TL:DR; @thom and I are attempting to develop a collaborative vision document to start understanding how we envision Radicle’s strategy & objectives being developed via the DAO. To contribute your thoughts to the discussion, please take the time to fill out this typeform by Friday, June 10th.
In 2020, the Radicle Foundation, a Swiss non-profit was created to fund & coordinate the development of the Radicle network. Over the last year, Foundation’s Council (composed of @lftherios and @cloudhead — and more recently, me) has coordinated project-wide strategy & capital allocations in line with a set of higher-level objectives (see below):
As the project continues on The Path to Increasing Decentralization within Radicle and looks forward to The Next Phase of the RadicleDAO, it’s important to start understanding how we — the contributors, users, and greater community of Radicle — envision the continued development of project-wide strategy & objectives. Since Radicle is still on its journey towards market-protocol fit, it’s important the project’s core development stays focused & coordinated despite its decentralized and DAO-funded future operating structure.
How does a DAO decide on a “North Star”?
The desire for a "North Star"or project-wide vision was something surfaced during the DevConnect Contributor offsite during the cross-team coordination and mission & values sessions as something that could potentially support better coordination between Core Teams. While what a North Star actually means in practice should probably be agreed upon, some sort of a project-wide vision should be available to Core Teams so they have a framework to prioritize their roadmaps.
As a continuation and reflection on the proposed long-term directions that @louiegrey presented in their Org Design Workstream, it seems a natural next step that - after Radicle development has transitioned to the DAO - the Core Teams will cooperate to redefine Radicle’s “North Star” in a public, transparent, and community-inclusive way and set short-term objectives that they coordinate their work around.
But the definition of a project-wide vision also comes with some open questions such as:
- How can this vision be defined collaboratively among contributors — and more so, among a community? Who is best fit for designing this vision?
- What responsibility do Core Teams have to this vision? How do contributors hold each other accountable to this vision?
- How does the community hold Core Teams & contributors accountable to this vision?
- How is this vision maintained and by who? How is it changed?
While these questions won’t be answered in a day, or by the first iteration of this process, the conversation can be initiated within our community to figure out what is most needed to support a successful transition to the DAO.
First Steps
If you’ve followed the forum, you’ve probably seen @thom’s posts regarding Radicle’s decentralized marketing strategy & principles. To best support this work, there is a need to align around and evolve key definitions for the headless Radicle Brand, starting with fundamental questions for the RadicleDAO itself.
Essentially, at the very end of this process, most of this work-in-progress should be answered by the Radicle Messaging Kit. As an output, a page on the website or community forum will be published articulating the crowd-sourced mission/vision/values and how they were created.
Instead of this work being driven by the Council of the Radicle Foundation, this document will be developed collaboratively as a first step towards defining how vision-setting will look in the RadicleDAO. To do so, all Radicle contributors and community members are invited to contribute their thoughts in this typeform.
The insights from this typeform will be taken & workshopped into a vision document that can be used as a jumping off point for Radicle contributors as responsibilities are transitioned to the DAO. Workshopping will be done in a public & transparent manner to allow for continued community participation & contributions.
Please feel free to drop any questions or feedback regarding our approach in the comments of this post! As I said, these questions aren’t solved in a day, this is just the beginning. We’re navigating (pioneering really!) exciting new territory for decentralized & open-source projects.
Stay Radicle 