Scope of the Secret Foundation

Secret Governance
#1

Hey everyone!

After the governance committee meeting today, so we can all be prepared for next week’s meeting, I think it would be great to have a community scoping exercise for what should be in-scope and out-scope for the Secret Foundation for current protocol needs. Let’s make this a constructive conversation.

I believe this will help us have an informed discussion next week about funding. It would be an added benefit to have insight from current and past Foundation members, Secret Labs, and some application layer teams.

Let’s find a path forward together.

Template
In Scope for the Foundation

Out of Scope for the Foundation

Notes:

5 Likes
Governance Meeting Notes Mega-Thread
Governance Meeting Notes Mega-Thread
#2

Secret Foundation Scope To-Date

Secret Foundation is an organization devoted to expanding the growth of Secret Network and privacy technology in Web3.

Marketing

  • Write regular blogs and articles about products and initiatives on Secret Network & privacy in Web3
  • Manage specific in-person events for conference meetups and assist secret agents to attend other conferences
    • Host community meet-ups
    • Creation of in-person marketing collateral
  • Create marketing videos & interviews
  • Attend podcasts
  • Twitter spaces
  • Twitter collateral / participation
  • Swag
  • Establish and analyze data concerning Secret Networking social media presence & growth
  • Cross-chain community marketing & partnerships

Education

  • Infographics

  • Videos

  • Articles

  • Tutorials

  • scrt.network website management

  • New user onboarding sessions + Q&A

Community

  • Manage community channels

(YouTube, Telegram, Forums, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, Reddit, Discord, etc.)

  • Moderation of the above channels

  • Empowering decentralized communities & initatives within Secret Network

  • Help grow the community surrounding dApps and help highlight dApps in the Secret Network ecosystem

  • Contribute, lead, and foster the growth of the Secret Agents program

Exchange Listings

  • Help support relationships between centralized exchanges & Secret Network

Product Launches

  • Help amplify product launches on Secret Network via awareness and education/marketing support

Ecosystem KOL Management

  • Maintain relationships with VCs and key cross-chain figureheads

  • Ecosystem fund & grant advocacy

  • OTC deals with influential funds and potential growth stakeholders

Operational

  • Transparency reports

  • Regular budget proposals

  • Regular attendance of governance calls / channels / committees

  • Facilitate and lead leadership & app cross-communications

  • Handle KYC/AML relationships on the network tied to funding initiatives

  • Strategic market buybacks

Out of Scope:

  • Business Development
  • Developer documentation
  • Hackathons
  • Grants program
  • Ecosystem Fund management

While foundation can assist on all of the above, it seems prudent that there should be alternative primary leads on all of the above “Out of Scope” functions unless the foundation explicitly would like control of these categories, and has consensus from the larger community that they are the primary owners of these categories.

14 Likes
#3

Thank you @Carter-Woetzel for this effort. I’ll definitely review and add my thoughts soon.

Only point of clarity: Foundation has not explicitly said previously that those functions should be out of scope, only that they currently fall out of our scope. BD is owned by BD Committee and SLABS, documentation is owned by a group of external stakeholders (unclear ultimate ownership?), Hackathons are blocked by documentation and dev support, Grants program is managed solely by SCRT Labs (we no longer have input), and SCRT Labs requested ownership of Eco Fund management.

For all things “out of scope,” Foundation can still contribute funding and support to a variety of different initiatives even if we are not the ultimate owners. For example, we fully intend to resource hackathons either by covering a portion of operational costs or a portion of available prizes. We also regularly engage in business development on behalf of the network, but we now funnel these opportunities to their owners.

13 Likes
#4

Thanks for the awesome breakdown from your experience @Carter-Woetzel :slight_smile:

5 Likes
#5

Thanks for following up @tor :slight_smile:

Foundation has not explicitly said previously that those functions should be out of scope

  • With the goal being to make the Secret Network efficient yet still decentralized, do you think it be better from the Foundation’s operational standpoint to have those topics in-scope or out-scope?

For all things “out of scope,” Foundation can still contribute funding and support to a variety of different initiatives even if we are not the ultimate owners.

  • I think this is awesome and super important with the Foundation being the public facing entity representing the network.
4 Likes
#6

When it comes to what is out of scope, the only matter that I think could be contemplated as in-scope could be hackathons, but it requires collaboration with Scrt Labs most likely in order for them to help with the technical aspect. Nevertheless hackathons are growth initiatives, so it definitely does feel like it’s something where the Foundation should at least have a hand.

Some initial thoughts in what concerns the in scope matters, I think the problem currently is two fold.

  1. There is overlap in some of the areas committees and Foundation cover (awareness and education), which in part leads to a vision of Foundation not doing enough since we have multiple parties working on this.

  2. The Foundation is very conservative with its spending. This is not a bad thing however it can also be a symptom of resources not being efficiently spent. I think the latter feeling is what leads to people considering the foundation is currently overfunded.

The solution for the first problem seems simple to me. These committees should once again again be centralized by the Foundation’s leadership and the Foundation should invest in these areas at the same time to increase the number of people working on this, NOT simply rely in the existing structures as contractors and carry on as is.

As for the second, it gets more complicated. Where should the Foundation spend more money? It’s definitely not the only area (see above), but maybe the Foundation taking ownership of funding events that are not strictly network-only would be a good place to start.

This comes with its own sets of issues though:

  1. How much of a say should the Foundation have on the branding/design/creative process of these events if its funding specific product events

  2. How to preserve the foundation as a neutral entity if it will fund specific product focused events.

On the first point, I would tie it simply to how much of a % of total funding the Foundation provides for the event. A series of intermediate thresholds could be defined in case of partial funding (naturally for 100% Foundation funding assumes total control of the process for that event and viceversa for 0).

On the second, given the Foundation does not have any sort of formal board, a possibility could be using on-chain governance. If the proposal to fund an event passes, the Foundation executes. If it doesn’t, the Foundation does not execute. Thus, the Foundation simply carries on the will of the chain and we remove any potential conflict of interest, accusations of Tor favoring X over Y, etc.

To be clear, what I propose on this mechanism would be a yes/no question and only for product specific events, the community would have no input as to how the Foundation then executes in order to keep this process lean and efficient.

3 Likes
#7

Working with Evelien, John and Jay is a treat but i feel in the past months all of these topics besides Website management are mostly owned by the Education committee. Videos is a topic the SF is spending more time on with a recent contract hire though. Agent onboarding is something done by awareness. in Q1 this was funded by the SF but Awareness went on chain with q2 with a budget to also cover that and handle it themselves.

These 2 also feel like deliverables of Awareness eventhough SF also has Patrick as a full time mod to help on this. The events also seems like something Awareness is doing a lot for with University outreach and the recent talks at Nigeria and Mexico conferences. Personally i contacted them when needing something for decvonnect Amsterdam even though i probably should have messaged SF.

End story with this is that i think SF is doing a lot of work on this but the above categories seem to be owned by some other organizations or at least it feels like that. It would improve the overall structure a lot if we can discuss whether or not these Goals are SF owned and committees are just helping or the other way around.

Edit: Skrillah let me know that Q1 and earlier Awareness props also included the Agent onboarding funds.

5 Likes
#8

This feels right and might throw Support in on the set of committees to be centralized if moderation of chats falls in Foundation scope. It feels like a growth initative to me.

My only point where I might want to better details is what type of product specific funding is in scope to be funded? Is there a cap on the budget?

#9

I’d like to better understand if this should be a function of the foundation anymore? I’m open to learning. My concern is that while the foundation doesn’t directly dump scrt on the market, apparently they’ve done OTC deals with people that has resulted in very large dumps on the market. If we can get a better understanding of that we can determine if this actually benefits the community as a whole or if it only benefits the Foundations treasury. Again, to reiterate, I’m open to learning.

3 Likes
#10

Absolutely 100%. It’s the only organization that can even do it outside of Secret Labs. It’s simply how SCRT gets converted to dollars that can be spent on many of the above items. Otherwise the Foundation would have to dump SCRT on the open market to pay for things, and I don’t think anyone wants that. It’s essentially a way to get operational budget for real world stuff. We don’t have the liquidity to do this another way IMO.

#11

These committees should once again again be centralized by the Foundation’s leadership and the Foundation should invest in these areas at the same time to increase the number of people working on this, NOT simply rely in the existing structures as contractors and carry on as is.

Why would we centralise the Awareness & Education committees to make it appear as though the foundation does more in these areas? That will create more problems whilst only solving this wholly aesthetic issue, if it even does that…

Both of our committees are overachieving because we are able to operate quickly & deploy funds to empower Agents all over the world to drive Secrets adoption. For example, we are about to send out squads of Agents to crypto events all over the world in collaboration with SF. Committees will fund the Agents to go along with merch, SF funds any sponsorship packages & speaking fees for the more advanced Agents. We colloborate on projects all the time & play to each organisations strengths. If it ain’t broke don’t fix it.

The foundation is training a Social Media Manager, and actively recruiting a video producer to hammer out content for the Secret channels, so you will be able to measure their output there for Awareness / Education.

What they really need is more staff, a recruiter to work on the new jobs board & plug holes in the network, probably another social media manager, a kick-ass admin/accountant & a flippin’ PA for Tor. :smiley:

8 Likes
#12

Yes but considering that secret was dumped by multiple dollars worth of price by parties who received OTC deals from the foundation, I am inclined now more than ever to reduce their income drastically. The foundation is merely the marketing arm of the network, that doesn’t require over a couple hundred thousand dollars a month. Certainly nowhere near many millions of dollars a year.

1 Like
#13

The comment wasn’t about budget it was about OTC responsibility. Do we have proof these entities dumped?

#14

No proof other than Tor admitting it happened.

1 Like
#15

Let’s try to get this conversation back on track a little.

I think everyone can agree the foundation is overfunded relative to the scope outlined by Carter and comments from some committee leaders.

For business function, the foundation still needs the ability to OTC to access capital needed for their current responsibilities in fiat currency.

1 Like
#16

Yes I agree, but enabling VC’s to dump many millions vs a much smaller amount is a valid comment regarding scope IMHO.

1 Like
#17

Are you suggesting implementing a standard vesting schedule for all OTC deals conducted by the foundation?

If possible that may be an interesting idea.

1 Like
#18

Here are my initial thoughts for options.

  1. Limit the total budget to ensure even if all intake is sold by OTC recipents, it can’t result in massive impact on market.
  2. Standard and public vesting schedules, perhaps even in phases. I don’t have more specifics for this suggestion yet.
  3. Perhaps a combination of the 2.
4 Likes
#19

Speaking about the SF scope or whatnot, but specifically in relation to how we work with the foundation in the awareness committee;

I personally like the potential direction it’s taking of;
The foundation has it’s marketing team + now a dedicated social media manager and content writer, who can help coordinate sprints for bigger announcements we want to make, whilst coordinating everything from how you experience their posts to what landing on the SN website looks and feels like to how we can convert that into a stronger community with committed stakeholders.

Whilst on the other hand, the awareness committee is a subsection of the ‘Secret DAO’, where we can essentially mobilise the community (as we fix our pipelines/slowly are enabled to build them up properly) to create initial impact for these well designed, strategically positioned sprints, whilst more involved members such as ourselves are able to provide a broader array of perspectives to help enable the processes the professionals have built over their many years in whatever industry they’re familiar with.

Imho, off the top of my head, it’s a particularly powerful way to approach empathising and understanding the end user.
If we can utilise the ability of the marketing team to actionably streamline processes when they’ve got something they’re trying to achieve in mind, whilst crowdsourcing relevant ideas through both feedback and empowerment, you have a nice two pronged approach to growing this aspect of the ecosystem in a collaborative manner.

I do think however there is probably a need to actually touch base with and align ourselves with their team, if any of our duties overlap, and this could also go for any other committee that feels that their existing responsibilities likely overlap with current hires within SF; that way we can turn a disjointed push into a collaborative progression, without arbitrarily holding enough power to limit the other.

In fact, I know that we do actually work together in some form on many levels, however it’s mostly via direct channels as everyone is very busy, so it’s hard to have a streamlined, fully coordinated effort; thus I echo some of Skrillah’s points about them benefiting from additional staff.

Just my two cents

1 Like
#20

I like this ! Clearly “in scope” for SF : hackathon organization and prizes, dev documentation, awareness, education, marketing, community channels, product launches, etc). Nevertheless, there is no harm SCRTLabs and Community Pool funding hackathons and prizes from time to time or whenever needed, as those should be considered strategic actions for SN awareness and expansion.