The sCoop - Contributor Newsletter - 2022.01.13 Thursday

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Fresh Owlpha, curated daily. This is @HOWweDAO . (previous issue)

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Big day today means big sCoop today. The Coop hosted seven meetings, kicking off with GovOps’s first meeting as Governance Nest and ending with Owlchemy AMA: Episode 2. As WGs restructure as Nests and Pods, groups consider what this means for their specific team. We also held the LAYER2 Community Call explaining our new product, a collaboration with L2BEAT that answers the demand for an L2 chain index made clear by recent market surveys.

Join us for ‘Fridays with the Coop’ on Twitter Spaces hosted by @Alks4778. And be on the lookout for Friday’s sCoop Weekly where you’ll get a rundown of the week that was and where the Owls are flying next.

Announcements:

MetaGovernance:

Product | Hoodies:

GovOps’s First Meeting as "Governance Nest"
Governance Nest (14 attendees) notion

GovOps is now the Governance Nest. Changes include: higher level discussions, two meetings per week (instead of one), and a distinction between low-context and high-context roles. The two meetings are scheduled for Wednesdays at 15:00 UTC (Touchpoint) and Friday at 15:00 UTC (Nesting), each for 30 minutes. Future calls will be recorded and managed. If you want to join, send an email to @sixtykeys with the subject line, “Invite Me to Gov Nest.”

Next, the grouped talked functional workflow. There will be levels of works that determines who does what kind of work.

There will be three levels:

  1. Salary: high-context roles that drive strategy, decision-making, and direction of work. These roles will not complete bounties, but rather build bounties.
  2. Contract/Grant (monthly/quarterly grant): mid-context roles that involve repetitive operational work, like running a process, ongoing reporting, or project management.
  3. Bounty: roles requiring lower organizational context work, but may be high-context in an area of expertise. Task-oriented work with a clear beginning, end and deliverable perfect for new joiners.

@mel.eth will continue to build out workflow as well as an agenda for the next five meetings. And shoutout to @shawn16400 for his diligent scribing.

Ducks, Horses and Some Upcoming W+NB Events
Women + Non-binary of Index Pod (9 attendees)

The call started off with a heated debate: Would you rather fight 1 horse-sized duck or 100 duck-sized horses? The group settled on fighting the 1 horse-sized duck; only @jujube and @coolhorsegirl argued for the 100 duck-sized horses on the grounds that their scaled-down legs would make them delicate and their size would make them quite puntable (and because I like horses; the more, the merrier, even if we’re fighting).

Now, down to business: @catjam explained Women + NB’s integration into the Community Nest per the Leadership Forum yesterday ( slides here and video here). The group will continue to focus on partnerships, events, networking, and community (vs. contributor) engagement.

@chasechapman proposed a new meeting schedule that will begin next week. An ops-focused meeting will meet every other week on Google Meets (functioning like the meeting that currently happens every week). On weeks when the ops meeting does not happen, W+NB will host a “vibe session” on Twitter Spaces focused on community-building for those interested in meeting new people, learning, and potentially joining Index. It was met with positive feedback from the group; future goals include expanding W+NB to include all underrepresented groups in Index and compensating for the lack of direct representation of W+NB interests on Index Council with the help of @mel.eth more formally bridging the groups.

Some updates on events: @rashmiashok11 and @Alks4778 have planned the Index 101 Workshop from January 17-19 to help educate people (particularly historically underrepresented groups) about how Index-based products are a great stepping stone to improved personal finance and the role that IC plays at the intersection of index products and cryptocurrency. @Lfeld and @anay scheduled the first Female Founder AMA for February 8 with the hope make it a weekly event. Please reach out to either if you know anyone who you think would make a good guest.

The group also discussed changing its name from Women + NB to something more inclusive of other historically underrepresented groups. They welcome suggestions. Lastly, @chasechapman shared one of her new obsessions: The Ready, a future-of-work laboratory with tons of articles topical to Index.

:musical_note: “I’m goinnnn’ through changes”:musical_note:
Design Pod (14 attendees)

@dev started with a contextualization of what was formerly Design WG in the new restructuring plan. Design WG is now Design Pod within the Growth Nest. This pod will remain distinct from other pods in the Growth Nest, like Video Pod. For those that are focused on specific design-related bounties, day-to-day activities will not change dramatically. Each week, there will be one public Pan-Growth Nest meeting each week, one internal meeting for core team members and others doing lots of bounty-driven work, and specific stand-ups/rapid calls for those working with others on projects.

Compensation is two-fold. Each nest will get:

  1. A budget to hire a (likely full-time) core team to meet its specific objectives.
  2. An address funded with bounty money to pay for other stuff (likely half-time or quarter-time contributors). The contributors in this category (non-core team) will submit a Google Sheet at the end of the month just as they do now. Their payment is posted in the first few days of the next month.

If you are looking for explicit rationale for the restructure, @dev recommends looking through forum posts from Q1 of 2021 including some pieces on organizational theory and management psychology (the subject of @Pepperoni_Joe’s Master’s degree). In the forums, we’re also reminded that this restructure, along with the Wise Owl Council, is a large-scale experiment for the Coop that may be amended in the coming months.

Layer 1, who??
LAYER2 Community Call (18 attendees) slides

@overanalyser opened this meeting with goals to introduce methodologists, explain our new product LAYER2, and hold a Q&A. It is a collaboration with L2BEAT—the leader in analytics and research about Ethereum Layer 2—and led by our methodologist @JosephKnecht.

The LAYER2 index token captures the leading projects in the Layer 2 ecosystem with data from L2BEAT. L2 chains provide transactions which are orders of magnitude faster, less expensive and higher than their L1 counterparts. We see this as a $50m-100m opportunity if we’re able to capture a similar amount of TVL as the DeFi Pulse Index (the closest comparator) captures (0.14%). In our two previous market surveys, the demand for an L2 chain index featured very highly (the 4th most demanded product in August and 6th most demanded product in December).

Methodology changed substantially since the initial forum post about the product. We’ve decided to only include L2 protocols and not to include L1 sidechains (except $MATIC, due to its heavy investments in the L2 ecosystem) or native L2 DAPs. It is weighted 75% by square-root TVL and 25% by liquidity. Allocations are capped at 20%. Token eligibility includes: (1) ERC-20 standard, (2) >$50M TVL according to L2BEAT and (3) >$15k trading depth at 100 bps without order aggregation and excluding LP fee. The product will launch on Mainnet and rebalance quarterly if time-weighted average deviation is >25%.

"The possibilities for DAOs are literally endless."
Owlchemy AMA Episode 2: DAO Design (40 attendees)

@bradwmorris gave an intro: help the community keep a pulse on what’s happening and open source what we’re doing as a DAO to the rest of the web3 ecosystem. He led the conversation with our very own @Pepperoni_Joe and @pet3rpan as well as Forefront’s Caroline Nguyen (@SpaceXponential) and author of Impact Networks David Ehrlichmann.

First, the panel talked key opportunities and challenges for DAOs. Yes, DAOs are communities, but they are not built for no reason, said @pet3rpan. They’re about building a network of valuable contributors that actively work towards the overall vision of the DAO, which is hard to do, especially in a non-hierarchically structured space. @Pepperoni_Joe quit his TradFi job to work for a DAO; for him, benefits of a DAO are that it gives opportunities to everyone, no CV required. However, it is difficult to find balances between certain dualities like focus and creativity and bottom-up and top-down leadership approaches.

Caroline explained her view of a DAO as a vessel for creating a product or service but also a digital world that can bolster the well-being of its citizens even better than the society we live in, stating that “the possibilities of DAOs are literally endless.” We’ve barely scratched the surface of this design space, she said. While web3 is a response and rebellion to economic models designed around fear, control and exploitation, the challenge she anticipates for DAOs is that that they may fail to intentionally penetrated the root of the problem with centralized companies: the lack of concern for human-centered design.

David explained that a DAO is a network deliberately designed to support connection, learning and action for a common purpose. For a long time, hierarchy has been the default way of doing things, and for good reason: it is predictable, reliable and good at executing strategies when it’s clear what needs to be done. For DAOs, which prioritize ownership, this structure is limiting. DAOs support people’s ability to connect on behalf of things they care about. In this way, form follows function.

@Pepperoni_Joe applied this reasoning to the Coop’s new structure. The new nest/pod structure will allow groups to function in a more organic, fluid way. They can connect with other DAOs and sub-DAOs so that eventually DAOs may become networks of teams not confined to one specific DAO.

So how do we know we’re heading in the right direction? Caroline said that we have to “remember the human.” Sometimes DAO design puts overwhelming emphasis on structures and technology while forgetting that these concepts are chiefly interpreted through human experiences. Good DAO design is that which sparks authenticity and joy at every level rooted in community consciousness and autonomy.

@pet3rpan called this analysis “beautiful” and added that DAOs should optimize for things like quality of life, the Genie Coefficient, and other factors that affect their contributors. Every DAO has determined the the KPIs it cares about. Index is focused on some like revenue and TVL; by creating immense clarity on the goals of the DAO, an environment is created that encourages the ability of contributors to drive the overall mission forward.

@StepvhenH is working to post a recording of Owlchemy AMA sessions ASAP. Thank you to @bradwmorris for coordinating today’s AMA. And look forward to the next installment!

Friday: (UTC/1-hr, UON)
2000 - ‘Fridays with the Coop’ on Twitter Spaces @Alks4778 @MrMadila @BigSky7 @Crypto_Texan

Monday: (UTC/1-hr, UON)
1600 - Weekly Standup
2000 - Product Nest

OOO:

Daily DAOwlpha: "I’m not waiting for an open world game because we’re already in one. The spawn point is your wallet, the world map includes anywhere it connects to, rewards are missions, staking is quests, and PFPs are your race/faction. Think about what you build as a piece of the greater game.” - @ohhshiny

Hoot!

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Hey @kindeagle and @coolhorsegirl - how are you thinking about sCoop coverage in our nested future? I think a lot about how communication in the DAO flows; feel free to loop me in if you’re riffing or doing anything like a strategy session :white_heart:

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