22Q1 Report
Intro
Early March ‘22, La Tribu was voted into existence by the Tribe DAO.
The goal of this initiative is to create a new team within the DAO that onboard Solidity beginners & train them, with the goal of retaining them as long-term contributors for projects within the DAO.
The Tribe DAO allocated a budget per developer of up to 120k FEI / year for salary, up to 20k FEI / year of expenses, and 500k TRIBE over 4 years (back-weighted stream, 1 year cliff). These tokens are on Timelocks (FEI, TRIBE) and can be clawed back by a DAO vote. The initiative is initially funded for 2 developers, for up to 4 years.
La Tribu will report quarterly to the DAO, by creating a forum post like this one. This first issue is a bit special, because it details the process by which La Tribu will run, and focuses less on the work done, since we are still in the bootstrapping phase. I mostly met with lawyers this month. Now is a good time to comment on the process, since actual work will start in the next few months 
Reporting
Expenses
All expenses will be publicly reported in a Google Sheet, updated in real-time. Etherscan can also be used to see the token movements on the 2 contracts.
The expected expenses are mostly salary, hardware, travel, tickets & housing (to meet other DAO members), 3rd-party contractors (lawyers, designers).
FEI will be claimed on the timelock monthly (for the month going forward).
Team Updates
When relevant, the quarterly report will include a section about staffing (who was hired, what their profile is, and if we are looking for a new person, a list of criterias & an address to contact for people interested).
Work done
The quarterly report will contain a dedicated section to present the work done during the last 3 months, and a section to present the foreseen tasks of the next 3 months.
The project management tool used to prioritize, assign, and track advancement of tasks (Github projects, Trello, Linear, Jira, …TBD) will be public-facing, and everyone will be able to see the progress & priorities of the team in real-time.
Pause & Clawback conditions
As this is a DAO initiative, anyone can create a vote/proposal by themselves to propose changes on how La Tribu operates & whether it should stop.
That being said, here is a policy on how I plan to make sure the DAO is satisfied with the initiative :
- On quarterly report forum threads, if the team’s results are not satisfactory, I will create a Snapshot vote to pause all claims on the Timelocks. If the Snapshot vote passes (>10M quorum, >50% “YES”), all claims on the Timelocks will be paused.
- If, after 1 month of being “paused”, the situation is not resolved through forum discussions or another Snapshot vote, I will post an on-chain vote to make the DAO clawback the Timelocks.
There are 2 hard lines that La Tribu should not cross :
- La Tribu shall work exclusively on projects of the Tribe DAO, as it is bankrolling the formation of the team. If La Tribu members paid by the DAO are working on other projects, the DAO is entitled to claw back.
- If La Tribu members fail to report quarterly in an accurate and timely manner (2 weeks), the DAO will lose visibility on the team’s actions, so the funds should be clawed back.
Bootstrapping
Building a new team from 0 is very different from operating an existing team of several people. As such, I consider separately the recruitment of the first 1-2 team members (almost “co-founders”) from the following recruitments.
The risk of failure is much higher initially than after the team is established & running, and I’ll also need to solve issues like company registration (if it doesn’t go through my existing company), hiring/contracting paperwork, agreements for token vesting, establish a team culture, a hiring process, an onboarding process, sustainability plan on what to do with the devs if the DAO votes to end La Tribu, etc.
I reached out to my network of former colleagues that I know are competent/good workers, and I’m happy to say that 2 of them are interested in joining La Tribu.
I organized a Discord call with these 2 former colleagues & various DAO contributors & most feedback was positive. The main suggestion was to establish a clear process on how La Tribu will run, hence this forum post
These 2 first recruits are also interesting to bootstrap La Tribu, because they represent 2 categories of recruits the team will target :
- One is a senior web2 back-end dev, very knowledgeable in SW development, but who needs to learn more about DeFi/Crypto and Solidity
- One is a junior dev, who knows more about DeFi/Crypto, but needs to ramp up on software development skills. He’s also interested in doing some front-end in addition to Solidity
With these 2 profiles, I’ll have a team capable of executing on the full stack (front, back, smart contracts), and I’ll have to find training resources/partners for different technologies & levels of knowledge. Since one of the first tasks is to establish a list of training materials & define an onboarding process, I think it will help greatly.
Recruitment process
The team is to be composed of 100% devs, as I believe devs can also do the additional tasks of being DAO operators or talking to other DAOs to draft/execute new partnerships.
Recruitment of additional people (after the initial 2) is a topic for later, but if the first steps of La Tribu are successful, I could submit a DAO proposal to fund the recruitment of additional developers. The recruitment process would be performed by the La Tribu team, as they would be their daily colleagues, and I would also like the recruits to meet devs of the various core dev teams (Fei, Rari, Volt, Midas, etc), because they’ll work on the same projects, and it will allow more diverse feedbacks.
I think the DAO at large should focus on outcomes & results of the team, and not the day-to-day operations (emphasis !), and I consider recruitment / layoff as part of the day-to-day operations, as is choosing contractors to perform some external tasks, similar to how the Grants committee operates.
Onboarding process
During the first months when the 2 first devs join the team, we will build a “book” (github repository full of .md files?) of training resources (mostly links to external resources, and a plan on what to read in which order & why). This training resource will be built as the first recruits train themselves, by taking notes on what they learn & where, and it will be open-source. This should help all future DAO contributors (whether they join through La Tribu or not), and maybe even other DAOs.
As of today, I plan to make them start with some Coursera/Udemy MOOCs, some popular tutorials like CryptoZombies or Ethernaut, work on toy projects & peer-review their code, organize internal meetings to teach them about the various protocols live on Ethereum, and maybe even register them to some paid programs like Shipyard or Artemis Academy, later. There are a bunch of amazing training resources available everywhere (Mastering Ethereum, DeFi Developer Roadmap, Simplified Roadmap for Blockchain Security, …) and our contribution will mostly be to use them in an operational DAO context & build a coherent pathway in navigating them, from the point of view of people with different backgrounds.
Task assignment process
As the devs within La Tribu are exclusively funded by the Tribe DAO, they will exclusively work on projects within the Tribe DAO (or about to launch within the Tribe DAO).
Any community member or pod can suggest tasks & they will be put into the backlog of La Tribu’s devs. There will be an internal weekly team meeting to prioritize tasks. Anyone should feel free to post on the forum why certain tasks should move higher in the priority list, and the team will answer. The team will also regularly meet with other core dev teams within the DAO (there are weekly meetings), and that will help establish a priority list.
For longer-term commitments, for instance a 1-month project, or a protocol within the DAO working on a major release that will take 3 months to ship, the locking of a full-time dev from La Tribu could be agreed by a meeting between the Tribal Council (or an “ops pod” if it exists) & dev teams (there’s some overlap!).
The projects launching inside the DAO could also snapshot to ask for dev resources (Kirk’s snapshot “FIP:88 VOLT joins the TRIBE” for instance could have requested a dev for 6 months while they recruit a core dev team for themselves). Recruitment from La Tribu to the DAO’s protocols will be welcomed to a certain extent. I think it will happen organically, because La Tribu’s devs will be cross-protocol and general-purpose, and if a dev works too much for one of the protocols, they should be poached to free a spot in La Tribu, and allow us to onboard a new dev to replace.
they had several weeks of notice before being able to quit their former employer, and will start on the 11th of July. This is in less than 2 weeks, can’t wait to start !