Gitcoin DAO - Workstream Accountability Flow

🤖 DAO Governance and Vision
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Summary

This proposal seeks to amend, improve and standardise the proposal process for Gitcoin DAO. The purpose of this standardisation attempt is to improve transparency, accountability and accessibility when it comes to proposal review processes.

Motivation

One of Gitcoin’s missions is to upgrade society’s capabilities to coordinate - with the hope of defeating coordination failure altogether.

As a constantly iterating and innovating force in the web3 ecosystem, improving the accessibility and transparency of DAO flows is the next level in better coordination. For our DAO ecosystem to flourish, it requires a mindful effort to improve on current tooling and to support better ways for DAOs at large to enable governance engagement and accountability across the board.

Current proposal framework

Proposals can vary broadly in their stated goals and requests.

*They may ask the community to endorse a specific policy and procedure (e.g. “Should Gitcoin Grants allow VC backed projects?”), or ask the community to build something (e.g. “Building a new software tool” or “Writing improved documentation”).

*They may have no funding requests attached, or make an explicit request for funding (e.g. “We would like to create a workstream focused on building a decentralized architecture for Gitcoin Grants”).

There is currently no formal template for proposals. This document aims to establish a standard template to facilitate review. The proposal also aims to align all Gitcoin DAO activity around quarterly dynamics for better alignment, contribution and transparency across the organism.

New (improved) proposal framework

All proposals should ideally follow the following format:

  1. A tl;dr section at the top of the proposal summarizing the main points. This is for increased transparency and a smoother decision making process.

  2. If applicable, a milestone report containing goals achieved during the previous quarter. The milestone report should include:

  • number of current contributors (marked as FT or PT)
  • funds spent to date - perhaps adopting some quarterly reporting?
  • any funds carrying over to the next quarter
  • notable achievements for the quarter
  • have the actions of the workstream brought back value into the DAO/treasury
  1. The flow of a proposal will still follow the steps laid out in the Gov process

These (and other) accountability metrics could form the basis of workstream health cards/reports that may serve not only as a catalyst for self improvement but as an opportunity to bring greater transparency, collaboration and accountability into the DAO ecosystem at large.

Standardisation does not aim to stifle creativity and originality, it merely aims to facilitate better and speedier delivery of information to promote better engagement in governance and participation mechanisms.

Example Proposal Template:

TLDR

Text of section goes here.

Milestone Report

Text of section goes here.

Proposal Body

Text of section goes here.

13 Likes
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This looks great to me, thanks for putting it together!

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I like this Simona. Additionally, I liked @tjayrush suggestion during the call to add the percentage of total treasury of the request.

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Approve of these amendments!

A great example set by @ceresstation in his newest budget proposal

Would be good to indicate which steps specifically are applicable here for proposals (it’s a massive doc you’re linking to :slight_smile: ) and have an integrated proposal template. Otherwise not sure if this is worth voting on?

Big fan of this

I think it would be good to really focus on very concrete objectives.
I’m a fan (slightly biased) of having very concrete objectives if it’s a budget proposal for a workstream. This also will help tremendously in defining measurable objectives for roles.
See objectives per initiative in this proposal.

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I think this ‘precentage of total’ thing could start out as a “suggested” part of the proposal. Otherwise, people might have to spend a lot of time trying to find this information out. But…it being there might help us focus on the need for such a number. Over time, it could become required, as I do think it’s super important.

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I like this flow, which is very helpful for steward to understand our workstreams.

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I think once this treasury dashboard becomes a DAO tool reality, I would see workstreams being able to calculate what the impact might be on overall treasury health

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I like the idea of standardizing the format of proposals. It will help both the proposal writer and the reviewers.

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:+1: Sounds good! Sounds good! :+1::+1:

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Accounting in crypto IS HARD!

I would suggest having a DAO Accountant that can support and standardize the accounting processes that all workstreams are using, while also helping people report the true status of their funds… It’s easy to forget about some funds that were moved to Polygon 2 months ago for that one guy’s payment (for example).

Lots of teams are great at what they do, but aren’t the best at accounting so might produce confusing documents or inaccurate reports.

If you want to go next level, you could have a Transparency Workstream, like TEC’s Transparency Working Group.

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That’s a very good suggestion.

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Love this. In our last proposal we added most of the items in this proposal so I think this is right on.

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@Pop I see a vote on Tally?

Is that needed? It’s not sending money anywhere… we can just take snapshot as the yes vote and then not pay $40-$200 in gas to signal support?

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Yeah - after discussion and review of the gov flow, it’s not really a structural change. Tally has a cancel option but it’s not been working for me so I am in touch with the Tally team to sort it out…

1 Like