FFP-01 - FF Season 1 Proposal

Carlos

FF Season 1 Proposal

Since its inception, Forefront has established itself as the leading aggregator in the social token landscape. From insight-packed essays to social token tooling to one of the best newsletters in the crypto space, the Forefront community is on a mission to truly become the home of social tokens, through community engagement, discovery, and leadership.

Today, we’re excited to announce the next step in the Forefront journey: FF Season 1.

Why seasons?

A season is a bounded period of time where the Forefront community can align on projects and experiments that help us achieve our broader mission.

While the grand vision for Forefront’s long-term future may differ for different community members, seasons allow us to build consensus around what high-level steps we are taking over a period of time.

Up until this point, Forefront has been in a sort of “pre-season” phase – very experimentation heavy, but building toward our core mission. Our hope is that Season 1 will be a step forward in continuing to strengthen Forefront's position as the leader of the social tokens space while building a strong community and strong relationships with existing and new communities.

FF Pre-season

Two months ago, we launched $FF, as the first step to transition Forefront towards community ownership. We pioneered a robust token distribution model by onboarding over 1289+ active members of communities listed on Forefront;

Along with listing FF token on all major token platforms (CoinGecko, CoinMarketCap, Zerion, Zora Market, etc.), we introduced a contributors only and community liquidity mining program, giving community members an opportunity to earn additional FF by providing liquidity to FF Uniswap pool.

Collabs

As part of FF brand awareness, cross-DAOs collab and treasury diversification, we partnered with fashion house Metafactory to release a limited edition “Forefront Genesis Drop” long sleeve sweatshirt.

We quickly followed up with a deployment of the beta version of Forefront Auction House built on top of the Zora protocol. Our first collab featured MintFund’s uprising artist Ikaro Cavalcante. To date, these two drops alone have generated over $14,000 in sales revenue for the DAO.

Content

The Forefront community has grown largely due to our focus on creating and curating high-quality content around the social token space. Forefront.market hosts over two dozen original essays discussing a wide variety of topics. We also launched the Forefront community incentive program to reward community members for contributing to our content engine.

In early June, we won Mirror’s Write Race and experimented with the first token-gated Mirror essay covering tokenized SaaS business models.

Community

Community is core to our mission at Forefront, and we’ve managed to cultivate one of the most exciting communities in the space. Forefront Hangouts have been a huge success – we’ve hosted weekly conversations with some of the most interesting thinkers in the space. We also launched FF Tea Times as an informal way to engage community members on the work and conversations happening throughout the community.

Finally, the FF Bounty Program has continued to be a source of high-quality production for the DAO, allowing community members of all levels of engagement and familiarity to contribute to high-priority tasks and projects.

Enter FF Season 01

The next chapter of Forefront will be focused on continuing on building forefront and $FF token utility in four key ways:

Community Ownership
FF Content Engine
Partnerships
FF Market V1

Season 1 is set to start on the date specified in the official snapshot proposal and run for a period of 90 days.

Community

Community will always be the center of everything we do at Forefront.

Season 1 is set to introduce new tools to enable us to more effectively onboard new members and contributors, integrate Sourcecred to create a contribution graph and reward value creation within our Discord, and bootstrap our first set of community-run Guilds;

On-boarding

One of the biggest pieces of feedback we received throughout the pre-season was the need for a new contributor on-boarding process. Members should be able to know from Day 1 what Forefront is, what the key projects are, and how they can get involved.

The launch of “Tea Time” community call was our first crack at on-boarding, but a fleshed out process is definitely necessary.

In addition to existing community programs, season 1 will introduce new on-boarding elements for new and existing members, including:

Bi-weekly community calls: every two weeks, the FF Contributor Team will host community calls to update members on high-level priorities, projects, and progress.
A community curated wiki: we’re revamping the Notion to include descriptions of high-level projects, guides, and processes to better on-board new contributors.
A public contributors task list: Trello will be the new home of a public and regularly updated roadmap so that contributors can see who is working on what and what tasks the DAO needs completed.
A more robust bounty tracking program: Forefront ongoing bounty program is a great way for new community members to begin contributing to the DAO in exchange for $FF. For season 1 we are aiming to open these to not only include FF community related bounties but also partners bounties.
Community Forum: Our community forum will be our new home to discuss and signal FF governance proposals (before these are pushed to snapshot) but also a place to host high value conversations on topics related to social tokens and DAOs.

Rewarding contributions

For season 1 through Sourcecred integration, FF community members will be able to start earning $FF for active participation on discord. This will allow us to continue to foster a healthy community where ongoing valuable contributions are recognized and rewarded.

Guilds

With the pre-season introduction of the Writers program we quickly realized that although decentralized communities offer clear advantages over knowledge production, pure token incentives aren't enough to foster impactful content collaboration, there is a clear need to also foster a safe and exciting environment where work happens. Enter Guilds.

Guilds are groups of contributors focused on a particular area of the DAO’s work and growth. For each Guild, members will outline its core mission, values, and role within the broader FF community. There are three Guilds currently in progress:

Writers’ Guild: to support the FF content engine and create opportunities for FF members to research and produce content around relevant topics.
Growth Guild: to support any marketing content creation (graphics, video, swag, etc.) also to handle potential partnerships.
Culture Guild: to support internal community development efforts (Hangouts, Tea Time, Onboarding, etc.).

More information on individual Guilds is coming soon.

Content

One of our primary goals at Forefront is to support and develop the leading voices in the social token space. Forefront should be the go-to place to learn about the value and potential of social tokens and their communities. For Season 1 we will introduce a revamped Writers’ Program with the Writers’ Guild at its core.

Writers’ Program. We’re going to experiment with funding writing on certain topics up front, with editing/research help from our Writers’ Guild throughout the entire process. We’ll also assist with monetization once the essay is published.
Content Curation. While content production is important, some incredible content is written outside of FF’s publications. Season 1 will introduce formal curation of essays across the internet, through grants, NFT purchases, and more.
FF Learn. One content segment we’re really excited about is FF Learn, a place where those new to the social token space can go from zero to productive DAO contributor!

Partnerships

The social token space isn’t made of individuals, but of hundreds of rich, diverse communities. To uphold our mission, we are building out a set of tools and services to support these communities in achieving their own goals, with ongoing support from FF community (through our partners and in-house guilds).

Staking Platform - We will be opening our staking platform so that any social tokens community can run their own version of incentivized farms that fits their vision or of their community. To start these will be highly curated but with the intention to open to the broader social tokens space via off-chain snapshot proposal.
Auction House - NFT cashflow present an unmatched opportunity for FF to extend its collab culture while creating a steady revenue stream for the DAO. We are looking to partner with uprising and established NFT artists and communities to continue to experiment with culture and curation.
Advisory - Forefront intends to run an experimental builders edition cohort where early stage creators and communities can leverage FF tooling, distribution and community to quickly iterate and launch their product to market.

Conclusion

The Forefront community has come a long way, and we’re extremely excited for the future as we transition much of the roadmap into the community’s hands.

To reward those who’ve been with us so far, the FF DAO will reward top contributors from the pre-season for their active participation with a retroactive airdrop! Stay tuned in the Discord for more details here.

Next Steps

A Formal proposal will be posted on snapshot for community voting.

Get Involved

If you have any feedback on the proposal make sure to leave your comment below!
Interested in contributing? Fill out the Sign up form.

ChaseChapman

This looks amazing 🔥

Love to see onboarding is a key focus for Season 1! I think bi-weekly community calls, the contributors task list, and the wiki are going to be huge in helping onboard new members ‒ would love to help with onboarding.

I have one super small piece of feedback and one idea!

Feedback:

Carlos A public contributors task list: Trello will be the new home of a public and regularly updated roadmap so that contributors can see who is working on what and what tasks the DAO needs completed.

Just want to throw this out there ‒ I'm not sure if this is something that's already been considered, but I wonder if it makes sense to use Notion rather than Trello. Since other onboarding materials will be on Notion, it might simplify the onboarding process a bit. 🙂

Idea:

Carlos Writers’ Program. We’re going to experiment with funding writing on certain topics up front, with editing/research help from our Writers’ Guild throughout the entire process. We’ll also assist with monetization once the essay is published.

I think experimenting with different funding mechanisms for writing is cool! One additional idea here is to have a list of specific community-curated topics that writers can potentially create content about. They don't have to be funded upfront, but might be helpful to give writers a jumping-off point. I also think having the community suggest and curate topics could be a cool experiment (kinda like Ghost Knowledge).

Also super excited about the launch of guilds and FF Learn! So much good stuff in here.

Can't wait for Season 1 ✨

coopahtroopa

Carlos Nice work on this. The idea of implementing Seasons is one I'm very much in favor of.

Reading through this proposal, there's a lot to be unpacked here - each of which almost require their own teams and sprints.

Might I suggest narrowing in the scope of the first Snapshot proposal to clearly articulate what Season 1 includes from a cost perspective (# of FF tokens to different projects) and the contributor(s) expected to lead each of the workstreams?

I would personally like to see ownership assigned to different community members with proposed budgets as opposed to hoping it gets figured out naturally.

I'm overall very in favor of all the above proposals, and think we could take some time to better flesh out the priorities and owners of each before putting a general Seasons proposal to a vote (which I'm sure everyone is in favor of by default).

Excited to watch this be built out!

nir

Carlos

This is awesome. Reading and sending more feedback soon

CPTNskeletor

Love seeing these ideas all fleshed out! The thought and effort yall have put into this is highly evident! I think the guilds are going to be a huge benefit for Forefront to further mature into one of the best communities within the DAO and social token space. Really excited for the FF learn section as well! Lots of amazing ideas and projects happening. Can't wait to keep learning and helping out!

Jihad

Very excited to kick off Season 1!

Really looking forward to improved onboarding practices and guilds as a means of better organizing the rich talent of community members towards a set of common goals. I'd be happy to contribute to both of these initiatives and welcome anyone who'd like to help to DM me.

Re: staking and auctions, I'd love to see a more formal outline of how we can use these tools to generate revenue for the DAO. Experimenting with revenue generation is going to need to be a huge point of focus in Season 1, and while we don't need to have it all figure out, structure experiments are key.

What are some good examples of DAOs offering tools/services to other DAOs and getting paid for it? Llama DAO comes to mind, and I'd love to learn more about how they structure those engagements.

Ready Season 1 😀

belgiangwaffles

ChaseChapman

ChaseChapman Just want to throw this out there ‒ I'm not sure if this is something that's already been considered, but I wonder if it makes sense to use Notion rather than Trello. Since other onboarding materials will be on Notion, it might simplify the onboarding process a bit.

Honestly thinking the same!

makoto

ChaseChapman e Notion rather than Trello. Since other onboarding materials will be on Notion, it might simplify the onboarding process a bit.

It's definitely a good idea to have all the info in one place but not sure if Notion has a good task management tool where you can assign tasks to each user, change progress, etc which is hard to do in wiki-style documentation format.

Jihad

coopahtroopa Agreed on this. The proposal implies that details will get worked out after passing, but it's much better precedent to set budget and ownership before it all goes into effect.

What're your thoughts on the best way to have those conversations and make those decisions as efficiently as possible?

SpaceXponential

coopahtroopa , love this. +1 on narrowing scope of the first Snapshot and moving forward with ownership for various streams.

ChaseChapman

makoto Yeah I guess it depends on what the task list looks like, but Notion is pretty customizable ‒ you can assign tasks to specific users, change progress, and do Kanban boards like you can with Trello. Here's an overview.

SpaceXponential

Thanks Carlos, Jihad & Joey!

Some quick thoughts:

How will the existing portal for FF content/essays interact with our new Mirror presence? What is the relationship between the two?
I haven't any experience yet with Sourcecred; I look forward to getting concrete exposure to It. So It remains a bit obscure for me how the value of contributions will be evaluated by the algorithm.

Part of my ongoing exploration of DAOs involves the question of how to cultivate authentic community - which Is happily core to FF's mission! Given that It's still relatively early in the inception of the community, I would throw out the possibility of having community mods perform the (admittedly difficult to scale) work of cultivating culture and recognizing engagement in the Discord at least for the first part of Season 1. (I just submitted the volunteer form 🙂 )

I think it's a good step to take in the direction of community coherence and curation to locate higher-value, more targeted convo on the Forum. (constantly thinking about the challenges posed by the ephemeral/fragmented nature of discord...)
I would love to see a summary of your learnings as to the advantages/disadvantages that decentralized communities pose for knowledge production.
Besides the partnership element, will there be any unique advantages for creators to list on the FF auction house over existing platforms such as OpenSea? For Instance, maybe royalties can be more favorable, or built-In charity element, or launching a FF Clubhouse or podcast series to give the spotlight to the featured creators? (see my volunteer form 😉 )
Advisory partnership sounds amazing!

Carlos

Thanks @coopahtroopa @ChaseChapman SpaceXponential and others for the overall feedback and thoughts, these are spot on. We have revised the scope and details of core areas of the proposal (mainly overall season budget, guilds specification and governance framework). Will post them here as a comment feel free to share your thoughts. Also, we are also spinning up a brainstorm channel on our discord to further coordinate on actionable items prior to going live (if you're interested in joining the conversation, fill out this form we'll get you added - in case you haven't yet.

Proposal scope update (based on feedback)

Overview

This is a proposal to bring the concept of seasons to forefront - FF Season 1;
The Season will run for a period of 90 days.
Core components: Community ownership, Content engine, Partnerships;
Key priorities: Introduce and incorporate guilds in the overall operations, improve the governance structure and improve new members onboarding experience;

Proposal Snapshot scope

Approve a total allocation of 450,000 FF for season 1 (period of 90 days);
Approve a 150,000 FF allocation for operations expenses (based on Llama budget);
Approve a 300,000 FF allocation for guilds (100,000 FF each - writer, marketing, culture);
Assign / Identify initial guild leaders for the guilds - TBD

Note: In addition to the season total allocation amount, FF Treasury reserves the right to propose or allocate any additional funds that fall outside of the season budget but are aligned with the DAO mission and roadmap.

Scope

Guilds

Mission
Responsibility
Budget

Governance framework

Process
Staff review
Snapshot voting (Quorum / Threshold)

Contributor Types

Guilds

Season 1 will introduce 3 core guilds (writers, marketing and culture);
Each guild will have to self-elect its respective leader;
Any community member can join and contribute to one or more guilds.
Guild contributors will receive compensation in the form of FF based on their contribution and responsibility.

Guild responsabilities

Create and execute allocation strategies (budget and governance) within the guild;
Report activities to staff members and community members;
Active participation in the DAO governance decisions;
Create, document and maintain a central resource repository related to the guild;

Guild Budget

Each guild will be allocated a max of 100,000 FF for season 1 for operation expenses (bounties, members compensation and incentives program);
Once the guilds are formed and have a working body, funds can be requested on a project / expenses basis, with plans to move to self-custody wallet for season 2;
if by the end of the season 1 the funds are not fully utilized the remain allocation will roll back to treasury;

Governance Framework

The goal of governance framework for season 1 is to allow community members to create and propose guild projects budget spending, contributors compensation budget and approve monthly treasury budget & expenses.

Proposal Process

Discord #governance channel is to be used for initial proposal signaling;
Once it has gained enough consensus, a formal proposal is created in the forum, where all formal discussions will happen;
Once the proposal has gone through revision, staff members will do a final review to confirm it meets the requirement;
Editor will create the proposal on Snapshot for a 3 to 5 days voting period;
To be approved and implemented the proposal has to reach a minimum quorum and threshold.
Minimum quorum: 10% of circulating supply, treasury tokens does not apply;
Threshold: over 50% of the tokens must be FOR the proposal to pass
Ship

Contributor Types

For season 1 we will be introducing three types of contributors:

Casual Contributor - Community members making any casual / no strings attached contributions to the DAO. Including: Vote on governance actions; Claiming one-time or rolling community bounties; Active contributions in the guild operations; Contributors compensation are evaluated based on their responsibilities and level of contribution.

Core Contributor - Core contributors are members that have passed the contributor phase and are voted by the community. Key responsibilities include: Work closely with the guilds to define and create strategic plans; Lead and manage working groups or tasks.

Staff - Staff members include an instigator and other staff members. Staff members lead core components of forefront mission and vision, including partnerships, product and business development. Staff members receive compensation in the form of stablecoins and/or FF (Subject to vesting).

Next steps

Spin out a discord channel to coordinate overall season roll out strategy;
Coordinate and identify initial guild members;
Submit the final proposal to snapshot, for a 3 days voting period;
Kickstart the season (aiming at July 15th).

CPTNskeletor

Carlos This is a phenomenal revision/honing of the original proposal. The quantifiable action items and goals are really going to help us move with efficiency and shared understanding.

Is there a framework for what the self-selection process look like for organizing guilds?

Carlos

CPTNskeletor To bootstrap the creation of each working group staff members will be responsible for the initial coordination and setup (see #🥬-season-1 discord channel for actionable items). The idea is that community members that consistently contribute their expertise and time will eventually be voted by the community into a higher position (see contributors types in the updated comment). Also eventually the self-election / selection criteria might be different from each guild so ultimately it will be up to guild members to define what those are.

agorismlabs

Would it be possible to visualize the on-boarding process somehow? Perhaps we might even consider a handbook we can direct new users to, showing the paths based on skillset or what guild they would like to end up involved with.

Re: Trello: I would maybe echo what others have said here. With Discord, Notion, the forums, Mirror, Coinvise, and Trello there are many different sources of information and this might get confusing. I know Notion is somewhat limited, but I think the point still stands.

In the revised version it seems this part has been dropped, but I think it’s still a potential issue.

Overall, however, this is a remarkably clear and well-written statement of intent.

frogmonkee

This thread has been exciting to read. There are clear parallels between this proposal and the Season 1 Specification for BanklessDAO, which reinforces my theory on this model of operation.

Reading through, I do have a few questions and comments:

> Approve a 150,000 FF allocation for operations expenses (based on Llama budget)
Can you please link me to this?
> Each guild will have to self-elect its respective leader;
This may not be necessary. Given the size of FF, a single group may be sufficient. Electing a leader may mitigate some coordination friction, but I've found that guilds can better manage responsibilities on a peer to peer basis.
> Once the guilds are formed and have a working body, funds can be requested on a project / expenses basis, with plans to move to self-custody wallet for season 2.
This may not be appropriate for Season 1, as you've indicated, but there is merit in letting Guilds operate their own funds, especially over a period of 90 days. It's simple to elect a 3 of 5 or 4 of 7 multisig for guilds. At BanklessDAO, we have a requirement that every guild is capable of claiming their seasonal stipend, but only after they've created a multi-sig.
> Staff members include an instigator and other staff members
Can you further expand on this? How are staff members different from a separate bizdev guild? Early in BanklessDAO, we had a lot of conversations around what degree of segmentation is appropriate as to not create an inner social circle that wields disproportionate powers.

On a whole, this is fantastic. I'm quite excited to see how FF and BanklessDAO grow in parallel, given the similarities in Seasonal constructs.

Further reading:
Season 1 FAQ
BanklessDAO Governance

Carlos

Thanks frogmonkee for the comment, the guilds spec is the one we think its best aligned with current state of FF (decentralization, community and engagement size), we've been testing it out as well for squiggleDAO committee and i think the scope is a great foundation for most DAOs.

To clarify at the moment most of FF operations are heavily centralized (will continue to be so until the community is mature enough, hopefully we get there sooner than later). The concept of Guilds are the first attempt towards a progressive decentralization. Simply put the BanklessDAO model you mentioned is prob 2/3 season ahead of FF.

frogmonkee This may not be necessary. Given the size of FF, a single group may be sufficient. Electing a leader may mitigate some coordination friction, but I've found that guilds can better manage responsibilities on a peer to peer basis.

Makes sense, open to have each guild have a model that works for them.

frogmonkee This may not be appropriate for Season 1, as you've indicated, but there is merit in letting Guilds operate their own funds, especially over a period of 90 days. It's simple to elect a 3 of 5 or 4 of 7 multisig for guilds. At BanklessDAO, we have a requirement that every guild is capable of claiming their seasonal stipend, but only after they've created a multi-sig.

This might be too early for the current state of FF and a bit of a heavy lift for each guild but it's something we can consider once we have a working body.

frogmonkee Can you further expand on this? How are staff members different from a separate bizdev guild? Early in BanklessDAO, we had a lot of conversations around what degree of segmentation is appropriate as to not create an inner social circle that wields disproportionate powers.

Forefront today has an operations team (staff), the plan is to progressively decentralize and have a process in place for a more robust governance. Until then this will mostly continue to be the case.

frogmonkee Can you please link me to this?

Sure here - Treasury expenses have been handled internally with the plan to make them publicly starting season 1.

There are more details on this we can discuss during our tea time call this week, join us.