[Discussion] Safe DAO Resource Allocation Model (OBRA)

Proposals Phase 0: Discussion
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Title: Safe DAO Resource Allocation Model (OBRA)
Status: Draft SEP, open for feedback and discussion
Author: Peter ‘pet3rpan’ (1kx), Justin ‘AccelXR’ (1kx)
Date: 22nd Thursday, September 2022

// This is a draft proposal that we are seeing feedback and looking to iterate upon

About:

Decentralized governance / DAOs established a vision for the possibility of decentralized, neutral public goods owned by the public. However, after 3+ years of live data emerging around decentralized networks, decentralized coordination is still a work in progress.

During this period, 1kx has supported, invested, and participated in over 40+ DAOs and incubated/launched many ourselves. Through our experience, the case for decentralized resource allocation has a long way to go with finding a long-term viable model, with most DAOs experiencing major coordination failures such as the following:

  • Unclear consensus and clarity on core DAO activities and product strategy, leading to excessive spending and misallocation of community resources to misaligned initiatives.

  • Lack of oversight, feedback loops, and accountability of community initiatives leading to overhiring and working groups with unreasonably high burn rates and low output efficiency.

  • Inadequate contributor quality curation and accountability leading to a high amount of incompetent, low context individuals gaining senior leadership positions, leading to a further degradation of the community’s operating standard and contributor value extraction at the cost of the entire community.

  • Lack of data driven of decision making processes that lead to the governance capture of the community to contributors who brute force governance via beuracractic lobbying.

  • Bloating on the DAO’s decisional surface area to a point where collective governance contributors no longer have the adequate context to govern effectively, leading to over delegation and concentration of social capital to a few select voices who are time rich but not nessearily those creating real impact for the DAO.

Rather than trying to address these problems incrementally, 1kx looks to propose a surface area reduced model for the governance of Safe DAO’s resource allocation known as ‘outcome-based resource allocation’ (OBRA).

Outcomes-based resource allocation (‘OBRA’)

The OBRA model minimizes the focus on the governance of resource allocation to focus only on the following areas:

1. Goals & metrics:

  • What are the vision, goals, and north star of Safe DAO?
    • eg. ‘To become the asset management standard of web3’
  • What metrics does the DAO use to measure progress towards its north star?
    eg. ‘# of multi-sigs deployed, TVL of multi-sigs, volume transacted via multi-sigs, revenue/token buy back rate, multi-sig market share"

2. Strategy:

  • What are the different approaches to achieving the DAO’s agreed-upon goals?

    • Eg. ‘Focus on building more third-party safe modules to drive safe transaction volume, which would lead to more utility and thus greater TVL’
    • Eg. ‘Focus on institutional crypto adoption to drive TVL’

  • We expect there to be three main categories of strategies:

    • Adoption (focused on gaining greater adoption and market share)
    • Value accrual (focused on accruing value to Safe DAO)
    • Risk (focused on addressing and managing risk for Safe DAO)

  • Example of a strategy proposal template/framework:

    • Goals and metrics the strategy looks to drive progress in
    • Outline the execution strategy or thesis
    • Detail around existing data or evidence to support this thesis
    • Detail around any risks associated with this strategy
    • If this strategy succeeds, what is the happy case?
    • If this strategy fails, what would be some reasons?
    • What are some example initiatives that would fall under this strategy
    • Assessment of the strategy’s maturity and if there is additional data that needs to be collected for the validation of this strategy

  • We expect there to be many valid strategies that the DAO can adopt to achieve its goals. We should both carefully assess the validity of strategies while also focusing on experimenting and validating new strategies.

  • The maturity of each strategy and progress being made on each front should determine the level of resources being allocated by Safe DAO towards initiatives under that particular strategy

3. Initiatives

  • Initiatives are work proposals that are funded by Safe DAO
  • Initatives are more traditionally thought of as more traditional ‘DAO proposals’
  • Example of an initiative proposal template/framework
    • Which pre-approved strategy is this initiative driving forward?
    • Which metrics and KPIs will the initiative be measured against?
    • Who is the accountable initiative lead? (individual or organization)
    • What is the initiative about?
    • What resources are being requested from Safe DAO?
    • What risks does the initiative entail?
    • Timeline/roadmap of milestones for the initiative
    • Are there any upfront funding this initiative needs at the beginning
    • The requested $SAFE success reward if the team achieves all work milestones (vested token bonus for completion of work)
  • Operating procedures around initiatives:
    • All initiatives must be driving forward an existing DAO strategy
    • All initiatives are funded by streamed payments via a tool such as superfluid or sablier unless the sum of funds is < $10,000
    • The proposer may request an initial lump sum to kickstart the initiative, but the lump sum may not exceed more than 20% of the total funding requested for the project unless the project timeline requires less than 3 month to complete
    • The $SAFE success reward for the completion of initiatives will be locked up for 1 year, followed by a 1 year linear unlock via vesting contract

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4. Review:

  • Safe DAO will operate on seasons lasting 4 months each consisting of a work period and a review period:
    • Initial 14 weeks of operational focus
    • Followed by a 2 week review period in which the funded initiatives of Safe DAO will be reviewed by token holders and delegates
  • During the review period, all initiatives with streams of funding are subject to review and be required to share progress updates - they however do not need to re-apply for funding and drive a proposal through governance if their pre-approved funding extends beyond the prior work period
  • The DAO will also review existing approve strategies and may also decide to remove supported strategies too
  • Any new strategies and initiatives for the DAO must be proposed before this period to be considered for funding or approval
  • If token holders and delegates wish to terminate an initiative, the rest of their approved funding are returned to the DAO (all unspent funds and unvested tokens)

We expect the first review cycles for Safe DAO to take a bit longer in practical reality but, over time, get to a better place of operational predictability. For the first review cycle that emerges of Safe DAO, we want to take extraordinary care to walk through the process carefully to educate all community members involved about the process and invest time with involving delegates.

Voting thresholds for governing strategy, initiatives, and review

We suggest there be minimum thresholds in governance power for being able to vote on the DAO’s core strategies, initiatives, and review cycles as a means of encouraging coordinated delegation parties to emerge in the governance process while also discouraging low effort and low signal participation. We suggest the following parameters:

  • Governance on strategy: minimum 1% of circulating supply
  • Governance on initiatives: minimum 1% of circulating supply
  • Governance on review: minimum 1% of circulating supply

Incentives for reviewing initiatives

Once the first review cycle emerges, there will be an open question on how to properly incentivize the review of this work, as this becomes an operational burden on token holders and delegates. We can expect professional delegates that take a delegate management fee on tokens to emerge as a result of such incentives. MakerDAO currently has a model for rewarding delegates (MIP-61), and we can expect a similar design to emerge here eventually.

Why no working groups?

Typically working groups within DAOs are funded on an ongoing basis, with very little oversight where many critical decisions around strategy left for contributors to decide. By first defining strategies as a DAO via token holder governance, it enables clarity of operating strategy and direction for contributors to focus on contributing as opposed to overly involving themselves in governance and other areas of their core competency. Initiatives are then funded based on pre-approved strategies and curated based on their ability to efficiently produce metris driven results for the DAO.

As such, with Safe DAO, there are no ‘default’ working groups. While working groups may form and request resources to drive initiatives forward for Safe DAO, there are no ‘official’ working groups to which the DAO will default responsibilities towards. Any arbitrary individual or group will be able to apply to contribute towards the DAO via initiatives.

We instead look to foster many groups contributing to Safe DAO, some cross-functional, others specialized in certain functions. By assessing contributors based on metrics/KPIs and fostering a free market of working service provider options, the DAO is able to assess and reward its contributors in a manner that is politically minimized and free of governance capture from any single contributor group.

The goal here is to open up a free market for teams to offer bids for work in relation to the DAO as opposed to many of the other DAOs that ‘officiate’ working groups and their working group leaders into permanent positions purely based on being ‘early’ or having social capital in the community.

While this model might introduce sub-optimal resource allocation towards initiatives, it is a design that minimizes the political friction of Safe DAO. We can think of the current status quo of working groups as highly inefficient government-subsidized departments and the initiative-based model as a free market-based model that encourages the formation of service providers for the state that operates under the pressure of competition and a free market.

While a working group model for earlier stage DAOs might fit better due to the need to be more iterative with feedback loops and strategy, Safe DAO has product market fit and a natural monopoly. At a smaller scale, you can operate with greater uncertainty without the overhead of politics, but as you scale, the political environment is a variable you want to minimize.

In every case, we’ve seen an over-reliance on working group-based models suffer similar fates to centrally governed economies which we’ve historically seen to fail.

In this outcomes-based governance model, we look to place a heavier emphasis on debating strategies first before deploying resources and having metric-driven feedback review cycles on the DAO’s allocation of resources. reviewing the DAO’s work.

Slow is smooth, smooth is fast.

How do we retain crucial functions for the DAO without working groups?

There may be areas of critical function for the DAO that may need ongoing functions, such as smart contract security or full-stack security audits to which the DAO should look to create a risk strategy to which various service providers can bid for the ongoing responsibility required to be filled by the DAO. The difference here is that there will continue to be regular review cycles for service providers retained by the DAO and that there might even be several service providers that are engaged to support the same very initiative. We expect risk-based initiatives to be much longer than and steadier supported by the DAO as opposed to other initiatives surrounding adoption or value accrual, as these areas are far more dynamic than risk management.

Design principles

  • Limit the scope of the DAO’s scope of governance and push complexity to the edges
  • Establish a resource allocation process that limits politics and rewards merit/data
  • Allow for bottoms up open source resource allocation and opportunities to contribute, but only if there is pre-existing clarity and due diligence around strategy
  • Keep it simple stupid (K.I.S.S)

The evolution of Safe’s operating model

This operating model looks to soften the landing of Safe from a centrally operated organization into an open-source DAO. We expect this operating model to evolve as the core organization currently driving forward Safe gradually decentralizes over time. For the time being, this operating model simply looks to accommodate community-driven resource allocation toward grassroots initiatives.

Non-resource allocation-related proposals

There will be many other proposals that are non-resource allocation related, such as smart contract parameters or token list upgrades, and we expect those to have their own set of processes governed as needed by the rest of the DAO. This operating model mostly has looked to zero in on resource allocation, which has been mostly been the number one point of failure in other DAOs.

Governance references that inform our point of view:

Our goal here is not to refute the tremendous contributions these DAOs have made to the space for their experiments are necessary to understand the viable design space of coordination better but instead to acknowledge the risks involved and seek an alternative structure that accounts for these common pitfalls.

Next steps

  • Feedback from community members on this operating model
  • Ratify a revised version of this operating model as a DAO via a community vote
  • If the community ratifies the operating model:
    • Propose a set of metrics and KPIs for Safe DAO as a community proposal
    • Propose a governance framework for developing strategies (a way to propose new strategies and a process to validate them)
    • Propose a governance framework for proposing initiatives (that drive forward approved strategies)

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This initial draft here aims to open up a conversation and gather feedback.

We’ll be iterating on the design and execution of this model per community discussion.

ps. Please fork these ideas and apply elsewhere as needed.

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Attaching diagram:

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// Was only allowed to post a single embedded media in the forum post

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This will likely be a canonical post referred to by metagovernance geeks like myself for at least months if not years to come. Thank you for writing it.

Why didn’t you make a higher threshold I wonder for Governance on strategy? Wouldn’t we want something “constitutional” to have a higher threshold? We wouldn’t want the Goals and strategies changing as frequently or easily as individual initiatives / proposals would we?

I know this post is focused on OBRA as opposed the particular goals & metrics, strategy and initiatives. That said - I’d argue that the most important projects in web3 should have some component of their strategy being to grow web3 itself. My observation is that with only ~5k active developers in web3, we are still early days and need to all be intentional about 100xing that number in the years to come. What do you think?

Last quick point - once metrics are agreed upon - would it make sense to have a function that gathers these? I’m new to the SAFE DAO and maybe there are already guardians or something doing this role in which case my question is of course moot.

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I fully support an OBRA approach. Although reviewing and monitoring outcomes is critical, I believe the real power of this approach is the process it instills and what that process produces - a plan.

From a messaging standpoint, I view this as having DAO governance move from a proposal-based approach to a plan-based approach. By plan, I mean having discrete objectives (what you call strategies) and the initiatives to achieve those objectives.

This is an approach I have spent considerable time researching, as a founder in the DAO coordination space and as a genesis core operator with Wilfdfire DAO (a meta-governance services DAO founded by the Fire Eyes team).

Referring back to my renaming of strategies, I recommend a slightly different naming structure. I have thought long and hard about terminology (you need to because it is far more important than people realize) and this is the position I came to. DAO “seasons” are coordinated through a strategic plan. A strategic plan is comprised of objectives and initiatives.

A strategic plan, if you think about it as an object contains the narrative for why you have this particular plan and it defines the time period you are working in. In the case of Safe DAO that would be four months. The objectives are what the DAO wants to achieve (or avoid). You can have multiple objectives.

Each objective should have an unambiguous way to define what success means if the objective is achieved. These are the “goals and metrics” in 1k(x)'s model. You can see how it makes more sense to embed these in an objective rather than have the metrics across all objectives in a single bucket. For example, an objective could be, “To become a leading project in the web3 space” with a metric, “TVL is in the top 10 of all web3 projects”.

From a process standpoint, the first step is to create a strategic plan (a name, i.e., “Safe DAO Season 3”, timeframe, and possibly a draft narrative). Then the objectives are proposed, debated, and decided on. Once finished, the draft strategic plan is opened up to the community to propose initiatives that support achieving the various objectives. The community debates and then approves or rejects the proposed initiatives based on the community’s belief in the outcomes they will produce.

At this point the final narrative can be written, the strategic plan “published” or made active, and the DAO can start to execute. The plan now becomes the communication vehicle for what this DAO is working to accomplish. A great onboarding and project management tool. I have lots of ideas on this as well but I’ll stop here.

Anyway, these are my initial comments. I would enjoy participating in a working group to make this proposal a reality and to make Safe DAO a testbed for OBRA (aka, plan-based governance).

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I like this structure and flexibility of the OBRA model. It may be a good way to avoid ‘working group complacency’ where progress can grind to a halt when people get busy or don’t have clear KPIs.

I’d consider adding something in addition to the $SAFE success reward for completion of initiatives that don’t go to plan. If a team fails to deliver wrt the metrics and KPIs outlined in the initial prop, they could recover some of the reward by presenting how and why they didn’t meet the expected goal so the rest of the community can learn & adapt.

I’m not sure if this needs to be an explicit guideline or could emerge as a cultural norm, but I think it could minimize KPI/ metric misalignment.

I also like having risk as a core strategy because it will encourage more meta initiatives that look at the long term resiliency of the DAO/ ecosystem. Although metrics for the risk category will be harder to define.

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@isaac you bring up a critical point. Although, you may not realize just how big an issue it is. Right now, web3 comp is broken - badly. Most people don’t get paid for their efforts or are at the mercy of the crowd to retroactively comp them when they have no idea of the effort involved or the results achieved. They basically guess.

More to your point, paying for results makes complete sense, except when it doesn’t. Where it doesn’t is when a community is doing complex problem-solving. For these situations, these communities need to support experimentation to discover the innovation that solves the problem.

In an all-or-nothing payout mindset, you will get little to no risk-taking, resulting in just incremental advancement. We need to reward the experimenters and pay for their efforts even if the desired outcome was not achieved. In reality, a great deal was achieved. The community discovered a path that does not work (for this org, at this point in time, with the given resources).

If you set up an objective/initiative, plan-based model you’ll realize the initiatives competing for resources to achieve an objective are actually a set of possible paths to success. If the chosen pathway project (aka initiative) doesn’t pan out. The community can learn from it and now make a more informed decision of what the next-best initiative should be resourced to achieve the breakthrough result.

When a community gets good at this process they will learn to fail fast, saving the remaining resources to be allocated to the next-best experiment. This is where I will add my next modification to the above model. I would not wait to do an end-of-season retrospective/review on the outcomes. I would make it an ongoing process. As soon as an initiative should be killed, kill it. Then move on.

The originally proposed process will likely lead to a major project management problem - the sunk-cost fallacy. This is to say, getting the project to the finish line, no matter what the evidence is saying, in the hopes that maybe the team can pull off success in the end. This wastes resources and is how many bureaucratic environments operate. The very orgs we’re trying to disrupt.

The end-of-season review should still happen. There still needs to be an accounting of the overall season results and for any non-experimental initiatives that ran for the season. Also, it’s good to stop and reflect and reset. This is when you can start the next season’s planning cycle by creating the next strategic plan.

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Agree with a lot of this @OmnistratMatt, specifically related to paying for effort not just results. Retroactive comp is unsustainable. I’d like to bring up two additional points here as well related to the comp:

  1. I’m concerned about setting 20% payment cap. This may block some contributors willing to give the DAO full focus that are unable to do so due to cash flow problems.
  2. We should look at paying in a mix of stablecoins and $SAFE. I’m unsure exactly what the mix should be, but paying in just $SAFE, which will likely be volatile for a time, makes financial planning difficult for contributors and adds structural sell pressure as many contributors will need to sell their tokens to pay for expenses.
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I am in favor of most of this proposal overall, but have some comments (along with the response above related to comp).

First, a question: How do tokens held by various “neutral” parties figure into circulating supply? Does the SAFE Foundation’s tokens count? The three community treasuries? The below comment holds generally, but the degree of it assumes circulating supply is as inclusive a definition as possible.

Voting thresholds:
Given my current knowledge, I am against voting thresholds as it is a strong centralizing force. Additionally, the % indicated will exclude all individuals and guardians. Let’s take Guardians as a specific example. There are over 100 guardians (https://twitter.com/gnosisSafe/status/1539249613999308800). It is unlikely any will have the ability to vote given 5% total airdrop allocation to guardians.

Low signal / low effort participation is worth discouraging, but this does not seem to be the right path. It may make more sense to have thresholds (that can be pooled amongst delegates) for other mechanisms such as creating proposals, but not voting in them.

No working groups:
I suspect we will get good results from this approach, but expect it will come with new types of problems. I am particularly concerned with need to have explicit effort to either foster and share or codify institutional knowledge over time. Are there other teams doing this that we can look at as an example?

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I set it to an arbitrary threshold that didn’t seem over imposing for the time being as we are always able to adjust it as needed. Goal right now is to approach it with an open mind and not overly think it.

I’d consider adding something in addition to the $SAFE success reward for completion of initiatives that don’t go to plan. If a team fails to deliver wrt the metrics and KPIs outlined in the initial prop, they could recover some of the reward by presenting how and why they didn’t meet the expected goal so the rest of the community can learn & adapt.

I like the idea in theory and how it promotes operating and psychological safety but not sure how to design it so that the incentives align here. Eg. if you cap the failure token reward as a % of the total funding requested, you align incentives for teams to over promise and fail. This would be some sort of social security type safety for work. Not sure if this is appropriate as a first order means of distributing funding from the DAO.

Disagree. The free market is comprised of all or nothing risk taking. The uncapped and large upside potential is what drives risk taking and that is what we should look to optimise for regarding the token rewards for completing entire projects/initiatives. We should look to significantly reward teams/individuals that are able to move the needle considerably.

I don’t see how the cash flow situation can be different to any other job. You get a paycheck week or month to month, here the cash flow situation is much better given the fact that the funding is streamed. I’d rather operate first then iterate on this as needed.

DAO contributors will receive a token bonus if they complete their work. If DAO contributors wish to receive more tokens for work, they can under price their cash compensation and ask for a greater token bonus. The DAO should ideally look to to raise stablecoin funding via OTC sales of tokens to strategic investors if possible as opposed to distributing tokens to contributors who eventually sell to much more passive and lesser strategic holders on the secondary market.

Yes, would consider any token not locked up inside Safe DAO’s treasury as circulating.

Good point, open to lowering the thresholders. Initial levels were set pretty arbitrarily IMO. Might be good to observe the delegation levels to guardians and then approve the actual voting thesholders after.

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A good debate to have. I’m only referring to the specific use case of complex-problem solving and not the way most OBRA initiatives would play out. And yes, even with complex problem-solving, you can make it an all-or-nothing proposition. Really, the comp/reward payout could be left to be negotiated on a case-per-case basis rather than locking something in.

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I didn’t catch the distinction between the streamed payments and the success rewards. Are they two different aspects of the payout? I.e., the streamed payments for the work along the way (or completing the work), and the success rewards for achieving the goals/metrics.

I ask because you spoke about uncapped and large upside potential. You also mention a couple of times about being paid for completing the work with no reference to hitting the goals/metrics.

Basically, do you envision payouts based on completing the work regardless of results or is getting a payout based on achieving the goals/metrics?

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Must’ve misunderstood in my initial reading. Fully in support of this cap, or even a lower one, given the streaming configuration.

By “cash compensation” do you mean compensation via stablecoins as the default for contributor streams? Is the intention that all streaming payments are in stables? I find this amenable, but wanted to clarify.

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@isaac

I’d consider adding something in addition to the $SAFE success reward for completion of initiatives that don’t go to plan. If a team fails to deliver wrt the metrics and KPIs outlined in the initial prop, they could recover some of the reward by presenting how and why they didn’t meet the expected goal so the rest of the community can learn & adapt.

I’m not sure if this needs to be an explicit guideline or could emerge as a cultural norm, but I think it could minimize KPI/ metric misalignment.

If something like this is implemented where a team can recover some of the reward by presenting progress to the goal, these guidelines should be explicitly outlined and not left to implicit emergence.

If this isn’t explicitly outlined and left to ad-hoc decisions, the general trend will be towards heavily rewarding failed initiatives. Having all compensation/reward schemas being explicit also helps contributors predict their own outcomes, which increases their engagement and willingness to participate.

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Yup! I envision the stablecoins cash payments getting streamed and then a pre-defined success fee in tokens paid out if all work was successfully achieved (to be pre-defined).

Yup, stablecoins or ETH if requested etc. (or even fully paid in $SAFE) but open to have the team to decide their compensation here.

100% Agree. I’d like to run the first wave of initiatives and then implement a patch to the process after rather than introducing more upfront complexity here. Want to layer on rules/complexity as needed over time vs. over speculate on the design decisions.

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Every 4-month work/review period, the end vision ideally should produce a report card overview of the DAO’s efforts attributed to KPIs. The goal is to start slow and build up the org in a way so that we have become increasingly more efficient and to improve the output of metrics consistently.

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Eventually, we’d be able to produce quantifiable metrics for CAC and LTV for safes. Once we do, we can more aggressively deploy capital to drive forward the growth of Safe DAO.

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Operating model seems reasonable to me, I appreciate the laser focus on hard quantifiable KPIs in the report card @pet3rpan-1kx

I’d like to add that resources allocation should be structured to facilitate more qualitative objectives. Some goals are harder to define but is of sufficient importance to DAO’s core values. Some of which are:

  • measures of decentralization: decentralized UI, front end diversity, user owning their own data and/or run self-hosted transaction service
  • brand growth and education: important as Safe begins to differentiate from the legacy Gnosis Multisig branding
  • expansion into new use cases: applications that enable new non-financial use cases
  • development ecosystem diversity: pushing plugins development to the edge to grow a healthy engineering community instead of reliance on the core team

Also note: Safe DAO hard metrics is already impressive by industry standard, I’d like to see the resource allocation model focused on growing the pie in the long run- not to mention 4 months review cycle could restrictive to a more moon-shot initiatives

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Hello Safe friends,

First of all, I would like to say that I love that blog post !! While reading it I had lots of flashbacks regarding the discussion while we are developing Inverter. Inverter is a funding tool that aims to increase accountability and transparency while reducing administrative effort.

The mechanism of Inverter embraces a very similar approach that this proposal suggests for fund management.

Inverter embraces milestone-based funding. Such that, while creating a proposal, the working team has to set milestones and deliverables. Each milestone will have a budget and duration. The milestone budget amount will only start streaming to the working team once they provide the Proof of Completion document.

As you have stated, “Without established KPIs or accountability, both contributors and funded projects lack clear goals and metrics to work towards.”

One of the novel solutions that Inverter brought here is that the “approval” process of the proof of work document is based on an optimistic approach. Unless there is a disagreement with the document, the document will be redeemed as satisfactory. However, if the community is not satisfied with the provided proof of completion document, they can interrupt streaming and withdraw their funds anytime. This allows a built-in accountability mechanism that does not require many approvals on each milestone which involves lots of bureaucratic work but still protects funders from under delivery of work.

One may be concerned that in DAO daily work activities, it is hard to perfectly define milestones with objective outcomes or there may be under deliveries due to external reasons, etc. However, the idea behind providing proof of deliverable completion documents is to maintain the consent of your funder, not complete all the promises without any compromise. For example, the writing guild may promise to provide 3 articles this month but publish 2. However, if the community believes that those 2 articles were very good and satisfied with their performance. All they need to do is not withdraw their funds, which signals that they are satisfied with the provided work.

Also, inside Inverter, communities can provide feedback on proof of deliverable reports. This may be a suggestion for future reports or a request for a new report or any sort of feedback. That way working teams will have constant pulse checks.

I believe one of the most important value add that Inverter can provide Safe DAO is the organization dashboard that it provides. Inverter provides an organizational dashboard that funding programs can see and get notified about

  • Who is already funding this proposal
  • Who is contributing to this proposal
  • Public discussions about the proposal in community forums
  • The proposal’s target funding goal
  • Established Milestones and Deliverables
  • Proof of Deliverable Completion reports
  • Feedbacks on Proof of Deliverable Completion reports from funder

Being able to navigate this important information for many proposals would help SAFE DAO to have a more transparent and easy time to manage its funding activities.

I am looking forward to hearing your opinion. I believe there is a very interesting value alignmentthere. I would love to invite the Safe community to be one of the early tester of the product in our close beta launch. We would love to have a user interview with Safe DAO members to improve our product based on your needs !!

Here you can check some documentation about Inverter:

Product Doc (Work in Progress): Introduction to Inverter - Inverter Network-Docs (WIP)
Latest Blog Post: The birth of Inverter Network, Team and Feature Updates- Part 2 — Inverter Network

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Excellent proposal and discussion - having participated in many DAOs and defi projects for some time, I think you have hit the nail on the head for many DAOs in terms of improving the incentives and focus.

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I will be releasing a final form of OBRA to be pushed for community governance over the next month!

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I have read this a few times, slowly letting things percolate. Really appreciate you putting this thought out into the world.

On the first read I mostly connected with the idea of pushing initiatives to compete under the umbrella of a strategy, providing specific metrics to evaluate and compare them with.

I’m realizing now, this could actually be a bit broader. I’m very interested in seeing measurable competition between strategies, providing an evaluation of different approaches towards the DAO’s goals, different mental models.

This begs the questions: how are strategies selected, and how are good strategies recognized and rewarded? What if any DAO member could permissionlessly propose new strategies and trial initiatives within them to prove efficacy. Trial strategies would have less rewards and therefore less competition between incoming initiatives. More mature, proven strategies would have higher rewards, fostering intense competition within them. Strategy authors would receive increasing rewards as more successful initiatives are completed under their strategies.

Most importantly, trial strategies would provide innovators a permissionless space to iterate and improve the entire approach to meeting the DAOs goals. If the DAO has clear, measurable goals - a strategy could be evaluated simply as $ spent per unit of goal achieved.

Permissionless strategy creation and competition would seriously minimize the amount of things the DAO needs to agree on. The DAO decides on the Goal, and the most important metrics of success. Strategies and initiatives evolve permissionlessly on their own, forced to compete and deliver measurable success.

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