Nexus Hub: Community-Driven Teams

Governance Discussions Nexus Mutual DAO Proposals
1

Nexus Hub

Nexus Hub
Nexus Hub1280Ă—720 37.4 KB

With Operation Wartortle being discussed, I started thinking about ways the community can help the protocol in certain key areas. We have an active core group of members with diverse skillsets. Now that the Community Fund is live, I think we ought to consider how we can utilize those funds through active initiatives rather than waiting for Grant Proposals.

The core team behind Nexus is incredible, but they are a small team. If we were to form distributed teams to create key Hubs, our community can contribute in deliberate action to help in key areas. We have talent within our community that can help in the following areas:

  • Marketing
  • Communications
  • Growth
  • Analytics

Each Hub would have a Team Lead who would communicate with other Team Leads and their own designated core team member. This would streamline communication and reduce the chance for confusion/miscommunication about projects/objectives. See graphic below:

Nexus Team
Nexus Team1280Ă—720 7.84 KB

Marketing

This team can create awareness about the mutual and the benefits of membership. They can regularly post on Twitter, Reddit, and other social platforms to further the reach of the mutual, while engaging with potential members.

Essential Duties: Using social media (Twitter, Reddit, YouTube, etc.) to promote the mutual/cover products, engaging with potential users, creating coordinated marketing campaigns/strategies, etc.

A Marketing Hub could also identify news outlets, podcasts, and other venues the mutual could use to spread awareness of our product offerings.

Communications

This team can engage with members on Discord and Telegram to answer questions, act as a general resource, and to troubleshoot issues (among other things). This team would direct community inquiries to the necessary member of the core team, as well.

Written copy would be a key focus as well. This includes: writing a newsletter (in partnership with the Marketing Team), updating the docs, creating how-to guides, etc.

Essential Duties: Writing copy, creating a biweekly/monthly newsletter (in partnership w/ marketing), maintenance of docs, creating how-to guides, creating helpful YouTube videos, etc.

This team would also create a Community Channel where regular updates about the core team’s objectives and progress can be shared.

Growth

This team would work with Ricky in Business Development. They would identify small-to-medium protocols that could be listed on Nexus Mutual. They would also identify ways to grow our membership base over time.

I envision this team developing relationships with development teams behind protocols and influential figures in the DeFi space. This team can communicate with team leads from various protocols to identify ways the mutual can offer greater value to members and support protocols.

Essential Duties: Recruiting talent, reaching out to protocols, identifying areas for growth, etc.

This team would drive Membership Growth and Product Development.

Analytics

While we have a variety of data points available in Nexus Tracker, it would be helpful to have tools to track other data sets for other teams. Effectiveness of marketing strategies, number of unique visitors to our documentation/website, number of covers taken out by protocol/custodian (instead of aggregate values for each), etc.

Having a team that can analyze data and create Dune Analytics solutions to help other teams, and the community at large, would be a huge benefit. Any data that can assist Risk Assessors would also be of major value.

Payment

All members that contribute to a team or serve as Team Leads would be compensated through the Community Fund. Instead of proposing a pay structure, I think it would be important for the community to discuss the size/frequency of grant payouts to members working within a Hub.

Individual payment will be determined through discussion, but I believe that it would be beneficial to earmark 1000 NXM for the Nexus Hub Initiative. That amount of subject to community discussion as well, but I thought it would be helpful to have a sum in mind since I am starting this conversation.

Conclusion

Creating a distributed system of teams is a step toward decentralization and greater community engagement with the protocol. I’d like to put more power in the hands of members, while consulting with the core team on these initiatives. The goal is to give the core team greater time/resources to focus on their internal goals.

Please share your thoughts below. I’d like community feedback on this idea. :turtle:

6 Likes
2

That’s a great initiative! I think yearn finance and index coop have one of the best models right in term of paying out community contributors. We might be able to learn something from them.

4 Likes
3

This is exactly what I had in mind: Working Groups 101 - Index Coop Community Handbook

Fantastic reference! Thank you :turtle:

4

Love this idea.

I think we probably need some good discussion on exactly which groups should be formed.

We are going to need an Investment Committee, so that’s a key one that’s missing. It may also be better to combine Marketing/Comms at least to start with, seems like a fair amount of overlap. Could split out later once the workload gets bigger.

1 Like
5

Great initiative!

To jump on this right away, what would be included in this first 1,000 NXM?

1 Like
6

Fantastic idea! A team structured DAO would be great step forward to get different types of community projects rolling. As @luciusfang mentioned yearn is head a similar road. Here their proposal as inspriation: YIP-61: Governance 2.0 - YIPs - yearn.finance

7

I just wanted to establish an idea of how many NXM would be allotted for these working groups.

Members would be paid for their contributions, so the 1000 NXM would be earmarked for annual payouts through these working groups, which I’ve referred to here as “Hubs.” Team Leads and Community Members would receive some level of compensation for their work, though I wanted some discussion on the amounts and frequency of payments.

For example: if a marketing team developed a strategy and launched an ad campaign through social media, members can decide how much a Team Lead would be compensated for coordinating the work and the community members for executing the campaign.

I want to create a way to hire community members for contract work through the Community Fund; though anyone can submit a grant, this working group-based structure would be an active group that engages with the community, teams behind protocols, DeFi users, etc. to see where the mutual can expand services and how the mutual can grow membership.

I’m also looking over the Yearn YIP-61 Proposal to see their design; it differs from my idea in a technical sense, and I’m studying YIP-61 and Index Coop’s Working Groups 101 to identify the ideas we can apply to my Nexus Hub idea.

1 Like
8

That is a great point, Hugh. We can combine Marketing/Comms and have an Investment Committee.

Thanks for the input!

9

It would be great to talk about budgets once we have identified team leads who can propose a concrete roadmap around their hub and the money they will need for this.

How do we go about finding hub leads? Would you want to be a communications hub lead @BraveNewDeFi?

1 Like
10

Definitely agree with your thoughts here. I’m reading through some other community’s proposals/initiatives that are similarly focused to have a more concrete idea of how Nexus can create this Hub system. I’m reading through Yearn’s YIP-61 and Index Coop’s Working Groups 101 to determine a middle ground for our community.

Having defined budgets for each team is the end game. Finding a balance between allocating the right amount of funds vs. constantly asking the community to vote for approvals is my focus. If a team lead writes a statement of purpose and identifies a roadmap for what they’d like to accomplish over a 4-month period, the community can approve that lead to oversee an initiative and coordinate a working group team made up of community members.

That person would have a budget for a set amount of funds, and those funds would be paid out on a quarterly basis to community members who contribute. There are multiple ways we could accomplish this:

  • Team lead puts together a budget w/ defined allocations that is approved on a quarterly basis through a snapshot vote
  • Team lead submits a budget at the end of a quarter that is approved through snapshot vote
  • The community grants a team lead the discretion to spend a set amount of funds on initiatives throughout the quarter; an account of those distributions would be disclosed on a quarterly basis

These are all things I’ve thinking about. I’d like to have a more refined idea worked out and posted here sometime next week, if I can manage that.

Finding Hub Leads

This is another aspect the Hub would be utilized for. Initially, we’d need members to volunteer for a team lead position. Once we have at least one or two people, they can work with the Core Team to identify community members who could add value to one of these teams. We’d look to recruit community members that have talents we can utilize within a Hub group.

The goal of this initiative is to create an active arm of Nexus that can identify talent and bring members onboard. I also believe that if a person has a project with defined goals, community members would be more willing to jump in and help out.

I would love to be a team lead for a Communications/Marketing Hub but that would be subject to community approval.

Right now, I’m focused on restructuring the mutual’s documentation and refining this Hub idea.

2 Likes
11

Awesome to see this happening finally. Happy to contribute on BD/Sales front. I am currently helping projects in Lending, DEX and Data verticals in their efforts. I also host my own podcast which lends itself naturally to having conversations with other projects on the important topic of risk coverage. Perhaps we can organise a call to figure out vertical strategies (for example, common risks associated with DEX or Lending and the onboarding process).

4 Likes
12

This sounds great. I’m actually going to put a follow-up post about this idea in the forum within the next couple of days. That is going to provide some background on possible models and how we can design our Hub system.

Once it’s up, I’ll let everyone know via Discord and Twitter. Feel free to connect with me on Discord or Twitter :v: