This is a proposal to reimagine the Paladins circle. I’d love to hear feedback from all of Warcamp on this. What do you think?
Background and Problem
Currently, the Paladins circle is tasked with facilitating Warcamp operations, including:
Weekly Warcamp meetings
Budget management
Contributor compensation management
This is vital yet not the most thrilling work. As DAOhaus grows and Warcamp seeks to expand and fractalize, we’ll need more Paladins and smoother operations.
Additionally, DAO ops is a nascent field with much room for innovation, and many DAOs – including those using DAOhaus – could benefit from better tools and processes.
Objectives
Increase bandwidth for facilitating Warcamp ops
Support innovation in DAO ops to improve Warcamp / DAOhaus ops as well as for the broader DAO ecosystem
Inform development of DAOhaus platform primitives as well as boost, composability, and partnership priorities
Make contributing to Paladins more attractive
Proposal
Evolve Paladins to become a center for research, innovation, and dogfooding in DAO operations.
Paladins would now be charged with the following:
Researching operations practices and tools within other DAOs
Determining which practices and tools may address challenges that Warcamp faces
Designing new practices and tools where existing ones don’t meet our needs (in coordination with Magesmiths and/or Boost Foundry)
Implementing and experimenting with those those practices and tools with Warcamp operations (dogfooding)
Publishing our findings, ideas, and progress
Required Resources
None, other than budget determined by the size of retroactive compensation (which will grow only with the success of this change)
I think an experimental injection of unknown into the Paladin Circle is a great idea and will also help attract contributors and spur ideas that move the space forward.
Yes, this would be important to achieve the goals laid out. I think it’ll be important to define the roles & scope clearly for the success of this role, and DAOhaus at large.
Put simply, the Paladins’ role is to empower other contributors (and consequently DAOhaus) to do their best work:
They ensure DAOhaus can sustain & exist (hence budget management)
They ensure that contributors want to continue contributing by ensuring they are:
They ensure that other operational & administrative functions are well-taken care of.
At this point, the scope of ‘operational/back-office/support department’ we inherited from Web2 has served us well, but it feels like we are outgrowing it and are on the cusp of defining what ‘Operations’ mean for DAOs.
Another way to see it is that the current scope solves ‘present-state’ / recurring tasks really well, but is limited for the more fluid nature & challenges of DAOs (i.e. ‘future-state’ issues)
Solving Future State Issues
That’s why expanding the scope to solve these ‘future-state’ issues seem timely. Building on @spencer’s points, I took a stab at visualising how this might work for Paladins, as well as other Circles.
In my view, the Paladins solve new, unknown and multi-faceted problems that do not fit squarely into a Circle. The Paladins:
Scope out the problem (& do research if necessary), so we know more about the problem, user personas, alternative approaches, existing solutions.
Run experiments with low/no-code, so we actually put these theoretical knowledge to the test
Funnel these information to the right Circles (or even DAOhaus ecosystem working group) , so that they are well-equipped to solve and scale them
When successful, they publish their findings, so that other DAOs & ecosystems can learn and implement them.
This way, Paladins help to solve the ‘present-state’ tasks, as well as ‘future-state’ issues, enabling each Circle to work on what they do best and continue doing good for the DAOhaus ecosystem.
In support of reimagining the Paladins circle. OPs is so critical to a healthy organization. Unfortunately, it bores many and most take it for granted. Taking an experimental approach to validating processes and tools improves DAOhaus and can benefit the entire ecosystem if well documented and shared.
