Fei Protocol DAO Structure

Proposals
1

Hello Tribe,

I would like to share my vision for the structure of Fei’s DAO and its various core functional components as we build out our community. It is based on a similar visualization of Index Coop’s organizational structure (Index Coop Org Chart - Leadership & Governance - The Index Coop), and I believe this framework works quite well with some modifications. A wireframe draft has been discussed with various mods and below is a refined version based on their feedback.

A big thank you to @Spiral for helping out with the infographics.

Edit #1 - Org Chart updated per comments.

Motivation
This exercise allows:

  1. The community to establish, organize and to bring focus into what activities are required to sustain the operational aspects of the DAO.
  2. Those new and existing to the project to visualize the relationships of the structure of the various core components.
  3. As a marketing and onboarding tool for users outside of the ecosystem to understand Fei.
  4. As a long term roadmap on how Fei should grow into and what types of roles needs to be filled.
  5. This is a chart to show what Fei could be, and not should be (see ending notes).

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Organizational Structure
The Community and Tribe Holders are central to the organization. You can imagine that these are ‘sub-Tribes’ under our main ‘Tribe’. The various core functions have a flat relationship and are as follows:

DAO Organization & Operations - this is the entity that runs the day-to-day operations of the DAO.
Treasury - this is the entity that is responsible for the finances of the DAO, including management of the PCV.
Growth & Business Development - this is the entity that is responsible for interfacing with various other protocols and come up with ways to bring value to Fei.
Protocol Controlled Value (PCV) - this is the entity that represents our main asset, used for the collateralization of Fei and defense of its peg.
Community Engagement - this is the entity that will oversee its current and future users, and is responsible for generating content for investors outside of our ecosystem. For example, the Discord and this Discourse forum is a channel for Community Engagement.
Engineering and Protocol R&D - this is the entity responsible for implementing the code necessary to execute the various functions. Currently Fei Labs sit within this sphere as they are leading the project (and thus have direct access to the PCV). It is in my hope that there will be more community involvement to decentralize the functions of this entity and for organic growth as our ecosystem matures.

Sub-Functions
The current Working Groups fall under the various core functions:

  • The PCV Diversification WG currently work under the scope of the Treasury. Over time, this will be absorbed into the core Treasury function itself as the PCV will need to be continuously managed.
  • Partnerships & Integrations WG work under the scope of the Business Development entity. Over time, they will be absorbed into the Business Development itself as their role is one and the same.
  • There are various roles that currently do not exist (or are currently informal) and should be considered, these are described as dotted circles right now:
  • Meta-governance would be a paired function between the Treasury and Business Development. This allows Fei to have governance power by holding various other tokens as an investment and will allow us to help influence other protocols for our interests as well as good governance of the DeFi space as a whole.
  • The Academy is an entity that some others are working on which help educate users about Fei and DeFi.
  • Design is an element of marketing that is essential. Good graphic design represents our brand and helps to break down complex relationships so that it is visually easier to understand (like the diagram you see above).
  • Global Translations is a function which allows us global outreach to all users. Non English-speaking users also need to be taken care of.

Open for Feedback
I hope that this diagram is thought-provoking. I welcome the community to give feedback on whether there are any roles or functions that should be (or not be) there. I also hope that this will lead to further discussions and proposals on whether there is interest from the community to take up formal roles for the core functions, and to establish a leadership team.

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2

This is a great follow-up and addition to Grant’s post. :+1:

Oh wow, this changed quite a lot, didn’t it? Thank you @Spiral for the polish! :heart:

First I would ask users that are obvious “informal leaders” whether or not they want to take a lead here (if we do establish these further WGs.)
For example:

Let me tell you about all the great natives/translators we already have:

  • Spiral: Russian
  • cozeno: Chinese
  • Dio: Japanese, German

I would ask these users first to take the lead when It comes to “official” translations for these languages. After all, they have been doing it for a long time already. (If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.)

Also, @Meertitan suggested to me that he could handle the Vietnamese community if that community should ever grow.

I feel like this is loosely defined. Wouldn’t you also count Ric Burton’s contributions/designs towards this topic? Then he should definitely be the leading man here. If not, then are we only talking about something like those flowcharts and graphics that meertitan and Spiral created?

The current dilemma that meertitan and I are facing while working on the Academy is that we are not sure about the purpose of this Academy, as the Medium posts and Documentations already offer such great insight. This is why we wanted to work on simple graphics and ELI5 articles in order to find a niche.

We just have to keep in mind the protocol is currently not in a place to make use of all these ideas(nor do I think that the core team could support all of them sufficiently). It is good that we are talking about it, but realistically a lot of these WGs will not be prioritised until we get the protocol to a comfortable place.
So the question should be which ones can we focus on? Currently, I would say the obvious contender for top priority WG is the PCV Diversification WG. Keeping this in mind, how would you proceed here?
As you said yourself a lot of these roles are already carried out informally. So which ones need some level of formalisation?

Also may I ask one final question @arcology ? Where do you see yourself come into play here? :wink:

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@arcology Thank you for your efforts! A couple of questions/comments.

First of all

How do you envision this? De facto we’re talking here about some full-scale organisation.

And as a follow-up. If we’re talking big picture, I’d like to call out the elephant in the room: compensations. The bigger, more complicated and structured Tribe becomes, the less it’s capable of functioning as a hobbyist volunteer community, if we’re talking about serious work on development, marketing, design, outreach. What’s your take on this issue as an OP. More about the approach, principles, not how much.

When you’re saying Treasury is an entity and PCV is an entity, there is some confusion. Treasury is more like a department managing PCV – a portfolio of investments.

Plus PCV management is to a significant degree an engineering task, so it’s also part of Engineering and Protocol R&D.

Enough for now.

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Thank you @DioDionysos and @pavel for your feedback:

Agreed. The existing WG leads already have experience in the field, so naturally they will be absorbed into the core functions, as I have explained. If not, then this is an open call to potential suitors who would like to apply for a role. It will have to be vetted by the community - consider this another avenue for hiring.

The global translations role is more like a coordinator for all of the various languages and standardizing the message, especially if we need to market in various languages. Of course, the existing mods with additional language capability is great and they should continue with that aspect of their jobs. This is a role that may be redundant at this stage.

I have not had a discussion with him so would be more than happy to do so. Design is all-encompassing: a great UX/UI is as paramount as great and easy to understand infographics.

We can discuss further about your intent for the Academy. I envision this being similar to Zapper’s Learn platform with a focus on what you can do with Fei.
Does the Fei medium posts and documentation explain properly to someone who is completely new how to get into Fei? For example, is there a central resource (or linked to others) on questions such as ‘what is DeFi’? and ‘what is Impermanent Loss’?

I agree, so my preamble is about a vision and to encourage discussion on the growth of the protocol. This is still early days when we are still trying to fix the core product, Fei. The protocol will build upon this organization structure once it gets to a critical mass. As with other startups, at its infancy roles will be more informal and many early ‘staff’ will need to wear multiple hats.

The immediate focus will be to formalize the Treasury, then Business Development in that order. Treasury to secure the PCV (this is what @Bruno is already doing with the PCV-D WG and it is our only asset currently) and perhaps to start thinking about an investment strategy to generate revenue. Business Development in parallel with the fixing of Fei so hopefully from when Fei is fixed to starting integrations, this is as seamless as possible. Many users on Discord are concerned about things taking too much time. To address their concerns we want to be more efficient with our time - some of the work processes can really happen in parallel.
One final aspect is that Community Engagement has sort of been finalized by all the great work that you and the other mods have been doing. No additional formalization needed here.

My interests are creating strategies and functional operational frameworks. But this is not a post to nominate myself for any position - I will let the community to decide if I am worthy of any role here. At this point I am just a community member who is more engaged that the average user. :grinning:

Simply put, Operations are about the stability and performance of any functioning community (or company) and to improve productivity and efficiency in that aspect. Operations would be conversing/collaborating with the other core functions on things such as:

  • Creating/improving a framework/strategy for various community processes, such as how do we design policies to make sure we are communicating with the Tribe holders, and how do we address and act upon it? Another example - how do we create reporting standards for the activities for the PCV/Treasury? What data is to be reported? These would all be done in collaboration with the leads of the various functions.

  • Collating/Reporting on the performance of all various core functions.

  • Strategizing on the approach to integrations and other growth initiatives.

  • Act as an advisor for other core functions.

Among others, it is a role which keeps the community functions as tight as possible. This feels like putting a job description together! I am sure Fei Labs would be able to weigh in on this.

That’s a good question and something we should address sooner than later.
First of all, do we want to keep this as an informal enthusiast community? Given Fei Labs’ backing of several large investors, my view is that they have a vested interest to making something a lot more serious. In this regard, we should consider the core functions as full-time roles subject to proper vetting and hiring criteria, albeit the hiring authority is the community perhaps with some input from Fei Labs. For example, if you are hiring someone for R&D, you would expect that they have relevant expertise in the field and support from the community. The level of experience will be commensurate with skill and experience. This can be easily benchmarked against formal startups and other DAOs to keep ourselves competitive.

You are right, the PCV is an asset that should be managed by the Treasury. It already has a relationship, also jointly-managed by the R&D function (part of Fei Labs). Remember, all core functions are devised as a flat organizational structure.

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Great post and design, @arcology and @Spiral!

I will share my initial thoughts.

I understood the orange circles as the DAO’s divisions. I agree with @pavel that the PCV within the orange circle is confusing as it seems to be a different division than Treasury.

Just a detail, but I would prefer to put TRIBE Holders in the top center to highlight the importance of Tribe holders on the overall organization design. They are the shareholders of this organization and they seem small by the current image.

I think the Operations division should take care of the important point brought by @pavel, compensations. How this organization will compensate contributors? What roles need to be full time? What others could be part time? We would need a clear and transparent policy here.

In my view, Operations division is a mix of Human resources, Planning and Backoffice division from a traditional company. So it could include DAO planning and budget, KPIs definitions, organizational structure and processes, HR policy, including compensations, etc. Contributions from @arcology on organizational design and from @GrantG on working groups are helping to understand better its scope.

Treasury - this is the entity that is responsible for the finances of the DAO, including advising the management of the PCV.

The decision about how to manage PCV is made by Tribe Holders, Treasury division only advises it. In the future, Tribe Holders, advised by Treasury and Operations divisions, can also define specific budgets for certain activities such as Grants program and working groups. It is important to have KPIs and to be evaluated periodically the budget allocation.

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Hey @arcology , looks like the design changed quite a bit since I last saw the graphic. You guys did a great job!

These are indeed topics we plan to write articles about on Fei Academy. The current vision is to make Academy attractive to newcomers with helpful documents and make it attractive for veterans with up-to-date news. Like @DioDionysos pointed out it is important to find a niche that hasn’t been filled yet.

We will give an update on Academy soon, in the meantime you can check out our preliminary version here. Feedback is appreciated.

Agreed, this should be first on the agenda. A nicely diversified PCV might be even more attractive to potential partners anyways.

You’ve been doing a great job on this, I’m sure the communtiy will recognize this in due time. Just keep on doing what you’re doing. :+1:

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Hi @Bruno and @Meertitan,

Thank you for your feedback.

Good idea - I have some proposals on how to improve this. I will work with @Spiral to address this in an update of the diagram.

These are great questions and would need to be discussed further in a separate thread. My initial thought is to ask what sort of roles need continuous engagement versus something that can be done or updated on a more periodic basis. Another dimension to this would be how critical the work is to the functionality of the protocol/community.

I fully agree with this - we can work together on how to devise/implement a working budget and KPIs for the protocol for the various functions and external grants.

Leadership Team
Based on my observation of comments in the community Discord, I also propose that a ‘leadership team’ be formed from the various core functions to vote on various initiatives which are operations-based or to fix certain issues without the need to engage the entire community to be more efficient with time.

Case in point - as of this writing, there is a DAO vote scheduled to fix the bonding curve vulnerability. This is a core function of the protocol, and the solution to this is straightforward (a direct vote to yes). In this case, a multi-sig vote of the leadership team would be much faster to implement and to pass (the interests of the leadership team should be aligned - that is to fix it) without requiring the approval of all TRIBE holders.

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The Org Chart diagram has been updated per above comments:

  1. The PCV is a sub-category (asset) under the Treasury, where they advise the investment strategy but ultimately decisions voted for/against by the DAO,
  2. The emphasis on Tribe holders and de-emphasizing the Fei Labs Core team, even though they will continue to lead the project, with the future goal of decentralization and that devs to further improve the protocol will be community-based.
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