Community Support DAO Governance Proposal

CommunitysupportDAO.md

Community Support DAO Governance Proposal

Proposal: Allocate 60,000 OSMO from the community pool to a community multisig address to be spent on bootstrapping and managing the Osmosis community support DAO

The DAO will be controlled by a 3-of-5 community multisig. The admins of this multisig will be:

• Michael Barbera (TG @MikeBarb)
• Dennis Kim (TG @SJ_DK)
• Edwin Hartman (TG @DynamicManic)
• Justin M (TG @jm124578)
• Kevin Dizzle (TG @kevindizzle)

Every three months, the DAO will produce a transparency report detailing the use of funds in the previous quarter. The report is expected to state the amount of funds spent in the quarter, and for what purpose they were used. See sample-transparency-report.png included in this gist as an example of what is expected.

Initially, the DAO will assemble a team to manage channels specifically for Osmosis support issues. This team will be responsible for creating and maintaining a Telegram channel specifically for any technical problems or questions that Osmosis users might be having. The DAO will also provide support to Twitter users experiencing difficulty with Osmosis. Furthermore, the DAO will use funds for training new support staff members.

Over time, the DAO will spearhead more community-run initiatives and provide an organized process through which community pool funds can be allocated and dispersed. The DAO will eventually become informal community leadership regarding protocol governance. DAO members can help other community leaders formulate ideas for how to improve Osmosis and collaboratively draft and submit these proposals. In particular, the DAO will assume a leadership role in facilitating regular discussions about updating pool rewards and submitting proposals to this end.

This team will help increase decentralization in Osmosis by putting the community in charge of key operations and distributing OSMO back to community members who help onboard more users through technical support and general education. The DAO will set a precedent not just for Osmosis but the overall DeFi industry. This proposal is the first of its kind among DeFi protocols.

In coming years, the DAO will require additional funds to continue operating. The Osmosis community can allocate new funds to the DAO through future governance proposals.

sample-transparency-report.png

https://gist.github.com/johnpatten1/182dfb0b12d1b68212a24a7f0bcb94fc#gistcomment-3902871

THIS is how it's done. Proper project management at work. People keep asking what we want from this proposal and you hit it on the head, but for some reason, they are still being stubborn and don't see why we didn't accept their 2% of an idea. For those trying to make future use of the community pool, this is the minimum standard. Thanks for the write-up!

Hi all,
Thank you @ronnydobbs for taking the time to engage in conversation with everyone. Your explanations so far have already provided clarity.

Osmosis is a wonderful platform, and what's even better is that there are volunteers who are trying to help support and broaden our community. Bravo!

Now, it seems you volunteers have had enough volunteering and would like to be compensated for your efforts. Makes sense.
In regard to Prop # 39, I see two large problems:

1. The budget outweighs the value added.
2. There is little-to-no transparency for your plan.

I do appreciate your efforts, and therefore would like to explain the above points.

1. The budget outweighs the value added

Simply put, Osmosis launched only a few months ago. It's terrific you all are helping the community in telegram channels, but:

1. Osmosis is pretty straight-forward and easy to use. Most people can pick it up without community support.
2. The budget you have outlined is very expensive for community service roles. It appears you are based in New York, which makes you one of the most expensive humans on the planet, but even so, the budget you have proposed is almost double the average for "community support specialist"
3. For this price, it is more beneficial for the Osmosis team to use the money to hire 1-3 senior developers and add more features to the platform.

2. There is little-to-no transparency for your plan.

So far you have provided an 8-row workbook screenshot and asked for approx $409,000 USD.

Imagine walking into a board room full of investors and asking them for $400k and providing the screenshot above.
You are essentially doing that now - all of us love Osmosis, some of us have participated in the Telegram group, but most of us are not familiar with you, and it appears as if five random humans are asking for money and promising to spread the hype as much as possible.

It would behoove you and future Osmosis propositions to put together a formal paper with the following structure:

1. Cover page with appropriate contact details (not just usernames on github)
2. Abstract
3. Introduction
4. Pros
5. Cons (unbiased) - even possibly adding sources and snippets from opponents for credibility
6. Links and timeline

Side note: it would also be nice to have a standard template for proposal texts (for example, a mandatory contact and links section)

Since you are asking to form a DAO (although, it's not really decentralized, so it's more of just asking for money), it's common in the professional world (this includes DeFi) to include a detailed plan, outlining your activities for investors to critique. This ties the amount of money you are asking for with actionable metrics or Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)

I have taken the time and put together an example quarterly report for your proposal. Please have a look now.

You will see in cell D52 that the hourly salary per employee comes out to around $39/hour. From a return on investment standpoint, this means that each employee should bring at least $39 of value to the Osmosis platform per hour.
How do you plan to do this exactly?

By calculating the number of messages in Telegram, Reddit, etc., we can essentially boil down the cost of each user ("Customer Acquisition") such that it becomes clear if we are wasting our time talking about Osmosis, or spending our time building a better Osmosis.

Conclusion

I encourage readers to vote "no"

• I appreciate your volunteering efforts, but this is an amateur proposal and it tarnishes your credibility.
• If this proposal passes, I fear the credibility of Osmosis Governance will also be impacted.
• If you would like to be compensated for your efforts - ask for donations (use your OSMO wallet addresses!) or look into options like Brave Browser tipping
• If the proposition passes, I would still expect a detailed quarterly report and more effort.

I hope you don't take offense to how this post is written. I hope it's clear by the time I put into building the spreadsheet that I also care very much about the platform. We simply need to set appropriate standards such that the future becomes brighter.

Thank you. Noone could've put this together better than this. Just registered to say thank you.

@Atricoz comment echoes my thoughts to a t. I really don't like how this proposal was approached, at all. Hard no here, but I help multiple people on telegram a day too so if this passes I also expect to be paid! lol

Hard no. This is only the "downpaymennt" in their mind, and the actual budget request/demand will come later.

The DAO will eventually become informal community leadership regarding protocol governance.

Why are we giving that to tech support?

The proposal failed by 21.8%. 36.8% yes. 47.8% no + 10.8 no with veto. So, we got the message. Despite being rough around the edges and too vague for some, 9,133,759.716287 still backed it.

Your point is 100% true and 100% false. It's true in that "This is only the "downpaymennt" in their mind". No one thinks this would solve community support permanently. Most funding, especially for us to multi-sign on hiring admins, goes to labor. It's funding a sprint to start bootstrapping solutions with a massively simplified scope: 60k OSMO runway. Fix every damn major problem you can anticipate emanating from new customer support admin outward.

That's it.

Go to the community – as you have been – to find the best ideas, sign off on them. We'll all see the results in real time. In the chats of various platforms. On d'apps and portals. Every tx is on-chain. Summarize in report and demonstrate results in a way that the community says, let's keep going. Or not.

Saying, "the actual budget request/demand will come later" is false. This is the budget. When it runs out, the community decides whether they want to keep funding admins, scaling solutions, or not.

I did not draft the proposal. I did not provide input on the proposal. I was asked if I'd lend my expertise and gumption to helping us gather community opinions and gauge problems to fund solutions in anticipation of the onslaught of new users coming in with e-money, terra assets, etc. in the coming weeks.

I said yes because I've tried to say yes to Osmosis and what the team is doing, based on the results they've demonstrated. They reached out to these five community members based on the results they've demonstrated.

Guess what? I think they did the right thing by putting this out -- even if it was in an imperfect state. It's jumpstarted the conversation and stirred up a ton of objections and common sense concerns. I'm confident we can get to a minimum viable product vis-a-vis a proposal for this mission on the next round.

Here's where I'd like to defend. John P. saying "The DAO will eventually become informal community leadership regarding protocol governance." I think this is his and the Osmosis' team's vision and hope for a DAO, not necessarily even these five multi-sig members. Although I think he did have this much confidence in these members and was trying to express that.

I believe leadership from a community's perspective and will is earned through demonstrable results and confidence over time. There may have been a disconnect, especially because we're growing so fast. Community is so siloed into different chambers across channels that the names in this multi-sig might as well be characters from Sesame Street for all you know. I get that.

But I think it's a reasonable vision, over time, to believe that the community will want to approve of some of its members to oversee a DAO treasury that continues to do the work of signing off on funding excellent support admins and projects. I'd presume the framework for how to appoint, elect, expand, re-shape, or tweak members and their roles in this model will evolve. But getting everyone to agree on spending the first uOSMO without a nudge like this could take months? Years?

And, John and the Osmosis team didn't just pick this group of people randomly or lightly. They vetted. Have you trusted their decisions and the performance of who they've chosen to work with so far? Is the product to your liking? Do you think they would make a massive mistake in assigning intermediary roles to all 5 of the multisig members? Hell, only 3 need to agree. I don't. But we all have different risk aversion.

I think this point from Dev on the Osmosis team nails my thinking on the paradigm we should use for bootstrapping ways to activate the Community Pool for the good of the community for this and other "start-up" DAO endeavors:

"I primarily want to make sure were not letting great transparency (with high logistical overhead, and privacy concerns0 get in the way of something with good enough transparency and lots more time to dedicate toward the actual desired task. Also I think transparency needs scale up as the DAO controls greater percentages of the pools funds. For context, I'm generally viewing 60k osmo as .2% of the pools funds, since the airdrop clawback will 5x the pool supply e.g. I'd rather have 10% less transparency, and 50% more DAO member time / mental cycles freed up to figure out how and where to effectively spend those funds." https://discord.com/channels/798583171548840026/889774379716710400/890812735653302322

Hopefully a Community Support DAO will get your approval in the future.

Hi all,
Thank you @ronnydobbs for taking the time to engage in conversation with everyone. Your explanations so far have already provided clarity.

You're welcome! I'm happy to take some time to engage in conversation.

What I really want to do is sign off on paying and onboarding new admin staff and other funding initiatives that get ahead of the massive influx of users who will flood into the Zone with assets from Terra, ETH and BTC.

And we've all learned so much from the reactions to this proposal. I hope we can count on your support when an amended one takes shape.

My major concern is that you said my explanations had provided clarity. But then you failed to comprehend them. And then you ran with a patently false premise.

Did you really just miss when I said: "We've been told multisig member pay for work done won't come from this proposed budget"? Or how the multi-sig members were "going to be compensated with a one-time grant from the strategic reserve" which was a decision generously made by Sunny to tap the Osmosis Dev's own fund?

As to your last point, I don't take offense to your writing style at all. We're both laying down walls of text in this thread!

However, by the end you seem to be implying that I devised and wrote this proposal. I did not. I agreed to approve of txs from a DAO wallet to pay community-hired support admins and other such expenses described – perhaps with too little detail – in the 2nd paragraph of the proposal. I accepted that as a volunteer role.

Please refer to https://gist.github.com/johnpatten1/182dfb0b12d1b68212a24a7f0bcb94fc#gistcomment-3904102 for my particular level of involvement in crafting the proposal itself. At the bottom of that post is what think is an excellent rationale from one of the Osmosis developers for why they wanted and pushed for this original proposal, and felt an approach perhaps more like yours could be warranted for a larger spend than 0.2% of the pool.

And, even though your mistaken premise led you down a path of false assumptions, I do appreciate the thoughtfulness, care for detail, and consideration you've poured into this post. For what it is, your sample transparency report looks rock solid.