Formation of the Solar Guild & Roadmap Proposal

Governance City Hall
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This is the suggested roadmap for the Solar Guild, a guild composed of a handful of laser-focused full-time members.

Intro

Why: All the other guilds are semi-open and mostly composed of part-time members. That structure works very well in some cases like maintainance of existing products, adding scoped features and performing research. However, two-pizza teams with full-time members excel in efficient product prototyping, fast-paced iterations and tight vertical integrations. Nation3 has the opportunity to leverage both models and their respective tradeoffs. The Solar Guild would leverage the latter to efficiently bring to market new products like the Court or the next iteration of Passports. For further background, check the original proposal for re-org.

Who: @anastasiya @0xGallego @luis to start with, + new hires

What: A limited liability company, in order to provide certain legal protection to its contractors.

Roadmap

Constitution

Objective: Work alongside legal professionals (by kickstarting the Legal Guild) to draft a Constitution for Nation3, making sure it adheres to the Manifesto and to the technical implementation of the DAO and Court.

Key Result: A successful Meta governance proposal to enact the proposed Constitution and replace the current governance process.

Court

Objective: Deploy Nation3 Court (as detailed in this spec) on mainnet, together with UIs for users and judges to interact with it.

Key Result: Nation3 Court on mainnet securing assets worth more than 10 BTC.

*The initial funding proposal for Court established a total compensation of 40k USDC and $20k worth of NATION. $10k has been paid out. Once the second milestone is completed, a further 25% will be paid out. If this proposal passes, the last milestone corresponding to the remaining 50% of the budget will be forgoed.*

Standard passports

Objective: Research and converge on one design for the Nation3 Standard Passports that plays well with the existing Genesis Passports, the Court and NationCred. Launch it.

Key Result: A successful set of governance proposals implementing and launching Standard Passports.

Guardian Guild

Objective: Help form the Guardian Guild as described here.

Key Result: A successful Meta governance proposal (or equivalent) to form the Guardian Guild, outlining the first members as well as the process for future elections.

App revamp & monorepo

Objective: Integrate all Nation3 apps under the same UI while keeping individually ownable codebases. Estructuring the apps as modular libraries that can be easily mantained and used for fast prototyping.

Key Result: Monorepo of visual and logic components for all current apps of the Nation3 ecosystem with storybook and usage documentation. Single Nation3 App to give access to all things Nation3 under the same UI.

Billing & infrastructure

Objective: Maintain and cover costs for Nation3 key infrastructure that requires a legal entity and a traditional payment method to operate.

Key Result: Apps & Forum hosting, Discord server boosting, development / design tools paid & maintaned by the Solar Guild legal entity.

Brand & recognition

Objective: Increase recognition as a sovereign cloud nation and increase Nation3 brand power through social media, events, and communications.

Key Result: Increase Twitter following, website visits, and Discord membership by 30%.

Community

Objective: Maintain regular virtual avenues for community interactions, such as Social Circles, the Agora, and State of the Nation community calls (or others). Introduce in-person avenues for community interactions, such as side-events at big crypto conferences, or Nation3 embassies.

Key Result: Increase conversion from community members to citizens, and from citizens to active citizens (according to NationCred or other metric if introduced by Research Guild) by 30%.

The previous proposal on community and partnerships established a total compensation of 30k USDC. 15k USDC was paid out. If this proposal passes, the remaining part of the payout in the original community proposal will be forgoed, any any subsequent work will be part of the Solar Guild.

Financials

Solar Guild requests 370k USDC as its funding for 6 months, which includes compensation of members, core infrastructure services, and in-person team building.

Solar Guild also requests 405 NATION for long-term alignment, in order to offer vesting plans with 1-year cliff and 4-year vesting to guild members. To clarify, Solar Guild will only receive such NATION to set up vesting streams after reasonably delivering on the OKRs described in this proposal, and a successful subsequent proposal for another 6 months of funding (therefore meeting the 1 year cliff). 405 NATION is therefore equivalent to the 1st year of vesting.

Solar Guild will hire full-time members for the following roles:

  • Comms & community to handle social media, PR & media relations, and contribute to content production, event coordination, and community growth
  • Frontend developer to take the lead the development & improvement of the new apps and component libraries.
  • Solidity / full-stack developer to increase the workload capacity of the team in regard to smart-contracts and other required backend services development.

Should Solar Guild not hire for some of those positions, it shall return any USDC and NATION corresponding to those hires to the Nation3 DAO.

Solar Guild members will opt-out of any other compensation from open guilds.

Key considerations

  • Solar Guild is a guild within Nation3. Its sole purpose is to advance the Nation3 mission.
  • Solar Guild doesn’t aim to expand past a two-pizza team (which is important to keep a philosophy of substraction).
  • Solar Guild will follow a philosophy of subtraction and always prioritize Nation3’s interests above their own.

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Matter less and decrease prestige doesn’t mean that Solar Guild will have low quality standards or don’t do work. It means that it will prioritize increasing the prestige of Nation3 instead of its own, and always prioritize making Nation3 matter more instead of Solar Guild.

Actionable proposal:

{
  "id": 1337,
  "spec": 1,
  "votes": [
    null
  ],
  "content": {
    "kind": "proclamation",
    "statement": "The DAO requests that the Meta Guild sends 92,500 USDC to the Solar Guild (solarguild.eth)"
  },
  "discussion": "https://forum.nation3.org/t/formation-of-the-solar-guild-roadmap-proposal/803"
}
7 Likes
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I think this is a really important proposal! The roadmap is solid and achievable, I love the concept of 2 pizza teams and we have enough skilled and ideologically motivated people within the community to fill all three of those roles.

Exciting times

4 Likes
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I love this proposal, and the clarity with which it is written. I love being part of the guilds, but can completely understand how permanent staff can drive a much more aggressive and cohesive (technical) roadmap.

My only query is on the amount of the “raise” £370K for 6 months is a significant amount of capital, much more budget than most startups would have during a bootstrapping and even seed phase. There is also a lot of cross over in funding for the different guilds and initiatives - will there be some clear reporting / transparency on how the funds are being used and how we are protecting N3 (I saw a suggestion of stables / BTC) moving forwards?

1 Like
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Thanks for the comments @johnmark13!

Just a quick correction that it’s $370k (USD, not GBP - a not insignificant difference) :slight_smile:

I think it’s actually on the conservative side for funding a 7 person full-time team (including salaries & some overhead for in-person team time like offsites, which are critical for alignment). In my experience, it’s tricky to hire top talent in Web3 with anything less than this.

We’ve been in slower / bootstrapping mode until now, but we gotta move faster than that.

The reason why I think it’s critical we secure the best talent & do this now, is because Nation3 today is the biggest cloud nation project in terms of treasury and potential, and we have to not miss out on the opportunity to capitalise on this momentum. To do that, we need to grow as fast as we can, including taking the Court to market, onboarding users & increasing value secured by it. If we do this well, we’ll be able to soon enough grow the treasury sufficiently and be confident we have the reserves to fund development for years to come.

So in my view, slowly using funds from the treasury to fund research & development at a part-time pace could gradually deplete the DAO funds without making enough impact to grow the treasury / take us to the next level.

There shouldn’t actually be any crossover, since no Solar Guild member would be a member of any other guild. So that means, of course, if one works full time for the Solar Guild and gets paid for it, they wouldn’t participate in any other Dework / Coordinape distributions - those would be reserved for other DAO contributors (prev Court proposal from @0xGallego and my contributor proposal would transition to the Solar Guild as we described in this proposal). And in terms of the workload, the Solar Guild would focus very specifically on the OKRs proposed here, and of course report on them.

Exactly - the plan is that as the Nation3 treasury grows, assets will be diversified into stables, BTC & ETH, and put into work in DeFi strategies, to provide healthy reserves.

1 Like
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Thanks! The above definitely makes a lot of sense, dedicated resource will definitely bring considerable value. I think with the exclusion of Aahna and OXG most development happens piecemeal. That in part is what I am referring too, would Coordinape/Developers Guild/OKR/Court/R*D budgets/payments be applied to full time team members, or would they opt out (which would be sad from a recognition perspective)?

I would still argue that 7 salaries averaging $100K is unusual for a startup, but I would not argue that it is unreasonable, especially as you say in Web3 where your decent fullstack solidity engineer might eat all of that. It is doubly not unreasonable as the funds are drawn/leveraged from the reserves rather than selling %%% of Nation to VCs.

I would definitely eat a whole pizza, so might have assumed a smaller team :wink:

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The initial portion of the funding (92,500 USDC) has been secured, and the Snapshot proposal will be a vote on releasing that portion for Solar Guild funding.

1 Like