Pre-Proposal for Video Builder DAO - Retroactive Grant Distribution System

Governance
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Pre-Proposal for Video Builder DAO - Retroactive Grant Distribution System

Video Builder DAO logo

Greetings Livepeer Community,

We are delighted to present a pre-proposal for the establishment of Video Builder DAO, a Decentralized Autonomous Organization dedicated to supporting individuals and teams who have previously built decentralized web3 video applications and tools that benefit the Livepeer ecosystem. Our proposal outlines the structure, objectives, and benefits of Video Builder DAO’s retroactive grant distribution system.

Executive Summary:

Video Builder DAO aims to recognize and support the valuable contributions made by builders in the decentralized web3 video space. Through our retroactive grant distribution system, we seek to reward past efforts, foster continued innovation, and strengthen the ecosystem. This pre-proposal outlines the framework for our DAO, including governance, grant distribution process, funding model, community engagement and feedback for improvements.

Introduction:

Video Builder DAO acknowledges the importance of incentivizing builders who have already made significant contributions to the decentralized web3 video ecosystem. We believe in the power of retrospective recognition and aim to provide support that enables further development and advancement in this domain.

Objectives:

The primary objectives of Video Builder DAO’s retroactive grant distribution system include:

  • Recognizing and rewarding builders for their past contributions to the decentralized web3 video ecosystem.

  • Encouraging builders to continue their innovative work and further enhance the ecosystem.

  • Facilitating knowledge sharing and collaboration among builders to collectively push the boundaries of web3 video technology.

  • Establishing a sustainable and inclusive community that supports ongoing development efforts.

Governance Structure:

Video Builder DAO will operate as a decentralized and community-governed organization. Key features of our governance structure include:

  1. Token-based voting system to make collective decisions.
    Each member of the DAO will be given one (1) DAO ERC-20 token for voting which holds a weight of 1 vote per member.

  2. Clear guidelines for membership.
    Eligibility of membership is available to any individual who has completed at least one of the following:
    Please provide feedback about eligibility*

  • Currently listed as an active Orchestrator
  • Listed as one of the following Roles the Official Livepeer Discord:
    • Livepeer Core Contributor
    • Orchestrator
    • Video Builder
    • Mist Team
    • Studio Team

  1. Clear guidelines for participation.
    Please provide feedback about participation*
    We strongly encourage participation, therefore, any member who has abstained from voting on a proposal will have their membership revoked.
    In addition, any member may be voted out with the passing of a “Membership Removal” vote.

  2. Regular community forums and discussions.
    Our primary form of discussion will happen in the Official Livepeer Forum website and a dedicated Discord Thread.

  3. Transparent governance proposals and voting processes.

  • All proposals must be submitted through the Official Video Builder DAO web portal and provide adequate details about the retroactive funding application.
  • Any wallet, whether individual or team, may submit a proposal.
  • Only token holding members of the DAO will be allowed to vote on a proposal.
  • A 50% quorum and a 70% “For” vote must be met before a proposal may be awarded.
  1. Actionable reporting on grant distribution, grantee accountability, and grant effectiveness.
    A clear interface will be accessible to evaluate the historic on-chain transactions of the DAO as well as numerical evidence of grant effectiveness by determining the amount of increased network traffic brought in by each proposal.

Grant Distribution Process:

Video Builder DAO’s retroactive grant distribution process will involve:

  • Identification of previously built decentralized web3 video applications and tools that have made significant contributions to the ecosystem.

  • Evaluation of the impact, innovation, and benefit to the community of each project.

  • Thorough review by a diverse panel of DAO members to ensure fairness and transparency.

  • Grant recipients selected through a transparent voting process by the DAO community.

Funding Model:

The funding for Video Builder DAO will be sourced from the Tier one Livepeer Treasury and will submit an annual budget for replenishing funds into the Video Builder DAO Treasury. The budget will include projections for additional rounds of retroactive funding, use of previous funds and membership or organizational changes.

Community Engagement:

Video Builder DAO places significant emphasis on community engagement. Our approach includes:

  • Regular community meetings and a 15 minute dedicated slot about Video Builder DAO during the weekly Water Cooler Chats.

  • Online forums and communication channels for open discussions and idea sharing.

  • Collaborative initiatives with other web3 communities and organizations.

Benefits and Impact:

The establishment of Video Builder DAO’s retroactive grant distribution system will lead to various benefits, including:

  • Recognizing and rewarding builders for their past contributions, fostering motivation, and encouraging continued innovation.

  • Enhancing the decentralized web3 video ecosystem by supporting ongoing development efforts.

  • Facilitating collaboration and knowledge sharing among builders to collectively push the boundaries of web3 video technology.

  • Establishing a vibrant and sustainable community that actively supports builders and their projects.

Implementation Plan:

We have devised a comprehensive implementation plan for Video Builder DAO, including:

  1. Establishing the DAO’s technical infrastructure, tokenomics, and governance framework.
    All voting and membership tokens contacts will be located on the Arbitrum-One network.
    During the first year of development all contracts will be owned by the DAO contract deployer and all Treasury funds will be held by a multisig account. Until we achieve a degree of success that members vote on, we will upgrade the DAO into a full on-chain funding system with automatic payouts from the treasury and remove the need for a multisig account to release funds.

  2. Conducting an extensive review and identification process to select eligible projects for retroactive grants.
    Each proposal must include, but not limited to, the following:

    • Description
    • Project start and end date
    • Budget of expenses
    • Impact of project
    • Team size
    • Future plans.

  3. Setting up community engagement channels and organizing initial proposals.
    Our goal for our live web portal to accept initial proposals will be targeted for October 30, 2023. During the building phase, we will generate feedback from members and create the engagement channels we see fit.

Budget and Resources:

The initial grant application to the Livepeer tier one fund will be submitted once more information is available about the tier one Treasury. Required information about budgeting will include distribution intervals, payment types and feedback from the Livepeer ecosystem.

This section will be formalized in an official budget.

Conclusion:

Video Builder DAO’s retroactive grant distribution system aims to recognize and support the valuable contributions of builders who have previously built decentralized web3 video applications and tools. We invite you to further discuss this pre-proposal and explore potential ways to collaborate and contribute to the growth and development of Video Builder DAO.

Thank you for your time and consideration. We look forward to hearing from you.

Titan

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Love, love, love this. Thanks for leading the charge. Directionally it looks awesome, so just sharing some minor feedback on a couple points to consider.

Proposals requiring a budget

For retroactive funding, typically it is less about getting “reimbursed” for what you spent, as that might be hard or even impossible to track down after the fact…and more about the community dividing up a pool of funds to a number of recipients somewhat proportionally based on impact, or even donation based. See Optimism’s RetroPGF or Gitcoin Grants Rounds.

You could ask yourselves whether Video Builder DAO members would be better suited to evaluate “does proposal X deserve Y LPT?” or “Let’s divvy up X LPT amongst the applicants and use our votes to determine which are eligible for anything and how much each gets proportionally based on the impact of their work?” I suspect the latter might be a better fit.

Eligibility

For what it’s worth, I’ve been trying to give out the video builder tag to members of all of your mentioned categories who opt in, or who actively participate in the video builder discussions in #developer-lounge. So it might be better to consider the video builder tag a simpler starting point, and figure out how to expand how people get invited to that role or can opt in, than trying to have it encompass additional roles by default. (If anyone wants the tag, just ask me :slight_smile:

Participation

Losing membership for failing to vote on every single proposal might be too high of a bar :wink: But I love encouraging paticipation. If you go with the rounds based model instead of the vote on every proposal model, and a round runs once every few months, then perhaps you could require participation in a round to keep the role.

A word about Titan

For anyone who reads the part about funds controlled by the multisig and the contracts owned by the deployer who might feel concerned about that, I just want to highlight that Titan has done an incredible job over the past two years leading multiple programs, such as the Orchestrator Startup Grant program and Watercooler Chats, and has shown to be efficient, practical, and high integrity when it comes to allocating funds according to the program’s charter. If there are benefits in moving fast while trying this experiment, and not overcomplicating things by using simple offchain approaches, that outweigh fully trustless onchain mechanisms, then I trust Titan would be a good shepherd of those processes.

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Yes yes yes! I have no feedback other than I want in somehow.

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This looks amazing and I am very excited about the potential here for Video Builder DAO to be incubated and for the learnings it will generate. Thank you for the initiative here.

To Doug’s comment about Eligibility – We have also started onchain badging / platform agnostic role management through guild.xyz/livepeer - would be happy to work together on leveraging those roles for Video Builder DAO as well as suggesting something like a Typeform application that allows individuals to request the required roles based on past contributions to automate the process a bit and expand beyond Discord.

One other thing I’ve seen work well here is NFT memberships vs ERC-20 tokens for voting. There is a lot of really cool innovation happening with dynamic NFTs which can take on more properties over time (and could be useful for something like VB DAO where there is a fairly wide range of applicable skillsets for participation and you might want to do voting based on subject matter expertise etc). Could also help with encouraging participation and dynamic membership criteria over time.

I would also be very interested to work out how VB DAO can support in attracting and engaging audiences by doing things like incubating hackathon teams etc which may then be eligible for RPGF but that can come as ideation once we stand up the entity.

Overall, very excited about this!

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Really excited with this! Thanks for laying it out. I wanna comment only on the participation bits. I agree with Doug that voting on every proposal is too strict of a requirement and we should allow people to “disconnect” every now and then from the governance system. It is fair to have a lower threshold though, like the rounds (months, quarters) proposal which I also like.

Regarding how the participation itself is implemented:

Each member of the DAO will be given one (1) DAO ERC-20 token for voting which holds a weight of 1 vote per member.

My suggestion is that we don’t go with an ERC-20, since there is not a lot of use for fungibility here. Every membership is unique because every person is unique (so more like an NFT). Additionally, this membership should not be transferrable, or individual users could put people in the DAO that have not been approved by the community. So, in practice, this ERC-20 should be more like an SBT (“untransferable NFT”) which would work exactly like that! Even though it is not transferrable, it can still be burned.

The flows could be like:

  • For adding a new member to DAO, create a proposal to add them. When it passes, the user gets an SBT and is an official member of the DAO.
    • A challenge is how can we make this quickly without having to wait too long for a complex vote.
  • For removing a member, either the member themselves can burn their token, or the DAO can vote on a proposal to remove them in a similar way.
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Ok I’ve put together a list of replies and updates based on feedback from the community. Thanks everyone for their input thus far!

Agreed, based on our Water Cooler conversation we will go with a round model with a set number of LPT to give away. We will likely start with a round every 6 months.

I like Optimism’s structure and will likely take away lessons from their set up. Unfortunately Gitcoin Grants will likely not be a good fit, 1) they only provide support for Optimism, Ethereum and Fandom chains so LPT would have to be distributed over a bridge, 2) they only accept ETH and DAI for funding which makes dealing with the tier 1 treasury more complicated and 3) they seem to be more about raising funds from the public rather than managing a DAO.

Yes we decided to go with a multi token per member voting system to evaluate and determine the proportional impact and reward for each project.

I love the idea of NFT membership but there are 2 reasons to go with an ERC-20 to start, 1) it’s pre build with the Thirdweb libraries and easy to get started, 2) with multiple ERC-20 tokens we can quadratically vote on the impact/importance of each project with our on-chain voting and fund each project accordingly. Although with development of the DAO there is always an opportunity to switch to NFTs and create more customizable features we see fit!

This was an interesting point and I understand the need for non-transferability for security, however, wallet management is still a developing space, especially with account abstraction, and I think the risk of having members give away their membership is less important than the freedom to move between personal wallets. Also this will take custom contract building which will we can happily do once a proof of concept for this DAO is achieved.

Notes on Eligibility

Based on feedback from the community we are going with an application based system for inducting members into the DAO. Applicants will be required to show why they believe they are qualified to be apart of the DAO and show willingness to spend time in participating in DAO activities. This is a major change from the pre-proposal where there was a objective task to be rewarded membership. We believe this will keep the DAO smaller and more capable of making valuable decisions.

Notes on Participation

We are removing any automatic DAO membership removal process. A vote must be proposed and passed to have members removed.

Notes on Funds Management

After digging a bit deeper into the Thirdweb contracts there is a “split” contact that can be deployed to handle the funds autotomicatilly. This contract can be created for each round with the pre determined distribution of funds based on the results of the voting. This eliminates the need for any single person or multisig wallet to manually distribute the funds. The tier one treasury can deposit the funds directly into the split contact and the DAO can become closer to a trustless on-chain DAO rather than a fully off-chain DAO.

In addition to the conversation about fund management, the idea of recording expenses and rewarding DAO members for their time and effort was brought up. I believe we will create a tracking system for DAO members to record their contribution. Each round a percentage of the total round tokens will get divided up between the DAO members and their relative effort put into building and maintaining the DAO. Once the DAO is formed we can vote on this variable and what is acceptable.

Things To Do:

The next steps to get things going are as follows:

  1. Create an official whitepaper based on community feedback
  2. Create membership application

Please let me know if you have any more feedback. :slight_smile:

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I am also researching these three platforms.

Hopefully there will be a Arbitrum enabled DAO management platform that can handle the needs of Video Builder DAO, else it will have to be manually built using Thirdweb as indicated above.

Please let me know if you have any other DAO management resources that can be utilized.:slight_smile:

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Great progress and pace. Many of the responses sound sensible to me. One you may want to discuss a bit:

We will likely start with a round every 6 months

While you ultimately may end up here based on what you learn through trying things out in the early days, I do think establishing once every six months initially may be too slow to actually learn/react/capture momentum. Especially if it starts as a lean group that is already excited and moving quickly.

What do you think about, “We’ll aim to learn quickly through running the first two experimental rounds within the first six months, and establish a more predictable cadence from there.” or something like that?

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Yes this is a good method. We will go with that :+1:

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Platforms

Alright so I’ve done some research on some DAO management tools already in the wild, rather than jumping in both feet with building contracts and web apps to manage the DAO I have been searching for pre built platforms that may work well for our retroactive grant funding. Here is my first impression in order of viability.

  1. JokeDAO.io

So far the best option seems to be JokeDAO.io

It is very straight forward, provides a “round” like style of proposals and voting. It’s also free and supports Arbitrum. The only downside is the look of the site is a bit silly or goofy. It is based around contest style voting for fun web3 proposals. The UI is a bit hard to look at and doesn’t scream professionalism, but it has all the right features for the right cost.

In this case we would set up a website for explaining the DAO and directing links to the resources we use, ie Forum for discussion, JokeDAO for applications and voting, etc.

This might be a really simple way to start a first trial and get a concept going quickly.

  1. Thirdweb.io

Thirdweb allows anyone to deploy pre made and autided contracts for free. They also have a simple interface to interact with the contracts for voting and membership management. Along with their contracts they have SDKs and code examples on how to build your own web apps to interact with the contracts allowing a developer to build any type of functionality into the DAO website. This would take more time but would likely end up as the most tailored experience for members and applicants of the DAO.

  1. Boardroom.io

Boardroom is a hosted DAO site that manages every aspect of a DAO. Proposals, voting, discussion etc in one place. They take your deployed contracts and wrap their hosted service around the functionality of each contract. This becomes highly customizable, which is fine, but they have to manually build an interface for the DAO and they quoted 10k-20k USD in fees in the first 6 months with ongoing fees of unknown per year.

There’s also a large list of other DAOs using this platform, Uniswap, Bankless and more, which could create some SEO or organic traffic around the interest in what Video Builder DAO is.

Seems like a nice investment for an established DAO but not certain of the cost.

  1. charmverse.io

Charmverse is a pretty robust and customizable platform. Basic plan is free up to 200 active members and only $10/mo beyond that. It’s full featured with forums, voting, bounties, tools and so many customizations but it’s actually quite hard to navigate. This is the platform the Optimism uses and would most likely support a more general DAO management situation than just round voting.

If someone has the time to dig deep into this platform and figure out how we would accept anonymous grant applicants and do round voting then I think it’s worth looking at.

Also not sure if all the voting is off chain or if they support on-chain votes.

  1. Gitcoin.io

Gitcoin.io is an interesting choice, however it seems to be primarily based around raising funds rather than DAO management tools which is needed for voting and creating rounds. I will need to do more research in case I am missing any tools provided by Gitcoin.

  1. daohaus.club

This is the highest level of the meaning of DAOs in the ecosystem. The platform is free. Everything is on-chain, all proposals are built on smart contracts and actions are taken solely on-chain. It’s very rigid and likely going to be hard for members and applicants to use in it’s current form, but very cool!

Any feedback on either of these platforms will be much appreciated.

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After further community feedback we are now in search of a new DAO name.

Anyone can participate here:

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