Building MetaFactory in Public

Platform
#1

Operating as a DAO has its challenges. One of the main ones is the fact that coordinating and organizing becomes a tedious task without having a point person to turn to. Not having standardized processes for the various workflows of the DAO adds a ton of friction and prevents both new and older participants from contributing meaningfully.

While preaching decentralization and transparency, we’re constantly working behind closed doors as an inner circle, with opaque processes and arbitrary workflows.

In order to evolve and get more people to be active participants, we need to practice proactive transparency and create streamlined processes. Instead of making the information available to anyone who asks after the fact, we should have information readily available for anyone to use.

I’ve identified some key areas we could work towards improving below, along with some suggestions on how we can go about doing it.

Content

Right now, the content for MetaFactory lives in the ether. There’s no specific place to point someone to if they ask where they can learn more about us. We have articles, podcasts, our newsletter, and our blog all scattered around the web.

Some places where content lives currently:

Medium: https://themetafactory.medium.com/
Mirror: https://meta.mirror.xyz/
Gov Forum: https://gov.metafactory.ai/
MetaFactory Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCLrYuGZvvr1t05JuYvYV-cg
Metafactory Newsletter: MetaFactory
Delphi Podcast: METAFACTORY: Glimpsing The Future Of Fashion — Metaverse Musings Ep 22 by The Delphi Podcast
DAO or Never Podcast: https://dao-or-never.simplecast.com/episodes/creator-economies-and-celebrating-community-with-metafactory-YOaG8L6B
Crypto Sapiens Podcast: ‎Crypto Sapiens: Metadreamer | Metafactory: A Community Owned Marketplace and Manufacturing Platform for Designers on Apple Podcasts
MetaMedia Youtube: Digiphysical Supply Chains - MetaFactory and Kong @ MCON 2 - YouTube
Unstoppable Domains Youtube: Building a Bridge Between Physical and Digital with METADREAMER from MetaFactory | Ep. #76 - YouTube
NYFTQ Show: https://player.fm/series/the-nftyq-show-nft-podcast/ep-16-metafactory-digi-physical-101-metaverse-and-nft-merchandise-community-owned-brands-robot-token
Community Call Notes: https://hackmd.io/@XR/mf_notes/https%3A%2F%2Fhackmd.io%2F%40XR%2Fmfnotes_11-4-21
And probably many more places I can’t even find

We need to pull everything together and create a knowledge base that we can link to from our Discord, Twitter, and Website. That could be in the form of a blog page on our website, or a fully updated Mirror where we publish both content we create and content we’re featured in.

On top of gathering all the content that has been created so far, we should throw more weight towards creating more content, both external and internal.

External Content
More frequent newsletter, covering both new drops and collabs, but also news at the intersection of fashion and tech, as well as “progress reports” that go over what we’re working on as a DAO.

Internal Content
Documented processes for different things (e.g properly requesting a payment from the DAO’s treasury), onboarding material explaining how one can go from 0 to contributing within the DAO based on their skill set, and documents breaking down how we go about decision making.

Treasury

Treasury Transparency
All transactions going in and out of the multisig are on-chain and thus transparent. However, if we’re being honest, nobody actually bothers checking the content of those transactions, nor can they verify their validity without having to ask the people who submitted them.

I suggest putting together a monthly report of all the incoming and outgoing transactions to increase transparency and make the “logistics” of the DAO accessible to everyone in a streamlined process.

Fixed Dates for Fixed Expenses

On top of that, since the DAO has some fixed expenses that are paid out on a monthly basis (e.g admin budget and NYC location expenses), I suggest having fixed dates on which those transactions are executed. Having fixed dates would help increase the speed of execution since multi-sig signers would be aware ahead of time, and it would also increase reliability for the receivers.

Multisig Signers
The signers of our multisig were elected back in 2020. It doesn’t hurt to discuss re-electing signers that can actively manage the treasury and see that transactions are executed in a timely manner. Since we’ll be actively working on improving operations and making things run more smoothly, it makes sense to clear up any potential bottlenecks at the same time.

Edit 5/12/2022: Created a governance proposal for the re-election of multisig signers.

Onboarding

People who come into the Discord wondering how they can be involved with MetaFactory are greeted with disorganization and confusion as to who they should talk to, and how they can actually start contributing.

We should create an onboarding process, complete with “tutorial”-like content that explains how one can start contributing to MetaFactory using their skillset. However, instead of the process heavily relying on core contributors holding new participants’ hands, we should automate and gamify it as much as possible through quests and bounties (similar to how Rabbithole does it).

Collab Drops

Right now, collab drops happen through either direct communication with someone from the core-team or through the expression of interest in Discord and a reach-out from our side (usually someone from the core team).

We also have this form, but not sure as to how much it’s actually being used.

We should direct any interested third party to our forums to submit a collaboration proposal (based on a template we’ll create) publicly. That will help:

  1. Alleviate the workload of core team members by allowing other contributors to take lead. We can possibly use a DeWork bounty for leading each drop.
  2. Filter out people who are not serious about collaborating with MF since they need to have an actual and specific proposal to work with us on. For people who are not sure and want to learn more info, we can redirect them to some of the content mentioned above.
  3. Quickly do a soft-consensus “vote” internally to decide whether we want to proceed or not, with everyone having access to the same info.

Discord

We should adopt a “less is more” approach to Discord. Below are some clean-up suggestions.

  1. INFO . Consolidate important info into 1 channel and move secondary info away from Discord and instead on our website, our blog, or a public Notion page. Channels include:
  • #welcome info
  • #prod-fulfillment
  • #create-with-us
  1. ONLY ROBOTS . Merge $ROBOT-gated channels into 1 channel with a fixed “price” point.
  2. COMMUNITY . Merge #ideas channel within the broader “Collab/Get DAON” category. Reduce to a discussion channel, take collab to forum posts (through info point).
  3. DAO ZONE . If anything, we just need a channel for any DAO-related conversation, be it governance proposals, contributors, or comp.
  • #Contributor-chat hasn’t been used since September. Can move to the token-gated channels or Telegram.
  • #Did-a-thing, #props, and #ops-distro can all be merged into one channel. They haven’t been used since November, August, and April respectively.
  1. PARTNERS & BRANDS . We can have bridges to other Discords, but they should be at the lower end of the list of channel categories.
  2. DESIGN & BRANDING . I think we can use a channel to talk about designs and branding, but it shouldn’t be a whole category with subchannels. Most aren’t really active anyway. Consolidating them into one channel would help drive discussion.
  3. REST INACTIVE CHANNELS . There are multiple channels that have been radio-silent for over 5 months that have no further use. Archiving them would help clean up the place. Less is more.

Action Items

Below are some action items that we could work towards, given that there’s consensus on the items mentioned above or discussed in the comments below.

  1. Create a page where all MF content lives.
  2. Clean up the Discord
  3. Introduce a specific public process that interested parties can use to collaborate with us.
  4. Direct more people to the forums for proposing initiatives.
  5. Create a document describing how one should request a payment from the DAO through Utopia.
  6. Create recurring payments on Utopia for fixed expenses.
  7. Plan onboarding quests/bounties for new contributors.
  8. Initiate a public monthly report of treasury movements.
  9. Re-elect multisig signers.
  10. Create DeWork bounties for relevant tasks.

Conclusion

I want to help drive everyone to work more publicly and I’ll happily run point on all of these initiatives. However, it’s really important that everyone actively participates in the shaping of the new paradigm with their input and feedback. And let’s lead by example and use the forums to discuss the majority of these proposals while leaving Discord/Telegram for the minor details.

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#2

Great, detailed overview @Sinkas

I would suggest that we map these to an order of operations

IMO, we are stuck in a state of energy-drain which could be turned around with an honest assessment of who we are, what we have and, where we want to go. You laid this out more clearly above so just reiterating what you wrote.

I suggest we

  1. start with a Discord clean-up
  2. follow with a roll call
  3. decide on what we are building and determine what features into that (whether it’s newsletter, onboarding, all the above or something else)

We need a structured workshop to move through some of the deeper sentiment and purpose analysis… if anyone has a framework that they know well, that would be great. Otherwise we may need to bring in a facilitator.

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#3

Can put some more time in The Cleanening:)
60 or more channels killed but can hardly tell lmao

Roll call is definitely relevant. Even if it isn’t incorporated into a widescale “Seasonal” structure alongside products, timed Epochs for contributors is a nice meta for KPIs and some reward allocations.

#4

@weseeclearly I think we have both the manpower and skills to tackle multiple things at once, but I definitely agree that we need to be on the same page in terms of the foundation we’re building on. We can open the discussion on that through a roll call/community call, but we can start tackling lower-hanging fruit immediately - think Discord clean-up and automated payments on Utopia.

@DAOFREN I know we’ve killed a ton of channels, but as you said: one can hardly tell. I think we need to go deeper with the clean-up on Discord. Browse through some of the channels and you’ll see for yourself that some haven’t been active at all in months, and some others have maybe 1 or 2 messages per month. You could argue that it’s happening because of the bear market which makes everyone less interested and active as a second-order effect, but that was the case back in 2021 too with some of the channels. As I mentioned in the original post, less is more.

Less important decisions can be taken in smaller working groups with relevant parties. E.g for the Discord, we could arrange a quick call to discuss some of the suggestions above along with any other ideas and just start executing - the DAO way.

#5

Thanks @Sinkas for the recommendations.

I think its important to keep in mind that although we are a DAO, there are many aspects of our operations that are centralized due to the nature of physical goods production and the need to interface with web2 partners. This is one of the main reasons we have a smaller core working group to drive operations. We have to balance both fiat and token treasuries and have tax obligations related to retail sales that require some level of sensitivity. Decentralized physical production is incredibly challenging. But that challenge is our opportunity. I do think we have worked to be as transparent as possible despite this friction and we’re building tooling to enable that even further - including the ability for the community to drive what is produced. But there are always ways we can improve.

Regarding content consolidation, ideally this should live on/be our homepage. So if we feel like our message isn’t being captured adequately, we should probably address it there. Maybe we need a richer content directory to guide the way. I kind of love that our story is captured in the corners of digital/fashion/tech culture, but it doesn’t help if no one knows where to find it.

I 100% agree on Discord clean up.

I also think that streamlining drops can make a huge difference. We need to templatize the entire process in order to decentralize it - enabling scale. Anyone with any idea can leverage the process to produce apparel. I know we are doing some important work on the NFT/digital wearable side right now in order to standardize that piece of the puzzle. That should solve a lot of current headaches and open new opportunities related to token gates/discounts. We’re also putting focus on MFOS for production management transparency and metadata tracking. This opens the doors to our long time vision for curation game and curated community collections.

+1 to standardizing fixed expense payments and review processes for transparency.

Regarding onboarding quests/bounties for new contributors - I think this should be entirely focused on the creative side. I don’t think we have a lack of operational contributors or competence. I think the real challenge right now is the lack of drops. We need to help creatives realize they have a partner in MetaFactory for turning ideas into physical garments and goods - and we need to provide a clear and easy process for them to engage. I think we can leverage new tokenomics to drive this and we are starting to discuss ideas.

Let’s definitely hold a new multi-sig signer election.

3 Likes
#6

I think there’s a fine dividing line -as there should be- between the DAO and the LLC and I’m personally completely okay with that. To me, the DAO is about driving design, collaboration, and innovation, while the LLC is more about the “dull” part of the business which is managing production and shipping, interacting with web2 partners, and handling the logistics of the fiat treasury. With that in mind, I agree that there should be a core group driving operations of the LLC with some level of sensitivity as you mentioned.

The main point and goal of my post are to make the operations of the DAO more transparent and organized.

From creating a directory that makes all MF-related content easily accessible, to cleaning up the Discord and standardizing processes for drops and payments, all points made are about the DAO side of MetaFactory.

I believe that the core team has done an outstanding job so far with running the physical production side and I don’t personally have any input on that aspect of MetaFactory as I haven’t been involved at all. Nothing in the above post or any future posts is criticism or things I believe must happen. I just want to open some conversations, catch up on many things, and contribute in the way I can best: by organizing, creating processes, and coordinating efforts.

1 Like