Strategy for running a mission-driven protocol-based organization

Traditional centralized business strategies won’t work for achieving a massive transformative purpose such as ending poverty. So what then?

A protocol-based organization such as Proof of Humanity (PoH) requires an exponential organization strategy; instead of relying on the capacity and time of a centralized group, PoH needs to leverage the skills, time, and knowledge of all the community to reach a globally shared prosperity.

The PoH DAO is currently hiring a Product Manager and a Developer to steer into this direction. However, it would be näive to think that two individuals would have the necessary capacity to lead the whole community into achieving this massive goal.

What are we proposing instead?

✨ The birth of the UBI Rebel Alliance

As Scott Santens wrote in May the Force be with UBI, we need to get together under a common cause to vanish once and for all, the biggest weapon slaving humanity: Fear of poverty.

We got Scott’s personal consent to name this strategy the UBI Rebel Alliance. This strategy aims to leverage the true potential of the community to outperform even the best of experts because we are stronger and wiser in numbers. The UBI Rebel Alliance strategy is the aggregation of three key points:

1. The Polycentric Product Manager
2. A mission-driven bounty center
3. Space for community engagement

1️⃣ The Polycentric Product Manager

The way to have one single point of accountability to the DAO, while not being limited by the creative potential of one single person, is hiring a polycentric product manager. This means, hiring a PM that is responsible for enabling the whole community to autonomously develop products by facilitating access to tools, financial resources, and the matching between talents. How? Through five areas specialized in facilitating community engagement and its inclusion in product development, plus 5 bounty bags tagged for rewarding quality-based contributions. Let’s go through each one of them.

Product Manager

Humberto Besso Oberto H. is proposing to become the product manager of Proof of Humanity. If chosen, he will be the direct point of contact and the only one accountable for the strategy by the DAO. His responsibilities are three: Facilitate the community to self-develop products and services; Build synergies with subject-matter experts and their networks to reach PoH’s goals; And, sense opportunities and threats for PoH and its token.

While these are the responsibilities Humberto will attend, his work aims to make the DAO a manager-less org. This means that by the end of the year, the DAO should be closer to work without a central manager, and instead, use the human collective intelligence and power of software to scale fast and wide.

Specialized areas for facilitating community engagement and product development:

Community Assistance. This is a broad, but maybe the most important area. It holds three sub-areas of responsibilities. One, assisting newcomers, moderating and updating the YouTube, Twitter, Telegram, and Discord channels. Two, guiding proposals and projects to properly use Discord for accessing talents and resources. Three, exploring for PoH’s registries at risk, and defending them in court. Currently, there are 21 heroes voluntarily leading this area, and as you are reading this, we are in the process of distributing tasks to cover all of the other areas.

Fundraising. This area focuses on getting funds for two purposes. On one hand, for the Human.Money vaults, with this we directly provide liquidity to the offer of $UBI in a sustainable manner. On the other hand, for community proposals looking to develop products and services around the use of PoH as a safe identification technology and $UBI as a fair payment method.

Additionally, the people participating in this area will share within the #Grants for Humanity channel, those grants that might help other PoH members achieve their own missions.
Bonus: We got the approval from Marisol Martinez to become the personal mentor of the fundraiser team. Marisol is the co-founder of Grantsy, a search engine platform for international grants.

Growth. This area has two goals: On one side, provide a congruent design and communication style to all projects emerging within the PoH ecosystem. On the other side, develop resources for enabling the community to autonomously contact, negotiate, and close partnership agreements. Together we can reach faster and wider stakeholders all around the world for both accepting UBI as a payment method and PoH as a sybil-proof id. Currently, Anna Kaić is voluntarily leading this part. Check her work plan here.

Tech. This is also a broad area with 3 main goals: Facilitate every community-approved project to access tech-related commons resources such as hosting, APIs, infrastructure, etc. The second goal is to assist the accepted projects in their technical product outlining through the proper use of GitHub and the tools available. The third goal is to support both practices and projects that aim at improving PoH’s interface and self-development ecosystem. This last part will take most of the budget, and most likely will require to increase it, as we are looking to encourage whitehacking practices (detection and fix of bugs and vulnerabilities of PoH) and participation in the development of proposals that are critical for PoH, such as RoboTeddy’s proposal for registration improvement and the Human Bounties Network.

Finally, the Governance and Tokenomics. This area focuses on performing dynamic workshops with two purposes. On one hand, to improve the experience of the PoH DAO into a more welcoming, participatory, and deliberative governance system. On the other, to improve the tokenomics of $UBI. Everyone in the community is invited, and the Token Engineering Commons (TEC) will be summoned to be the one leading the workshops.

Bounty bag. The proposal is to give every area a monthly budget of $2,150.00 to pay in $UBI for all its bounties. Not all areas will consume the same amount of budget, so eventually at the end of the year, any budget not used would return to the PoH DAO.

In conclusion, having an area-based approach satisfies two goals. Enable everyone in the community to bring their ideas to life, especially those that directly help the $UBI token maintain and raise in price. And, leverage the potential of the community by hiring those individuals that can significantly help in carrying out the projects accepted by the community.

@Mati has set a Discord server (now in test and soon available to everyone) where besides solving the need for a different Telegram channel for each and every issue, now you will be able to find and match with people that share the initiative to realize the ideas you have in mind.
The use of this Discord together with the UBI Rebel Alliance strategy will facilitate the coordination between members of PoH while also putting at reach financial resources and tools. The access to these resources and talent will allow the organic development of a human-centered ecosystem of products and services.

How can you contribute? You can compete in proposing the best working plan for an area. The working plan chosen by the community along with its associated bounty bag will allow everyone registered in PoH to collaborate on performing the required tasks. In summary, you can contribute by making a working plan proposal and by offering your knowledge and skills.

Will you earn something? Yes. Two things. $UBI from the bounty bags; and a badge, or an official recognition from Proof of Humanity, that your work contributed to the cause. Each badge will hold the evidence of your work, and it will follow you forever in the blockchain.

💰 Budget.

The DAO has a budget of 48 ETH for hiring purposes plus around 4 million $UBI. Humberto is proposing a fair payment for him and for all the people involved in the development and improvement of PoH. This is a monthly salary of 0.33 ETH and $953.13 USD in $UBI for him, plus 5 bounty bags for the community. The total annual budget asked to the DAO is: $129,000 USD for the 5 bounty bags, plus the total annual salary for Humberto of $11,437.6 in $UBI + 4 ETH. Therefore, a total of: $140,437.6 USD in $UBI + 4 ETH.

Asking for less than a tenth of the available ETH will allow the DAO to hire a world class Developer, and have additional budget to expand the team if deemed necessary, and to have a cushion of anti-contigency resources. The Alliance believes in the PoH and UBI project. We believe that even though the price of the token is being significantly affected, it is part of the maturation process and we are here through thick and thin.

Therefore, it is important to highlight that having a fundraising area seeks to increase the budget of those areas that require more budget, finance the Human.Money vaults and have resources for marketing the products developed. The UBI Rebel Alliance’s strategy aims to turn PoH into a financially independent and, thus, completely autonomous organization.

2️⃣ Human.Bounties: A mission-driven bounty center

You might be asking: If each area is holding its own bounty bag, how is the bag going to be used?

A coordinated collective outperforms over 90% of the time any group of highly skilled individuals (Surowiecki, 2005).
To leverage the true potential of the community, the UBI Rebel Alliance strategy focuses on developing products as direct solutions to pain points. Each project presented to the DAO will have a product vision and a roadmap to break down into bounties (tasks).

The cycle of product development will start within Discord, and then it will be complemented with the Human.Bounties site. The process is the following:

1. Proposal. Anyone from the PoH community submits a proposal for project development in PoH’s Discord (link soon) using the Project Template in GitHub and posting both at the PoH Governance forum.
2. Vote. If the project requires access to resources or to the bounty bag then is put to vote, otherwise, the project can directly ask in the contribution-opportunities channel at Discord for people to join either volunteering or paying with the project’s own $UBI.
3. Funding. Projects approved by the community vote will get direct help from the community assistance, fundraiser, and tech areas to break down the project into bounties, facilitate access to specialized talent, and to available resources.
4. Development. Every week there is a meeting called Ask Me Anything (AMA) where all active projects, including the PM’s overall strategy, present their progress and roadblocks. The meeting is done live on Discord and streamed to YouTube as a recording. This is the space and time to open new bounties for all active members.
5. Reward. All projects accessing resources do it against delivery. This means that for every milestone achieved the payment is unlocked, not the other way around. Initial funds are only given to kick-start a project with their initial settings. Payment against delivery is also applied to bounty hunters.
6. Close. A marketing campaign is done throughout the process of the project, and at the end too. Once a new product is released it's integrated within the resources of PoH’s ecosystem to facilitate its adoption.
7. Celebrate. Thanks are given to all participants, and everyone involved gets the number of badges corresponding to the work contributions they did, recognizing in this way, their skills and commitment.

3️⃣ A space for Community engagement in decision-making: Human.Agora and the Planetary Senate

Human.Agora is the language inclusive forum discussion that is taken to YouTube. This space looks to engage the community in participating in the governance’s discussion threads by inviting PoH members to discuss, debate, and deliberate on live sessions. This format will allow the audience to participate by making questions and commentaries, all facilitated by a moderator. Participation will be open to English and Spanish speakers at the beginning, adding subtitles to the recordings.

The Planetary Senate will bring world-class stakeholders and experts in the fields of universal basic income, sustainable development goals, and the use of cryptocommons to the PoH community. Presenting them to the community through interviews and engaging them in a once-a-month gathering for discussing, proposing, and acting on solving the challenges that both PoH and UBI face. Hilde Latour has confirmed participation.

Both the Planetary Senate and the Human.Agora gatherings have three main objectives:

1. Assess the current obstacles that PoH and UBI face to fulfill their mission.
2. Outline the next steps to solve these.
3. Make a massive call to action worldwide to engage in solving these issues.

Additionally, these gatherings will provide enough content material to promote PoH and UBI worldwide, piggybacking on the people’s networks. This strategy will increase our awareness and, thus, our potential to raise funds, lock liquidity at the humanitarian yearn vaults, and close mutual benefit partnerships.

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If you believe that together we can reach the DAO’s goals. Support the UBI Rebel Alliance by voting for Humberto as Product Manager.

Let’s end poverty together!
Let’s be the first DAO awarded with a Nobel prize ;)

Envision of the Peace Nobel Prize for the PoH DAO