Crafting the Blueprint: Building an Engaged DAO - Najdana Majors | Connext Network

um hey everyone welcome um today I'll be talking about building an Engaged Dow nice to see you all uh let's jump right into introductions so that you know why you should listen to me uh so I'm head of people and then more recently governance lead at ever CLE that was previously connects uh Ever Clear is the first uh clearing layer uh and uh it coordinates settlement uh of liquidity between chains solving fragmentation for modular blockchains we just did our big uh testet launch earlier this week so make sure make sure to check it out but back to me uh my experience has been in people and talent space uh and then I also have masters of industrial organizational psychology um from the University of Georgia and why this is important my main focus really is company culture motivation uh and engagement and my masters really helps me combine practical experience uh with the scientific approach as well why am I talking about those you may ask uh well I think that we can all agree with more traditional companies there are some poor experiences and I do think as many others do that do offer um fresh perspective um I think that dolls are more of a social experiment right now there are some problems to solve but if if you continue working on this I think uh we can have a future uh where where Dows really allow people to work differently um another reason why I'm really excited to to share my experiences on this talk is a lot of times you can see you know five men talking about DS in very technical very hard to understand way and uh I think there is a way to actually build outs um simple terms and talk about them in simple terms uh so I kind of want to share how those can be can be set up and kept going um in simple ways so let's jump right into it uh this is the overview these are some of the topics uh that we will uh cover today the first one is community building um important to to mention here uh Ever Clear previously connects has been around for many years so it was founded in 2018 we were bridging and focusing on chain abstraction long before it was cool so although we have a very small uh core team of just 20 people uh we have a pretty big network of contributors developers are working on top of us and collaborating with us so I would say community was mostly built and when we were preparing for launch uh we for the Dow launch and the token launch uh we uh wanted to do a call for delegates to obviously build a good group of delegates to to work with running a do without delegates in my opinion is really hard um but to each their own so what we did in call for delegates we kind of took this uh two level approach uh bottom up uh and top down bottom up means that we pretty much try to amplify this call for delegates uh in every single media outlet that we had on Discord on telegram we really wanted to reach every single person that has any interest uh in now Ever Clear previously connects and can bring you know their opinions and their thoughts and kind of push uh the whole ecosystem forward so any person that was in any way engaged or just you know use the the bridge previously could apply to become a delegate and then also top- down approach is that our Founders invited some thought leaders in the space that we already know and have relationship with tools to apply and become delegates uh some of them did some of them have been extremely helpful and extremely engaged uh so far and what I think this created is um pretty good diversity I know that this diversity is like this you know a term that some people uh think is really valuable some get frustrated with it but uh what research shows is that diversity does lead to better decision making and I can definitely kind of witness that now the last 10 months initially when we were making decisions when we were talking uh about things it was kind of hard to to have you know so many thoughts so many opinions but over time teams get used to working uh with each other and then we really do have uh better decisions over over the last um 10 months moving on to the next topic governance process uh Dows need extremely simple governance process uh to actually function um in terms of preparing for the launch again we needed to have some document that outlines how decisions are made initially um and I did some re research preparing for it I researched that was like hop VNS arbitrum and so on and came to the conclusion that we should have process that consists of an RFC uh temperature check and then uh formal vote very quickly uh you know after launch after documents were available delegates starting sharing their thoughts around what a process should look like it was kind of funny to see how many port the opinions there were if we should have temperature check if we should not have it how long the vote should be uh and so on and we obviously had the first vote I actually the first stap check and the first vote was actually deciding on how long the formal vote uh is going to take so delegates decided to remove temperature check in our case so our current process uh is 7-Day request for comments sometimes it takes longer most of the time it's 7 days and then we go straight to to formal vote uh with some delays before the execution um as you can see we do not have temp check uh and kind of looking back at the last 10 months um I don't think we missed it honestly it just never came up in in in discussions so if you're thinking about governance process building it out these days consider not having temp check I don't think it it helps much next topic listening I want to cover communication tools here uh again 10 months ago setting up the Dow it was really I was kind of asking those questions what do we need to have what do we need to have to kind of get the the Dow running uh one answer was good communication Tools in this case I would say we have a pretty simple setup as well we obviously have Forum where all the rfc's and votes uh and all the discussions uh take place publicly uh we do have Discord where we announce all the news related to the Dow like new rfc's and new votes and so on we have da uh delegates uh telegram group where we also post those updates to make sure that people are um aware of everything taking place and then we also have uh monthly delegates calls where we discuss again rfc's votes uh any conflicts um and so on why am I calling this slide listening and not communication tools but because I think listening is is extremely important there is this term in um um workplace psychology that is called employee listening or employee voice and employee listening pretty much entails getting often feedback uh from employees about what motivates them why they are engaged why they're not engaged what are some of the problems uh that they have and really taking this approach of proactive listening in more traditional companies and in the Dows is really really important uh for engagement uh in my um experience um there are always some delegates that going to have difference of the opinion if you kind of compare to what everybody else thinks and I actually think that to promote that diversity of thought it's actually really important to praise any engagement to praise any opinion that you get as long as it's constructive in any dos I'm sure that you experience it there are people's people who share let's say negative feedback that is not constructive which is not ideal to those I do not always respond but as long as it's constructive uh I will praise that I will thank them for engagement I will ask them to to uh contribute more as that really really does keep people uh engaged long term autonomy uh this kind of flows well um from the from the previous um slide uh going into the centralized Organization for us as a core team what was really important important is that um we progressively decentralized and that my role as as a governance lead becomes a lot smaller over time uh 10 months later I'm not as involved day to day uh but what I did initially I knew that I had to support initial proposals I needed to support um initial decision- making process and just do everything to make sure decisions are being made and da is is moving forward what I still did like doing that I definitely tried to balance the work that I do and then also the space that I create uh for others to contribute um I didn't want to do everything for everybody because that that's just not a wayte to decentralize that's not a way to to start slowly from the day one uh removing yourself um another thing I did to to support this I didn't just you know leave gaps and leave space and not do anything about it I also started connecting with our delegates um I pretty much scheduled calls with some of them they were very engaged uh to really identify their potential assess their skills areas of Interest ask them questions and asking them questions is the most important takeaway here funny thing happens when you ask people questions uh they feel valued they want to share more they really willing to open theselves themselves up and like share ideas and share their experiences which is really crucial you don't need delegates if you're not going to listen to them uh so essentially 10 months later as I said my day-to-day role is a lot smaller delegates are very autonomous very independent in what they do in decisions that they make they are going to ping me from time to time if they need something from the foundation in particular but most of the time they just do a stuff independently a really good example I want to share here is governance task force uh there is a formal vote that seems like it's going to pass um today or tomorrow uh and hopefully uh we will be going to elections next what governance task force is well it's really this task force that will take governance lead role decentralize it further into couple of different roles with some additional added tasks that are going to fill those gaps um that we had initially and are really going to push governance operations to the next level um what is really impressive about this is that I didn't have anything to do with this one of delegates brought the whole idea I did comment on it I did give give my feedback but it's completely independently you know D is decentralizing role of the governance lead which is really awesome to see uh after only 10 months values um I left values for almost the end on purpose all the values are really really really important thing to discuss so you may all know the values do Define company culture um uh and for example looking back two years ago when I joined Ever Clear previously connect uh I was talking to the founders about how do we maintain company culture as scale that was the main question that was the main reason that I wanted to hire some uh someone like me to lead talent and people function so the first thing I pitched to them was values you know like if you have company values if if you as Founders you as leaders are actually uh behaving in such a way that is in line with those values that will be perceived as from employees and from everybody else and those values are be are going to be what keeps your culture going as a scale values in my opinion although are slightly harder to implement in um can also be uh glue decentralization in my opinion in general I don't think values are should be a part of constitution you cannot really enforce people to follow your values but you can have code of contact or some quote of contact or something similar uh where where values are outlined uh and discussed what we did looking back uh is is is not too much but um I can see now that the results of it are good so the first thing we did in previously mention call for delegates uh we had something that uh could be identified this value statement we essentially asked all the delegates in their application uh to state what is their vision for the da and like what are their goals for their participation through that you can really see how they see the da what their values are even in my experience in particular when I was looking who I'm going to delegate my voting power to I noticed one specific delegate that talked about how he sees uh the da and what values he thinks the da should have and I delegated my votes to him he still doesn't know that he has majority of my votes but the funny thing is like you know working with all the delegates 10 months later we've always had alignment when it comes to the opinion uh without uh needing to to discuss it and this is really what matters and having delegates represent um values of the of the token holders is really what they're there for so having something like that in call for delegates is extremely extremely helpful other thing already mentioned more in the in the um let's say realm of of company culture is leading by example there are no leaders to the Dow there's just contributors there are people that are maybe more visible than the others but it's still important to lead by example you need to behave in line with values that you want the doubt to have this also means um making sure that voice Community is always Amplified uh there are delegates who might not have as much voting power but whose opinion really really matters matters and it's really important to give them space to speak up to call out issues as as that actually uh means integrity and I do want to say like again looking back 10 months later I think that um I think the delegates have called us out a couple of times on a c on on a few things that may not be 100% in line with the values it was a discussion and it was really good discussion so I think we're also uh doing well in this department and then the future outlook I already said Dallas are social experiment right now but I do see Dallas's future work in a few years from now and the question is what needs to happen in my opinion in my experience uh to bring dllas to that level the first thing is diversity um we're really lucky that our delegates have a lot of diversity in terms of backgrounds location thought uh experience and that's why we're making better decisions however considering this is a protocol when you look at gender diversity I don't think we're doing great we need to do better uh and that is one of the reasons that I wanted to do this talk again I'm tired of being at conferences where five men are constantly having a panel about dos and speak in technical ways that they're super complex I wanted to take a different approach and hopefully talk about do in simple ways um the second uh important point is long-term engagement pretty much the topic of this uh talk it's very easy to have an Engaged hour in the early days right after launch right after air drop people are hyped about the token they're hyped about everything they're doing a few months later a lot of them drop off you know they have jobs they're not paid for what they do they have other stuff to do and thinking about long-term engagement is really important for me it's like I would say it's still early days for us 10 months but long term uh this will be a challenge there are a couple of ways to solve this there are some incentive incent incentives for delegates and for their participation thoughts are very polarized again about this if you ask certain delegates what they think about it they're like yeah you know people should get tokens or something like that for voting some other people think that no absolutely not why would you pay delegates for just participating I'm still thinking what is the best way uh to do this uh we did not include any kind of incentives right now but we might long term um as we grow definitely interested in hearing other people uh's experiences when it comes to this paid contributions um another really important thing to do as the Dow grows there are going to be subd Dows or task forces the governance task force that I mentioned um that um in order to be efficient should be paid it should basically be paid roles that might not take them not full-time they might be just few hours per week but they should be paid and one of our delegates K us to them L2 be they have been advocating from this uh from the very beginning of da and I have to say that we've kind of learned on the on our experience that if those task forces are paid you can actually have expectations you can have kpis you can ask for detailed report outlining what was achieved and this really is a good way to push uh Dow to become uh more efficient better tools thinking about Dow tooling uh there's a lot of space uh to to make improvements we currently use a snapshot for votes and then we use uh o snap tool kudas to Uma and o snap team for developing this it works pretty well if you're doing Simple transactions in executable proposals that are just you know maina to maina transfer however as ever clear is a clearing layer and it's concerned with chain abstraction we really want it to have cross chain Dow uh immediately so whenever we have to do an executable proposal that transfers uh assets from maybe mayet uh to arbitrum to fund task force or something like that it's really complex to to create a transaction I'm not very technical I have to reach out to an engineer to make sure that everything's uh right so that's one tool that I can immediately uh would love to have I think that what recently happened is that there was um integration of of o snap with tenderly which is awesome that people can now simulate simple transactions but there's definitely a lot of space um for improvements here um preparing for scale final thought uh today is that as as dolls grow as the treasury of the Dolls grow there are usually more grants there's a lot of politics that starts happening because there's a lot of money flowing around and it's really important to think about the structure preparing for scale again my experience with more traditional companies you have to think about where this thing might be going and how to set up this rocket ship to actually uh succeed as more and more people are try to come in and uh contribute again having some of the things that we outlined here like values simple governance process this good communication tools is really important but then also thinking about the structure you know maybe one mayet uh multi or main multisig that is let's say the main Dow and then a bunch of sub Dows uh could be very well the solution however that does uh include a lot of additional operational roles uh to really keep things going and that's about it when it comes to sharing my thoughts I hope that this was valuable to you and I hope this is kind of shedding some light on the Dows in a way that is simple and easy to understand I happy to chat later or answer any questions if there are any right now no questions awesome thank you all for your attention it was a pleasure being in Belgrade today byebye