Neighborhood Accelerator DAO Proposal

⚙️ DAO Proposals
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TL;DR

Grow Cabin’s Network City by 75 net new neighborhoods + run the Neighborhood Accelerator Program for $120K + 18,900 ₡ABIN

Team

Goals

Over the next 12 months (Nov 2024-Nov 2025):

  1. Run the Cabin Neighborhood Accelerator Program (see reflections on the program here)
  2. Facilitate 75 net new neighborhoods in the Cabin Network
  3. Support and retain 100 total neighborhoods in the Cabin Network

Run the Cabin Neighborhood Accelerator Program (NAP)

  • Program Design & Development: creating curriculum, a wiki of resources, participant experience design during + after the program, and iteratively improving to facilitate better outcomes. Creating systems to automate and decentralize aspects of NAP to a wider group.
  • Culture + Network Building: Building the culture + systems that sustain a strong network. Creating a culture of action, experimentation, transformation, and mutual support for participants. Onboarding NAP participants into Cabin’s DAO governance.
  • Participant Support & Coaching: Forming and managing cohorts, holding participants accountable, facilitating group calls, and 1:1 coaching.
  • Experimenting to Drive Revenue Streams: Listening for signals and running experiments to test viable revenue opportunities

Facilitate 75 net new neighborhoods in the Cabin network via the Neighborhood Accelerator Program

In addition to the above actions:

  • Pipeline & Growth: Building + improving the programs marketing and sales funnel with @Kaela, @jon, and @grin to usher the right people into our network.

Support and retain 100 total neighborhoods in the Cabin Network

  • Supporting existing neighborhood stewards and responding to their needs. Creating more pathways for stewards to become leaders within the network.
  • Connecting stewards with grants and public goods funding opportunities
  • Building alongside neighborhood stewards. Applying for grants as a network, exploring potential revenue streams, supporting stewards to contribute to Cabin + run experiments in their neighborhoods.

Why Savannah?

At Cabin, I created and have been leading the Neighborhood Accelerator Program for the past 7 months (check out my reflections on NAP1+2). I have an intimate knowledge of Cabin and am a major reason we’re focusing on neighborhoods in this chapter. I’ve been performing this role inside of Cabin Labs and am now writing my own proposal to continue doing this work. If this proposal goes through then I’ll stop receiving funding from the Cabin Labs proposal. The decision to spin out my own proposal is a function of @jon’s original intention for Cabin Labs - to be an incubator to fund new ideas in the DAO that after proving their merit, become their own independent DAO proposals.

Prior to Cabin, I designed and managed a hyperlocal social impact startup accelerator program in partnership with MIT’s Presencing Institute, facilitated sustainability executives to be more effective change agents at Harvard, ran the community + programs at a social impact centric coworking space, and have been building community in many local Boulder contexts for the last 13 years. I’m also doing the thing in my neighborhood.

My deeper “why” for doing this work is to create a grassroots movement of neighborhood building - where everyday people are creating genuine communities of belonging, mutual support, empowerment, and climate resilience - thus reweaving the social fabric of society. I feel so deeply honored to have the chance to do this work here.

Additional Teammates: @Shani Graham is currently facilitating the Australian + Euro cohort in NAP2 (that I can’t facilitate given timezone differences). Shani was a mentor in NAP1 and her presence in the program brought in 20% of the participants in NAP2. Learn more about Shani’s neighborhood building background here - she’s amazing. As we get more and more people wanting to take the program, I’ve allocated some additional budget to hire additional facilitators like Shani as needed.

Why Neighborhoods for Cabin?

Alignment with Mission: From my perspective, training intrinsically motivated people to create community in existing neighborhoods around the world + meaningfully onboarding them into Cabin’s network is an extremely clear and direct way to achieve our goal of building a network city of modern villages.

Early Interest: We’re already seeing demand for this program with the minimal marketing efforts that I + the Cabin Labs team + past participants put forth for NAP1 and NAP2. Some of the recent applicants are visibly upset on calls w us when they learn that they need to wait for the next cohort. People who’ve already built strong neighborhoods are also applying. In the wake of Hurricane Helene in Asheville, I anticipate an even greater groundswell of folks who feel compelled to do this work with us.

Scale: The Cabin Labs team recently set the goal to create 500 active neighborhoods in the Cabin network in 5 years. If we continue at the rate we’re growing, we’re on track to meet that goal and sustain those 500 neighborhoods for years to come. See this map for all the NAP 1, NAP2 and upcoming neighborhoods in our network.

Building Revenue Steams: In addition to community, the Neighborhood Accelerator Program is creating a network of active, resilient neighborhoods that can serve as testing grounds for potential business models: paid partnerships with municipalities, coworking / third spaces, public goods funding, real estate brokerage services, and more. The program currently generates a small income (~$4400 from participant sales in NAP2) and we plan to increase that income over time to help offset costs via institutional partnerships, sponsored seats, and increased cohort sizes.

Proposed Budget

1 year of funding for this work + the contributions of the community members:

  • $100K USDC + 2400 ₡ABIN to Savannah
  • 20K to fund additional facilitators + contributors as needed. If funds are left over from this $20K by the end of Nov 2025, they will roll over into the renewed proposal (if it passes) or will be returned to the treasury (if it does not pass)
  • 16,500 ₡ABIN to distribute to new neighborhood stewards, facilitators, mentors, and additional contributors

Timeline and Deliverables

Timeline: 1 year (Nov 2024-Nov 2025), at which point the proposal can be reviewed and renewed as needed

Deliverables:

  • Neighborhood Accelerator Program
  • 75 net new neighborhoods in the Cabin Network
  • 100 total sustained neighborhoods in the Cabin Network

Next Steps

Please leave a comment below to share thoughts, questions, and feedback. I wrote this proposal with brevity in mind and am super happy to elaborate on anything. I’m excited to take this next step with you all!

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Love everything about this, including how much you covered while still keeping it brief! The most obvious “hell yeah” ever.

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Glad you’re putting this out there to get additional funds for this effort @savkruger! :clap:

I see the value in the NAP and have experienced firsthand the progress made when a central organizing force inspires people to take neighborhood-building seriously while also bringing an edge of accountability that’s crucial to getting things done.

Two questions I’m left with:

  1. What has changed since you were hired by Cabin Labs that requires this to be a DAO proposal? Why not just stay within Cabin Labs and benefit from the flexibility and autonomy there?

  2. I agree wholeheartedly with your decision to add $10k for contributors for the year, the only issue I foresee is that $833/month isn’t actually that useful IMO.
    Whether it’s legit part-time work or just a few hours here are there, $833 doesn’t actually give you much to work with. If we’re going to request this money from the treasury, I’d personally go for $20k so that you have the ability to offer more compelling incentives to Stewards/community members if/whenever the need for them arrives. You can add language to stipulate that these are optional funds and will roll-over to next year if not used, but that they’re explicitly set aside to experiment with different ways to incentivize and integrate community members into contributor roles in order to help Cabin back to it’s DAO roots a bit more. I’d certainly love to see that ◡̈

Very excited for this proposal, and looking forward to hearing your responses to the above and for this to go to a vote! :ballot_box:

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If you are working at cabin labs already why the additional proposal? I like to see the finical break down on these proposals. How was the last 400 k spent? Also we spent 200k technical support website? Only revenue that came in was 4k . That’s some crazy spending. For what?

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Hi Scott, this is a super valid question and I’ll update my post to make things more clear. If this proposal goes through then I’d stop being paid by the Cabin Labs proposal and be funded on my own proposal - so not being paid in 2 places.

On the day to day level, I really enjoy working on a team w Jon and Grin on Cabin Labs so everything besides where the money is coming from would be the same.

I’ll address your other questions soon, gotta hop on a call!

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Hi Cam! Thanks for your thoughts here.

Regarding the move to solo DAO proposal from Cabin Labs:
I just updated the post to clarify the Cabin Labs → solo proposal jump a bit more. In more depth, it’s because the original stated intention of the Cabin Labs proposal is to run experiments and incubate ideas that could 1) help us build a network city and 2) move us towards financial sustainability. See this snippet from the Cabin Labs proposal:

So this move is because it was very much the plan from the beginning.

Regarding increasing the $10k set aside for contributors:
Thanks for this. I arrived at the $10K figure based on us paying Shani $1500 as a lump sum (not hourly or monthly) to facilitate part of the NAP2 cohort, which came from the Cabin Labs budget. I appreciate your feedback that this number should be higher. My goal here was to strike the balance between there being enough to cover Shani again if need be plus some buffer, while still staying lean and not over-allocating resources. I’m going to up it to $20K in the post and would love to hear if other folks have hesitations there.

Good call on rolling over unused funds (reminds me of that surplus episode of The Office :joy:). I’ve changed the proposal to include that stipulation regardless of the final number.

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Hey Scott, thanks for your questions!

The three core components of Cabin Labs’ mandate are to:

  1. Run Experiments
  2. Refine Vision & Strategy
  3. Keep the Lights On

Here’s what the original proposal said about these experiments:

We ran each of the original experiments in the proposal in the first 3 months of Cabin Labs’ mandate, and then focused on a new set of experiments. The biggest of these was the Neighborhood Accelerator program.

Now, it’s operating successfully, is core to achieving the goal of 500 neighborhoods in 5 years, has autonomous leadership from @savkruger, and is ready to spin out into its own proposal.

This proposal is about her continuing to grow the Neighborhood Accelerator. It is spinning out and separating from my pod, Cabin Labs.

For Cabin Labs, I share updates each season about our progress every season (eg August 2024 - Cabin Digest). You can see every dollar we’ve spent here: cabinlabs.eth | Address 0xc39cf17c216d05cc3C59163718A31897baD80F56 | Etherscan. The budget has been spent across the three categories outlined in my proposal: contributor payments, community incentives, and operating costs. We have $132k left, and I’ll be sharing a larger summary of the progress before I return to the DAO to propose renewing my pod.

Similarly, @grin operates his own independent pod, Meeting Cabin's Technical Needs, which will be coming up for renewal around the end of the year, and I know he is also happy to answer your questions and provide more context about his work.

While we’re happy to answer any questions you have about how this money has been spent in another thread, I don’t want to get off topic from @savkruger’s proposal here, which is specifically about the accelerator program.

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Nothing has changed—the goal of Cabin Labs is to incubate experiments and contributor pods and then spin them out. This allows us to progressively decentralize into a network of autonomous pods. @savkruger has been crushing it and is ready to graduate into her own pod.

The system is working! :muscle:

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So what are the different PODs so far and who’s in them?

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I made a new wiki page to answer this question: Live Contributor Pods

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I was thinking about this this morning on my walk and wanted to say thank you to @Matai and @jon especially for saying yes to me at the beginning of my time here at Cabin. Both of them made so much time to have calls with me 1:1, explained the context of Cabin to me, answered all my questions, looked for ways to involve me, heard my ideas and considered them. It feels really meaningful to me to write this proposal because it’s the culmination of so much energy and intention and time here at Cabin, but none of this would have been possible without both of them in the Winter and Spring seasons making space to engage me.

It’s important to me to recognize folks bc I wrote this proposal with as much brevity as I could so more folks could read it, but in the comments here I really want to acknowledge the fact that the last 7 months weren’t just me, it was Jon and Matai and Grin working closely with me on various things. It was @KathiInPorto and @Dahveed and Lauren and Stephen and @camlindsay and Shirah and @Ktando and Bethany and Forest and @Shani and @McBain and @prigoose and @jonbo and so many more people.

I’m really grateful and excited to see where this goes.

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Savannah thanks for putting forward this thoughtful proposal. I had a chance to read this twice, along with the discussion in the comments. Some questions along with my current perspective- which with more info/perspective could change.

  1. I understand Cabin Labs goal is to spin out experiments, but how does Cabin Labs work with pods that spinout? How should we think about that working relationship going forward? What are the deliverables of Cabin Labs vs. your proposal?
  2. What is the criteria for something being seen as “successful” to spin out?
  3. Is 1 year the minimum interval for this proposal? Would 3 months or 6 months be on the table to see how things continue to develop? I don’t have a strong perspective here, but trying to better understand the thinking or constraints we’re operating under for this proposal? Are the funds paid out in a lump sum if the proposal passes?

What I’m struggling with at the moment is that I’m a bit surprised that we’re spinning out the NAP when it still feels very early. The user numbers are still relatively low, we haven’t fully developed who our ideal steward persona is, and the pipeline to get applicants still feels underdeveloped. This isn’t to say these things can’t be figured out, but this still feels like an experiment rather than something that’s baked enough at this stage. This is where it would be helpful to better understand how Cabin Labs is thinking about things.

Additionally, as I’ve shared directly and in other channels- more consistent updates would help give the DAO more surface area into experiments, so we have a more prepared mind for when they spinout and seek more funding. Updates are often put out just days before a new proposal hits, which is not ideal imo. It would be helpful to see more about how we build in more visibility for the community in the projects that get funded, and if there are accountability mechanisms in place too.

Look forward to hearing more and would encourage anyone reading who hasn’t participated by commenting to do the same. Participation can hopefully create stronger proposals!

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In response to your questions @Ktando:

Nothing changes about the way we work together. Even after pods spin out their own proposals, contributors continue to join a weekly contributor meeting, I have weekly 1:1s with each contributor, and we have constant async chat channels where we coordinate. I think that the full time contributors to the DAO over the past few seasons (@grin, @savkruger, and myself) have formed the strongest group of contributors we’ve ever had at Cabin, and that won’t change.

What does change is three things: (1) the DAO has direct control over approving/rejecting more granular proposals for spun-out pods, (2) as a result, the contributor(s) of those pods are more directly responsible for keeping the DAO updated on their work, and (3) that pod manages their own multi-sig and budget directly and autonomously, instead of being compensated via the Cabin Labs budget/multi-sig. This structure is designed to progressively decentralize contributions in order to provide more DAO oversight of workstreams and clearer ownership and accountability from contributors.

Ultimately, this is up to the DAO to decide. It’s an opportunity for the DAO to vote on the continued existence of the work, and to ratify budget for supporting that work directly. From Cabin Lab’s perspective, we are would like to get contributors in a position to spin out their own proposals within ~3-6 months, but some projects could have shorter or longer incubation periods.

I don’t think it’s reasonable to contributors to ask them to continue reapplying for their jobs every 3 months. When they are first starting, it makes since to operate with a 1-3 month trial, but we can’t retain top talent or do effective long-term planning if we can’t make 1 year commitments to them after they have demonstrated themselves. This is a precedent that we have followed for the several years, because we’ve found it’s untenable to have every contributor go through a full governance process every 3 months — writing all of these forum posts takes a lot of time and energy, and that is time and energy we can’t spend Doing The Thing.

In this case, I think @savkruger has provided a bunch of strong updates over time about the accelerator, including these:

Additionally, I have provided more updates contextualizing the accelerator across these posts:

I hear you on the desire to have more updates further in advance of governance proposals. I think it’s a reasonable request and it’s something we are working on (eg Cabin Labs - First Year Retrospective and Cabin Labs - First Year of Experiments, Oct 23 - Oct 24). We will continue to try to keep the DAO as informed as possible on this forum, answer any questions from the community, and provide opportunities to engage in discussion before votes. And also, we need to spend most of our time and energy focused on the work of the DAO in addition to spending some time talking about the work. Writing forum posts already takes a lot of contributor time and energy—it’s very important, but it also doesn’t directly contribute to the actual work we are trying to accomplish.

I want to understand how you think we can better strike the right balance here. I don’t want to get too off topic in this thread, but I’d love to see a new thread from you with your thoughts on the following questions:

  1. What would an ideal cadence / structure of updates would look like for you?
  2. What would an ideal cadence / structure for Cabin Labs spinning out proposals would look like for you?
  3. What would an ideal cadence / structure for the proposal/voting process would look like for you?
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Thanks for all this @jon .

Re my relationship w Cabin Labs: I really enjoy working w Grin and Jon. I’m pushed to do more each week than I would if I was working alone (very much bc of the structures put in place by Jon). I have thought partners I can bounce ideas off of who bring experience that works in concert with mine. Being on a team - especially this team - feels really good. It’s by choice that I’m continuing to participate functionally on the Cabin Labs team.

If this proposal succeeds, the day-to-day flow of my work would look exactly the same (same team meetings, 1:1s, OKRs), but the funding would come from the DAO instead of the Cabin Labs budget.

When I originally joined the Cabin Labs team, Jon and I had a conversation and consciously entered into a dual boss/employee + teammate relationship. My scope is NAP. His scope (among other things) is the broader success of Cabin, keeping the lights on, pursuing viable revenue streams, and the success of the team (which includes me and NAP). Our relationship over the last few months has really deepened. If this proposal goes through, Jon’s scope remains the same as does mine.

@Ktando We’ve talked 1:1 about your desire to receive smaller, more frequent updates from me about the progress NAP is making, what’s happening, etc. and I’m super down to do that. Excited to hear the specifics of what you’d desire there. I’m remembering from our chats you said something to the tune of “share a few key things that are working, what’s not working, lessons learned, outcomes…” Am I remembering right that you wanted that in Discord? Happy to put it there. I’m also tapping a few other folks in the DAO to ask what they’d want to get updates on to further inform this.

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I’ll start off by sharing that I am grateful Cabin has such a dedicated and compassionate community builder like @savkruger leading the NAP. It was a pleasure to work with her on the Cabin Labs team this past winter / spring, and I am in strong support of her continuing to lead the NAP program forward.

Few questions / thoughts:

1. Are there additional dependencies outside this proposal for its success? Visibility into plans for external dependencies would help paint a more holistic picture for how funded contributors will be collaborating to work together on shared goals, allowing the DAO to strategically allocate funding with more visibility across the set of dependent projects.

2. What does it mean to be an “active” neighborhood in Cabin’s network? Previously Cabin had invested lots of time and effort to onboard neighborhood hosts as a part of their network city launch, and not many seem to be active today. I understand that the NAP is designed to boost engagement and nurture relationships with new neighborhood stewards, but how will this engagement be sustained once people exit the NAP program, and what about stewards outside of the NAP? As a neighborhood steward myself who is not in the NAP, I am not sure how to engage with the Cabin ecosystem beyond working on new proposals or chatting or Discord / Telegram. I would love to understand how contributor pods will be working together to foster community retention to avoid the high turnover that Cabin has experienced.

3. Are there any examples of “viable revenue opportunities” that are being actively pursued by NAP participants? While working at Cabin Labs I had pitched a few third space opportunities to @jon that he deemed not worthwhile, claiming that they had tried them yet failed as a part of past experiments already. I saw the potential business models post, but I haven’t seen any updates around revenue generating experiments that are being collaboratively pursued with NAP participants, and am curious how discussions on the topics of business models have gone with participants.

4. What is the plan to decentralize the NAP program? For a global network city to thrive, I think it makes sense to onboard more facilitators. Its been awesome to see new facilitators getting involved already, so I think this is underway, but I would love to see a deliverable document be a part of this proposal that outlined a vision and approach for progressive decentralization of the NAP to better grow and deepen connections across a globally diverse community.

5. How will progress be shared and opportunity for community input created throughout the year? I think @savkruger has done a great job sharing progress updates so far, but after Cabin Labs’ burn-the-ships pivot mid proposal without a DAO vote, I think it would be helpful for new proposals to outline a plan for keeping the community involved in the behind the scenes activities and decision making, with routine progress updates and opportunities for community input.

6. How will the facilitator & contributor budget be used? The $20K amount currently being requested would result in ~$1.6K budget per month for 12 months. I’d love to see this proposal include more details around how people interested in supporting the program can get involved to help illuminate opportunities and encourage interested people to reach out. I also think it would be worthwhile to have more funding allocated towards contributors to help scale the program while maintaining the authenticity of connections with a plan outlined for onboarding, engagement, and measuring the effectiveness of contributor efforts. Maybe this could be another deliverable for an operational & strategy doc of sorts that is worked on during this proposal?

7. Shouldn’t more ₡ABIN tokens be allocated towards the NAP? With the NAP program being the cornerstone of what Cabin Labs intends to rebuild the community around, I would love to see more ₡ABIN allocated towards @savkruger for leading the program, to contributors for supporting the program, and to NAP cohort participants for helping to collectively shape the experience.

Currently @jon & @grin both receive the following ₡ABIN token allocation from the founder-level vesting proposal:

As a result, Jon & Grin earn >2,000 vested ₡ABIN tokens / month in their role for a combined total of 50,000 ₡ABIN / year, while this proposal would only allocate 7,400 ₡ABIN / year for the NAP program. Jon also controls Cabin Labs’ 12,600 ₡ABIN budget, and Grin requested 2,400 ₡ABIN for his technical needs proposal. Adding all that up, this NAP proposal represents only ~11% of the ₡ABIN allocation across proposals mentioned.

From my perspective, the work @savkruger is doing leading the NAP is the most impactful work being done at Cabin right now, and I would love to see her, neighborhood stewards, and other contributors recognized more for their roles in helping to create a community that Cabin Labs intends to monetize through different business models. By allocating more ₡ABIN to the NAP, we can create systems of mutual support as we collaborate towards shared goals, instead of replicating the extractive practices of traditional businesses. For those unaware of the importance of ₡ABIN, it controls voting for how Cabin allocates money as an organization, check out the Cabin DAO governance wiki and this awesome podcast that talks about tensions and opportunities around VC backed DAOs for more info. I’ve also asked more questions in this open discussions post that aim to help create shared understanding about Cabin DAO’s origin story.

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I recognize that answers to some of these questions might involve more lengthy discussions, and I think that addressing them should involve responses from other people beyond @savkruger, so I’d welcome us compartmentalizing those with linked comments to other forum posts, and I’m excited for more live engagement opportunities like @savkruger’s upcoming community call on this being planned in the Cabin Discord group chat server #DAO-proposals channel.

Also shout out to everyone here reading these posts and getting involved. The beauty of DAOs is the opportunity for community to create decentralized and transparent organizations. Grateful to have the chance to build alongside you all :saluting_face:

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It would be great to have it here. I know the team are real sticklers for keeping these discussions all on here. Also that way people can come back here and review ahead of voting. Thanks!

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Just so I understand you right, are you saying you want the shorter, more frequent updates here in the forum?

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sorry for the confusion. shorter more frequent updates in Discord. I think we should have a discord channel for proposals to update the community. Cabin Labs, Grin, etc. And that should be the place where we are getting more frequent updates.

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Jon- where can we see more clearly beyond an etherscan transaction how money that a proposal funds is being spent? I know in a discord you shared a rough breakdown of various costs for Cabin Labs, including accounting. Can you share more detailed accounting of the spending?

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The link I shared above isn’t just one transaction, it contains every transaction Cabin Labs has completed. This is the source of truth that our accountants use to file our annual paperwork with the government. Over the last year, Cabin Labs has had 2-3 contributors at any given time being paid from our budget. These payments account for most of the spend. Additionally, the Cabin Labs budget covers all SaaS, legal costs, contributor retreats, and other expenses we incur. If you have more detailed questions about Cabin Labs, let’s do that in a separate thread so it doesn’t get confused with the Neighborhood Accelerator Proposal we’re discussing here.