SEA Community Hub Proposal: Collective Intelligence Governance Hub

Community Hubs
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Summary of Proposal

We want to create an inspiring space to discuss key challenges to governance design & coordination. Each day, we will facilitate discussions around engaging governance topics, encourage an exchange of ideas, resources and experiences amongst participants, and host office hours with the governance leads and facilitators hosting the Hub.

Potential Topics:

  • Delegation - Where we are today vs where we should be
  • Governance “experience” design
  • “Build a DAO from scratch”: If you were to build a DAO from scratch today, how would you design governance/launch a token/incentivize participation?
  • Quadratic voting - a time and a place
  • Finding the right sustainable funding mechanisms for your community
  • Councils: Accountability, empowerment, transparency, reporting & incentivization

Motivation & Rationale

This Hub offers “governance geeks” a chance to tap into the collective intelligence of Governance Leads and Facilitators from major DAOs who will be facilitating the Hub. Attendees will gain a deeper understanding of the current governance structures, the tools and infrastructure supporting DAOs, and the legal, financial, operational considerations critical to their success. We’ll explore both past and future trends, and discuss the developments in DAO governance that excite us most.

Creating spaces that bring together diverse perspectives and stakeholders to share experiences and ideas is essential for developing sustainable solutions that enhance the governance experience. Whether someone is interested in working on governance design or participating in governance as a stakeholder or contributor, this session will be relevant to them.

To ensure these discussions and learnings do not stay with those who participate, we want to produce a summary of the discussions in the form of a blog or forum post for each day of the Hub.

Implementation

The space will tentatively operate between 10:00 and 3:00 pm each day. Below is the tentative schedule for each day.

  • 10:00 - 10:15 - Intro: Who is “in the room” today
  • 10:15 - 11:15 - 1 Hour Discussion / Workshop (see potential topics above)
  • 11:15 - 11:30 - Break
  • 11:30 - 12:30 - Collective Intelligence Round - This is an open discussion time where anyone can ask a question or present a problem to the group and tap into our “collective intelligence” to hopefully get an answer or at least a lead.
  • 12:30 - 3:00 - Office Hours / Co-working

If we find participants enjoy the Collective Intelligence rounds, we may add another session to the afternoon block for following days.

Equipment & production requirements for the space:

In decreasing order of importance.

  • Seating: Ideally mix of cozy & functional for discussions and work
  • Whiteboard/flip charts
  • Power outlets
  • TV or screen for presentations
  • A few small tables
  • Signage (simple sign with Hub name so folks know where to find us)

Team

The team facilitating the discussions will be a group of DAO operators who are focused on governance design and coordinating for various major DAOs (Celo, ZK Nation, EigenLayer). Participants will be able to tap into the knowledge and experience of these folks, as well as that of other participants.

Governance operators are often connected to every type of stakeholder in a project, and have experienced first hand the trouble-shooting and problem solving around various governance challenges. Governance operators also naturally are community managers, and are well connected to the communities they help facilitate.

The core Hub coordinators will be:

  • Anna Alexa - Governance and Community at Celo Foundation, formerly community at MakerDAO and part of Meta Gamma Delta grants DAO
  • Shelby Steidl - Governance Operations Lead at ZKsync Association, formerly Governance Facilitator at Radworks
  • Trach - Chief Gov Officer at Eigen Foundation, formerly cofounder at Coordinape, contributor to Yearn
  • Rafa - Governance Strategy Lead at ZKsync Association

We will also bring in other Governance Leads and Facilitators to help facilitate discussions around specific topics when relevant. We are working on confirming these folks as we narrow down discussion topics.

Governance is not something any one DAO does “perfectly”. We are still in an era of experimentation and exploration for best practices, and the discussions for this Hub are more focused on highlighting general challenges to DAO governance and solution ideation that could be applied more broadly to the space rather than to one specific project. In order to ensure that the hub stays free from marketing and avoids promoting specific tokens or projects, we plan to do the following:

  • Intention setting: Make sure to open each discussion with a disclaimer and reminder why we are here and what we are not here to discuss (e.g. shill specific projects/tokens)
  • Encourage everyone to share their affiliations, interests, etc. to ensure everyone feels represented and included in Hub discussions
  • Make sure to pull examples for the presentations and workshops from various projects
18 Likes
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Hi!

Thanks for putting together this proposal

General Update on the Process

  • The RFP is now open until September 7th 2024
  • Shortly after this (mid-September), we will share which Community Hub proposals got accepted and will work with those accepted teams to fine-tune the proposals/hubs and how we can best meet their production requirements.

We’ll keep you updated, should we have any more questions!

Thanks!

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Hey @Shyam_Sridhar - thanks for the update! We will keep an eye on the forum for further info.

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I love this!

Having governance nerds in one room for a day will surely bring up important topics and spicy takes (the group could also decide to adopt the Chatham House Rule where participants afterwards do not reveal the identity of who said what, just what they said).

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Exciting hub idea! Hope this passes and look forward to jamming with fellow governance and ecosystem wizards.

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Great idea! Cliff from Arbitrum here. Would love to jam with fellow governerds and share learnings. :blue_heart::orange_heart:

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Erin from the uniswap foundation here. Would love to hang out and jam with my fellow geeks!

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Excited to create a space to jam about governance at Devcon!

A group of us have been hosting these conversations virtually for over a year on a monthly basis and it’s been the best way to learn from our peers and support each other as we all navigate this new and evolving field of governance.

@theshelb has brought us together on numerous occasions in person for the Governance Geeks Gatherings in Denver, Istanbul, and for informal cafe meetups in Paris over ETHCC. Stoked to have a chance to work together to bring this conversation to more people during Devcon!

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Hi everyone,

I’m excited to see this initiative and would love to contribute based on my involvement with Celo Governance as Celo Governance Guardian and past CPG Steward.

I’ve been actively participating in decentralized governance processes, and I have experience supporting proposals, facilitating discussions, and monitoring voting systems. I’m particularly interested in topics like delegation, governance design, and finding sustainable mechanisms for community engagement.

Looking forward to joining the discussions, sharing insights from Celo, and learning from others involved in governance across the ecosystem.

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:point_right: CONTRIBUTOR UPDATE:

In addition to the core contributors listed in the proposal above, we have confirmed the following additional contributors who will help coordinate programming and facilitate discussions for this Community Hub.

  • Erin Koen - Head of Governance at Uniswap Foundation
  • Eugene Leventhal - Ecosystem at Scroll
  • Juan - Facilitator at Sky (previously Maker)
  • Maxwell - Governance Onboarding Lead at Optimism Foundation
  • Theo Beutal - Former Governance Lead at Safe
  • Maria Gomez - Governance at Interchain Foundation
  • Ivan - DeFi Ops & Stategy at karpatkey, Advisor at Aragon, Investor at Hydra Ventures
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Hey Klaus here from HackHumanity creator of GovHacks - a unique no-code hackathon type format where DAO contributors “ship proposals to the DAO” (not code) run 2 Arbitrum GovHacks this year.

@theshelb and crew this is a great idea, I look forward to participating.

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What a great initiative. I’ve been working a bit stealth for almost a year, and it’s time to talk through how onchain organization are evolving. A few topics I’m eager to jam on:

  1. Networks of onchain and offchain (legal) contracts
  2. How we can make distributed systems through network diversity
  3. Why online democratic processes should be fundamentally different than geographic based processes
  4. How do we go beyond grants, and look at opportunities in token mechanics to scale token allocations, including mint-on-demand instead of treasury management
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This is dope! I would love to come and join the discussion.

My main topics are:

  • How do DAOs scale - moving away from direct democracy to more roles based / empowered orgs.
  • How to do that while still tapping into the vast common knowledge and sensory capacity of the token holder base?
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Super excited for this initiative. Shelby and the rest of the team have been star facilitators of several cross-DAO governance events!

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Hi there,

Thank you again for putting together this proposal!

We’re excited to let you know that your proposal has been selected as a Community Hub for this year’s Devcon!

What’s next?

  1. Submit a DIP: To confirm your commitment, please submit a DIP in our DIP repository. This helps us track all community initiatives, and your Hub will be featured in the DIPs section of the Devcon website. Please tag proposal with ‘Community Hub’. Here’s an example from last year.
  2. Production details: We’ll collaborate with our production team to prepare a manual covering all the logistics for your space. Expect it within the next week or two.
  3. Program planning: We’ll work with you to refine your program and offer feedback to help create an amazing experience for Devcon attendees.
  4. Communication channels: We’ll set up the necessary channels to stay in touch from now until the end of Devcon.

Thank you again for your initiative—we can’t wait to see your Community Hub come to life at Devcon SEA!

Best Regards,

Shyam & The Devcon Team

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Hey @Shyam_Sridhar ! This is wonderful news! I think I speak for all of the co-organizers when I say we are thrilled to host this Community Hub for all the governance geeks out there! :metal: :nerd_face:

Happy to submit the DIP - could you kindly share a deadline for when you need this done by?

Re production, planning and comms - Looking forward to working together to make this Hub happen. I think all of the organizers should have a call within the next two weeks to get everyone on the same page and finalize an agenda. We will keep you updated, but also let us know if you would like to be a part of that call.

1 Like
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Hey @Shyam_Sridhar ! I have created a PR for our DIP here.

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Congrats on this great initiative! I’m Candu, Growth Lead at SEED Gov, and I’d be more than happy to participate and take this opportunity to connect.

Count on the SEED Gov team. We’re looking forward to joining you!

Thanks and see you there!

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Thanks for sharing this initiative! I love the idea of creating a space to dive into key governance challenges. The range of topics looks great, and I think this hub will be a fantastic way to exchange ideas and experiences.

A bit about me – I’m Varit, from Curia Lab, where we focus on governance data and analytics for DAOs like SafeDAO and Optimism Collective. My work revolves around governance frameworks and using data to help communities make more informed decisions. I’m particularly excited about the Collective Intelligence Round – it sounds like a perfect chance for collaborative problem-solving. I’d be curious if there’s a way to document these insights more thoroughly, maybe beyond just blog posts? For instance, a shared resource hub that can aggregate these learnings for future use could amplify the impact of the discussions.

Really appreciate the emphasis on keeping discussions free of marketing and focused on real governance issues. I look forward to seeing how this unfolds and would love to get involved!

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Thank you to all of the organizers and contributors helping to make this happen!

I know many of you and look forward to meeting others through great conversation in this space.

I am currently the Foundation Operator at SuperRare / RareDAO as well as an active member of the Hats protoDAO. I am particularly interested in conversations around delegation, governance experience design, funding, and councils (or alternatives to them).

I think it could also be valuable to explore or share situations where business, governance, and regulatory compliance goals conflict and how we as governance facilitators and contributors can or already have help to resolve that tension within a particular org.

Excited to share this space with everyone and see you soon :slight_smile: