Self-Sustainable Community Organizations

Pilot in Honduras

Community building is like growing plants: you plant the seed in fertile soil, water it every day, give nutrients and prune the weed to make it grow healthy.

The most important resource that organizers pour is time yet money is needed in order to buy food, swag, venue, transportation, speakers, etc. A community that is not able to get sponsors is more likely to not grow and even die even since the resources of initial members are limited.

Blockchain and web3 allow communities to experiment with new funding models, the advantage of creating a community around Blockchain is that community members are web3 native.

TL;DR: In this post, I’ll explain what is a Self-Sustainable Community Organization and how to build using tools powered by Ethereum to achieve financial sustainability. You can Donate to our Gitcoin Grant Here

Background

First of all, BUIDL Honduras is a community-driven Decentralized Organization with the end goal to make Honduras a blockchain-friendly Hub.

Since it’s creation in April 2018, We have hosted over 26+ Meetups and 4 hackathons in the two main cities of the country. BUIDL Honduras is a member of the ConsenSys BUIDL Network.

For 2020 we want to increase the number of local projects related to blockchain and developers working for companies in the space. We have tried sponsorships and self-fund our community using Aragon and Moloch DAO (Decentralized Autonomous Organizations).

So far none were successful, DAOs are complicated and most of the time community members don’t want to use their time voting and taking decisions. We decided to try a different model.

Enters Self-Sustainable Community Organizations

A Self-Sustainable Community is one that is able to raise funds constantly and survive even if its leaders change. The funds are used to improve the experience of community members. Here is how we a building ours:

Money Vault

The first thing we needed to define is where the money had to be stored, we created a multi-sign account Gnosis Safe for Teams. For extra flavor, we bought an Ethereum Name Service Domain — buidlhn.eth (You can donate to that address 😉).

Governance

Instead of having all member stake and vote, we simply empowered the community leaders, the ones that have invested time and sweat. The organizers that have organized X amounts of events recurrently for Y amount of time are voted in to have decision power in the multisign account.

Kickback, Meetup, Eventbrite, and Facebook events allow us to keep track of these events. Kickback besides improving the show rate can provide additional revenue for the community fund.

Financial Sustainability (BETA)

We are currently using Gitcoin Grants in order to fund community activities, but we plan to move to a membership using rDAI to get recurring revenue. rDAI enables users to automatically allocate accrued interest to a recipient of their choice, in this case, the community organization account.

We can use rDAI to:

• Accept recurring outside donations.
• Create a community membership.

Not all members have the time to organize an event but want to have a voice. Members that want to have a voice need to commit Z amount of accrued interests to the community fund. To manage this, we are dogfooding a local solution built on Ethereum, Ballotted it runs secure, transparent, and fully auditable elections, in this case, decisions on how to use the community funds. It’s simple while you have a commitment > Z you are added to the voting whitelist.

And that’s all! Simple and can be set up in a couple of hours.

ENS + Gnosis Safe + rDAI + Ballotted + Kickback = a Self-Sustainable Community Organization

If you want to help us in our mission to create more Ethereum Developers and Startups you can directly donate to our address buidlhn.eth or help us fund activities donating to our Gitcoin Grant here.

We will be using funds to finance the organization of meetups, bootcamps, conferences, and local hackathons.

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