Dear Bankless Nation 🏴,

Can you believe we are heading into the final week of the season? August 27 marks the last day of Season 8, and the Gap Week runs from August 28 to September 3. It’s been a longer season than ever before, so we encourage you to take some time to relax and recharge during the break.

Before you take off though, think seriously about applying for Grants Committee if you are a Level 1 Member. Submissions close on August 19 so don’t delay. That’s today!

There are many BanklessDAO projects represented in the latest Gitcoin Grant Round, with a pool of 250,000 DAI to be shared in the Web3 Community and Education category. In this week’s editorial, HiroKennelly provides a list of all the projects you could donate to this Grants Season, but not before he gives sincere thanks to our very own Grants Committee for the work they do to promote value alignment through KPIs.

Speaking of value alignment, there is a temp check on the Forum which introduces the idea of changing Guest Pass conditions at BanklessDAO. The aim of such a change would be to increase the likelihood that the DAO attracts contributors who share the bankless values and are willing to align with the DAO long term.

We’re here for a good time, but we also want to be here for a long, long time. The Guest Pass temp check has attracted several comments and some fresh ideas for the utility of tlBANK. This weekend, and as we head into the break, it’s a great time to reflect on our own contributions to the DAO and what we each see as our DAO’s future. We’re making our own path, but our direction is based on shared values. Have a great weekend!

Contributors: Warrior, theconfusedcoin, anointingthompson1.eth, Paulito, Vi-Fi, Tonytad, Teekaygod, Trewkat, HiroKennelly

This is an official newsletter of BanklessDAO. To unsubscribe, edit your settings.

✅ Action Items

✍️ Register now to get on the bDAO VIP List for the Permissionless Event in Austin.

🏛️ Donate to Bankless Africa, listen to BA podcast and collect articles on Lenster.

🪙 Donate to BanklessDAO in the Gitcoin Grants Round and follow BanklessDAO socials.

🏃‍♀️ Catch up: Review this week's Community Call notes or listen to the recording.

🏛 Governance

Proposals in Discussion

🚀 Season 9 Specification

The Operations Department has provided the draft for our Season 9 Specification. Hop on the Forum to see the remaining Season 8 Operations timeline and the proposed timeline for Season 9 (excerpt below):

• September 4 : Season 9 begins.

• Week 1 or 2 : The Season 9 Kick-Off Event will be held on Twitter.

• November 11 : All funding requests from guilds, departments, and projects to be posted to the Forum for the Grants Committee to review.

• November 12 - 25 : Grants Committee to work with groups to review funding requests.

• December 17, 2023 : Last day of Season 9.

• December 18 - January 1, 2024 : Annual Break (15-day gap).

🔑 Temp Check — Guest Pass V2

This temp check explores options for changing the Guest Pass system. The BanklessDAO Constitution specifies that a Guest Pass lasts for 14 days, but does not cover renewal limits. The Forum post suggests the introduction of a four-week guest pass with two renewals (total of 12 weeks), instead of the current perpetual renewals. This change aims to deepen engagement and seamlessly transition guests into Level 1 members. What do you think about this proposal? Share your opinions on the Forum.

Thank You Grants Committee and Welcome To Grants Season!

Author: HiroKennelly

Part I

Let’s face it, the Grants Committee has it tough. At the intersection of the DAO treasury, organizational units, and contributors, they oversee funding for the work we do here on behalf of the Bankless Nation.

And I’m here to tell you it’s because of the Grants Committee (GC) that the BanklessDAO Writers Cohort found its stride in Season 8.

We’ve been running cohorts for over a year, having just completed our fifth with Taptive. During that time, we’ve shipped more than 200 articles, which I find amazing, but during this Season’s funding discussion, the Grants Committee didn’t necessarily agree that shipping was a great metric for success, and wanted us to focus on aligning the Cohort’s mission — to build community and help folks ship articles — with the DAO’s broader goals of member engagement and retention. In short, we needed to change our KPIs. In our Season 8 proposal, we offered these KPIs:

KPIs are Key Performance Indicators, but their purpose and application are often misunderstood. Through links’ patient tutelage, I’ve come to not only understand them, but actually be able to explain the basics. Contrary to popular misconception, they are not goals to meet or buckets to fill. Rather, they are guide posts, north stars to orient intentions for a season, data points that enable the GC to measure the status, health, and direction of a project.

And they can also be used to align incentives between stakeholders.

In this case, the GC wanted the Writers Cohort to focus more on member engagement and retention, not simply by onboarding more participants into the Writers Guild and Bankless Publishing, but also into the wider DAO. After some initial resistance on my part, it became clear that funding would be in jeopardy if we couldn’t agree on KPIs, so Grant (founder of Taptive) and I worked with the GC to come up with KPIs that aligned the interests of the Writers Cohort, the Writers Guild, Taptive, Bankless Publishing, and the DAO. The revised Writers Cohort KPIs:

As a result of these consensus-driven KPIs, Grant at Taptive tweaked a few things in the way he ran the Cohort. We talked more about the DAO, the Writers Guild, and Bankless Publishing and the opportunities within them; the DAO’s wider place in the ecosystem; and what the DAO was trying to accomplish within that. In other words we talked more about our mission, the opportunities to help drive it forward, and the reasons why that was important.

We saw immediate, dramatic results. Within the first week we had more members engaging within the channels, the Guild, showing up at Bankless Publishing’s weekly stand up, and one amazing Friday I saw ! ! Romano1_MX, an enthusiastic Cohort participant, get on stage at the Community Call and talk Treasury Department. WHAT!?

This was something that would not have happened without pushback from the GC to tweak our KPIs to align more with the DAO’s goals. Simple as that. It was the GC doing its job, and doing it well.

Since that time, there have been a half-dozen or more contributors who have become active across the DAO, and we have the GC to thank for that.

With the Writers Cohort, we still struggled to get authors to share metrics and screenshots, or to include one-liners promoting the DAO in their tweets, but we don’t feel like we failed anything or anyone. We just know for next time we have to either find better goal posts, or discover a method that incentivizes people to go through the effort of providing that data. Either way, we’ve become a better initiative because of it. Which means KPIs are working just the way they should.

With seasonal funding just around the corner, the GC is back in the spotlight, taking on the thankless but vital task of moving energy and BANK around the DAO. To those who work with the GC to refine proposals and KPIs, please remember what KPIs are for and how they serve to further alignment, and work with your reviewer to get your proposal to a place where it can get funding.

And to those who have ever wondered if they might do a good job on Grants Committee, NOW is the time to apply. Applications for the three places on Season 9’s GC are closing on the August 19 i.e. as you read this. The DAO needs you to step up and have a go, so if you’re a Level 1 Member, please apply now.

Part II

In addition to raining some love on the GC, let’s talk about one more thing:

The DAO has more than a dozen projects in the latest Gitcoin Grants round. Below you will find the name of each project and direct links to its project page on Gitcoin. Your support helps sustain our projects, and quadratic matching means that many small donations are preferable. To maximize matching, you’ll also want to set up your Gitcoin Passport, details of which can be found in the below thread. Thank you Bankless Nation for helping us to continue to further BanklessDAO’s mission.

Gitcoin Grants 18 bDAO Project List

Bankless Publishing

DAOstewards

Bankless Academy

DAO Global Events

Bankless Africa

International Media Nodes

Bankless Turkish

Bankless Ukraine

Bankless Malayalam

Bankless Magyar

Nación Bankless

Bankless Japan

BanklessDAO

👀 In Case You Missed It

💳 Join BanklessWallet Closed Beta

Join the BanklessWallet closed Beta and be a part of shaping the future of smart contract wallets. Test its latest features, catch bugs, and provide your valuable to help make this into one of the best products out there. Sign up here!

⏲️ DAO O’Clock at ETHToronto

DAO O’Clock, an official after-party event of ETHToronto, was a partnership with CityDAO — organised by links and MemeBrains. MemeBrains reports that it was a big-time hit, with around 75 people attending. There were some interviews recorded so we have those to look forward to, all in good time.

🗳️ DAOStewards <> VitaDAO

DAOStewards have formally joined VitaDAO as a delegate. DAOStewards is a metagovernance group from BanklessDAO. They were delegated 16,046 VITA tokens from BanklessDAO via Snapshot vote. The aim of the DAOStewards is to encourage good governance in the DAO space by expressing Bankless values and fostering a collaborative environment for the space to grow.

🍔 Grab It While It’s Hot

⛴️ BanklessDAO Content

🧠 Crypto Sapiens

🌍 Bankless Africa Podcasts

✍️ Bankless Publishing

🗞 The Rug Newsletter

🗓 Set A Reminder

📒 How To Notion

Get help with the Notion Ninja Learn to Earn courses. Understand how Notion permissions are managed and what courses you need to know to learn how to be an effective Notion Administrator or role holder. Join the Education Department on Monday, August 21 at 14:00 UTC in the watercooler voice channel.

🗄️ How To Gnosis/Parcel

Safe (formally Gnosis) is a tool frequently used by DAOs for the management of a shared Treasury. In this session, you will have the opportunity to add the Goerli Testnet, learn how to create a multi-signature wallet, and join a testnet multisig. We will execute a few transactions, learn how to adjust the policy, and remove signers from the multi-signature wallet. Join the Education Department on Tuesday, August 22 at 14:00 UTC in the watercooler voice channel to participate.

🏦 How To BANK (Tokenomics)

BANK is the governance token of BanklessDAO. To learn about the origin of the BANK token and its tokenomics, join the Education Department on Wednesday, August 23 at 14:00 UTC in the watercooler voice channel.

👏 Praise Bot Knowledge session

Praise is an open-source community intelligence and rewards system designed to strengthen online communities through peer recognition and tokenized incentives. Praise allows community members to openly acknowledge and appreciate each other's contributions through simple peer-to-peer messages called "praise statements." These statements recognize efforts both big and small, creating a transparent record of community participation. To learn how to appreciate folks within the DAO using the praise bot, join the Education Department on Thursday, August 24 at 14:00 UTC in the watercooler voice channel.

🤣 Meme of the Week