Hire a dApps team to help build the DAO

by 0xfe91c0c482e09600f2d1dbca10fd705bc6de60bc

Summary

Hire a team to maintain and improve the Governance App and develop new tools.

Abstract

The DAO is the beneficiary of a 10-year vesting contract for a total of 222M of MANA, that is 1.8 million MANA vested per month. This has been mentioned in the docs and in the blog before, but many may not be aware of it.

The DAO has a lot of resources and a thriving community but lacks executing power. We need to invest more money and time in building infrastructure for Decentraland’s DAO.

At the moment the DAO has 4 teams:

• Security Advisory Board: 5 people to address security risk.
• DAO Committee: 3 people to enact proposals on-chain.
• DAO Facilitator: 1 person to produce reports and organize meets.
• Wearable Curation Committee: 3 people to review applications.

This proposal aims to create a new team with the mission of developing new software.

Motivation

At the moment the DAO is supporting contributions in the form of grants aimed to individual contributors. As an open-source project we rely on external contributors, being The Foundation the most active contributor.

The Foundation team has ~45 people working under their wing, they have been doing an amazing job and brought us a great decentralized platform and a world explorer to enjoy it.

But in order to accomplish the wider goal of becoming a more capable and powerful DAO, we need to take action. We need to onboard new contributors to help build Decentraland’s ecosystem. We need to create our own teams capable of executing the vision of the DAO.

We can start by speeding the development of our Governance dApp. This app is a critical piece of software for the DAO and it needs to be well maintained. It's also a small project in terms of scope, which makes it a great place to start.

Specification

A team of highly capable full-time contributors will be assembled, filling the primary roles of Team Lead, Product Manager, Technical Writer, Web Designer, Solidity and, frontend dev.

The main scope of this team will be:

• Become core maintainers of the Governance dApp.
• Automate key processes of DAO’s operations.
• Research proposals in order to enrich conversations.
• Build new dApps to support community use-cases.

The DAO will set a budget and formally delegate the Governance dApp to the team. The team will be free to work on ideas that make the conversation in the governance more fruitful. The team will report their progress and consult their roadmap with the community.

This team won’t be focusing on contributing to projects already maintained by The Foundation (eg. client, builder, marketplace). If they do, they will be treated by the maintainers as regular open-source contributions.

A list of things to work on the Governance dApp at the moment:

• Automate generation of reports.
• Replace Aragon's UI to ease DAO Committee operations.
• Add a Treasury page showing stats of the current treasury.
• Add a Grants page showing all grants that have been or are being funded by the DAO.
• Add a Members' page listing current teams and members.
• Load forum comments on the proposal to encourage discussion.
• Implement automatic status updates of proposals in the forum.
• Work on reports on technical viability about discussed proposals.
• Implement content moderation tools for the community, DAO Facilitator, and DAO Committee to help filter out offensive, poorly defined, or spammy proposals.
• Improve the proposal creation process by adding new proposal categories for common actions in the DAO.
• Advance the grant program to include larger grants with a more robust vetting and oversight process

Funding a team to work primarily on the Governance dApp will produce faster development than relying on individual contributions because of their capability of shipping cross-cutting features.

This is a push to boost Decentraland’s ecosystem. We’ll start with one piece by building a team to improve it. If this strategy proves successful we could build more scoped teams to maintain and build other projects.

The point of this proposal is to reach a consensus that the DAO should begin the process of forming its own dApps team. The details of how many members, what their roles are, how much they are paid and how often, and how the DAO can oversee their work should be covered in a separate proposal(s).

Vote

• For: Hire a dApps team to help build the DAO
• Against: Do not hire a dApps team to help build the DAO

• Hire a dApps team to help build the DAO
• Do not hire a dApps team to help build the DAO
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Vote on this proposal on the Decentraland DAO