The First 60 Days — Osmosis Community Support DAO
In preparation for our first official Community Town Hall on 5 January 2022 at 6p UTC / 1p EST, let’s recap the major promises made by the Community Support DAO in our founding document, Governance Proposal #57. Along the way, we’ll highlight examples of specific ways we have kept these promises.
Would you mind following along with the most up-to-date version of our work-in-progress roadmap here? Our primary concern has been to stay true to our objectives:
Core Objectives
- 🧠 Evaluate community support problems, research effective solutions, and make critical decisions; occasionally (more during the start-up phase) bootstrap solutions when no good 3rd party option exists; rarely, engage key stakeholders regarding governance matters posing an existential threat or safeguard to the community
- 💰 Negotiate payment and distribute funds from a multi-sig wallet to solution providers, whether they be qualified community members or outside vendors
- 🤝 Actively participate, with the support managers, in the selection of community administrators
- 👀 Guide projects and track contractors’ outcomes to guarantee that they fulfill their commitments
- 🧪 Work with the Marketing DAO and other partners doing tooling and contract work to confirm our efforts are synergistic instead of redundant.
- 👂 + 🎯 Conduct periodic meetings with the core team and community to share progress, gather feedback, and ensure everyone’s efforts are aligned.
- 🗣 Write, present, and report findings and results in select media.
Initiatives Underway
Each of the following initiatives launched is a promise kept. It fulfills one or more of our seven core objectives above.
1) Create an environment where we value our support teams on all channels: Telegram, Discord, and Reddit
Creating an atmosphere where support teams and value-contributing community members are recognized is a broad initiative, but we’ve taken concrete steps to achieve it. We believe it is an ongoing challenge that will continue to parallel the growth of our user base and total funds traded and invested on the Osmosis DEX.
- In a future post, we will go into more detail about our day-to-day work, but here’s one fact. We’ve signed 58 transactions in as many days.
- On 1 November, day one of the CS DAO, we compensated two long-time volunteers — moderators of the Osmosis discord community who have helped architect and maintain the server.
- They now operate as ongoing freelance support workers, answering questions and leading the charge to help community members in the channel. (Discord member count: 6947)
The above example speaks to the main thrust of our formation. To borrow a bit from our first monthly expense report:
“According to our mandate, our priority was to onboard more admins and moderators for the Osmosis Telegram, Discord, and Reddit channels. Our goal was to achieve around-the-clock support coverage for Osmosis’s global community. Indeed, staffing was our biggest expense, accounting for 93% of November’s outlays… By the end of November, we had hired nine new admins and moderators for a total of 10 Osmosis support team contractors: three Senior Admins, six Junior Admins, and 1 Rotating Admin.”
2) Recognize our irreplaceable community members
And in terms of recognizing our irreplaceable community members:
- In week two, we rewarded the first non-admin community member Steviewoofwoof for providing executive summary notes of each episode of Updates from the Lab on Twitter Spaces. We continue to do so.
- We added to this a bounty paid to Kych and his collaborators for our 3d avatar art — the character Helpybot, who has served as our Support Mascot.
3) Tooling/Software
- On day two, we paid a bounty for the initial creation of the ION Telegram Bot. You will find it lets newcomers know about scammers. It informs people who join that messages from scammers are coming and to block them.
- Throughout November and December, we have researched, negotiated, and begun the implementation of Kustomer, an official live chat widget for Osmosis. It is in private testing and will launch in January. It will allow our existing admins to use and expand a one-to-one ticketing system that only moderators can oversee — cutting out potential scammers on Telegram and other channels.
- The widget will launch on our minimum viable version of the support site page, linked to the Osmosis UI.
4) Enlist Senior Admins and Moderators to collaborate in developing a searchable support database with the most common questions and problems and reward them for their time and expertise.
- We have done this, thanks to the wisdom and generosity of Tis Me, Worker Bee, and others. It will launch as the up-to-date Knowledge Base accessible in our live chat widget come January 2022.
- SOP (Standard Operating Procedure) Manual — Tis Me has drafted version 1.0 and we are incorporating it into our onboarding process for new admins.
That highlights ten promises kept from our original funding proposal under the major initiatives of creating an environment where we value our support teams and community contributors, software/tooling, and the development of a searchable support database/FAQs.
It is only the beginning. And we’ve gone well beyond our initial promises to fill in gaps and add value to the community in more ways than can be quickly addressed here. For example, we coordinated and produced Reverse Osmosis: The Clawback Party on Dec-15 where we gave away 420 OSMO to community members, engaged 663 members in the giveaway, and racked up over 1000 attendees of the streaming party with co-founder Sunny, Cryptocito, Coney Daddy, and early Cosmos engineer and inventor of CosmWasm Ethan Frey.
We’ve created a series of Medium articles educating users about updates in the Zone — a duty we’re now sharing with the Ministry of Marketing/Marketing DAO. We’ve done validator and community outreach for several pressing matters. And we’ve begun collaborating more with members of the Marketing and Osmosis DAOs. Most recently, this resulted in educating 100s of investors about Osmosis and making dozens of professional contacts at DCentralcon and Art Basel in Miami, FL.
As 2022 approaches, we know one thing. The Dev team has asked us to raise additional funding to compensate all current and future admins, support-related contractors, and ourselves for the foreseeable future. This slightly sooner than planned return to governance would nudge along the progressive decentralization process by making us more properly autonomous.
Please join Sunny and us at the Community Town Hall on 5 January 2022 at 6p UTC / 1p EST. Stay tuned on Twitter for details on how to join the call, ask questions, and get involved.
