[S15 Proposal - INTEGRATED] - DAO Ops Budget Request

📜 Proposals
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Updated 8/8/2022: The following proposal was edited to include Steward feedback, including formatting and language changes. The proposal was also edited to include additional OKRs for Community Experience and Community Governance. Additionally, one KR was removed from the Support initiative.

Essential Intent

During S15, DAO Operations will focus its initiatives on delivering results that support the following Essential Intents (EI) of the DAO:

  • DAO Organization
  • Financial Sustainability
  • Protocol Adoption
  • Program Success

TL;DR

Over the last 2 seasons, DAO Ops’ ambitions were focused on building a service-oriented team with the right expertise to advise and support our fellow workstreams. On the whole, those efforts are producing results, especially in the areas of cross stream strategic planning, budgeting and decision making. One notable example of this is CSDO’s adoption of the DAO’s Purpose and Essential Intents, a leadership and community process that was facilitated by DAO Ops.

In S15, we have scaled back some initiatives and teams (i.e., accounting, people operations, and support) in an effort to reduce costs, and focus our attention on the DAO’s most important core functions and pivot to a protocol future. We see our overarching priorities as twofold:

  1. Rebuild trust with workstreams by delivering results that are immediately helpful to them and the DAO as a whole, and
  2. Building a habit of accountability throughout DAO Ops that facilitates focused delivery of initiative goals.

Though this season’s budget cuts were taken out of necessity, we recognize this season as an opportunity to focus our attention on service excellence in a few areas.

Amount

DAO Ops will not request new funds from the DAO treasury to fund our workstream in S15. Instead, we will use the excess funds in our multisig to fund approximately $293K in total costs for the season. This total spend is 25% lower from the budget spent in S14, and 52% lower than the requested S14 budget. All surplus funds beyond our funding needs, representing roughly $270K USD, will be returned to the treasury.

Note: The GTC total will be adjusted based on the current market value at the time this proposal is moved to Tally. The vote will be to send the requested $USD amount in GTC at the lower of the current price or the 20 day moving average, whichever is lower.

Milestone Report

Legend

:green_circle: Success

:yellow_circle: Incomplete, will hit goal or priority change

:red_circle: Incomplete, will not hit goal

:black_circle: Canceled - out of workstream’s control

Initiative/Dept Objectives Past Season Value Delivered
Accounting & Finance :green_circle: Scale accounting operations ensure timely payments and treasury diversification within workstreams. - Onboarded Moonshot and PGF to budget and payment tools to support DAO-wide spend reporting.
Ensured 15% of DAO Ops S14 budget was traded into stables to manage volatility; advised interested workstreams on strategies.
(New): Increased the number of exchanges that have GTC listed.
Community Experience :yellow_circle: Streamline contributor onboarding process with clearer entry points, support CSDO, and set high standards for community management. New bi-weekly CSDO strategy call and updated weekly tactical (or ‘action’) call is improving the DAO’s executive decision making.
Fractionalized Community Lead role was filled by two existing contributors, saving time and money while also offering a strong result.
Community Governance :green_circle: Support steward participation via enhanced information flow. Updated budget proposal process, standardized workstream deliverables and (hopefully) reduced cognitive load for stewards.
Re-engagement of pledges for stewardship in the governance forum are fostering increased engagement, communication and context.
Tooling :green_circle: Improve community tooling, increase community adoption, service DAO infrastructure, and provide enhanced security. Created guidance and facilitated training sessions for new and existing contributors.
Tooling has completed the asset transfer from Holdings to the DAO.
Created additional permissions and processes to secure Notion, Discord, and GSuites.
Contributor tooling support occurs within 24 hours.
People Ops :green_circle: Improve the hiring experience, and provide clear, accessible People Ops guidance. Launched the People Ops Hub as an easy-to-find resource for forkable talent guidance to workstreams.
Published parental leave guidance.
Contributor work agreements are ready to sign.
New partnership with WorkDAO for employee benefits is in the final negotiation stage.
People Ops :green_circle: Scale the peer review and role documentation to support additional contributors. New framework for role documentation ensures that contributors consistently practice accountability to team mates and role definition in alignment with DAO needs.
As of S14, nearly 100% of core and trusted contributors received peer feedback.
Support :red_circle: Rebuild the user support team and improve its performance. Hired Support Lead mid-season.
Launched training series to professionalize service.
Updated and created new knowledge base articles.

Funds Spent to Date (current and projected)

During S14, DAO Ops spent an estimated $377K in S14. This estimate includes May and June actuals ($256K) and our projected spend for the month of July ($121K). We estimate roughly $750K USD is currently available to roll over into S15. This is in excess of our funding needed for the season.

Misses, Direction Changes, and Lessons Learned

In light of the broader market conditions, throughout S14, DAO Ops looked for ways to protect the DAO treasury from unnecessary spending. The result of those efforts was the addition of only one new hire instead of the three full-time hires projected at the beginning of the season. Some key learnings and changes in direction below:

  • Treasury Management Lead Hire: In S14, DAO Ops opted to prioritize treasury efforts currently in our control over hiring a new Treasury Lead.

  • Hiring & Onboarding Flow: We decided to put our onboarding efforts on hold while we evaluate and begin to define the impact we hope to make with the community onboarding experience (with other workstream partners). As a result, we did not onboard or track new community members through the existing onboarding flow. Our S15 community experience objectives are reflective of the time our team spent consulting our workstream partners to form a more inclusive and engaging community strategy.

  • Documented Accounting Guidance: Due in part to legal considerations and to not run afoul of money transmitter laws, published financial guidance will be put on hold until a time where the DAO has fulsome legal recommendation from counsel on the topic.

Season 15 Commitments

Initiative Commitments

Initiative Essential Intent Objectives Key Results
Community Experience DAO Organization, Protocol Adoption,Program Success Increase engagement and satisfaction among DAO Citizens interested in our grants program or grants protocol. KR1: Increase the average weekly percentage of engaged citizens on the DAO Citizens channels by 20%.
KR2: 50% reduction in requests to change Discord logic when compared to S14.
DAO Organization Develop a strong “Why” for community management initiatives that aligns with the DAO’s Purpose. KR1: Support the MMM community engagement strategy through weekly syncs, with insights from seasonal community management audits.
KR2: Identify and document the community and Discord needs of each workstream.
DAO Organization Continuing to improve how we work at CSDO level. KR1: Adopt a streamlined budget process ahead of S16.
KR2: Improve the quality of cross stream meeting processes, and the documentation of reviewed and adopted proposals.
Community Governance DAO Organization Improve community governance and steward engagement through simplified processes that streamline decision making for the largest GTC delegates. KR1: Create a clearly understood onboarding and incentivization process.
KR2: Launch a Governance Documentation Hub for new and existing stewards.
KR3: 80% of stewards and workstream leads view steward meeting structure, pacing and content favorably.
KR4: 80% of top stewards vote on 100% of formal S15 proposals.
People Ops DAO Organization Ensure contributors are in the right roles, and embrace a DAO-native hiring approach that further develops well supported contributors. KR1: 100% of core and trusted contributors have received a quarterly peer review.
People Ops DAO Organization Empower DAO contributors to grow and support our ImpactDAO and protocol development. KR1: Four or more workstreams receive compensation leveling recommendations from People Ops.
KR2: Provide GPC contributors comprehensive support transitioning from holdings to the DAO.
Tooling DAO Organization Ensure a coordinated and transparent software tooling approach. KR1: Deliver a recommendation for cost reductions based on a deep dive into all tools used by DAO.
KR2: Facilitate access to all control domain requests within 48 hours.
KR3: Ensure that all workstreams can use Notion as their primary tool for meeting notes and outward facing workstream description by end of season.
Support Program Success, Protocol Adoption Continue to implement processes that improve our grants rounds and supports our transition to a protocol-focused DAO. KR1: During GR15, support tickets (Discord+Email) are resolved within 20 hours (on average).
KR2: Current state of the Grants program and protocol development is reflected on KB within 10 business days of changes.
KR3: Deliver easily used data to grants round workstream partner post-GR15.

Budget Breakdown

Budget Category (or Initiative) Description Amount GTC Amount USD
Contributor Compensation Accounts for 3 months of compensation for core team who will be accountable for the success of DAO Ops and its initiatives. Includes 4 FT and 11 PT contributors. 83,877 $254,148
Professional Development Budget for 10 core contributors at $2K per person. 6,600 $19,998
OpEx Employment services through WorkDAO. 2,970 $9,000
The Ready Facilitation and Organizational Management Support 3,300 $10,000
60-day Reserves* Includes severance, parental leave and travel expenses totaling roughly $46K. The rest of reserves will be used for transition costs between seasons (i.e. delay in budget approval). 64,498 $195,431
Budget Request Subtotal Before Rollover 161,246 $488,577
S14 Rollover This is an estimation, based on current spot price. -247,525 -$750,000
Total Returned to DAO Treasury -86,279 -$261,423

Notes:
60-day reserves are calculated only against the contributor compensation and payroll related OpEx.

A denomination in dollar amount will be prioritized in budget proposals over GTC - if the spot price assumed at the time of posting ($3.03 on Aug. 8, 2022) this document on the forum changes between then and when the budget gets proposed on-chain, the GTC amount will be readjusted to reflect the USD amount above. GTC amounts are rounded values.

Team Composition

Full Time

  • Workstream Leads - Kris and Jodi

  • Support Lead - Rohan

  • Community Lead and Hiring Coordinator - Saf

Part Time*

  • Community Governance Lead - Shawn

  • Tooling Lead - Puncar

  • People Ops Coordinator - Sandy

  • Discord Manager and Scribe - Kyle J.

  • Support Coordinator - Yuki

Note:
In addition to the names listed above, the Support team currently has 6 part time contributors who provide support during grants rounds.

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![DO_S15|530x1000]](upload://375cqOZSZxBdZc30ENfJZrfUib6.png)
Visualization of the budget draft above. I intend to post these under each budget and keep them updated as proposals incorporate feedback and changes. Please reach out if you have any questions or input.

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Hi @Jodi_GitcoinDAO, hope you are doing well!

Got a few question over the budget request.

1- I can read that you will not request any budget for S15 and you are going to send back 270k into the treasury, what are the transaction fees for this specific amount to revert it back, did you made any simulation (Not sure how you will handle back this amount at this point, which tool are you using etc.?) And why are you not keeping it for S16 at this point?

2- Moving down in the draft, I see “Total Requested from Treasury” I’m a little bit confused here, are you requesting any funds or not for S15?

3- Since Loie she’s leaving the DAO, is there still a budget allocated to the People Ops part (Peer Review) or you are planning on onboarding a new contributor for this task specifically?

4- Close to 200k will be used for severance, parental leave and travel expenses?
Is there a way that we can break down these separately? Really curious to know and understand how much we are spending on each of those.

5- 1/4 of 80 contributor is 20, are you budgeting 2k each? This amount would be then 40k?

I understand this is simply a draft at this point, but I’m preparing my question for tomorrow in advance :slight_smile:

Thank you very much for your answers, really appreciate it!

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Hey @Sirlupinwatson thanks for the questions!

We haven’t dug into fees just yet, but in terms of process, the funds would be returned from our multisig to the DAO’s.

We are returning funds to the DAO’s treasury and updated the proposal language for clarity.

Yes, budget is allocated and Sandy who is an existing people ops contributor will be supporting this initiative.

Not quite. We’re just noting that we will be using a portion of our reserves to pay severance, parental leave, and cover any travel expenses that arise this season. Severance will cost $29K parental leave ~$7K, and we estimate about $10K in travel expenses. In total, those expense come to $46K, leaving about $149K in reserves.

This was a misstatement on our part. We’ve budgeted a total of $20K for professional development this season (same as last season). The funds will be used to reimburse up to 10 core contributors up to $2K. The budget narrative was edited to reflect reality. Thanks for catching it and looking forward our call later today.

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Thank you for the very clear write-up and for your work in improving overall DAO operations.

I was a little confused by the wording of the second Shared Cross Stream Commitment: " * Developing Gitcoin’s knowledge base with and evolving the support process to prepare for our protocol future with help from GPC."

As I understand it, this is preparing to support partners and other users of Grants 2.0 and passport for eg - by collaborating w/ GPC?

That one seems to me to both be really important and a bit vague as stated here so far.

One idea - not living in the streams here - would be to have processes set up that checklist releases from GPC (soft or hard gate) to ensure KB articles are updated for example. Or is that sort of thing already happening?

One meta piece of feedback for all of the write-ups is each summary could add at the beginning a context statement such as a bullet point or two:

  • DAO Ops = X people out of Y people in total across Gitcoin DAO; $X spending out of $Y spending in total across Gitcoin DAO.

Really clear write up and incredible the amount of work you and team are doing IMO.

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Hey Evan, thanks so much for your feedback here!
Some responses:

We agree with you that this is a bit vague and are considering to even take this out in our integrated proposal (going up on Monday), and integrate shared commitments in the various places, knowing that anything our workstream does is basically shared, as we facilitate all operational processes within the dao. This one specifically belongs under support, where it actually already is mentioned:

So we do have a process in place here, but it will be optimized over this coming season. More coming soon! :slight_smile:

This is a great suggestion, and we’ve been thinking in this direction.
We’ve done this exercise internally for this round during the budget preparation, while doing a peer evaluation. We did not count the people but we did know which part of the ‘pie’ we are representing, at least for these drafts.

To give you an idea of this, this is the current split. Only reason we did not share is because of time lack, so thx so much for asking.

image

image

Any other thoughts welcome and appreciate the feedback!

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Very nice proposal, and prescient to use existing reserves as opposed to requesting new funds.

One question – which I promise is not facetious – how does this…

…jive with the Ops team generally viewing all their past objectives (with exception of user support, which is not directly relevant to the above quote) as successes? Is there a disconnect between the Ops team’s quarterly objectives to what the workstreams perceive they need?

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Great to see the very first $0 request budget wise and money returning to the treasury! I am supportive of this level of awareness and mindfulness in expenditure. I also like the feedback integration and further clarifications on focus and priorities. It makes me extremely hopeful that S16 will be even better calibrated

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@Lunacat your question doesn’t read facetiously at all. I’d say though we generally delivered on our objectives, I think that in some cases, there was a misalignment in our approach to achieving them. And since the ends don’t justify the means, that overarching priority really comes down to delivering on the specific needs of workstreams and the DAO’s Essential Intent.

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I really appreciate the thoughtful approach to narrowing down to what matters most - and specifically how we will be focusing on supporting our Essential Intents.

I am supportive of the budget as proposed and I am interested to see what can still be accomplished in the areas where cuts were made.

This feels like the season that Support needs to shine. It has been a stumbling block for a couple seasons now. The focus on the KB is a great option. I don’t think hiring more people to support the platform and eventually protocol are what success looks like. Empowering the community to help support and fortified those folks with clear docs and support resources could go a long way.

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Hey @Jodi_GitcoinDAO I’m a bit late to the party, but I believe this KPI would be more impactful if we shifted the focus. Instead of aiming to increase average weekly engagement by 20%, what if we aimed to increase the percentage of engagement seen by all citizens by 20%?

To explain through examples (using hypothetical numbers), if we start with a current population size of 100 and an average of ten weekly engaged citizens (giving us a current engagement metric of 10%):

Currently we are aiming for a 20% increase in average weekly engagement, which is a metric that doesn’t account for population growth. If we have 100 citizens and ten are engaged, we aim to have 12 engaged citizens by the end of S15 regardless of how large our citizen population grows (a 20% increase on 10 gets us 12). Getting two more engaged citizens if we double our overall population is easy to achieve and would ultimately reflect a decrease in engagement (down to 6%)

I’m proposing we shift this KPI to “Increase the average weekly percentage of engaged citizens on the DAO Citizens channels by 20%.” With this, we can account for the growth of our community in addition to these specific engagement metrics. If our population size stays at 100, our end goal similarly stays at 12 engaged citizens. However, if our population size doubles, our new target will double to match. In a population size of 200, instead of aiming for 12 engaged citizens, we would now aim for 24 engaged citizens, providing that 12% engagement metric increase (up 20% from the hypothetical 10%).

To clarify definitions, we would consider the “overall population” as the target audience for the DAO Citizens channels / DAO vibes calls (which would be anyone with either the DAO Citizen or DAO Core role, as aligned with @safder)

The goal here is to ensure we scale our ambitions for engagement growth proportionally with our efforts to continue increasing the overall size of our community! I would love to hear other folk’s thoughts.

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I support this change, as discussed :slight_smile:

Thx for the thorough explanation kyle!

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@kylejensen the language now reflects the new framing. Thanks!

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I’m supporting this budget as the workstream is sending money back to the treasury. I have some concerns around this workstream that I would like to see addressed before S16 around the discussion of duplicative efforts with PGF Grassroots and MMM community engagement. I’d also want to see an improved milestone report with more strong efforts for executing on deliverables. The new metrics are well crafted and give me confidence that their focus will lead to better results this season.

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I am posting here mostly for technical reasons to hit the number of stewards required to take this to a vote.

But did read the proposal a bit and I really like seeing this

DAO Ops will not request new funds from the DAO treasury to fund our workstream in S15.

Also one question. you mentioned:

  • Onboarded Moonshot and PGF to budget and payment tools to support DAO-wide spend reporting.

But unless I misunderstand PGF still has their own accounting budget.

For accounting and HR (People Ops?) it would be nice to have a unified budget across the DAO.

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Overall I’m glad to see DAO Ops really focusing down on what is key, hopefully the adage “underpromise and overdeliver” will play out happily this season!

Good

  • returning money to the treasury is a first!
  • I’m really happy with DAO Ops supporting steward work. It has been much smoother since we’ve started, thank you @krrisis and @Jodi_GitcoinDAO !
  • the DAO citizen initiative is an interesting one. I’m glad to finally see some of these ideas discussed back in Nov’21 finally play out so kudos to @safder for getting this going
  • kudos to the team behind the work rallying the DAO around our purpose and essential intents. I’ve added these workshops and I must say that they have been helpful! Thank you @samspurlin for facilitating too

Can improve

  • what’s the key difference between DAO Visitor, DAO Applicant, and DAO Citizen? Also is there an idealised journey from someone new to Gitcoin to eventually contributing?
  • what has happened to Sobol? An initiative that I’m assuming has already been discontinued. Could we have some perspective on what happened here please?
  • has the onboarding flow changed? @safder I haven’t heard about onboarding calls in some time
  • curious about the conversations around WorkDAO and Opolis, legal cover is getting more important these days especially with :tornado:

Looking forward

  • Happy to be working closer with @safder (probably in conjunction with @Maxwell ) next season as we operationalise the transition of our grassroots efforts towards focusing on grantee engagement
  • I already do trust @krrisis quite a bit but I’m also looking forward to building more trust around DAO Ops’ work next season!
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I also support this budget request and have been happy to see the efforts DAOops put in to laser focus this season!

One very specific question that doesn’t impact how I will choose to vote - why is parental leave a separate line item in the budget? Wouldn’t this just be continuing to pay the agreed compensation of an existing contributor while they are out?

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Thanks for the support Lindsey!

There is no strong reason for this. We saw other workstream leads add travel expenses under reserves, and on my question on where to put potential severance fees and parental leave the use of reserves was also suggested. Because no work will really be done during this period by the contributor it made sense to add this to reserves for us.

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Thanks for the support lefteris!

This is correct - during the past season we supported the various workstream to set up their own accounting structure, with our help.

Thanks for this feedback. We still have some people ops tasks unified under DAO Ops but have minimized this because feedback from CSDO was that we should limit our efforts (less policies, more listening) and so for now we’ve decided to scale back, and listen. For accounting the cost per workstream should be fairly limited, and keeping this within the workstreams allows for more control and overview on who’s actually requesting payment for what, because the payment controller knows exactly what the team is working on. But also here, we stay open to increase our efforts again in the future if needed.

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Thank you for your support QZ!

On our points for improvement:

Saf and Kyle are continuing to map this out and have just started their check-ins with and audits of the various workstreams, where they can dive in deeper. But the tl;dr for these 3 roles are that they grant you level of access in discord.

  • Visitors see only support & townsquare.
  • Applicants are people who have indicated they want to become a more active member of the dao but still need to write their application.
  • Citizens are people who have introduced themselves and have been approved, they can now join our weekly dao vibes calls & citizens calls.
    More on the DAO Citizen role (beyond discord) can be found here

We do not have anything officially in our commitments on role documentation, as this was not indicated as a priority for this season. However, we will support the DAO here as part of our dao tooling efforts, and will normally be migrating everyone off of sobol into Notion. @puncar will be reaching out to the workstreams for this. The tl;dr on Sobol is that this is probably a too ambitious tool for the basic things we need, and given our limited budget and scaled down team, we will also scale down this project.

Onboarding now starts via the DAO Citizen role, which is a simplified process (see above).
We have a monthly call with anyone who applies, next to the weekly DAO Vibes. More to come for sure as we refine this in the coming weeks & months.

.Anyone can reach out to @sandy_gitcoinDAO for support on this - our focus will be most of all on PGF, coming from holdings, but we’re there to support anyone who needs guidance!

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