Discussion - Lowering barriers to entry for members who want to join and contribute to the DAO

Community
#1

I want to start a discussion about how we admit new contributors to the DAO and examine ways we could change and improve the process.

Right now, the process is not well-defined but generally speaking contributor tier members are required to own at least 1k PRINTS, and generally have to either apply for admission or be nominated by a member, following which they are voted on my existing members.

I think as we continue to grow, it will be increasingly important to make it easier for prospective members to join, particularly those who want to contribute to the DAO. Lowering the barriers to entry should benefit us in the long-run as it will hopefully attract more people who are willing and able to contribute their skills.

Ideally, in my mind, we’d have a process that’s flexible enough for prospective members to easily join, but robust enough to prune inactive or negative contributors to prevent significant bloat.

I’m hoping to get feedback from everyone to gather ideas and potential best practices we can use - I plan on then synthesizing it into a new process design and proposal.

Some potential ideas could be:

  • Removing the application and voting process entirely for 1k members
  • Using Coordinape as a filtering tool to identify 1k members who are not contributing to the DAO and revoking their ‘contributor tier’ role.
  • Creating a bounty board

Etc - please chime in with any thoughts/opinions/ideas!

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Membership Tiers Discussion
#2

Agree this is an issue that needs to be addressed quickly. We have multiple prospective members trying to join on this tier.

Some things we want to avoid (some of which you mentioned):

  1. bloat: tons of 1k members joining and not contributing
  2. upset: 5k tier members upset that they purchased 5k PRINTS to join and now we have lowered the bar
  3. lowering the admission cost: giving off the impression that membership to one of the top DAOs just went from 15-17 eth to 3-4 eth. As Luiz pointed out, we are way below the entry cost of Pleasr and Flamingo.

I believe we can solve this relatively easily if we all agree on a process.

Process:

  1. prospective member must be vouched for by 1 member. Member may only vouch for 2 individuals a year (unless part of Staff).
  2. prospective member, after being vouched for, goes up for a vote and must receive 10 positive votes via Discord.
  3. coordinape voting is enabled so that contributors can give points to those who contribute. 1k tier members are removed from the Discord member-only areas upon 2 months of inactivity.
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#3

Agree with your list of things to avoid - I think being sensitive around #2 is particularly important, since these members have been the foundation of the DAO so far.

On that point - we should think through how we can differentiate the full 5k members vs. the contributor tier members. Benefits, perks, status, etc.

The other thing I’ve been thinking through is how we can ensure that all the contributor-tier members are working towards a common goal. I think it’s important to have our main goals and objectives as a DAO defined at a high level so that there’s a north start that everyone’s working towards. So we should think through how to align all members towards a common cause.

@lucaspon You’ve done some terrific work in Raw - maybe there are some lessons/processes you could port over to FP?

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#4

I strongly believe we must have two separate hierarchies for Fingerprints, one for membership and one for contribution.

Lower tiers of the membership hierarchy would be required to work and perform well in the contribution stats to retain their membership. In exchange, they’d be allowed access with very few PRINTS tokens.

Meanwhile, higher membership tiers wouldn’t be required to perform, and would enjoy progressively more perks and benefits, of course, having to acquire more PRINTS tokens on the way.

The decentralized contribution hierarchy would work in a way similar to RAW, with coordinape results being aggregated throughout the months and top performers being awarded with more Coordinape votes and, after a while, PRINTS tokens.

Staff members would have a lot more votes than the typical member, under the pretense that they’d have better visibility into the work being conducted and its quality.

We could acommodate current staff arrangements by granting them top roles of the contribution hierarchy at kickoff.

I believe this would set the incentives just right for the kind of behavior we want to see from different kinds of members. We can’t possibly expect one single configuration to work well for a diverse member base.

Segmentation is a basic and well established marketing practice.
Members are our customers, and we’re not catering our offering (i.e. Fingerprints Membership) to their specific needs/wishes. It’s a one-size-fits-all product as it is, with one single price.

We have all sorts of potential members from across web3.0 we could be targeting with more segmented offerings. Poolsuite.fm is an excellent example of this, where you can (1) just listen to music, (2) follow them for more content, (3) buy merch and (4) go all the way up to a ~2.5ETH NFT membership to their high-end executive club.

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#5

Like this idea of thinking of different strands – contributors and members – with different levels of each.

Stepping back, what does the DAO want from additional members? As in, why do we care at all, why not keep the 5k entry threshold and be done with it (works for PROOF etc., no?)? I think the answer is that we want:

  1. More people contributing useful work to the DAO
  2. A way of allowing in people that bring status to the DAO by their participation (e.g. artists)

So I’d tweak what @lucaspon talks about above as follows:

  1. Have a lower associate membership tier for those who fulfil aim (2), voted on by full members. Access only to those that the DAO believes being cachet through their membership – but without expecation of anything in return (so no problems around ejection of members). Ensure this lower tier does not come with all the benefits of full membership.
  2. Use contribution tiers for those who fulfil aim (1), with a set of benefits that increases as their contributions increase. Contibution tiers can go up as well as down. Pay contributors through coordinape + bounties. Possibly even dangle the carrot of a contributor membership if they show they can contibute over a long period of time as a reward.

Ultimately, this is associating everyone involved in the DAO both on a contribution tier and membership tier, which could be a nice way of thinking about expectations and rewards.

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#6

I think your analysis sums up pretty nicely. Curious to see what people think, but I would support moving forward with this.

We should lower the friction on people trying to contribute, and have clear benefits for members.

#7

I agree we need to lower the barrier to contributors, but I believe we also must raise the value perception for the 5k $PRINTS membership, otherwise it could lose value.

I have just posted a topic that aims to cover the value creation for different membership tiers (Value Creation for Different Investors/Stakeholders) and the suggestions I made to the contributor membership are:

• Stakers of FP NFTs or 100 $PRINTS (amount to be discussed) are eligible to work and be compensated by the DAO.
• They will automatically have read-only access to all discord channels (except curation committee) to identify how they can help the DAO
• There will be a specific public channel where the potential contributors will be able to pitch to the community how they can help
• The pitch will trigger a soft voting process whereby achieving X (to be defined) votes a read and write access (except curation committee channel) and the right to be compensated will be granted
• Creation of a bounty/activities board to facilitate potential contributors to identify how they can help. The board must contain the compensation model for each activity, either by Coordinape or a specific amount
• Contributors to report on their activities on a weekly basis together with the staff
• The read and write access and right to be compensated can be revoked by the DAO anytime by reaching X (to be defined) votes on a soft voting process

The proposed low barrier should also increase the demand for $PRINTS and FP NFTs, but we have to make sure the community understands the value creation for the different membership tiers.

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