Establish DAO Communications Team and Processes

Withdrawn AIPs
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Thanks for taking the time to read our proposal and provide feedback. Please find additional information about our team, ideologies, and plan below.

We are seven active DAO members who saw the need for better communication. We came together to write this AIP to improve it. It is our hope to expand the communications team and create more positions for other active members of the community through a future AIP.

We are asking that you take a chance on us and give us a year. Much like in a retainer process with a communications firm, contracts typically last for a year and if clients are dissatisfied they can change their service provider after the term is up. We suggest a similar approach to give us room to establish the specifications we have provided in our proposal and deliver on our initiatives. The team will focus on ensuring that each contributor is providing value to the function, and the DAO.

In the communications industry, KPIs are meant for specific campaigns or initiatives, not macro performance. Marketing and communications work often suffers from an attribution problem, meaning it is challenging to isolate specific functions or activities to the growth of a brand. With that being said, we are open to feedback regarding particular KPIs that the community might want to have included, as long as they truly are a measure of the quality of our work and aren’t influenced by other factors.

Our team will also provide quarterly recaps of wins and opportunities. Reports will also include top priorities and initiatives for the upcoming quarter. In addition to these reports, there will also be weekly Twitter Spaces, AIP AMAs, and frequent communication updates including meeting minutes and other important announcements.

The team believes in output-based work versus focusing on the specific amount of time each contributor puts into this function. With the shift to remote asynchronous work in the world, this model feels more appropriate. That being said, our team is taking this commitment very seriously and will be contributing a large amount of time on the tasks laid out in our proposal. Tasks will be managed by one or more team members who focus on project management, ensuring tasks are delegated and completed. In addition, the team would love for the DAO to suggest tasks to fit into ongoing activities. The platform discussed in the proposal will include a mechanism for the broader DAO to suggest assignments.

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Hey DAC4, thanks for reading through the proposal. When you get a chance, please check out the reply to Swarm’s questions I just posted on this thread. You and Swarm had a few similar questions. In addition, we have noted your request for more information on the team and are providing it in this thread.

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Our team will have leadership and we are actively defining roles and responsibilities within the team. One specific role we are introducing is a Facilitator, which includes being the point of contact with a member of the Moderator and Special Council teams to coordinate things like seeking out status updates on specific proposals, reporting personnel changes, and submitting content (social updates, educational material, and announcements of things like Twitter Spaces) to be posted by the official Twitter account.

While marketing is a component of our goals and responsibilities, the team plans on accomplishing much more than that. One of our main goals is improving the communication between the Moderators, Special Council, and community by utilizing things like an official Discord, weekly Twitter Spaces, and providing educational material to both the community and media.

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This extremely vague reply doesn’t answer any of the questions. Please try to reply one more time being more specific.

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I totally support the idea that we need to spend much more attention on communications, but at the moment BIG NO for the proposal since it can cause great harm to the Ape Coin DAO.

The problem is that the team of 7 people wants to take the amount of work that such a small group will never be able to handle. What we will get as a result will be just a mess. At the same time other active DAO members will be blocked from offering other similar proposals for the community for ONE YEAR.

Many of the mentioned functions require its own separate team that will concentrate all efforts on performing specific tasks in a narrow niche.

I have a few suggestions to improve the proposal and processes to make it sustainable.

The number of team tasks should be reduced. Keeping in mind that the team have experience with social media, especially Twitter, and that @Vulkan specifically highlighted that the main goal of the team is to improving the communication between the Moderators, Special Council, and providing educational material to both the community and media, I would suggest to keep the same compensation, but to rebuild the proposal to left only the following functions for the team:

  • Schedule and host weekly Twitter spaces for AIPs, social updates, and “Twitter Takeovers”

  • Educate voters and the public around the specific nuances of proposals, and assist AIP drafters with building consensus

  • Serve as an open line of communication between the Special Council, Moderators, and Community

@Vulkan and @0xSword should be removed from the team and replaced with 2 other team members from active DAO contributors via open voting. Reason for removing them is that they are already receiving grants for ApeCoin Newsletter and if they will take extra work, quality of newsletters will be harmed, performance under new tasks will be harmed as well. The DAO can’t take the risk. I understand that when you just imagine, it feels like you will accomplish anything, but in reality you will get overloaded very fast.

Clear metrics to evaluate quality of the team performance should be provided. The DAO should receive reports one time per month.

A separated team of the DAO contributors should submit a proposal for an official Discord server. Discord management takes tons of time, and will require full time participation of another group of contributors.

A separate team of the DAO contributors should submit a proposal to create a PR team. Based on provided information the team has no or very little experience with Public Relations so there is no sense to entrust them with such an important role. This direction will also require a huge amount of time and efforts of another group of contributors.

In this way, we guarantee a full-fledged work in each direction with the result of high quality. At the same time, we will adhere to the principles of decentralisation, because instead of one team, we will have several teams that complement each other and compete a little with each other in order to show a higher result than the other teams. By distributing tasks between different teams we will also protect DAO from the risks of abusing DAO resources.

Which teams should we get

  1. Newsletter team (already funded)

  2. Communications team

  3. Discord team

  4. PR team

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Some very good discussion here, and many points to touch on.

First, overall I think this is a very good proposal headed in the right direction. I may be outnumbered here, but I genuinely like that this is being proposed as a Communications team and not Marketing or PR. This actually leaves their responsibilities and scope of work rather open ended which allows them to get creative and try new things. In fact, they will likely be important on scouting contributors for the next working group, whether that is Marketing/Ops/PR, etc. When you look at it this way, we are only holding them accountable for maintaining proper comms and moderation on what’s currently in development, what needs to be developed, how the community is going about that, and regular updates from the Special Council/Board. Everything PR and marketing related is just a bonus for us and helps drive more meaningful engagement.

Overall, the team proposed has been extremely active and they are arguably one of the main drivers keeping this DAO alive through the bear market. It can be difficult to drive engagement on forums like these where it is encouraged to post longer, thoughtful replies. Additionally, with a DAO structure everyone is hesitant to proactively work because they don’t know what other “leaders” in the DAO are doing so everyone is left in the dark waiting for someone else to come up with an idea. Having a clear line of communication between all current and future working groups in the DAO and the broader community empowers us all to get more involved and come up with unique solutions to our unique problems. When we do eventually have Treasury/Risk management, Marketing, Operations, etc the Communications working group will be very important in allowing us to coordinate properly.

Second, touching on @culturecodes.art post, I am hesitant to remove @Vulkan and @0xSword as I suspect they are primarily spearheading the initiative. They have been the largest public Apecoin advocates I’ve seen on the forums, their value cannot be taken for granted. That said, I am 100% on board with restructuring incentives depending on “focus” from each member especially when two of them have existing Apecoin funded projects. I’m not convinced it makes sense for all 7 members to have a flat rate, that said I am equally unconvinced it helps motivation and DAO culture if we start to nitpick salaries for members who have only been contributing for free up until this point. After demonstrating success with this working group, going forward we can obviously get more picky about who is assigned responsibilities and pay.

While I mentioned that I don’t think it’s particularly valuable to clearly define each individual’s responsibility, because we all can wear many hats, here’s a little breakdown of what I think these members should focus on:

1 Person: I do think we need someone who is a leader of the group who keeps everyone on task, I propose Vulkan as he has shown incredible initiative and the ability to self-start meaningful initiatives.

2-3 People: We also need “at least” 2 full time discord moderators to cover US and Asia time zones because if any Apecoin Discord becomes “Official” we will be constantly attacked and our members targeted.

1 Person: From here it may be prudent to assign the other tasks as needed. From the proposal: “Educate voters and the public around proposal nuances” can be seen as a separate weekly “newsletter” or official Apecoin Medium post whereby we break it down into digestible tldrs.

1 Person: Serving as the open line of communication between Special Council, Mods, Community. This user needs to actively reach out on a weekly basis and report back to the community in the form of another weekly discord announcement style update.

2-3 People: Actively seeking positive coverage about Apecoin developments from media. These are PR professionals, as such, they should be spending the majority of their time drafting and publishing long form content or personal outreach emails. They should not have to worry about if the Discord is being attacked, or if the twitter spaces was scheduled for this week.

With this generic breakdown of responsibilities I do think 7 people is currently reasonable. Although this would change if we got a proposal for an “DAO Marketing & PR Team,” as some of the responsibilities of the Comms team will be transferred to the new working group.

All said, I think this is very much needed. I think we can all agree the lack of communication and participation on the forums from “leaders” in our DAO has been lacking. This working group will help bridge that gap and provide much needed clarity to our community.

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I am still very much in favor. Why you ask? Because when 99% of people forget about apecoin DAO and didn’t care to contribute what so ever … these individuals were working free of charge to drive interest and create a welcoming place to foster growth. The money they are asking for is a drop in the bucket. I will say it again. The money in the treasury is not your money and it will never be (unless you get an aip to receive funds of course). Too many people are treating these AIPs like the money is being swiped from their own pockets. By attempting to consistently approve of only the “perfectly written AIPS” … you will guarantee that nothing ever gets accomplished by this dao. End of rant.

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Hey thanks for your input & thoughts on it @Amplify. You touched on something really important: some of us ARE scouting for other working groups. We gathered around helping w/ proposals & we have enjoyed doing this for free. Recently, there was a discord proposal, which allocated the same amount of money for a simple server. Instead we built this. The original idea was a Contributor Program that compensated ~12 active members.

For this proposal we’ve narrowed the scope & gotten specific about what tasks our group will be performing, but there’s certainly a need for more working groups. The hopes is to open those doors. One of the biggest challenges to this was finding active & engaged members to help. There’s a genuine engagement problem and often talent gets busy doing other things. I’m hearing quite a bit of feedback that more are interested in doing tasks for the DAO. A good thing!

From day 1, when somebody has been kind & helpful, I’ve usually reached out to ask “hey can you look at this proposal?” and “hey what do you think about this?” just to make conversation!

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Thanks for the perspective @culturecodes.art. As someone who (formerly) worked for a global PR firm for over a decade, I believe that Comms is an extremely scaleable activity. 7 people working on communications in a formalized way is greater than zero people working in an informal way. We believe we have a diversity of experience in this function, and can handle allocating an appropriate level of work to each member of the committee so that we don’t run into over-burdening ourselves.

We raised our hands to do this work because we believe it’s important, and encourage others to do the same whether they are affiliated with this committee or not. It’s very common for large brands to employ several PR groups to work on different initiatives at the same time. We absolutely encourage other groups to form to support Apecoin comms and would be happy to collaborate with them to ensure there’s no redundancy and maximizing collective efforts.

Can you share more of your experience working in this field or how you arrived at your assessment of our proposed output vs. resources available? Want to make sure we address your concerns around this proposal and outcome being damaging to the DAO.

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I am strongly in favor of this proposal, but think there are good points here:

One suggestion that stood out to me

  • Breaking official Discord into a separate proposal. If we did that we could have a separate budget that might include funding for a few leads, 5-8 mods & the various bot subscriptions we’d need.
  • That said, this proposal could be just step 1 in setting that up.

Where I disagree with CultureCodes

  • @Vulkan and @0xSword are probably the two most active members and having them basically do this full-time would potentially help the quality of the newsletter, not hurt it. We allow the board to run VC firms and run publicly traded companies, so I have no problem here.
  • I think a team of 7 can handle everything here, though we might need additional people later.

My biggest takeaway is that we are 6 months into the DAO existing and are lacking much of an organizational structure (outside of the board). While some people have concerns about this or that part of the proposal, I think we need to get get something in place and have a team out there learning by doing. We can then adjust our setup as we go.

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Hey @fridayyy thank you for vouching personally for me and Vulkan. I can assure that the rest of the team has the same level of ethics & desire to see proposals succeed. Much of our collective experience has come from working w/ you and Knock Knock & others. I was your first contact @ apecoin. Showed you what I could, shared my contacts, and gave sample proposals.

We did make the choice to also want to run the official Discord(or other platform as decided) because there are many of us who want to focus on this full-time. It gives us the ability to create “Official Links” and drive traffic to ecosystem projects without having to coordinate that w/ an outside mod team who may not be as involved. As of this time, theres no better alternative.

This is how your experience as a proposer should’ve went:

  • Access to guides & videos to jumpstart process
  • Feedback from many individuals before Discourse
  • Name recognition & support when it does go to forum
  • Large twitter spaces where you can address the community

With no resources, we were able to do SOME of this. But as a game studio entering into the ecosystem, you should be greeted by a helpful community & resources. That’s the heart of this!

We took the lessons learned & we’re ready to do more. Thank you again for the vocal support.

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Hey all, I’m also in favour of the ideas set out in this proposal and based on my own experience with most people on the team I know that they’re currently best fit for building a comms wing to the DAO almost from scratch. As also envisioned in the proposal, things will surely evolve and grow over time and with that some functions and responsibilities will evolve as well. So I think some level of flexibility and pragmatism would work in our favour at this stage. There’s always the danger of perfectionism that can delay action-oriented planning. I find this proposal strong both in terms of its ideas but also action plan. And that’s what we need: Action!

This is not a question related to the content of the proposal but I was wondering if there could be some IRL aspect to this project too for example a scheduled meet-up for the team and the wider admin department once or twice a year to build a more tangible sense of community and also to boost teamwork dynamics! Maybe it’s just me but I believe in the power of face to face interactions especially in a space where almost all our interactions are online!

I also want to thank everyone for their comments! There have been areas that I found interesting to discuss further which are already presented and replied to by the team. Loving this forum and what you all are doing to make it work.

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Thanks for your feedback and suggestions, Friday! Like @0xSword said, thanks for vouching for us! This is something our entire team is taking very seriously with a detailed plan and vision to improve the DAO. We don’t want to pigeonhole ourselves into thinking we should only focus on XYZ. Instead, we want to explore ideas, try new things, and adjust when needed. I’m confident our team can achieve great things.

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Thanks for the vote of confidence, Novo! Like I mentioned to Friday above, I agree allowing some flexibility to figure out what works best would be very beneficial to a communications team. We are constantly fine-tuning our vision every day in order to deliver outstanding products and services to our DAO.

An IRL aspect sounds amazing! This could include meetups during ApeFest, a potential Ape Festival @ssp1111 and others are working on, or even separate events. Being able to get out there and not only meet with the team but also connect with the community would open so many avenues of networking and allow us to continue to develop the chemistry we have already started building the past several months.

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As someone who (formerly) worked for a global PR firm for over a decade, I believe that Comms is an extremely scaleable activity

What was the firm? Maybe it looks for you simple because you worked as an employe, and did not touch management to see the whole picture.

Answering your question, I have my own crypto PR company from 2017, and I think that your experiment can negatively affect the $APE price if you will not cut the amount of work you want to take. I want to repeat again, my suggestion to cut the amount of responsibilities, but to keep the compensation the same, so there is nothing to afraid here.

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Do I understand right that the proposal discussion will take at least one more weak after the communication of the idea is closed? This proposal will directly affect my investements I need more time than 3 days to research.

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Please consider communication redundancies in the event Discord and/or Twitter is down and strongly consider decentralized record keeping. Telegram, discourse, Spotify, gm.Xyz, lenster, sylo, xeenon, etc.

Special Council should set the tone here. Or at least provide input on alternatives such that sub-committees have standardized processes.

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Ignoring hard questions is not an option if you are about to claim that you are able to work in communications.

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Welcome to the forum @BoredInvesting. The entire proposal process has averaged around 4-5 weeks for the ones that have made it to the final voting stage. The first phase is the AIP Idea we are currently in, where the community provides input. After that, the proposal will move into the AIP Draft phase where it is reviewed by the moderator team. From there, it goes through a few more review steps and makes it to the Live AIP voting stage for another week.

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Understood. Thank you for looking at our proposal & we will take action on looking at additional communication mediums. Currently some of us are in conversations on reddit & elsewhere. I’ll take a look at these suggestions & find ways to integrate them alongside the team. This proposal gives us the ability to move across many mediums. Telegram has been suggested multiple times during feedback!

One thing you’ll like about us is that we’ve spent time on calls w/ administrators of the Ape Foundation. We have been able to ask questions & develop working relations over last 6 months.

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