As far as I’m aware, Discord is not a property of the DAO. So consider this a signalling proposal from the community to have a less formal communication medium.
Crypto communities used to be very active on telegram, and now, due to the ease of origination, many prefer Discord as a viable alternative for quick and easy communication.
IMO, Zoom calls also have the same problem as the four i.e somewhat formal.
I prefer using an easy-to-access platform for the community.
With the help of minimal AV magic with OBS, it’s possible to stream directly to youtube and even use the chat function.
IMO ideal combination will be Discord stage + youtube for visuals. The community can use the chat to add comments and opinions.
Agree that the line is fuzzy between the DAO and “the community”, but isn’t the DAO supposed to be synonymous with the community in the long run? Isn’t that the whole point of a DAO? Or am i missing something?
Obviously we could start another discord, but that would have the opposite effect that we’re aiming for in this proposal - to facilitate informal communication to make us feel as one community.
I think the idea of “if you don’t like communication, communicate elsewhere” is divisive, and the main draw of a DAO is to be united by purpose. Surely adding a discord category isn’t such a burden that we have to encourage people to peel off their own subcommunity?
I didn’t mean to imply that the communication should be fragmented–we should make a Discord channel for governance.
That comment was meant to be a reason that this shouldn’t be subject to a vote: changing or creating a communication channel can be done by anyone at any time. If we proposed this and it didn’t pass, then someone would probably just make a Telegram or a new Discord server for this purpose.
Making a Discord channel is pretty different from using the treasury or changing the governance structure, for example. I’m trying to figure out how this decision should be made, and I’m honestly not sure. I’d love to hear from others whether they think this type of change needs to be voted on. I don’t think we have anything documented about whether the Discord is controlled by the DAO.
Good point! I guess it’s the nature of nascent DAOs to have a lot of gaps in places like this. Personally I would want to see us iterate so that things like adding a new Discord channel could be handled by a group in the DAO rather than a community vote. My decentralization model is: delegate authority to the places with the best information to make decisions. An Ops group or something like that would be what comes to my mind.
In the absence of clarity, getting community consensus is always my default, hence this post. Does SafeDAO have a wiki or something that tells us a bit more about the structure?
Personally, my gut feeling is that we’re talking about two different kinds of community calls, serving distinct purposes and catering to different audiences. My take:
Safe Community Calls as they are currently hosted (link):
Purpose: Provide updates about Safe, including the core product, Safe apps, ecosystem projects as well as updates from SafeDAO and the forum
Target audience: Diverse and not specific, but mostly suitable for those who prefer visuals/calls over newsletters/Twitter and want to use the call as a way to be sure to not miss out on any relevant activity across Safe and its ecosystem
Medium and format: Zoom ‘webinar’, one way communication, text-based questions via Q&A, recording shared on YouTube
Potential governance-specific community call:
Suggested purpose: ‘Watercooler-like’ discussions specifically around SafeDAO and current proposals; complementing the text-based forum with a more informal, more interactive space for any non-binding discussions around the forum and Snapshot, which would remain as the only source of truth and only place for decision-making as part of SafeDAO’s governance process
Suggested target audience: Anyone interested in SafeDAO’s governance process and looking for a more informal platform than the forum to discuss topics; proposal authors, Guardians and other key players in SafeDAO
Suggested medium and format: TBD, anything that allows for a relatively interactive discussion with as few barriers to entry as possible and, ideally, a way to share visuals. I’m torn between Twitter Spaces (highly accessible and a great way to onboard anyone from our Twitter networks into SafeDAO when they see the Space happening by chance, but no visuals), Zoom calls (supports visuals and accessible for some community members) and Discord (supports visuals and accessible for some community members). One a more pragmatic note, a Zoom pro plan is available whereas a Discord video channel with proper bandwidth may result in extra costs through Nitro subscriptions.
I tend to believe that we’ll be best off keeping the original community call as it is, and set up a separate governance-specific call separately, but keen to hear everyone’s thoughts on this once you’ve had a chance to join the fourth call or watch one of the recordings.
Pretty sure we can agree that we’ll need to experiment and iterate a bit until we’ve found a good enough medium, structure, frequency and other details of a governance-specific, interactive community call.
The polls above hint at certain trends, although I’m not sure if we’re all having the same idea of a ‘community call’ in mind and may be voting on the same options with different things in mind.
As a practical next step, what do you think about everyone interested in a governance call to join Monday’s community call to make up their mind whether this is a format to iterate on, or whether it would make more sense to have a separate, governance-specific call?
After attending today’s community call I think incrementing on this time slot is a good approach.
A. Timing: As a globally distributed org finding a workable time for live interaction is a challenge. Some live interaction is important and this time has seemed to work well for the first 4 calls.
B. Structure: The calls so far cover core Safe team, product, and community updates, as well as the ecosystem featuring at the end in the existing 30 min spot. Adding SafeDAO could be a dedicated 30 min spot after this call.
There would be 2 cal events. 1 “Safe Community/Product Call” and 2 “SafeDAO”. That way if call 1 ends earlier than 30 min participants can hop off and rejoin the 2nd 30 min time slot.
C. Platform: Because live interaction is important, can Safe’s Zoom account support the scale of group audio/video? If so, that might be best to start as participants are used to signing up for the existing community call through there. If it cannot support the scale of an interactive group call than Twitter Spaces seems the most accessible + usable.
@quasimatt to your question above on whether the community‘s desires matter at all to the administrators of the Safe Community discord, I’ve been told that they DO NOT want governance discussions on Discord: Discord
@theobtl since you mentioned this in
The SEP #3 post, perhaps you’d like to explain your reasoning? Why shouldn’t we be able to talk about governance in Discord?
Up for discussion of course. IMO, we shouldn’t discuss governance on Discord and keep those discussions on this forum to make it simpler for anyone to follow the DAO‘s decision making process.
I’ve heard lots of people across DAOs complaining about how hard it is to follow DAO governance. Too much information across too many channels and people loose track of when and where important discussion take place and decisions are being made. If we can avoid that in SafeDAO by keeping governance discussion to this Discourse forum, that’d be a win I think.
As argued earlier, I’d be for a channel in Discord if it’s e.g. push discussion in the forum to Discord, notify of Snapshot proposals, provide a Q&A space for unclear processes about the governance itself, maybe even for informal chit chat or a watercolor-like voice channel for spoke communications.
Although none of that should be mandatory to follow for anyone looking to be part of SafeDAO. That’d be too much to ask and a waste of our collective attention — which DAOs already require way too much of these days.
Do you see where I’m coming from? How would you approach the ‚source of truth‘ question whether that remains on the forum or is extended to Discord? If the former, what’s the purpose of a Discord channel then? If the latter, how can that a reasonable ask to all SafeDAO members and the attention they have to pay?
From what I’ve seen, people find it hard to keep up with DAO governance not because of multiple channels, but because of the effort it takes to read, understand, and have an opinion on what is being said. Most voters do NOT read everything that is written on a proposal before they make up their minds.
It’s normal - governance can’t always be everyone’s priority. That’s why reducing the barrier to engagement is more important than ensuring all conversations are in one place. Some people will engage with governance better in long-text form, some in real-time chat, some via audio/video. If our goal is to have people engage in governance, having more options to engage is vital.
I can sympathize with the idea of not having all the info you need to participate in governance. In fact I am dealing with that myself with this SEP. I’m not sure why it hasn’t been given a number like other SEPs or who even decides to give it a number. Are these kinds of vital information expected to be searched for in the forum by new members? Do you believe the forum should be the only software property the DAO has?
If we really want a “source of truth” for SafeDAO, I think it would be better for us to have an updatable wiki (like Notion) which becomes and easy-to-consume index for SafeDAO. In it, we could have a page explaining the history and mandate of SafeDAO, up-to-date explanations of governance processes, and links to other places of note (ie this forum).
Depends on the goals of our group. Do we want more people to engage? The votes above seem overwhelmingly in favour.
That’s a great suggestion. Any other thoughts on that? An updatable wiki in Notion seems quite approachable. I’ve been thinking about using GitBook to have a similarly user friendly formatting/UX but better version history and the functionality to manage commits in a more transparent and decentralized way. Discourse also has an inbuilt-wiki feature.
Any other suggestions how to maintain a ‚source of truth’ document? What would people choose?
Notion
GitBook
GitHub
other (please comment below)
0voters
Such a wiki could work well as a source of truth document. Although my original remark also included the discussion process itself which arguably benefits from reduced complexity of channels, I.e. preferably only this forum for official governance discussions so that we’ve got a level playing field for everyone to comprehend how SafeDAO came to make a certain decision. Introducing secondary channels quickly leads to shadow governance nobody would want and jeopardize SafeDAO’s very own principles of decentralization, I’m concerned.
That’s one of the many things our current governance process needs to be improved on, I think. Currently, forum mods label SEPs manually when they seem mature enough.
Would you consider this proposal ready for phase 1 and 2? IMO, it first needs to be updated based on the existing community call format and a suggestion how to (or not) integrate with them. The proposal also has several polls but we can only have one poll on Snapshot.
I think we can narrow it down to the question of a discord channel:
Do you support adding a Governance category on the Safe Community Discord to house ad-hoc governance conversation?
Yes
No
Make no changes
RE: wiki. Personally I don’t care about the technology that we use, just that there is some DAO member-editable wiki somewhere. This could be another proposal
That makes sense to me. I’d suggest to rephrase the purpose using the wording from the Guardians Telegram channel description, wdyt?
Also, if we’re just talking about a Discord channel for informal discussions, I don’t think this should require us all to vote on an SEP. Does anyone feel strongly about that?
I’ve been asking for literally “informal communication”. Also used the text “ad-hoc” discussion. I’m not discussing the purpose of the channel as I introduce it, I am asking if it’s possible to create.
This back and forth texting and missing nuance is EXACTLY why we need more low-barrier communication channels. It’s now taken us more than two weeks to talk about CREATING A DISCORD CHANNEL. This could have been aligned in a 5 minute voice chat.
It looks like there’s alignment then! My remarks where really just based on our interaction here on the forum, so apologies if I missed some context you had in conversations with others elsewhere.
There’s a Discord channel for governance now, with the purpose of providing space for such informal, ad-hoc discussions amongst the community that do not relate to decision-making of SEPs directly. The Discord team will help moderating it and we can use the channel to help referencing proposal-related content on the forum.
I hope that everyone will benefit from this channel while nobody perceives it as additional baggage. Since decision-making will continue to take place exclusively on the forum and the Discord channel will exclusively host informal, non-binding discussions, nobody should feel obliged allocate their scarce attention to yet another channel.
@links, what’s your take on this proposal itself then? The community call-part was considered done since there already was one, and creating a Discord channel did not require an SEP. Can we consider this phase 0 proposal resolved, in your opinion? Not to say that there’s nothing else to improve on ‘communication in SafeDAO’ - there’s a lot more of course. Just saying that we could discuss them in separate threads to keep things tidy and easy to follow if you consider this proposal broadly done.
I’m Adrian. I’ll post something about myself in the intro area after this. Oddly, a friend of mine and I were talking about the safe forum and how high barrier to understanding what’s going on with Safe it is. What is going on? Honey, am I outside? (Drunk Karen from Will and Grace)
I used to write a weekly news letter for the MakerDAO governance community (Called Maker Dai-gest…killer name huh?) Anyhow, I would summarize the big concepts into bitesize
readable understandable nuggets. People could subscribe, but I also posted on Reddit, Medium, Github, Cent I think.
At the risk of making a sweeping generalization…DAO nerds use difficult language (typically engineers…) and love to list every iteration of their thought/idea/proposal. Sometimes less is more people. Pick your favorite suggestion and go with that. I personally get confused by too many choices on the cereal aisle…let alone 8 different ways to implement an SEP.
Safe needs to open up to more community participation like what I did, but I didn’t do it for free. I was compensated under their grants program. I’ve been waiting for a program like that to step forward with a similar service i could provide to the Safe community. I guess let’s talk when the tokens are transferable and a grants program is in place.
