Boys Club DAO V1: Launching our MVC

Authors:

• Parker Jay-Pachirat (DAO Ops Guild Co-Lead)
• Amy Boudreau (DAO Ops Guild Co-Lead)
• Lillian Johnson (DAO Ops Guild Contributor: April — June 2022)

Background:

Boys Club is a social club and community designed to welcome women and non-binary individuals in web3, with aligned incentives at the heart of everything we do. Our community attracts people across the spectrum of web3 experience, from those who have yet to set up their first wallet to crypto-native founders & operators who have been building in the space for years.

Recognizing that crypto and blockchain are reimagining how society functions at a base level, we envision a world where women and non-binary individuals are at the forefront of building new avenues for wealth distribution and creation, in turn mitigating the replication of existing inequalities in web2. We strive to elevate underrepresented communities, enabling them to not only participate, but shape the future of this multifaceted industry.

• We started Boys Club in November 2021. Since then, we’ve completed the Seed Club SC04 Accelerator Cohort, incepted 7 fully-functioning DAO working guilds, launched a podcast, sold out a merch line, produced 2 educational roadmaps, launched a mentor-mentee program to support crypto onboarding, and sold out of our first 2 NFT collections, launched this past month.
• Since our inception this November, we’ve been featured on the Bankless podcast and in major media outlets including The Atlantic, Vox, and Fast Company. We’ve also been accepted to speak at conferences like Permissionless and Coindesk’s Consensus. Our weekly newsletter has a consistent 60% open rate. Our Discord has seen 222% growth within the last 4 months.

Now, we’re executing on decentralization and hitting the target to launch Boys Club DAO V1 this July (2022).

What’s happening:

Boys Club has seven active working guilds, each dedicated to maintaining and developing a core initiative or operational focus of Boys Club.

The DAO Ops guild is responsible for pioneering the establishment, design and implementation of the systems, processes, and tools needed to operationalize Boys Club DAO.

Over the past seven months, we’ve been hard at work researching, planning, and designing to transition Boys Club from community to a DAO. Here, we’re excited to share the progress we’ve made in decentralizing Boys Club, and where we go from here…

First and foremost: Why are we DAO’ing?

Aligning incentives has been a core priority since day 1. DAOs enable community-driven participation, engagement and value creation to be captured more fully than ever before. Implementing DAO architecture, tooling and infrastructure allows us to take everything that we love about Boys Club to the next level — increasing opportunities for transparent community-driven decision making, and in turn, creating more valuable opportunities for collaboration, participation andcontribution. We believe a DAO structure will also further remove bottlenecks to contribution and the creation of community-driven projects & initiatives by reducing intermediaries and the presence of top-down, autocratic processes within the organization.

How we got here:

Over the past seven months we’ve conducted extensive research on DAO best practices (structures, processes, tooling, etc), common pit-falls that cause DAOs to fail, and DAO-building methodology. Our research utilized a variety of methods and resources — including talking to the founders & members of numerous types of DAOs, talking to founders and teams across a plethora of DAO tooling startups, and conducting a literature review of both peer-reviewed and personally written research on social mobilization, resistance movements, governance structures, community sustainability, and DAO tooling. Drawing upon this research, we began to design the foundational components of Boys Club DAO.

As our work has progressed, we’ve decided to borrow from Agile practices and roll-out a smaller scale MVC (Minimum Viable Community) for the DAO.

What we’ve achieved so far:

The DAO-Ops guild has achieved a lot so far, having made sufficient strides in our aim to progressively decentralize the community & increase autonomy for members, including (but not limited to):

• Establishing the architecture of membership & contributor tiers, designing contributor journey
• Successfully launching seven working guilds, each focused on executing a core area of operation essential to the day-to-day operation and functionality of Boys Club
• Designing and implementing formal processes for applications, onboarding, offboarding, and more, within the working guilds
• Implementing Govrn: allowing contributors to track, log, and manage their contributions, (and eventually be retroactively rewarded for their work)
• Designing V1 of the proposal and governance structure for our DAO

What’s next? Launching our MVC:

We’re accelerating the momentum by launching Boys Club DAO V1, which will build on all that we’ve achieved so far — implementing the final tools, structures, frameworks and processes we need to call our DAO a DAO. Membership for Boys Club DAO V1 will follow a ‘Minimum Viable Community’ (MVC) approach.

Put simply, an MVC is:

1. The smallest group of people you can bring together to work towards a common goal and
2. The minimum amount of tools & processes needed to enable the group to work together successfully.

Following this approach, our current contributors (founding team, guild leaders, and guild members) will be the first group of members to participate in Boys Club DAO V1. Our current contributors will be responsible for testing, iterating, and providing feedback on the first iteration of our DAO before we open membership up to a larger group (Boys Club DAO V2).

Put simply, rather than trying to mobilize all 1,827 members in the Boys Club Discord into a DAO right away, we’re starting small — optimizing for thoughtfulness, attention to detail, and intentionality. Think of it as a beta test, a V1.

Why start with an MVC?:

Starting with a smaller MVC allows us to implement aspects of our DAO design to a smaller group, collect feedback on what’s working/not working, and iterate on the DAO to ensure we have a strong, effective framework before rolling this out to the entire community.

We’re launching the DAO with a small group to start (the MVC) because it allows us to experiment, iterate, and pivot at speed — all of which would be substantially harder, if not impossible to do, at a larger scale. Before we open the DAO up to our wider community, we need to ensure the systems, tools, structures, and processes we’re implementing are strong, sustainable, and the right fit for our community. Experimenting & iterating with an MVC allows us to do this. We aim to work on a 3 month Season for designing/testing/iterating.

Who’s involved?:

After considering a number of options for how our ‘Minimum Viable Community’ should be structured and defined, we decided the most natural path was to form the MVC around the current Working Guilds within Boys Club.

DAO V1 Action Items:

• Open each guild channel for all guild members to access, in order to increase context-sharing, collaboration and transparency
• Implement our governance framework (formal process for proposals, voting, and voting weight/delegation)
• Implement proof-of-membership tool (in partnership with Disco.xyz)
• Conduct a retrospective at the S1 to gather learnings & measure our progress against KPIs

DAO V1, S1 KPIs:

We plan to measure the effectiveness of the tooling, processes, and architecture of our DAO V1 at the end of its first season (S1), which will be 3 months — the same as a financial quarter. The success of DAO V1 will be measured on the following KPIs:

1. Proposal velocity.

Metric: Pass or reject 5 proposals in first season, across at least 3 guilds.

2. Voter participation.

Metric: 50% or higher average voter participation per proposal, with participation measured per guild-specific proposal by: guild member voter participation per proposal / guild members total.

3. Process decentralization.

Metric: Over 70% of DAO members vote “No one person can stop a proposal from passing” to be true (indicate ‘3’ or higher on a 1–5 scale) on season exit survey.

4. Process clarity: DAO members have a clear understanding of where and how to create, submit, vote upon, and discuss proposals.

Metric: Over 70% of DAO members vote this to be true (indicate ‘3’ or higher on a 1–5 scale) on season exit survey.

5. Treasury decentralization: the DAO’s treasury is sufficiently decentralized & multisig holders are armed with knowledge around wallet security & latest scams/phishing attacks etc.

Metric: Increase multisig holders to 5, with 3 min signers; all multisig holders have attended 1 security seminar.

Qualitative Focus Areas:

• Process fairness / satisfaction: Criteria and expectations for proposal submission, quorum, etc (proposal and voting architecture) is communicated fairly and assessed as fair by DAO members.
• High level of transparency & communication: High level of transparency around decision-making processes / how decisions are made — outcomes are communicated clearly.
• Proposal outcome follow-up — High level of transparency & communication on reasoning behind rejected proposals: For rejected proposals, reasoning for rejection is communicated clearly and transparently by the rejector.
• DAO Fluency: DAO contributors have a clear understanding of how to contribute and make changes to DAO structure.
• Collaboration: DAO members are able to work effectively with one another.
• Voting & proposal efficacy: Systems and processes for voting upon proposals, submitting proposals, and delegating / discussing proposals are efficient and effective.

About the DAO Ops Team:

• Parker Jay-Pachirat: Parker is on the founding team of Boys Club, working as a core contributor as the co-leader of the DAO Ops Guild. By day, Parker is Head of Community of Fintech Collective’s DeFi Fund, where she also works as a member of FTC’s crypto investment team.
• Amy Boudreau: Amy became a member of Boys Club in February 2022, where she co-leads the DAO Ops Guild with Parker and is the Atlanta Boyfriend. Her background is in web2 technology consulting and sales. Since pivoting into web3 she is an active member of BanklessDAO and was in the first Associate cohort of Bankless Consulting where she helps web3 and traditional organizations succeed in this space.
• Lillian Johnson: Lily is an ex-meta software engineer who is currently a freelancing solidity developer. She spends her free time going to crypto meetups, learning more about best web3 practices, and building in web3 with frenz.