March 17
Vision
Last week the Particle Foundation announced its plan to transition into a community-owned DAO. The first question we should ask is why would an organization want to do this? The short answer is that these new organizational entities unlock potentials that could not otherwise be realized. Consider the following three examples:
While this sounds promising and is highly desirable, it is not trivial or easy. It is, in fact, probably the most nascent and unexplored area of technology, economics, and business development in the world right now. It is for this very reason that it must be pursued incrementally. With this in mind, I’d like to share where I think we are and what the next steps should be.
Contributor Experience
Particle already has a beautiful product and a very invested community. We only need to capitalize and focus both of these into structured patterns and processes. The most popular way to do so is through a standard set of “DAO tools”. While this is what is commonly done, it results in a poor user experience. One great benefit we have besides already having the product and community is that we can observe the pains other communities are experiencing with preemptively avoiding them.
The tooling approach used by other communities also results in a mismatch of identities across web services and domains. An account on Discord has no connection to the community wiki or forum. Users hop from one tool to another and the community does its best to simulate a cohesive governance system. We can do better. We are rethinking the DAO contributor experience and working to introduce a new standard in user experience.
With our proposed setup users will authenticate once in Discord and log in using that authenticated identity to a DAO-controlled website. From there they will be able to engage and interact with a wiki and forum using their existing Discord access rights. We will also set our final governance tool (snapshot) as a subdomain on the website and embed real-time org maps from Sobol so that users experience an integrated experience. This is a work in progress and we aim to have it live within a week. After this solution has rolled out we’ll post a more detailed breakdown of the setup and user journey.
Constitution
The first thing to pass through our newly founded DAOs governance process should be a community constitution that captures the purpose, privilege, and relation to other Particle organizational entities. This is currently being drafted by members of the community and will be posted publicly for others to comment on when ready. There has been an unexpected slow down on this task as one of its primary drivers was blocked from Discord but the community is continuing to collaborate and move forward using external tools.
Cadence
Recurring events and ceremonies are the heartbeats of an organization. We now have a dedicated DAO calendar and a Discord bot the community can use to schedule events as needed. This is a big step and an essential tool for serving the community as it evolves. I suggest we also schedule a weekly community call (CC) as a chief community-wide ‘vibe check” asap. Please fill out this lettuce meet so we can figure out a good initial CC time. Best times for a weekly community call: lettuce meet
Tokenomics
While we will be bootstrapping our governance process using the existing Particle NFT, it will not stop there. There is an incredible opportunity to raise money and introduce a more robust and DAO-controlled economic system by launching a dedicated DAO governance token. This is a huge step with many complex factors to consider so it is being explored with the utmost diligence and sensitivity while the community continues to implement the other required DAO structures. I repeat, this is not a blocker but something being investigated in parallel with the other listed efforts of the community. When more clear options are known with lists or best-practice recommendations, they will be shared with the community for discussion and review.
Call for Contributors