I wanted to start a discussion about what an RFP (Request for Proposals) really is and what other kinds of proposals we can use in the DAO.
Are there established types of proposals, or can anything with voting options count as valid?
For example, we’ve seen “Yes/No/Abstain” proposals and ones with a list of candidates (like SIP-19 or SIP Idea CC).
Would CC proposal count as an RFP too, since it’s about selecting people for a specific role? Although it would also be something about who has more votes than others, maybe that’s another kind of proposal?
I think understanding this better could help us create more effective proposals in the future and avoid skipping important steps, like discussing whether an idea should move forward at all before voting on details.
An RFP normally is a call for external company consultant to respond to a market that you are offering. You detailed excatly what are the user requirements and every other company that want to propose their services can apply. Based on your requirements you will assess and chose the best company.
Maybe what you would like to have clarity about is who decide in the DAO to call for an RFP on which topic. In the case of the UGC SIPs the RFP was started by DAO admin team without asking the community if that is something we need or not (no judgement here only facts). This decision taken is debatable and is in a the grey zone about what can be done by admin team without SIP and what should/could be asked to the community.
Personnaly I will not challenge the admin team on that decision knowing that they have been transparent when they called for this RFP in the forum and we could have commented at that time.
While researching more about RFPs, I started thinking that there could be more types of methods for making proposals, and I’m not referring to categories like SAND Initiatives, LiveOps, Game Content, etc., but rather the way proposals are made.
For example, when the DAO started, my idea was on voting on simple Yes/No votes (even without the Abstain option). But now, knowing that we can have different methods like RFPs, I think it would be useful for future proposers to know that proposals are not limited to a final Yes/No/Abstain vote.
Take the CC SIP vote, for instance. If I’m not mistaken, there are 5 CC positions available. If 10 people run, only the top 5 with the most votes will get the position. This shows that voting methods can be more dynamic and flexible than just a simple binary decision.
I’m not trying to bring other SIP topics into this discussion, but rather to learn from these methods and explore new or different ways to approach proposals and how we can used them here. I believe that thinking “outside of the box” (beyond the Yes/No/Abstain type of proposal) could make the DAO more dynamic.
That’s why I wanted to open this forum to analyze more ideas and serve as a place where we can explore various types of voting methods. I’m not sure if there’s a (political ) manual or guidelines for this, but if anyone has more ideas or has seen other methods used elsewhere or other DAOs, it would be great to share them.
Yay! I get to talk about my professional career field. In my real life, I am a contract writer, proposal evaluator, and negotiator. I must’ve written 100+ RFPs and evaluated 200+ proposals at this point in my career.
Here’s the rundown
An RFP is a request to the public to submit a proposal
detailing how they will successfully deliver the product or service that the customer needs.
RFPs typically include:
a description of the product or service,
detailed info the offeror needs to know (like applicable labor laws or legal requirements)
evaluation criteria (how their proposal will be graded),
instructions to the offerors (formatting, page length, proposal structure, when the RFP expires)
After a set amount of time, the customer gathers all the submitted proposals, grades them, then chooses the winner. That winner is awarded the contract and the winner delivers the product or service they said they would deliver.
It’s all spelled out in this very short, 6,000 page handbook called the Federal Acquisition Regulation (Section 15.204-1). Basically been my job for the past 13 years.
RFP (Request for Proposal) is only one way to do this.
There are also IFBs (Invitation for Bid), or RFQs (Request for Quote). All of these are called solicitations.
RFPs are for complex or high-dollar needs requiring careful attention to how you select the winner (like buying a car). IFBs is when everyone submits their proposal and it’s all opened in public and the winner is chosen right there. RFQs are for routine purchases or small dollars where speed is more important (like buying a few books).
So we are talking about types of solicitations? (I think it’s better than types of proposals and types of solicitations is what I’m looking to explore.)
In my experience (just from someone who hears things from the township), I had some knowledge of RFPs but knew them as “merit competition” in the context of public contracts. When I learned about UGC Platform SIP, I immediately connected it to what I knew, and I think it’s essentially the same concept.
I was also “familiar” with IFB, wich for my case is Public Bidding.
Now that we start talking about IFBs or Biddings, it makes me wonder: Could we implement auctions within the DAO? While we don’t vote with money but rather with Voting Power, it would be interesting to explore how an auction-style process could work in this context. If it is something that could be done? who could do it? what could be auctioned? if it is even related to IFBs or Biddings?
Does everyone give an unsolicited proposal? or is there a call beforehand like RFPs?
What is the difference between a Request and an Invitation?
Yes. In real life they’re just structured approaches to fairly and reasonably choosing the best value for your customer. Merit competition is a really great word for it, and Public Bidding is exactly it.
Could you give me a little more context of what caused you to come up with this? I love the idea. Maybe we’d do a public auctioning of a future RFP requirement versus requiring private competitive proposals that goes to snapshot all at once?
So as an example, let’s take the current UGC RFP, maybe it would’ve gone like this…
DAO Admin Team creates this thread and declares “auction for UGC has started, submit your bids”
QA Council then submits a public bid for $150K like they did but as forum reply
Wakeup Labs then submits a bid for $50K like they did
QA Council decides they don’t want to go lower
The auction ends and Wakeup Lab wins the bid
Wakeup Labs then submits their proposal to the DAO Admin team, goes through curation
The Wakeup Labs proposal goes to Snapshot vote and it’s either “Accept this Bid” or “Reject this Bid”
Thoughts? Kind of a wild idea but you got me thinking @rocksymiguel
Yeah, I remember this video, never thought that I, at some time would start lookig for what a quadratic vote or non quadratic vote is and how can be use .
While reading some more about bids, the word “Auctions” crossed to mee, and I immediately started imagining scenarios on how we could do auctions here in the DAO. It’s something that is already done elsewhere, like opensea, but what if an artist wants to auction a valuable asset through the DAO. Or a studio wants to auction an account with X amount of high quality games and do it through the DAO.
It may not be the most productive thing to do, but I was just rambling on ideas with that word.
Another idea about RFP is, what if someone, with a certain budget, wants to make an experience and wants to use the DAO as a tool to find those artists to make it.
They create an issue on their official GitHub with the “Foundation Mission Requests” tag, and candidates submit their proposals in the comments. Some of these proposals are very interesting, especially for large projects.
Furthermore, the Foundation is the “only official” entity that knows each player in the DAO and can fund projects that align all participants with Optimism’s vision.
) manual or guidelines for this, but if anyone has more ideas or has seen other methods used elsewhere or other DAOs, it would be great to share them.
