Labs Budget - 2023-Q3

Authors: @kempsterrrr , @mannyornothing , @Billyjitsu , @PSkinnerTech , @allWiseee , @kayprasla @jamiebones @drop_knowledge (everyone who has attended VIBES calls)

Supporting Steward(s): @Erik_Knobl

Support conversations: Agency, DDW, Academy, Mentorship

Summary

Labs budget for Q3 2023. Introduces a new partnerships model, including preferred revenue share with Sub-DAOs and updated roles and responsibilities in Labs.

Motivation

This proposal seeks to learn from last quarter and improve what we’re doing in the following ways:

1. Bring the focus squarely back on the community > and partners and provide a consistent experience for Members.
2. Establish a stable and scalable revenue model.
3. Directly support the operations and growth of all Sub-DAOs by sharing partnerships revenue and ensuring all Sub-DAOs have the support of Labs in marketing, community engagement & partnerships.
4. More clearly define roles in Labs, increasing responsibility, accountability, and rewards with a flat rate across roles, with room for more flexible working via bounties.

Last quarter Labs covered Community, Partnerships, Jobs and Operations and proposed some support for website development with Agency.

This structure has worked OK. It allowed the team to focus and work better together but did not serve or support the other Sub-DAOs. We propose positioning Labs as the “core team” for the team that helps the entire DAO/Sub-DAOs, not just itself, succeed and grow together.

Scope of Work

Updated Partnerships Model & Community-Focused Experience

The Labs team has been working hard to figure out a new model that funds the DAO, allowing us to shift back to a more community-focused > partner-focused experience.

Preferred Partners

The foundation for this new model is “Preferred Partners”.

The goal is to form longer-term partnerships (min 3 months) with trusted providers in the space for tooling/products/services our community needs: RPC, Wallet, Exchange, Infrastructure & Storage.

Rather than needing to host one of the events for individual partners, this approach allows us to host community events that elevate the education and impact of our Members whilst recommending preferred partners via CTAs to their services: YouTube/Luma descriptions, Emails, Community Documentation etc.

For this model to have maximum impact, we’re hoping to extend these partnerships across our Sub-DAOs - i.e. Academy uses the “Preferred RPC” in their course, and Agency uses the “Preferred RPC” in their projects (where possible). We all share in the revenue generated from the partnerships to fund operations and growth.

We’ve opened conversations with Academy and Agency on these points and aim to find a solution that works well for everyone.

Hackathons, vibesIRL, Merch, Jobs and Fellowships

On top of this ongoing revenue from preferred partners, Labs will drive more revenue from these areas to further grow the DAO treasury and be able to pay more Contributors to help improve the Community experience and grow the DAO Treasury.

Merch, Fellowship and vibesIRL, were each previously delegated to other teams. Our experience in the last quarter showed us that this separation only made coordination harder for domains that are so core to the Member experience. We’ve agreed with each team to bring this work back into the Labs team whilst we establish and scale this model.

Supporting the wider DAO / Other Sub-DAOs

A vital benefit of this updated model is more explicitly supporting other Sub-DAOs. We aim to do this in the following ways.

Revenue share from preferred partners

Where Sub-DAOs are happy to support the preferred partner model, we’ll share 10% of the revenue from each preferred partner. If we hit current targets, this would amount to $2,500/month to both Academy and Agency.

Marketing, Partnerships & Community Engagement

The Labs team would like to work with Academy and Agency to support the work they’re doing directly. At the moment, we hope to see this playing out in the following ways, however, details pending conversations with the team and may evolve:

1. Sub-DAOs have dedicated time/space within existing marketing/community events to promote what they’re doing, seek/funnel contributors etc. (i.e. area on Town Hall, in the newsletter, Twitter Spaces etc.)
2. The Labs partnership team will promote the services they’re offering to the partners we’re already speaking with (Already discussing lining up paid partners for Academy and can do the same to create more inbound deal flow for Agency)

Sub-DAO Coordinator role

We’ve also budgeted to fund a Sub-DAO Coordinator role for each Sub-DAO, which allocates $1,000 USDC per month to fund someone to handle essential functions of the Sub-DAO: meeting cadence, rewards allocation, and documentation.

Community-Driven Experience

The north star for this new model is an updated experience anchored in providing value for all Members, helping to increase their education and impact in the space.

We aim to achieve this in the following ways:

Regular Cadence of Community Events:

We’re curating a regular cadence of community events we repeat each month anchored in providing value for Members. Some of the more solid ideas are:

1. Builder sessions: regular slots each week where 1/2 Contributors will be paid to be available to provide help/support to any Member that brings along a technical/product/whatever problem.
2. Regular, Community-driven Twitter Space Panels: Spaces around topics (for example, zk) where we invite experts in the space to discuss topics the community has signalled an interest in).
3. VIBES: Contributors paid specifically to host VIBES each week as part of the community team

We’re also considering a few other things, such as continuing the Wellness sessions with Emm and MVP/Feature demo sessions for Members to get feedback on what they’re building from other members. We’d LOVE to hear some ideas here for regular activities the community would like to see happen.

At the end of each month, we have a Hackathon, and at the end of the quarter, we run a fellowship program with partners like Press Start Cap x Developer DAO Fellowship.

Here is an image of what the average month might look like under this model:

NB - We’re actively seeking feedback from the community on this experience. Please share any thoughts, feedback, wishes, and critiques.

CODE Rewards for every activity

CODE has been underutilised in the last quarter. We propose allocating CODE rewards, or rewards pools, to the most community activities that help us achieve our mission.

The goal here is to “spend” CODE to incentivise and reward the things that make the community grow and more valuable for everyone, similar to how a DeFi protocol might issue yields to attract liquidity and make their protocol more useful for users.

Significantly, this will also help us recruit more members and further decentralise voting power in the DAO into the hands of Members.

More specific detail in the budget section below.

Domain of Operations & Team

This proposal delegates much of the DAO’s core experience to Labs, establishing them as the core team responsible for: Community Management, Partnerships, Marketing and DAO Growth Operations.

Our experience last quarter has further strengthened the view, at least in our eyes, that we need to increase accountability and responsibility for such fundamental functions and, in turn, reward those performing these roles more reasonably whilst still ensuring we provide flexibility to support a wider pool of contributors and an ability to experiment with the experience being created.

Team

Role	Contributor	Role Description
Community Lead	BillyJitsu	Link
Scholarship Lead	iamsamcodes	Link
Partnerships Lead	mannyornothing	Link
Content Lead	Patrick Skinner	Link
Growth Lead	kempsterrrrr	Link

The folks performing the roles above will be signers on the to-be set-up Labs treasury.

OKRs

	VIBE
O1	Foster a fun and safe Member experience	Owner
KR	Consistent cadence of community events	BillyJitsu
KR	Solicit feedback from Members to improve their experience	BillyJitsu
KR	Organise vibesIRL event for Instanbul	kempsterrrr
KR	Release DAO merch store	kempsterrrr

	LEARN
O2	Provide DAO members with high-quality learning opportunities	Owner
KR	Weekly learning workshops with Members	BillyJitsu
KR	Monthly Twitter panels with industry experts	Kempsterrrr
KR	2 Builder office hours a week to provide technical support to Member	BillyJitsu

	BUILD
O3	Support DAO members to elevate their impact on the world	Owner
KR	1 mini hackathon per month	Manny
KR	1 Fellowship program per quarter	Dropknowledge
KR	Jobs made available for members from 2 Venture Frens portfolios	Dropknowledge

	GOVERN
O4	Position the DAO structurally and financially for long-term success	Owner
KR	5,000 USDC added to the treasury each month	Manny
KR	2,500 USDC shared with both Agency and Academy each month	Manny
KR	500 new members with sufficient CODE tokens to acces the server	kempsterrrr
KR	Distribute at least 75% of request Member rewards budget	kempsterrrr

Budget Request (Including value returned to the DAO)

The full breakdown of the lab's budget can be found here - in CODE and USDC.

USDC

This budget makes Labs sustainable whilst returning 10% of revenue to the DAO and 10% of preferred partner revenue to both the Agency and Academy to help fund their operations.

While this model is being established and we transition back to Sub-DAOs having their SAFE independent of the DAO treasury, we request that funds in the DAO treasury provide the difference to cover contributor and infrastructure/tooling expenses for Labs, Agency and Academy.

The maximum potential cost assets to the DAO Treasury in USDC is $ 28,399.65/month - for all expenses listed in the budget breakdown here.

This cost assumes no revenue generated by Labs.

We aim to reach breakeven in the first month based on ongoing preferred partner conversations and a potential mini-hackathon for July. However, we may not reach breakeven until August.

If we don’t reach breakeven in July, the request from the treasury would be to cover the difference between revenue - expenses.

CODE

Our request for the $CODE budget has two parts.

Contributor rewards

Monthly contributor rewards are calculated using the following formula:

(Monthly reward in USDC / Flat hourly rate in USDC) * 15 CODE/hour

The baseline request for $CODE Contributor Rewards in Labs and for Agenyc, and Academy’s Sub-DAO Coordinators is therefore:

(Monthly Contributor Rewards in CODE / 50) * 15

($ 25,000.00 / 50) * 15 = 7,500 $CODE

Given there are two roles with a commissions structure - Partnership Lead and Venture Lead - we further request the CODE to cover the CODE rewards should both of these roles hit their full targets.

On target Partnership Lead commission - $1,500/month

Equivalent CODE reward - (1,500 / 50) * 15 = 450 CODE

On Target Venture Lead commission - $2,000

Equivalent CODE reward - (2,000 / 50) * 15 = 600 CODE

Total CODE request per month = 7,500 + 450 + 600 = 8,550 CODE

Total CODE Request for Q3 Contributors is = 25,650 CODE

Member Rewards

In the same way a DeFi Protocol uses yield to attract liquidity and encourage trading, we’d like to use code to incentivise and reward the activity that creates value for themselves, the DAO and the ecosystem (i.e. attending vibes, workshops, submitting to hackathons etc.).

Important second-order impacts of this are:

1. Decentralise the DAO faster by allocating more $CODE to Members
2. Grow DAO membership

Below is a breakdown of the CODE request to reward Members:

Activity	CODE Rewards Model	Month CODE Budget	Season CODE Budget (Max)
VIBES	15 CODE per NFT Claim (max 50 per NFT)	3,000	12,000
Workshop Attendees	45 CODE per NFT Claim (max 50 per NFT)	4,500	18,000
Hackathon Project Submission	360 per verified submission (3 -hacks, avg 20 subs)	5,400	21,600
Discord Praise System	5000 Bounty Pool Per Month	375	1,500
Twitter Space Giveaway	5 Memberships (400 * 5 * 3)	6,000	24000
DevNTell attendee	15 CODE per attendee Kudos NFT Claim (max 50 per NFT)	3,000	12,000
DevNTell Speaker	400 CODE per speaker Kudos Claim	1,600	6,400
			95,500

We'd welcome other ideas for activities that should be incentivised and rewarded.

Important note - The calculations for Twitter space giveaways are based on the current requirement of 400 CODE to enter the server. Once this proposal is passed, the labs' team would like to open a discussion with the DAO to significantly reduce this threshold and economic barrier for entry into the community.

Any change to this threshold would be reflected in the funds allocated for these giveaways. Assuming the DAO supports reducing down from 400 CODE, the labs team request permission to re-allocate that CODE to test other ways to reward Members.

Total CODE

The total CODE request, therefore, for Q3 is:

25,650 (Contributors) + 95,500 (Members) = 121,150 CODE

Drawbacks

• There is a reasonable chance there will be a currently unknown USDC cost to the DAO Treasury depending on how quickly Labs can breakeven. That said, it should be low and once breakeven is reached this budget will directly grow the treasury and open up opportunities for the DAO to allocate those funds.
• This proposal formally establishes Labs as the DAO’s core team with responsibility and accountability for community, marketing, partnerships, content and operations - a high level of trust is requested.
• This budget does not currently account for Mentorship efforts. However, conversations with Piablo and co are ongoing to define a path where their work can be directly supported and better integrated into the wider Member experience.
• Some of the roles defined still require further, and likely ongoing, definition, which leaves some uncertainty in the exact value they will create.
• The CODE request is equivalent to 1% of our treasury.
• Some conversations regarding how best to coordinate this new model between Sub-DAOs are ongoing which means some details are yet to be defined. Unknowns always present some risk but we know what they are and are actively collaborating with Agency an Academy to define them.
• Our mechanisms for distributing the $CODE Member rewards are not fully defined after this news from Mintkudos.