CityDAO Community Roundup vol.21

May 24th, 2023

It’s been a while since the last Community Roundup. From now on, roundups will break out of the usual template, and the content will changed slightly. Previously, roundups used to contain news from the CityDAO community, but since you can catch up on all the news from the CityDAO newspaper on the website, roundups will now discuss affairs around CityDAO in a more casual manner so as to not get redundant moving forward. That said, since this is the first roundup after a while, all the existing major CityDAO projects will be briefly summarised again. But firstly, we’re now 5 months into 2023. Let’s dive into the question that many of you must have been wondering: what is the current status of CityDAO?

Current State of CityDAO

There have been many turbulent events in the crypto world, and those events obviously had negative effects on CityDAO. Furthermore, we also had some internal issues that contributed to the problem. Most notably the governance issue. Nevertheless, we’re definitely surviving, and we have resources to build, and that’s what we’re doing.

What were the governance issues mentioned, you might ask? Unlike democracy which has been around for over two thousand years, DAOs’ governance system has been around for only about 10 years (although the concept itself has existed since the 90s). Naturally, we frequently run into governance issues, which has been hindering our progress. These issues are for example, inconsistent CIP process, tool ownership problem, opaque leadership designation, no accountability for promises made by contributors, transparency problem, etc. Nevertheless, these issues are constantly being worked on by our core contributors, and every week we’re closer to implementing a governance improvement.

We can be rather stagnant at times, but we're still in a relatively healthy state. We’ve got some funds that we can work with, and teams that are dedicated to CityDAO. Furthermore, we did have some progress on our major projects, which we’ll cover in the next topic. If you want to learn about the next step of CityDAO right away, skip to the second last topic.

CityDAO’s Current Major Projects

If you’ve been reading all the recent newspapers or have been following up on the discussions in the Discord server so far, you could actually skip this part entirely. If not, or perhaps you need some memory jog, then here is the summary of the current status of our major projects:

Parcel 0

This project has not seen much progress in the past half year or so due to lack of leadership and direction on the project (but the pieces of land that are tied to your Parcel 0 NFTs are obviously still there, so don’t throw the NFT away so quickly!). However, back in the autumn of last year, one of our citizens named NerdStroke went on a journey to install a park bench on the parcel. Remember, parcel 0 is essentially in the middle of a desert, so it was quite an effort. If you have some ideas and would like to develop our parcel 0 further, feel free to start a discussion on our Discord.

You can watch the bench journey on youtube:

Baby Parcel

This project had been on a slow but steady progress since last year. The 5 acres parcels were further divided into sub-parcels. A questionnaire was distributed, and the first sub-parcel was given out to be experimented on, the development of which is being planned. The current person in charge of this sub-parcel is our citizen melior. Originally, the idea was for the sub-parcel to be used as a land NFT art project, but it was scrapped and now the current idea is for the project to be community-building based, which is certainly more fitting for CityDAO. The second sub-parcel will also be given out soon.

t0wn

The IRL hub for DAOs/web3 organisations project has also seen some progress. The project now has its own landing page and a Discord server (the link to which you can find on the landing page). The project’s team has had conversations with many DAOs/web3 organisations—a number of which have shown some excitement towards the project—, a real estate company, and a financial analyst. The team will continue to contact more web3 organisations and look into suitable properties. If you represent a web3 organisation yourself, this is a chance to be an early part of something big, so go hit them up!

t0wn landing page:

CIP-129: NFT Marketplace

This project had gained a significant achievement at ETHDenver back in late Feb/early March. The CIP-129 team, composed of our citizens MemeBrains and TheBossDragon, participated in the hack with the initial prototype based on the project. The team placed top 3 out of 61 teams in “DAOs and Communities” category, and top 15 out of 450 teams across all five categories, which was a pretty huge achievement! Currently, a working MVP of the project is over half-way done, and the team will be launching it for alpha testers as soon as it is ready.

The initial prototype from ETHDenver hackathon, previously called GovBlocks, have been rebranded for use with the NFT Marketplace:

2023 roadmap of the project:

Reinstatement of the Community Team

At this point, it is worth mentioning that we are able to put efforts towards community building again due to the passage of our community team proposal back in the beginning of March. There was an argument that we should focus purely on project building and build community later when we’re ready, but we believe that community building, especially in a community-based project such as CityDAO, is important throughout.

As a summary, the Community Team, currently consisting of myself (Lupei), simplepixellife, and Ming, has been reinstated as per CIP-144. We were formerly the Community Guild last year, but since the guild system was discontinued, we now function under the new name. Our responsibilities are largely the same, so if you were there last year, then you’re already familiar with us. In short: we’re providing updates and activities on Discord, and markets CityDAO internationally.

Whenever we would like to offer community-related tasks, we always prioritise our citizens first. But of course, you don’t have to be a citizen to contribute. Citizens or not, if you have an idea about whatever project you’d like to do for CityDAO, feel free to share it in Discord. If we’re interested, we’ll be in touch. You can also leave some info about yourself on the Discord introduction. If we have a task that we want done, we might offer it to you if you fit the bill.

Next Step for CityDAO

So, what’s next for CityDAO? Like previously mentioned, we’re working on implementing a bunch of improvements to our governance systems. Prioritising the crucial ones first. These crucial fixes were a part of CIP-151: Quorum and Elections, which unfortunately didn’t pass Snapshot, but not because it wasn’t good enough, but rather because the quorum was higher than the voting participation rate. Let’s take a look at what the CIP was aiming to achieve.

First of all, a quorum adjustment. As mentioned in the last paragraph, this quorum problem caused the CIP-151—the CIP that would’ve fixed many important issues—to not pass Snapshot. So the new quorum after the proposed adjustment would require a lower amount of citizen NFTs to be voted on a CIP, but with more strict requirements for the yay/nay ratio, allowing the good CIPs to actually be able to pass Snapshot.

Secondly, an election of CityDAO city council. The council members would have many important responsibilities which would keep our DAO going, such as appointing Executive Facilitator, appointing Multisig Signers, setting policy and strategic direction, maintaining or hiring personnel to maintain DAO tools, establishing and enforcing behaviour regulations, and many more.

Lastly, an implementation of a complaint process for dealing with wrongdoing related to projects, behaviour, transactions, or violations of the rules at CityDAO. We did have a few of these in the past, but we didn’t have a proper process for dealing with the issues, so we just had to deal with them based on what we saw fit. This new complaint process would deal with such issues through proper mediation and jurisdiction.

CIP-151 not passing the Snapshot is by no means a big setback. The CIP can be broken down into smaller parts and re-proposed as necessary. Our governance issues are nothing that can’t be fixed, they just need a bit of time. We’ll definitely get them fixed, and we appreciate everyone who still believes in us.

Archive of CIP-151 on Snapshot:

Photo gallery

Let’s take a look back at interesting things that happened around CityDAO in pictures. If you’ve been following our newspapers and Discord, then you might be familiar with these photos.

A set of CityDAO PC wallpaper that the Community Guild (now Community Team) had made at the end of last year as a present to the community: