Decentraland DAO Community Pulse — November 2022
Welcome to our second edition of our Creator Series highlight! Join us as we feature Decentraland DAO grantees: showcasing their journey — from the concept’s inception to making the dream a reality.
This month we interviewed Sean Org the founding member of the Decentraland VR Client Team. If you have been dreaming of seeing Decentraland in VR then you’re gonna not want to miss this interview! Join us as we take a deep dive into all that is being done by the amazing team in order to make VR a reality for Decentraland.
Our conversation with Sean covered a wide range of topics including his VR/Crypto rabbit hole journey, proposal writing, the amazing community of DCL beta testers and technical challenges they have faced along the way. We also dive into Bylder + VR demo in DCL:
After a couple decades of working with clients and big, centralized agencies, being a grantee has been the most refreshing experience of my career. Direct community involvement like voting, DAO town halls, and passionate community testers all made me realize the power of community-powered governance. The community provided us with an incredible and fun opportunity that the team and I are exceedingly grateful for! — Sean Org
So get out your VR headset and come experience Decentraland in a whole new light.
Watch Entire Interview here → https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cl7T-CCMrF4
We hope our new interview series inspires you to start engaging and becoming a more active member of our Decentraland DAO community. Join us to help build the future of Decentraland!
To learn more about the VR/AR company behind this grant — >https://www.onginnovations.com/
To learn more about Decentraland VR Client check out their proposal here → https://governance.decentraland.org/proposal/?id=8fe0e0a0-d62b-11ec-b521-2f98ffa6ccb0
Want to join in an help with the VR Client Beta Testing? Head over to our discord and check out their channel?
- Special thanks to Boomboxhead for his sick beats for our intro! 🙏💗
Restructuring the Community Grants Program
The Decentraland DAO Community Grants Program is an essential part of the Decentraland Ecosystem. Since the program’s establishment in June 2021, the DAO has awarded over $7.5M USD in grants across a total of 126 projects (as of November 16, 2022).
(source: Zino, Grants Support Squad)
The program in its initial inception offered three tiers of grants, ranging from one-time payments of $500 to $3,000 USD in MANA; and $3,000 to $5,000 USD in MANA distributed over a 3 month vesting contract. In October 2021, the Grants Program was expanded to include three additional tiers, ranging from $60,000 USD to $240,000 USD, each with six month vesting contracts.
Over recent months, the Community Grants Program has come under increased scrutiny. Oversight, or at least monitoring, of the Grant’s Program was initially part of the responsibilities of the newly formed DAO Facilitator role. However, due to the extent of the program, as well as scale and pace of grant-making, a core unit of the DAO was established to provide the proper guardrails for the program — the Grants Support Squad.
In their initial evaluation of the Grants Program, the Grants Support Squad found that in the year of operations prior to their formation, nearly 50% of total distributed funds ($3.5 USD) were allocated to grants where there were concerns surrounding the stated and final outcome of the project. To mitigate risk of grantee attrition and misallocation of DAO resources, the Grants Support Squad has established a series of oversight and community engagement mechanisms, including a regular reporting framework, more frequent communications and support to grantees and forwarding a proposal to establish a committee with the power to pause and/or ultimately revoke grants for projects that are not able to be completed or are significantly delayed on their proposed roadmap.
That said, a total of 39 grant projects are currently active, the majority of which are on track toward completion, representing $2.9M USD, or 40% of total projects funded by the DAO, and new protocols put in place by the Grants Support Squad will help to ensure these projects move forward to completion, or funds are recovered by the DAO. To date, the DAO has recovered $565K USD from inactive grant projects, equating to 7.5% of total grant allocations. (source: Zino, Grants Support Squad)
Community concerns surrounding the Decentraland DAO Grants Program, which extend beyond efficacy of fund appropriations, appear to be a microcosm of broader fault lines that spread across the Decentraland DAO community as a whole, and include questions surrounding how and to what end resources are appropriated from the DAO treasury, what the treasury itself is made up of (e.g. MANA, Stable Coins, etc.), how voting power is distributed and used on proposals, and amongst others, how to balance the power of significant VP holders (and VP-holding networks). Many of these sentiments have been articulated in a proposal that has passed the initial Pre-Proposal Poll stage, calling for a “Temporary Pause of the Grants Program.”
While issues surrounding the Grants Program have made visible notable divides within our community, they also provide us with great opportunity to improve structural integrity of our governance system in general and effectiveness of our grant making framework in particular. Yemel, of the DAO Committee, has proposed a framework for “Restructuring the Community Grants Program,” and is currently coordinating with Core Units and community members of the DAO to move this process forward in the form of three upcoming Draft Proposals.
These proposals will focus on three primary areas of the Community Grants Program:
- Grant Categories — ensuring grant categories meet community needs
- Grant Voting Thresholds — modifying grant tiers and thresholds
- Grant Vesting Contracts — enacting flexible vesting contract schedules, with pause features
The overall goal of these changes will be to increase the effectiveness, efficacy and flexibility of the Decentraland DAO Community Grants program as whole.
Over the coming weeks, the DAO Facilitation Squad will open a community working group to facilitate collaboration and consensus building between the Decentraland DAO Community, Core Units of the DAO and DAO Committee Members, all of which have engaged members that are committed to finding long term solutions and improvements to our Community Grants Framework!
We Can Do Better!
In past weeks, the level of engagement in the Decentraland DAO Community Discord has taken a turn for the worse. While there remains a level of in depth and constructive discourse, particularly within existing working group channels, the DAO “general” channel has on several occasions digressed into targeted personal attacks and drawn out back and forth’s that lead to further dissent rather than constructive dialogue. During this time, the DAO facilitation team has increasingly fielded complaints surrounding the tenure and nature of engagement in the general channel.
As a reminder, the most important rules of the DCL DAO Discord are as follows:
Be Respectful: Treat everyone the way you want to be treated yourself. We have zero tolerance for any toxicity, profanity, personal attacks, libel, racial and/or gender-phobic remarks on the DAO server. Be Tolerant: Governance requires toleration of difference and opposition. We must not only respect each other, but tolerate and be open to conflicting opinions. No FUD: Please don’t spread FUD (fear, uncertainty, and doubt) or misinformation
To my knowledge, there have been no cases in which a community member has been banned from the DAO Discord for violating one of the above rules, and the only instance of removing profiles from the server has been in the event of spamming, mostly from bot or bot-like accounts. In the event that the above rules are violated, the following steps may be taken, by server admins and individual that receives the ban:
Not aligning with these rules or displaying any misbehavior will be evaluated case by case. Admins reserve the right to kick or ban when valid concerns arise. A user who is banned from the server may appeal the ban through a governance poll, explaining why they should be allowed back in the server.
As a reminder, we are collective governors of an imperfect system undergoing a process of progressive decentralization. In my opinion, 99% of committed community members have the best interest of each other and our platform at heart, and those with nefarious intentions are truly few and far between, or exist outside of the regular community of “Decentralandians.” **
That said, some of the behaviors, attacks, and engagements I have witnessed over the past month are reprehensible, and have created a toxic, if not unsafe space for many of our community members.
This is an appeal to the community to self-correct, refrain from personal and targeted attacks, and help make our DAO Discord a more pleasant and constructive place to engage!
In service,
Matimio
Stay Connected with Decentraland DAO!
- Join the Decentraland DAO Discord: https://discord.gg/ZdzKgYE5Q3
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The Decentraland DAO Community Pulse Report was prepared by the DAO Facilitation Team: @Matimio, @Fractilians, @Fehz
