Authors
Treasury League - @Teo @Biaf @emixprime, review with @RTP2016 @felix @ETM612 @thomas
Introduction
Before officially starting the first mandate of 2022, M1-2022, we would like to propose a set of improvements and updates to Leagues and DAO workflows.
Since its inception, the composition and workflow management of League DAOs is designed to evolve over time based on the needs and opportunities for Idle DAO. The initial composition of Leagues has been based on a relatively common organizational structure of departments of any professional asset management firm, but we can expect that the DAO structure evolves considerably over time.
We have interviewed numerous stakeholders in different sub-DAOs, some members of our community have participated in a variety of different DAOs and decentralized coordinated mechanisms and we have consolidated a series of improvements learned. These will be applied to:
- DAO mandates calendar
- DAO Leagues voting process
- Coordination tool: Coordinape
- Leagues leadership
- Advisors contribution
- Idle Community Call
1) DAO mandates calendar
Starting from January 1st, 2022, Leagues mandates will follow the standard solar calendar, resulting in 4 mandates per year as follows:
- M1: January - March
- M2: April - June
- M3: July - September
- M4: October - December
This would help us in comparing different Mandates between different years, hence improving the performance tracking of the platform and the DAO, especially for financial reporting.
2) DAO Leagues voting process
To address some limits of our current Leagues members’ voting system, we would like to introduce a more granular voting process for the reconfirmation of Idle Leagues contributors between mandates. To foster teamwork we would like to try a new mechanism and split the votes as follow, but at the same time, avoid the single vote as it happens in the case of Leagues new-joiners:
Six polls for the Treasury League Areas of Responsibility (AoR)*:
- One for Business development
- One for DAO architecture
- One for Ecosystem development
- One for Finance
- One for Tokenomics
Two polls for the Development League subDAOs
- One for the Smart Contract developers
- One for the Front End developers
Two polls for the Communication League subDAOs
- One for Communication
- One for Design
Advisors will be re-confirmed separately from the Leagues contributors following a similar approach, i.e. votes split by League subDAOs.
In addition, as already happened in 2021, the Leagues contributors reconfirmation vote will happen before the end of the Mandate to ensure continuity of business and avoid any overlap with the new-joiners election.
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*Majority of TL full-time contributors work in different AoR. We would like to avoid double-voting for them, hence we will only pick the most representative area of responsibility for each contributor.
3) Coordination tool: Coordinape
To better present Leagues results and record individual cross-contributions and co-contribution, we will start using Coordinape. This platform should allow a more coordinated tracking of the results and help the DAO community to shape a more informed vote related to contributors’ commitment.
Our aim is to make Leagues participants more self-aware by distributing funds through a decentralized gifting process. This would make the experience of working with Idle DAO more rewarding, human and fair.
We would like to link to Coordinape performance results the bonuses as well as a variable part of contributors mandate reward (ideally 20%). The idea would be to have an 80-20 split between fixed and variable rewards for full-time contributors and a 60-40 split for part-time ones. There is still a conversation going on about this, but we think is better to start a beta-test of Coordinape to understand how it fits in Leagues daily workflow.
4) Leagues members structure
Since we announced some structure novelties for M3 (introduction of Labs and work areas), members of the Leagues have been able to work individually on different areas while having multiple tasks to manage. During the last mandate, we have identified the need to have operational reference points in each League. Hence, we decided to introduce Leagues Coordinators.
Starting from M1-2022, we will introduce this new figure in our Leagues environment. Leagues will appoint one (senior) contributor as coordinator for each League, responsible to follow multiple initiatives and fostering effective teamwork among contributors.
5) Advisors contribution
Leagues Advisors serve as a sounding board off of which Leagues members can bounce new ideas. They allow to have an outside view or perspective and provide Leagues with DeFi and community connections.
Their contribution is often non-visible, as their involvement is based on a Leagues’ push and remains marooned within specific initiatives.
Although, during the last mandate, we have come up with some useful suggestions to better formalize the Advisor relationship with the Idle DAO. These can be summarized as follows:
- Advisors will set up a call at the beginning of each mandate to present their background and areas of expertise to let Leagues contributors understand where they can help and their availability/commitment.
- Leagues will have specific calls on a monthly basis with Advisors based on the asks that arise from Leagues.
- We will set up an internal Discord channel dedicated to Advisors where Leagues members can pool all their asks.
- Advisors can set up multiple educational Lab session within the mandate for Leagues members.
6) Idle CCs (community calls)
Based on the last mandate experience, Leagues suggest hosting one Community Call per mandate. This should help Leagues contributors to better focus on their initiatives during the mandate and to present their achievements altogether.
Leagues updates will continue to be shared on a recurrent basis (weekly with Idle Beats, or with the BiWeekly Governance Update), but the official CC# will happen at the end of the mandate.
Conclusion
Coordination and peer-recognition tools are improving but still merit further development to unlock the potential of large global P2P networks of actors working towards a common goal. Thinking very carefully about asynchronous communications vs synchronous communications tools, peer review mechanisms and coordination tools is an incredibly important design decision, and it’s the main purpose of this post.
Starting from our initial thesis, we recognize that the vast majority of Idle DAO participants tend towards passivity over time and Idle DAO architecture should allow for such a reality as capital management should be directed by a sufficiently decentralized community of competent professionals, but not necessarily all participants. Using continuous payments to individuals who work full-time for Leagues, providing compelling bounties and rewards for community members that deliver value, the mechanism we implemented at the inception of Idle DAO rewards Leagues and members that deliver outlier value, making Idle DAO’s primary edge its ability to scale the value-add contribution.
Leagues are Idle DAO’s solution to the scaling problems that DAOs face. They are working groups, centered around one expertise. They allow a fluid and fast organization of active contributors, as opposed to slow, inefficient, centralized and rigid structures. Leagues are indeed flexible, ductile and modular. They can be initiated by group of active community members, embed or be embedded in other sub-DAOs, and split or merge.
By delegating part of the execution power to key decision makers, the cost of participation drops significantly. The DAO’s decision process is thus more efficient without without compromising on transparency or openness. Furthermore, Leagues provides a canvas for talent to organically emerge to the relevant parts of the DAO.
This is based on the concept of collective intelligence, which strongly contributes to the shift of knowledge and power from the individual to the collective. However, collective actions or tasks require different amounts of coordination depending on the complexity of the task. Tasks vary from being highly independent simple tasks that require very little coordination to complex interdependent tasks that are built by many individuals and require a lot of coordination.
Group collective intelligence is a property that emerges through coordination from both bottom-up and top-down processes. In a bottom-up process, the different characteristics of each member are involved in contributing and enhancing coordination. Top-down processes are more strict and fixed with norms, group structures, and routines that in their own way enhance the group’s collective work.
Collective intelligence is at the root of Leagues and Idle DAO effectiveness and efficiency.
To conclude, Leagues have been conceived to put people first. Their flexibility allows for dynamic and composable structures to be created around any group of contributors, giving the DAO a mechanism to be accountable and aligned in terms of incentives. And this post sets another step towards these aforementioned goals.
From all of us at Idle DAO and Leagues, onwards 