Comments on Parcel 1 Real Estate Guild Winnowing Process

For full details of the process to get from 40+ proposals to 8 and then how we voted to get down to 5 see this notion page.

This is start of 7 day comment period at the end of which we will give project teams for the 5 proposals below guidance on full proposal structure which they will have time to flesh out and present to the community prior to a snapshot vote.

The list of parcel proposals, with winners highlighted in green, see here.

To summarize:

Question 1:
What type of parcel should be purchased for CityDao Parcel 1?
Winner: Embassy / HQ Likely in a major city, a location for CityDao members to congregate, cowork, host and attend events. It will gain revenue from coworking, events & any concessions.

Question 2
Should CityDao purchase land with existing infrastructure and extend it, or purchase land with no infrastructure and build from scratch?
Winner : For parcel 1, CityDao should look to purchase a property with existing infrastructure on it that can be adapted or built on for the purposes of CityDao.

Question 3
Should CityDao buy or lease a parcel?
Winner: For parcel 1, CityDao should buy a parcel.

Question 4
Of the following list of 8 parcel submission ideas after the filtering described above, please vote for 5 that you would like to see fleshed out into full proposals and voted on by the DAO for parcel 1.

Winners:

  1. Consolidated 3 submissions:
    1. CityDAO Bed & Breakfast | Denver
    2. CityDAO Denver Property
    3. CityDAO Lodge Hotel
  2. CityDao Embassy in Major US City
  3. Kanye West Ranch in Wyoming
  4. Tie between:
    1. CityDAO Events and Education Center on 160 acres in Wyoming
    2. Consolidated 2 submissions:
      1. First Township on Earth Managed by a DAO
      2. Stay in Wyoming
5 Likes

Thanks for the great write up! Do you want folks (non guild members) to give guidance here on this thread? Or is there somewhere else?

4 Likes

I won’t speak for @kkopczyn but at this stage I believe we are looking for feedback from the entire community. Fire away sir!

1 Like

I would like to suggest ideas 1 and 2 be expanded into 3 distinct ideas. Basically a hotel, a house, or a coworking space.

Current framing:

  1. Consolidated 3 submissions:
    1. CityDAO Bed & Breakfast | Denver
    2. CityDAO Denver Property
    3. CityDAO Lodge Hotel
  2. CityDao Embassy in Major US City

Proposed framing:

  1. CityDAO Bed & Breakfast or similar lodge
  2. CityDAO Denver Property (single family home)
  3. CityDAO Coworking Embassy in a Major US City
5 Likes

I have no opinion other than this:

Let’s be sure to use a ranked choice or Quadratic Voting system to make the final determination. This decision, once enacted, has high reversibility costs, and we should ensure we capture preference as accurately as possible.

Since I am already engaged by CityDAO to implement a bespoke Snapshot strategy to this end as detailed in CIP-48, have a strong working relationship with @DAOvolution, and am working on a QV article with @ScottA that is to be published by the DAO, I believe I am best suited to steward this process.

In practice, stewardship entails a) working with the real estate guild to ensure our QV implementation fits the requirements of this proposal, and b) waiting until the implementation is ready before bringing this to a snapshot vote.

3 Likes

This will be an important vote. Perhaps, the most important vote in CityDAO history? We should capture as much information as possible. Not sure how we would use QV, as we only have NFTs to go off, and most people only have 1. But, at the very least use rank choice.

2 Likes

CityDAO’s QV implementation includes

  1. Using the square root of aggregate token holdings as the number of votes the citizen can cast, as requested by 48, and
  2. The ability to set the number of voice credits per citizen, which is required for this to be QV as defined in the literature, but was not requested by the community, so it defaults to 1.

This looks like:

magnitude = params.voiceCredits || 1;

for (address, aggHoldings) in addresses:
  votes[address] = Math.sqRoot(aggHoldings * magnitude);

My recommendation here is to set the voiceCredits param >1 to enable the expression of weighted preference (either for or against).

3 Likes

Yes we are looking for everyone’s input!

2 Likes

As of now, the plan is to use ranked choice / instant runoff. Open to other suggestions.

1 Like

I see. So you could set it such that 1 NFT could be used in fractional ways. As in I could put .5 to one idea, then .3 and .2 towards other projects? People might get confused, but that would work. Well, default is rank choice if so.

1 Like

This is close, except it would not use fractions. Here’s how it works:

Each voter is allocated a certain number of votes per citizenship token (CT). Let’s call this V and say that V = 9. Each citizen then has CT * V votes.

A citizen can cast as many votes for or against as many of the options as she wishes, with the hard constraint that she can cast up to CT * V.

Let’s says question is “what’s your favorite animal?” with { dog, cat, fish } as the choices.

Alice might express a relatively neutral preference by voting something like:

Alice = { dog: 5, cat: 4, fish: 1 }

and Bob could display a strong dislike of fish and a relative apathy towards the others with

Bob = { dog: 0, cat: 0, fish: -9 }

At this point, the votes are rooted. To continue the above example:

{ dog: 5, cat: 4, fish: 1 } => { dog: 2.24, cat: 2, fish: 1 }
{ dog: 0, cat: 0, fish: -9 }  => { dog: 0, cat: 0, fish: -3 }

When the votes are tallied, dog is the winner, but we learn that cat was close behind and fish are disliked twice as much as cats.

{ dog: 2.24, cat: 2, fish: -2 }

If this was a ranked choice ballot, we would then perform a runoff with {dog,cat} as the sole options.

1 Like

I see. I got ya. Easy to just scale up a CT by any arbitrary number. The negative is really interesting. In theory, it makes total sense, just curious if anyone would think to use it. I guess most just don’t vote in terms of what they hate, they vote for what they like. I am all for it, just curious if anyone will use it.

Thanks for all team member who put this together. HUGE progress happening within such a short amount of time!

I think the 1 consolidated 3 submission and 2 embassy in major US city can be combined in one. Also Kanye Ranch and other WY options are also similar. So I see the option can be open ended divided into 2:

  1. A co-working / co-living building in Denver (close to home base Wyoming)
    Benefits: highly achievable, a lot faster, assured profitability
    Drawbacks: limited space, (almost) no chance to innovate on structural / spacial design.

  2. Land in Wyoming.
    Benefits: huge potential in innovating, building, expanding, raising land value
    Drawbacks: loads of challenges on building, zoning, governance, permits, remote location.

I like that we are narrowed down to the options, a question I’d like to ask the project team and the community is: building or land?

Obviously there’s pros and cons in both but wonder which option is more strategically beneficial or vision aligned…

2 Likes

A few thoughts…
Kanye West Ranch - that would probably be the best in terms of publicity for cityDAO, might spark more interest, but I’m not sure how valuable it would be at this point. We are more in the stage of “ok how do we actually do this land on chain thing and governance” where it would be a splashy purchase followed by months (years) of figuring out how to make something of it. IN the interim, it really would only be useful to a small subset of people who are near the ranch or can travel to it, and it seems like it would not be that useful for a vast majority of CityDAO citizens in the short term.

First Township on Earth Managed By A DAO - This is why I’m in CityDAO. I want this to happen… I friggin need this to happen, and I want to be a part of it. BUT I don’t think we are ready yet. We are just figuring out DAO governance, how to manage multiple interests etc. Its hard enough to do a Parcel 1… can you imagine trying to figure out roads, utilities, infrastructure etc? Don’t get me wrong, lets start working on the building the pieces now. Are we gonna do Plural Ownership (Radical Markets Taxation Strategy)? Great lets do a white paper for how it would work. Are we going to have zoning? Environmental Regulations? Lets do a white paper on that. Then when we are ready, we’ll have the pieces in place to hit the ground running.

Embassy / Home / hotel - This seems like the logical next step. Its a bite sized enough where we can reasonably execute, and it will have immediate value to Citizens and an IRL place to call home. If successful, it can also be easily replicated in other countries. I also like @scottfits proposed framing to break this into 3 distinct ideas.

5 Likes

Also, this may be stating the obvious, but for all these proposals, they should include cashflow projections. How much up front, and how much in mortgage/maintenance costs, and how much in income (if any) we are expecting. I know we have some real estate folks that can help with that.

Obviously we can’t base it off of a specific property, but some general ranges are necessary.

4 Likes

I’m 100% with you on this. We’re ambitious and hungry but we need to start from a seed and grow it.

For me an embassy / co working space / hotel / Airbnb feels like the best way forward.

We can have a little slice of everything and feel our way through it, while also generating some income.

1 Like

We’ll be releasing criteria that each proposal should include in order to be considered.

The main components we’re considering as of now are:

Financial Plan
(Initial & Ongoing Costs)

  • Business Model:

  • Initial Investment:

  • Time until Principal Paid:

  • Expected ROI:

Actual Implementation Timeline

  • To purchase the property:

  • To be up-and-running (generating Project & Financial reports):

Team Members and/or Roles

Each of these will need to be answered both at a high level in text format, as well as in detail with shown calculations where relevant.

And contrary to your last point @Nick123 , we would prefer that proposals ARE based on a specific property, as those will have higher likelihood of success.

3 Likes

To your question of " building or land?" This is similar to Question 2 that was voted on last week, the resounding answer here was to buy an existing structure.

To your other point, agreed that there are two clear types of proposals, in the interest of making the snapshot vote actionable, we are suggesting putting specific parcels up for vote, not just the categories. So there will be multiple parcels / teams within each category. Open to other opinions or suggestions on this.

1 Like

Will we need to purchase a separate “Citizen” style nft to qualify for this parcel? I think people involved with parcel 0 should reciece a perk of some sort. After all, it seems like parcel zero was the initial success factor for this project.

@DAOvolution can comment on this in more detail, but there will be benefits for those that hold the citizen NFTs of some sort.

1 Like