CIP 59 Mission Guild Dissolution (Sunset)

Proposals (CIPs)
1

This CIP proposes that the Mission Guild be dissolved (sunset) effective July 1, 2022. Why would I want to dissolve something that I love being a part of and I helped create? Glad you asked.

Background

The Bundled Guild proposal established Mission Guild made up of 13 core members and city council members. We created this Guild for the purpose of developing and implementing the “mission” of CityDAO. We are in the process of finalizing the mission which we are attempting to encapsulate in a one-page document led by @Da3vid. Once this is finalized the purpose of the Mission Guild will have been fulfilled. The implementation of this mission should now be handed off to all CityDAO NFT holders (“Citizens”).

Our Mission Guild has discussed whether to increase our authority and duties in private threads (which is in itself beyond our authority and could create legal issues—a discussion beyond the scope of this CIP). This CIP opens up the discussion for our community as a whole to decide.

One argument for maintaining the Mission Guild is that the 13 Guild members are benevolent and have the best intentions for CityDAO, so they should be entrusted with supervisory and veto authority to guide CityDAO forward. I disagree with this argument because it assumes that we cannot trust our Citizens with making decisions that benefit our community. Every Citizen has bought their NFT with their hard-earned money by purchasing their NFT, which gives us all, collectively, the right to shape the future of CityDAO–for better or for worse.

Another argument in favor of the Mission Guild is that it can guard against undue influence by a “whale” that has too many votes. This is addressed by implementing quadratic voting, proof of humanity and one-person-one-vote that we are in the process of putting up on snapshot.

I have nothing but love, respect and admiration for our core team and our city council. I trust each one of them be benevolent and want what is best for our community, but that is not what a DAO is meant to do. A DAO is meant to be decentralized and allow the collective consciousness to shape our future. A DAO is also meant to be autonomous—a sovereign, self-governed community. The Mission Guild creates unnecessary centralization in the 13 of us who have supplanted ourselves as benevolent dictators of CityDAO. As Citizens we have bought our Freedom, sovereignty and decentralization through approval of CIP 35 and CIP 40, which generously compensates the core team and council members for our services up to now—we no longer have or need overlords to decide on our behalf.

It is time to remove the training wheels and have our community to take the reigns of CityDAO. Our Charter already has mechanisms that will allow any Citizen to create and repeal any CIP. The Charter also gives any Citizen the power to initiate the removal of any facilitator or co-facilitator that is not serving the will of our community.

More importantly, our Charter provides a mechanism for the creation and implementation of Guilds, Guild facilitators and co-facilitators that are meant to be servants and facilitate the will of our community. Each member of the Mission Guild is already a facilitator or contributor of our other current Guilds. We are paying our facilitators salaries equivalent to $120,000 per year to serve the Citizens, which they are doing a great job at. The Operations Guild led by @lyons and @fugyeah, for example, is doing a great job with coordinating all the Guilds and providing for smooth operations of our community.

The promise of Web3 and DAOs is to give equal power, ownership and governance to ALL the people. Allowing the Mission Guild to remain will harbor the centralization and bureaucracy that belongs to the cities of old.

Approving this CIP will dissolve the Mission Guild effective July 1, 2022. This CIP will also make Facilitators responsible for the duties that were imputed to the Mission Guild in the Charter.

If you approve this CIP to go to snapshot, click like (the heart emoji). Once it reaches 20 likes it will go to snapshot.

9 Likes
2

This one shows me again why i’m here and why i believe DAOs will be our future.

Far away from greed, from a sense of power, from selfishness…

Very important and a guiding movement from the members of the guild. Could write more and more but i wont. Want to say that i fully support and want to hear also our citizens’ opinions about this one.

2 Likes
3

I am the person who first suggested that we disband the Mission Guild over a week ago in the Facilitators’ Channel on Discord. I believe in decentralization. Yet, I disagree with some of this language in this CIP. The Mission Guild cannot “discuss whether to increase our authority”. We cannot do that unilaterally and I think it’s not right to suggest that we can, regardless of what some people may have suggested in private chats.

I think it is a serious mischaracterization to say that “every citizen has invested their hard earned money.” The NFT is a governance token. I came to CityDAO because I am fed up with a lot of what I see in the world of law, education and government. This was not and is not an investment and anyone who expects profits from this is missing the point of the whole project.

I don’t think the Mission Guild, even its current form, are “benevolent dictators”. To me, it is a group of people trying to steer the ship towards building something meaningful. I think the Mission Guild should be made up of citizens who aren’t facilitators, personally. But this was just the way we started because we trusted each other to not choose greed.

And it is incorrect to say that facilitators make $120,000 per year. In fact, out of all facilitators in this entire DAO, only one person has that compensation. I, for one, really dislike modern late-stage capitalism and that’s why I’m here. While I agree with some of the sentiments, I really wish this proposal had been shown to a few more people for fact checking.

4 Likes
4

Thanks for fact checking me. That’s what this forum is for

2 Likes
5

This is some heavy shit! But I’m glad you brought it up. I’m honestly torn on this one. Bottom line is I think ultimately it should be sunset, but July might be too early. Maybe September? Or a year from the Charter adoption?

Here’s my thinking. When CityDAO started it was just a kernel of an idea. Land on chain. That meant something different to everyone. Which is great for an infusion of talent and ideas. However, it means making progress on a single goal difficult as Citizens can just throw up any old CIP and try to take the DAO in totally opposite directions. Each proposal might be fun and interesting on their own, but trying to do them all - means progress is slow or doesn’t happen at all.

This seems somewhat inevitable in decentralized orgs, its really difficult to accelerate in one direction AND keep velocity. I think especially in the DAO’s infancy - you need to keep the momentum, otherwise interest fades and even less can be done. That’s what the City Council, and the Mission Guild are here for, IMO. Its not full decentralization, but I don’t think we want that … yet. Lets build a little more momentum, get a little more in the swing of how guilds are working and our new charter based governance structure, and use the mission guild to help gently guide the course.

1 Like
6

Currently, the Mission Guild doesn’t really have clear responsibility in my opinion - most action is taken by guilds. I think the Mission Guild can continue but in a volunteer capacity.

2 Likes
7

Great points Nick123. One of the challenges/opportunities we will get to navigate with or without the Mission Guild is that we all have a different idea of “land on chain.” Even within the Mission Guild we have a diverse, but similar, opinion as to what that means–which I really believe is the same case with our wider community of Citizens. As the Mission Guild we do play a big part with shaping the vision and goals–which we have done through the charter, OA and mission statement. This will attract Citizens that presumptively want to be part of this mission.

Each of our Mission Guild members is pretty active already in other Guilds, so regardless of what we do, we will continue to play a leadership role in moving the project forward.

As to the timing, I don’t think we will ever be really “ready.” The more power that is given to us as the Mission Guild, (unconsciously) the more comfortable we will get and the more excuses we will make to prolong decentralization. At some point we have to trust Citizens, otherwise we should adopt the old fashion city governance (nothing wrong with that, we just have to call it what it is). I think we just have to set a date, I’m open to pushing it out further to ease into it.

Thoughts?