📅Meeting Notes

📅 Tuesday, July 6, 2021

Notes

  • Want to make sure we don't over commit with funding proposal, etc. Don't want to fall into trap of feeling like we need to perpetually fundraise.

  • Want more vision and mission to align behind. Possibly also explain roadmap for what happens if someone donates.

  • Start by writing a blog post per week, starting with mission / vision post.

  • Want to start branding / creating an endowment meme. Not sure exactly what. Possibly Pando? Or make it purposefully blank and let community decide?

  • Ether Cards are cool NFT example.

  • Want to bring more people into convo, start inviting more.

  • Seem aligned on using some NFT / community mechanics to fundraise, using those to vote on what protocols to allocate funds to, and relying on some third-party protocol's governance to ultimately allocate funds.

  • Keep things fun and moving forward.

  • Thinking about what value community provides. All seem to enjoy discussing philanthropy, DAOs, etc. Perhaps that's the hook?

  • Be careful not to commit to specifics in blog, more around intentions.

Next steps

  • Blog post about mission / vision / high-level roadmap (Based, Greg)

  • Add donating (and possibly wallet connection and adding name to website) (Jared, Ford)

  • Start seeding more conversations in Discord and inviting people (All)

📅 Tuesday, June 29, 2021

Notes

  • Presented DAO research

    • Boardroom.info

    • Parcel.money

    • Aragon

    • Colony

    • DAOHAUS

  • DAO decision

    • A lot of solutions are pretty heavy-weight

    • Decided to start with a gnosis safe with 2 of 5 signers and go from there

  • NFTs for fundraising and community

    • Exploring idea of minting NFTs that are sold or given to donors

    • NFTs could gate access to Discord, events, etc.

    • Outstanding question around purpose of NFTs and whether it's counter to the mission of the endowment to be exclusive

    • Idea of getting artists from around world to contribute art

    • Idea of generative NFTs

    • Idea of partnering with POAP

  • Collaboration ideas

    • Poap for NFTs

    • Arweave for hosting NFTs

    • Babylon for treasury management

    • Gnosis Safe for treasury

    • Collab Land for gating Discord access

    • Graph for safe subgraph

Next steps

  • Ford work on subgraph

  • BN set up gnosis safe

  • Greg look into Arweave and NFTs / Art

  • Jared add address to site and talk to artists

  • Mus help mock adding address to site

📅 Tuesday, June 22, 2021

Notes

  • Need more momentum. But how?

    • Start setting smaller goals that enable actions like depositing funds.

    • Do in parallel to thinking about governance

  • Open to applying for a grant

    • Things to differentiate us

      • Clear objective (What do we want to do? What question to answer?)

      • Clear funding need (Amount, what for)

      • Try to get grants from multiple protocols

    • Ideas

      • Could apply for research grant to outline project

      • Could apply for MVP grant to get something off ground (e.g. to fund small overhead costs, maybe some part-time comp)

      • Could apply for full project team grant (e.g. hire someone full-time) but this seems like too much right now, maybe later

      • Could donate to the endowment directly as well

  • Would be cool to get other protocols involved

    • Can start having exploratory conversations now

    • But also good to figure out what we want to do

  • Aligning on experimenting with governance being purpose of Ethdowment

    • Endowment is a long-term, solid funding mechanism

    • Do lots of fast, iterative governance experiments on top

    • “Endowment like ocean current, experiments like waves breaking”

    • “Experiment to find less bad governance” or “less shitty governance”

  • Possible MVP

    • A DAO-as-a-service that we can deposit into and vote (e.g. DAO HAUS)

    • Vote on what protocols to send funds to (i.e. what wallet address)

    • Those protocols implement their governance structures to vote on where to allocate the funds

  • Need to think about the goals and how to measure the effectiveness of the different governance experiments. What’s the north star?

    • Difficult because how we measure this and how we decide what experiments to allocate to is in effect a form of governance

    • Regardless, we should have a mission / vision / hypothesis around what is “good” governance. E.g. is it what the most Ethdowment users / donors like?

  • Transparency is important, will be built into DAO model

  • Possible roadmap

    • This week: explore DAO solutions

    • Next week: decide on DAO solution and implement

    • Following week: deposit capital into DAO and vote on where to invest

    • Onwards: start talking to governance recipients for first batch of funds

  • Next steps

    • CA to share DAO research so far

    • Come to next meeting with DAO as as service solutions

📅 Tuesday, June 15, 2021

Agenda

  • Review Roadmap and align on plan

  • Next steps for lifecycle, brand, governance

  • Explore operational funding?

Notes

  • What is the core innovation we want to focus on?

    • Permanence ("around in 1k years")

    • Sustainability / not having to constantly fundraise

    • Experiment with radical democracy

    • Decentralized philanthropy

  • What are the governance options?

    • Multi-sig / board of directors

    • Capital-weighted voting (1 token 1 vote, gov alpha)

    • Democracy (1 human 1 vote) -- difficult to implement now

    • Quadratic voting, with or without sybil resistance

    • Meta governance -- allow people to direct funds to different governance experiments. e.g. direct funds to a 1 vote per token protocol or a 1 vote per human protocol.

    • Soft-test / mvp democracy via simple Discord vote. Could be good v1.

    • Could allocate funds based on # votes and not a winner(s) take all system. e.g. some nonprofits could get $10. Some gas price concerns.

  • Discussion around experimentation

    • Seems plausible that we can create a protocol for accepting deposits, investing funds, allocating donations, and withdrawing funds.

    • Governance is harder. Perhaps we approach it as an experiment. Try to create a system that can create a system vs trying to create the perfect system.

  • Discussion around protocol partnerships / grants

    • Could protocols allocate grant budgets to us for development?

    • Could protocols save treasury funds in Ethdowment?

    • Could protocols use Ethdowment to allocate grants?

  • Roadmap

Next steps

  • Ford and Jared to discuss next steps on protocol development

  • Everyone try to invite 1 new person to Discord per week

  • CA explore ethereum foundation partnership

📅 Tuesday, June 8, 2021

Participants: CA, Jared, Ford

Next steps

  • Schedule call and share with community (get Zoom link from Jared)

  • Update Gitbook from free trial

  • Try to get 5 people on next call

  • Reach out to pool together

  • Start to explore operational funding

  • Look into tax implications of contributing

📅 Tuesday, June 1, 2021

Participants: CA, Jared, Mustafa

Agenda

  • Start promoting to people

    • ETH foundation guys

    • On Deck

    • SPC

    • Friends

  • What questions do we want to answer?

    • Voting

    • Product roadmap

    • Start proposal system in Discord

      • CA to write proposal for governance

      • CA to look up and share example proposals

      • Jared to write proposal for product lifecycle

  • CA add cal event and link to next community call so new members can join

  • Governance ideas

    • Open to idea of a governance token

    • Could be nice incentive for early users

    • Restrict % of returns that could fund overhead to keep aligned with mission

    • Lock at beginning to ensure used for governance

    • CA to write proposal

  • Branding and marketing

    • Could do profile avatar NFTs for first 1,000 donors as marketing thing

    • Like permanent aspect of ethdowment and pyramids, aliens, etc.

    • Want to play up permanence

    • Think we can also play up fun a bit -- do something unique that helps us stand out.

    • Have something people can display elsewhere -- NFT, emoji, etc. like being part of a club or having their name on a building -- make giving part of digital identity.

    • Look at Badger, Yearn, Yam, bored ape yacht club, Index Coop, etc. as examples

  • Goals for next week

    • Submit proposals

    • Get 20 total people into Discord (~14 more)

  • Next steps

    • Jared lifecycle draft

    • Mus to brainstorm brand / fun ideas

    • CA proposal examples and gov token proposal

    • CA add calendar event and link to Discord / Gitbook

    • CA write blurb and put in Gitbook

    • CA add channel descriptions to Discord

📅 Tuesday, May 25, 2021

Participants: CA, Jared, Mustafa

Agenda

  • CA agenda items

    • What do we want to do this week?

      • Brand mark across properties

      • Small site edits

      • Start twitter

      • Share with advisors

      • Spec v1 dapp / protocol?

    • Any documentation edits?

    • Add Gitbook to website? ✅

    • Ford's saving idea?!

    • Discuss fun vs professional balance for brand

      • Add a little spice to landing page?

        • "Welcome" sign rotating by language?

        • Song + animation?

    • What to build brand around?

      • Start to create a theme to build brand around now?

      • Brand is explicitly tabula rasa and we wait until community vote? (slight preference for this... e.g. could use white flag for now)

    • Governance plans re: donor vs human votes

    • Ok to start sharing site with potential advisors?

      • Thoughts about general representation (i.e. diversity)?

    • When we're ready to do intro blog post we should use mirror: https://mirror.xyz/

Notes

  • Start inviting people soon, but after we update site with brand, twitter link, github link

  • Like Ford's idea of people being able to save and withdraw from endowment

  • Product tiers in the future

    • Funds: save or donate

    • Governance: multi-sign, gov alpha (1 token 1 vote), forked communities, 1 person 1 vote

  • MVP is likely save or vote + multi-sig or 1 token one vote gov alpha voting on proposals. Later on figure out 1 vote per human.

  • Design idea of seedling inside Ethereum logo

Next Steps

  • Finish logo - Mus

  • Add logo to all properties (website, gitbook, github, twitter, discord) - CA and Jared

  • Add links to all properties to website (keep discord and gitbook primary and secondary CTAs) - Mus and Jared

  • Product spec and tiers document (in plain english, not technical yet) - CA then send to Jared and Mus for feedback

📅 Tuesday, May 18, 2021

Participants: CA, Jared, Mustafa

Agenda

  • Mustafa’s Background

  • Jared’s Background

    • Likes the “Permanence” of crypto projects like this DAO

    • Already built a smart contract

      • Receive money -- doesn’t do anything with it yet

  • Meeting Goals

    • What are we trying to achieve (high level)

      • Progress tracking

        • Milestones with dates

    • How do we want to work

      • Recurring meetings

Notes

  • Build website

  • Forcing function for figuring out copy

  • Website will be intro

    • Gitbook will be explanation docs on governance

  • Let people put in money from Day 1

  • Would want to look into a security audit

    • 75k is cheapest one

  • Look into southpark commons for someone to look over code

  • Website will pitch the basic concept

    • If we can’t hit the milestone, we’ll give money back or donate it to some charities

    • We frame up the possibilities

  • Timelines are helpful for establishing trust

    • We may not have decisions but some timeline will be essential for building trust

  • This should be one of the most trusted ideas that exist

  • Good community, trusted, doing good

  • Hypothesis: People will be supporting the “system” not so much the cause

  • Keep track of how much each address donated

  • Could assign tokens for donors so that they can

  • Governance protocol:

    • Multi-sig wallet

      • X-Y confirm transaction, it goes through

    • Smart contract / governor alpha

Action items

  • Jared will ask around southpark commons for someone that knows about governor alpha

  • Agree on language for website

  • CA to open up discord group for anyone interested in the project

  • Agreed to new meeting frequency:

    • 10 AM EST / 7 AM PST

    • Every Tuesday (can be flexible)

  • CA to draft and publish documentation

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