There are several topics that we are tackling behind the scenes with the Operations team . In a effort to be transparent, I’d like to give you a weekly update (let’s see if I can maintain the cadence) on the state of the Ops, starting today. Some of these projects have taken a really long time (especially when there are contracts and lawyers involved ).
Bear in mind that we are a small team of only 4 people (with the additional PM starting today, and soon 5 once I hire our Community and Social Media Manager!)
Our mains missions are: DAO mechanics (constitution, voting rules, etc), Project Management (SIP management), Maintainance of Technical asset, Treasury Management, and Community Management.
Which means:
Ensure all the DAO processes runs smoothly (still WIP on this one ).
Liaise with The Sandbox C-Suite, the Council and Advisors
Make sure all our various suppliers, partners and SIPs are paid
Manage our treasury
Ensure KYC/KYB and KYT are being done
Ensure The DAO is doing nothing illegal and is compliant
Review community ideas and help community members writting a SIP
Actively curate SIPs and make sure they are presented to the community with complete and accurate information
Follow up on SIPs implementation
Fed SIPs pipeline every other Wednesday
Write our own SIPs to evolve the mechanics
Moderate the forum and animate our coms channel (Twitter/X and Linkedin)
Thank you SO MUCH for posting the KPIs and SIP backlog. This helps me understand how things are functioning much better. I am looking forward to the weekly updates!
I didn’t see a posting for Project Manager at Sandbox DAO, apologies if I missed it! I want to formally submit my name for consideration. I have a deep expertise in proposal evaluation and negotiation.
I have questions I’d like to hear your insight on. And before I do, I want to emphatically state that I appreciate all of what you do. We’re all one SandFam, and we’re all on the same team trying to learn how to make our DAO a success.
1. What does “Council Agreement” refer to? 2. What does the Bank Account enable you to do? 3. How does the team prioritize SIPs? My SIPs (Window Sizing & in-game Inventory Filter) are at the bottom, and I submitted them over 30 days ago alongside my Roadmap SIP. Are they at the bottom because the 13 other SIPs were submitted before mine? More complete? Some other reason?
4. Can you help alleviate a worry of mine (and others)? There are a lot of TSB SIPs and the perception is that this is a community DAO for the SandFam. How did it come to be that so many SIPs are from TSB? I’m very surprised to see this. I feel as though a lot of things are happening in the background and I (and others) don’t have much context for these SIPs before they go to 14-day Community Discussion, and then 14-day yes/no vote. It feels very overwhelming and like we’ll miss something important that will affect the entire SandFam.
5. Regarding the Ongoing Focus, Difficulties to systematically reach quorum, Internal Project picture. First, THANK YOU for revealing your tasks and focuses. What immediately struck me is how much the team is doing that is outside of SIP curation and feedback. I’m happy to see that a 2nd project manager is being recruited. What is your estimation of the increase in SIPs that will be processed and batched for Community Discussion + vote?
6. What is the rate that you intend for submitted SIPs to go to vote? 1 a month? 10 a month?
7. Can you please clarify the DAO Team’s role in making sure SIPs are “presented to the community with complete and accurate information”? I’ve seen the DAO Team suggest SIPs reduce SAND costs, and reduce implementation to not exceed X days or months…I worry that SIPs would be forced to change before they ever go to Community Discussion + vote when their original SAND cost & implementation time estimates were very reasonable and might’ve been acceptable to the SandFam community.
None of this was meant as an attack on the DAO Team. I just want to better understand. I fully appreciate everything you all do and I’m very happy to see the effort your team puts into the DAO’s success.
Thank you for your time, DAO Team. I’m so excited to be a part of this and I’m glad that you’ve revealed that your job is much more than any one person’s SIP submission.
Hello @Lanzer! I’ll try to respond to your questions in order:
Council agreement is like an employment contract: exit clause, NDA, payment schedule etc. Standard stuff. Although the DAO had to draft his own agreement, to be reused in the future
The bank account will allow us to mainly pay for General expenses, as well as all the various memberships and software suites, that enable the DAO to run. These services mostly require a debit/credit card. We have also selected a bank that enable crypto payments, in case our main crypto custodian would fail. These expenses will come from the “operation” budget.
The SIPs are prioritised by maturity/readiness. Some SIPs require more works than others, or require 3rd party consultation (like in the SIP you have submitted, the Sandbox dev team) which takes some time. The goal is to have a steady pipeline.
We worked on a pipeline before the DAO became public, as we wanted to have a backlog of SIPs. We are maturing these in parallel.
It’s hard to say for now as we are just getting started, but the goal is to accelerate SIP curration for sure.
Our plan is to have a couple of SIPs posted for voting every 2 weeks (every other wednesday), which also mean “SIP for discussion” also every other wednesday. Sometimes it is difficult to maintain as we cannot mature SIPs quickly enough. Like for the last batch, and this is why there are no SIP to be voted upon at the moment. We want to avoid having too many SIPs posted at the same time, to avoid diluting community’s attention.
As per our strategy of progressive decentralisation, every SIPs get reviewed and challenged by a team of professional before it goes to voting. This is a service to the community as not everybody is aware of what a reasonable cost or implementation time is about, for example. We are also looking in particular on the (positive) impact this could have on The Sandbox as a all and guide the author into answering the questions: Why the Sandbox DAO should be doing this? What is the problem you are trying to solve? How do we measure success (KPIs) ? etc. And we will unlock payment only upon clear and verified milestone completion. We are trying to limit SIP submission to 100k SAND (unless exception) as a way to allow for more SIPs to be presented and more community participation, to avoid the entire budget being burned in only a couple of SIPs.
I appreciate that your team thought ahead and had a SIP backlog. Do community SIPs take priority over TSB SIPs when submitted? If so, then this feels well-thought out and congratulations. If new community SIPs must wait until after TSB SIPs, I feel uneasy about the 13+ TSB SIPs totaling more than 5M SAND being given such advance opportunity to request funds from the budget before community members even get the chance to fully propose its wants and desires, especially given your response to Question #7 (and my Q#7 Part II reply below). Not a criticism, just an observation.
Understood, that makes sense.
Okay! That seems like a reasonable approach.
7 Part I. I understand, thanks for clarifying. Does the challenge turn into denying the SIP to go to the Special Council if it doesn’t fully incorporate recommended changes? Let’s say SIP-X wants 200K, and your team advises 100K. If SIP-X author provides reasonable justification for 200K, will your team still require a change to 100K?
7 Part II. I understand the tough position you are in, trying to balance quality SIPs with being good stewards of DAO resources. My opinion is to exercise extreme caution with imposing a SIP limit and only allowing exceptions. I see it as the community’s decision to weigh the pros and cons of the SIP dollar amount. A 100K SAND limit would have caused the automatic rejection of all 7 SIPs already approved (to include Magic Palette, see the below Checkbook screenshot). And since 6 of those 7 SIPs were TSB SIPs, the door has been effectively shut on high-quality community SIPs attracting the necessary talent. 100K SAND = $33K USD, which is a hard number to stay under for many software development or business venture proposals. My Revenue Options SIP would have to be reduced to an insignificant study.
Again, thank you for your time and I have full appreciation for the tough position you are in. It’s easy for someone like me to be critical when I don’t have the responsibility you do. I would submit that your team has already established itself as the necessary sanity check that would prevent some of the things happening in other DAOs. Taken too far, it becomes counterproductive.
Hello @Lanzer. Do not worry, the TSB issued SIP do not have priority over community/partner/studios issued ones! We only care about SIP readiness which is appreciated by the project management team, during their collaboration with the author. The PM team will also take into consideration the number of SIPs proposed by the same author, and will adjust the pipeline accordingly, so we don’t have a series of batch or SIP too close in time, that are all proposed by the same person.
The PM team is here to help the author of a SIP being successful and are here to pose a fair challenge, ahead of the community vote. Think about it as a SharkTank (the TV show). They will assess the motivation of the author and properly investigate the proposal and it’s author. Perhaps we are too strict, perhaps not enough. We will adjust with time.
We know for example that SIPs that request significant amount (above the 100k mark) are tougher to pass, and the same goes for unclear value propostion etc. It is sometimes better for an author to break down a big SIP into smaller one, and prove his/her worth to the community, that will trust more the author on their following propositions.
Sounds like a plan, @Cyril ! I’m glad you are taking the “adjust with time” approach.
Where are you drawing from when you saw SIPs above 100K SAND are tougher to pass? So far, the only SIP that hasn’t passed was the one under 100K (SIP-8). 100K doesn’t seem significant to me. I’m drawing from an average of AIPs and SIPs both.
After all this, Cyril, I really want to have you on SANDDAO as a guest. I think it’ll do a ton of good for SandFam to have an interactive conversation on the things I’m reading from SandFam in Discord, Twitter/X, and Twitch chat while we go over the Articles.
These weekly updates will help a lot too. Mostly because we see the DAO doing things, not sure why, and even though I’m all caught up on the AMAs you and Seb have been doing, those are mostly C-suite level conversations from interview hosts outside of the SandFam ecosystem that don’t cover the needed clarity for daily Sandbox gamers, landowners, builders, and artists.
Nice. Sandbox Academy seems like a really interesting one. I’m happy to see my three SIPs are almost at the top! I submitted my SANDDAO podcast SIP about 4 days ago to the DAO PM team.
With half of the team being on summer break, we still managed to make good progress:
We are bringing more transparency to the table and sharing more details on our internal projects. This is what we are doing “behind the scene” for the DAO’s benefit, presented in an updated format, as we are organising the team better.
You will see these tasks are mapped to 4 clear objectives, and in summary driven by 2 pillars:
I took a few weeks off from these updates. The focus of the month is really on DELEGATION. The website homepage is ready and we are currently taking applications untill the end of the month. If you are interested, don’t hesitate to apply!
Also we have found our community manager! The announcement will be made soon. He is eager to meet you, keep your eyes opened!
And here is the rest of the update for our other internal projects.
. In a effort to be transparent, I’d like to give you a weekly update (let’s see if I can maintain the cadence) on the state of the Ops, starting today. Some of these projects have taken a really long time (especially when there are contracts and lawyers involved 
).
).
(including our full SIP pipeline and some KPIs!!):
!
THANK YOU for revealing your tasks and focuses. 
What immediately struck me is how much the team is doing that is outside of SIP curation and feedback. I’m happy to see that a 2nd project manager is being recruited. What is your estimation of the increase in SIPs that will be processed and batched for Community Discussion + vote?
