A North Star metric is paramount since it aligns everyone in the nation towards a particular, measurable goal.
Everything we do should then be aligned with such metric. While we already have the Nation3 Manifesto establishing the vision and the moral compass, a manifesto isn’t measurable per se.
This proposal aims for Nation3 to adopt the following North Star metrics:
Number of active citizens: The ethos of the Nation3 Manifesto is that we need to re-imagine nation states so people can enjoy increased freedom, wealth and fairness. In order to deliver on such vision, we need to onboard as citizens the people who need Nation3 the most. But at this early stage we need to prioritize citizens who can be valuable stakeholders in building Nation3. Active citizens can be defined as having a minimum NationCred score over a period of time. More citizens means more locked $NATION, thus providing further funding to the Nation3 DAO.
Total value secured by the Nation3 jurisdiction: An emergent way to frame Nation3’s first core service (apart from citizenship itself) is as a system of law/decentralized jurisdiction. As we make the Nation3 jurisdiction enticing for individuals and other entities to securely conduct business transactions, we are creating a cloud nation with a strong internal economy and also providing extra reasons for people to become citizens. The collateral for agreements secured by the Nation3 jurisdiction is $NATION, so this also helps fund the Nation3 DAO.
Although these North Star metrics can be amended in future proposals, it’s extremely important to start off with the right alignment. Therefore I invite all my fellow citizens to comment and provide feedback!
In order to promote a healthy discussion arround something that would drive the DAO to the future, I would like to propose that the first north start metric shouldn’t be the “number of citizens” but the “number of active citizens”. So, what would be the difference and why?
Right now being a Nation3 citizen is defined by the condition of holding a Nation3 Passport token. But, simply holding a token can easily fall into a passive membership category. Meanwhile being an active member means activelly taking part on the DAO lifecycle. Currently what comes first to my mind as valuable indicators of “citizen activity” are the creation, discussion & voting of new proposals. This could also be extended to participation in any future community events and activities.
While increasing the raw number of citizens it’s a fair enough goal because of the economic and brand awareness implications, I think we can go a step further and try to align every initiative with the goal of not only onboarding new Nation3 Passport holders, but building a bigger community of active thinkers towards the Nation3 horizon goals.
As a practical example: With the goal of increasing the number of Nation3 citizens would be logical to propose initiatives such as; lowering the cost to be a citizen or massively onboarding dozens of new citizens through temporal incentive programs to claim a passport. Probably both of this initiatives would be very successfull in achieving a fast growth of Nation3 Passport holders. But, by them alone, I feel that it would also be very successfull way to reduce the rate of active citizens in the DAO. Without clear paths and services towards a deeper onboarding to the Nation3 ecosystem, or even worst, without a proper ecosystem in place, most of those newly onboarded token holders would probably get bored and move on with other projects, communities, etc…
Hmmm… probably if we fine-tune the weights and we are able to include snapshot activity it would probably be a good tool to measure current citizen activity.
I fully support establishing a “north star metric” but think such a metric needs to be very carefully considered. Having a singular aim is a powerful catalyst for operating efficiently, but it could lead to unexpected side effects that would be difficult to remove once the metric is fully adopted.
I agree with @0xGallego’s concerns around using “number of citizens”, but I also think “active number of citizens” falls short. We could easily have plenty of enthusiastic contributors while making little to no progress on what we’re building. This is especially dangerous if the way we measure “activity” is based on governance participation or similar discussion-oriented metrics. So many DAOs end up in a state where everyone sits around arguing/discussing/planning things that never get built because they optimize for politics rather than legitimate building.
I don’t have a suggestion for a better metric yet, so I’m sorry for the purely adverse reaction. I do think whatever our metric is, it should be focused on an “end state” rather than the means to an end. We want lots of citizens so that we can provide them with the services they need. Why not make the metric more directly related to providing those services? That way, we still need to onboard citizens to achieve the goal, but we can’t take shortcuts like onboarding many low-quality citizens or providing citizens little to no value.
I’ll think more on this and hopefully, think of some suggestions for potential metrics.
Definitely agree in terms of defining these metrics carefully. And we need to avoid becoming the bureaucracy that we ourselves aim to disrupt at all costs. For that, I think we might need to fine-tune NationCred scoring so that it incentivizes more building and less meaningless talking.
An example might be talking on Discourse vs. submitting a governance proposal and getting it approved. The former can be very valuable, but also can just be gibberish. The latter is most certainly valuable, as passing a governance proposal requires a high degree of implication and goes through a vote which filters quality to some extent.
So I’d leave active citizens as the metric, but we need to carefully define and fine-tune the NationCred weights.
I do believe that’s the second point, total value secured by the Nation3 jurisdiction. This means that we are offering citizens a system of law with strong legal guarantees, and if they choose to secure value with it, it means it’s useful to them. So I think this second point is a good proxy for the end-goal, while the first point is about distribution of such service.
Also I want to point out that we should be flexible around the North Star. We should commit to it while enacted, but be open to change direction and propose new ones if the current ones don’t work. We want to move fast, it would be ironic if deciding theses metrics becomes too bureaucratic!
Another idea that came up was the Net Promoter Score of citizens — Citizen Promoter Score. That way our success would be tied to how important Nation3 is to its citizens — whether they wouldn’t care if N3 stopped to exist, or find it highly inconvenient, or just couldn’t do without its services.
However I think we are too early to properly implement such metric, as we don’t have many services and also we haven’t (yet) targeted an audience that is in strong need of the one we are building now, a sovereign system of law.
Really clear and I think valuable metrics, but, other than knowing that a metric is tracking in the right way how do you derive value - should they be accompanied by a North Star Goal and some regular period (quarterly?) or checking that we’re all good and happy with the metric and the goal?
On NPS, it is a much maligned measure which is hard to get right - the context of when asking someone “Would you recommend N3 to a friend” being critical to their response. However it is clear and simple and when deployed as part of a broader framework (I am deploying HEART again at the moment) a very useful indicator. As you have already said though, I think it is a little too early to garner statistical relevance and can be kicked to a later evolution of N3.
I’d say we should set quarterly KPIs, and if we aren’t happy with the metrics I’d leave the process open to change them (just another Proclamation governance proposal would suffice).
I truly believe our north star metric should be some quantifiable metric of how we measure the positive impact we are trying to make in the world. I don’t have any particular suggestion but in my opinion what ever it is should encapsulate that. I guess the follow up to that is what is it exactly we are trying to achieve?"and what is the most important measurable thing that encapsulates this?
I don’t have any answers but that’s just my 2 gewi
