the content team.
@alexalombardo is working on the brand evolution and is leading several brand-centred projects such as the website refresh.
We also have many part-time people working on very specific pieces of the overall marketing puzzle. For more of an insight to how it all works visit Who’s Who @ MMM
While not perfect, this composable approach has allowed us to be flexible in terms of the DAO’s needs as they continue to evolve (and quickly!). It has also allowed us to engage and build context with many p/t freelancers (which is a difficult feat as onboarding and building context takes a lot of time and guidance atm).
In order to do this, MMM has built out our WS’s knowledgebase so that it’s easily navigated by new contributors. I feel that a lot of work needs to be done make the DAO’s information more accessible before we can truly be permeable and permissionless.
Brand, Design & Creative
In your proposal, I feel there is a bit of context missing on this aspect of our work. We’ve been working to develop a brand strategy that will propel us into the future and maintain our position as a relevant player in web3. “Gitcoin’s Brand” is continuously cited as one of our major strengths–not directly investing in brand by staffing a least one overseer (even if only p/t) feels risky to me.
For added context, our brand strategy should directly ladder up to organizational objectives (and continue to recalibrate based on market position) on an on-going basis as it is both impacted by and impacts product & program-related work-- given that, it does feel like a core function of the DAO vs. a composable one. Moreover, brand creative (i.e., our visual identity and everything that we design for an external-facing audience) directly ladders into brand strategy. As does content creation.
All that said, @birdsoar is working on developing design guardrails so that community creators (i.e., bounty hunters) can better align to the overall strategy and visual identity but we’re far from there.
And these guardrails and someone to oversee and vet official creations is needed. The quality and consistency of our designs have 10x’d since hiring skilled in-house designers vs. relying on bounties. Others may disagree but I feel that having a small core creative function is really important to maintain our brand legitimacy in the space.
So, if we did staff some ppl for creative functions, where would that role live in this proposed structure? It has been suggested that these functions (brand, design & content) could live under Grants Ops, BD or even Community–in order to make an assessment of those suggestions, I would love to explore the purpose of a re-org in order to make the case. If the ultimate goal is to keep WS small and lean, then I would be against the approach of nesting these functions within a specific workstream. Rather, I would suggest a slimmed-down version of MMM–or, rather, a potential spin up of a lean “Design & Creative” WS
Meaningfully Onboarding & Retaining Creatives
In my experience helping build the team @ MMM, it’s been incredibly difficult to source, retain and build a roster of talented creatives. We now have a team of skilled designers and writers who are willing to be paid in crypto, have built immense amounts of context and we can count on to get work done with incredibly quick turnaround times.
Solely relying on bounties (as we have in the past) has been a massive challenge for us (one that we seem to have now overcome with a few creatives on a seasonal retainer). I would hate to see us face old challenges that have already been solved for with the current model.
There’s probably more to say here but I will leave it with a tl;dr:
-
Community engagement has proven to be a complex undertaking. I feel we need to resource some foundational pieces (e.g., shared definitions, aligning on outcomes we’re collectively driving to with community and beyond, etc.) before we elaborate on who and how we nurture.
-
I’m unclear about what we want to achieve with a re-org and am willing to explore this possibility
-
If we go through the re-org as proposed, there are some major marketing functions (mostly creative functions that currently serve the entire DAO) that I feel will suffer under this structure.
-
MMM has a history of experimenting with composable scopes of work, project-based funding and bounties that I think our learnings should be considered when making this decision