📅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

  • v1 roadmap in Gitbook seems ok

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