Hi owls,
I wanted to share the Index Coop Org chat which we are using at the “New Contributors” calls to help new joiners visualise how this bowl of spaghetti fits together.
Please let me know if there are any additional activities or names you think should be on here.
Edit 1: replaced “leadership” with “Index Token holders”
Edit 2: removed single owner for “organisation”. Instead, organisation can be viewed as a function / activity we all play to support consistency and effective collaboration across WGs and provide visibility of progress and updates to Index holders.
Edit 3: “community” label now shifted to better reflect the fact we are all part of the Coop community!
Leadership structure
When drafting this, one thing I wasn’t clear on was what/who constitutes “Index Coop Leadership” and if there are regular sessions held with this group of individuals.
This was such an unknown for me that every prior iteration of this chart has us all reporting into @MrMadila (# our glorious leader) 
If this does not happen already, maybe the community can give some thought to what might constitute an “Index Coop Leadership team” and what a regular meeting cadence with this group might look.
My recommendation would be the Set team, the four “full timers” and our funded WG leads.
However, I made this chart to map “as-is” and not to inform “to-be” - so I will leave it with you guys for further comment and reflection.
8 Likes
Great work as always Joe! Should have picked up on this on the call on Tuesday but just want to say I am in no way the leader! Far from it haha.
As we are a community with a relatively flat structure perhaps a circular diagram with core contributors in the middle supported by silver and bronze owls may better represent our structure. I know that will be a hard ask on the graphics front! We can discuss offline.
Keen to hear others ideas.
all hail supreme leader @MrMadila
edit: this is a joke
1 Like
Hey @Pepperoni_Joe awesome work, great to see all groups in one chart!
I really like @0xModene’s input 
but it might actually provide the impression to new-joiners that we do in fact have a supreme leader. How about putting organization on the same line as the others, or a circular approach as proposed by @MrMadila seems suitable as well. And I’d also include the community into the bigger circle (minor detail).
Thanks for putting this together!
1 Like
I will edit my response to make it clear it is a joke lol
2 Likes
Incredible work @Pepperoni_Joe. I feel like we have been talking about building an org chart for months. Glad to see it finally take shape.
I for one am glad to see @MrMadila assume his rightful place as Supreme President of Index Coop. There was never any doubt in my mind that he ran everything but this really makes it clear 
I firmly believe that each community member is part of the Index Coop Leadership - and I mean that in a very real and tangible way. Every Individual and organization who holds an $Index governance token has a voice in our community. While the number of governance tokens may vary from individual to individual the fundamental principle does not change. Each person is free to create an initiative and campaign to build community support around it.
Any individual can come and can have an immediate impact on our community. We embrace these contributions and strive to empower everyone to create impact. However, leadership takes more than just impact. Leadership also takes trust. Trust takes time to develop, and is a process that is continually reinforced by community involvement and activity.
In my mind leadership within this community is built around these two fundamental principles of impact and trust. This means is that no-one can be selected to be a leader in the Coop. People only become leaders in this community by creating impact and building trust. While impact can be felt immediately, trust grows over time.
Community members go through three stages as they become integrated into our community.
-
Learn: In this period the community member is essentially a student. Their one task is to learn as much about the community and organization as possible. They have 1:1 conversations with other members, attend as many meetings as possible, and read everything.
-
Contribute: Once context has been built- community members begin to contribute to the community. Initially this contribution is usually small - helping with materials or amplifying marketing. Over time this contribution is expected to grow, until the community member is ready to drive major Coop wide initiatives.
-
Build Trust: All it takes to build trust is showing up. We are open community and no-one can enforce working hard or completing tasks. To me building trust comes from helping out, offering good edits on forum posts, giving good feedback, asking for advice, taking initiative to push things forward, and supporting other members. This takes time and that is ok - this element of trust and time is the strength of the system.
This is how I think about leadership within the community- the beauty of this structure is that it is never ending. Because we have very few formal positions - every community member must continually create impact and build trust. The process is never over because our community will never stop growing and improving.
2 Likes
Has anyone use https://sobol.io/ before? Maybe @anon10525910. It was one of my favorite parts of ConsenSys.
It’s a org chart tool specifically designed for decentralized, non-hierarchical organizations like us. Has OKR/KPI features built in, soft governance/sentiment, inter-team agreements, and a lot of really useful tools that helped us self-organize at ConsenSys.
I can give you guys a demo one day if you want. I also know one of the founders if you want to talk directly with them.
3 Likes
yes!
Sobol seems to capture the realities of a DAO much more accurately than a hierarchical model (which doesn’t really reflect reality that accurately).
Whether costs of sobol are worth the gains is a different question.
Yea it’s definitely a more powerful tool than an org chart plotter and has pricing plan.
Can use free version if we just want to draft org chart or it’s like $5/user/month which would be like $2,000 a year for the whole coop. Pretty trivial compared to other expenses and it’s definitely worth it if we use it but if no one uses it then obviously not worth it.
Looks nice and tidy!
Makes it easier to understand
Great to see this post spark such interesting discussion! 
I’ve updated the chart with some of the recommended edits, though as pointed out by @anon10525910, @BigSky7, @Lavi and @MrMadila this hierarchical model is only so applicate to a DAO.
Given we are only using this for informative purposes with new joiners, I’m going to park more comprehensive rework for the time being.
@Kiba - I’d not encountered Sobol before, but as someone who’s done Org Design / Operating Model Design as part of their day job, the functionality it offers gets me really excited 
.
@BigSky7 - I enjoyed you comment around leadership and trust so much me and @ElliottWatts created a dedicated slide for it in our New Investor and Contributor call.
7 Likes
