Archived on 15/05/2025

Nounditor (accountability officer & devil’s advocate)

maty

Who am I:

Maty, writer of Nounsletter, founding member of Nouncil, creator of nounish poker deck, and a self proclaimed watchdog. As some of you might’ve noticed, I have been active in Nouns since I joined, and I am always trying to promote healthy conversations. I try to provide feedback, onboard newcomers, follow up with prop builders, and do what I can to reduce spam in the Discord.

Problem:

There’s an accountability gap between the DAO and its funded projects. There have been multiple conversations about the benefit of having a dedicated person in charge of bridging the gap. Holding builders accountable will help create a healthier and open ecosystem, foster trust, and set up standards for what the proposal-to-project pipeline should look like. I have started doing this type of work and would like to continue doing so in a more formal way.

Scope of work:

  • Follow-up with builders of proposals, prop house auctions (and maybe small grants), about their funded project’s status.
  • Maintain a public spreadsheet to better document the progress and timeline.
  • Report findings regularly on a biweekly basis with a simple status update and more detailed info where necessary.

Funding:

2.5 ETH/month for 3 months as a trial run (via small grants)

Noun142

I think this is great. Most nouners don’t have the time to make builders accountable for what they commit to do. Having a paid role to make sure that we get reports on the status of all the projects we fund will be very valuable - will increase the likelihood of delivery and will help us identify builders who execute (and those who don’t).

I trust maty to do a great job given his dedication to nouns.

BigshotKlim

2.5 Eth a month for herding cats and keeping track of so many things is a bargain and Maty has been an amazing resource and a trusted member of the community.

noun22

i think this is a no-brainer, will confirm with the rest of small grants. thanks maty

Noun12

Easy yes, you have demonstrated tremendous consistency and quality of your questions and support is strong.

9999

Thank you for this thoughtful proposal.

While I like the idea of seeing the progress of all the projects that have been funded, I do not like the wording of a single person “holding builders accountable.” I do not like the authority of an “officer” or a “watchdog.”

Recently Nouners have been adding themselves to proposals as point person to liaise between the DAO and the builder(s). I think this is a much healthier model going forward. For proposals that came earlier, I think it is ok that we use them as learning experience if their progress is slower than we would expect.

Noun12

The problem we have is that no one has a handle on the state of all the things, where they sit, what progress looks like, and in that environment, a Nouner is incapable of knowing what has has happened much less what is happening and we will be worse at course correcting and making better informed future decisions.

I don’t @maty will be a bulldog, he will be a friendly cat herder. Perhaps that is what the role should be called. Cat Herder and Kitten Accountant.

maty

Hey 9999,
I don’t think this would give me any special authority over anyone. I also didn´t mean for it to sound like I will be “going after” anyone, quite the opposite, I am interested in what people are building and this would allow me to dedicate more of my time to them.
I would like to create a list of all the stuff Nouns are funding (have funded) and track the progress of these projects (the list would include builder’s socials, links to updates (discord, social media posts, external), the results, media coverage, etc).
This would highlight the wonderful projects that we funded and let us celebrate but also allow us as a group to learn from our mistakes. A lot of people lose track of the projects we fund after they vote because it’s hard to keep up with everything, my work would allow anyone to see what´s going on just by taking a quick glance.

Coralorca

Hey Maty and nouns,

As a builder I think your interest has helped us move forward and deliver, so I trust that you are a good fit for the task. It is true that we need to create some accountability for all proposals to make sure we increase our rate of success.

But I also agree with 9999 and I am not sure this should be concentrated in one resident “officer”.

“to see what´s going on just by taking a quick glance” we could build an app that tracks proposal delivery and builders score. Some interesting data to have would be: funding, nouner sponsor, milestones, deadline, deadline extensions etc.

We could do a small grant to kick things off, start with a spreadsheet with Maty and get input from the community. Maybe Maty can assemble a nounish team to build this project management app and become a builder himself? Im sure it would be helpful to have you as a prop builder as well.

9999

Thank you. Yes that sounds useful and that list should probably live somewhere on Nouns Center (cc @Coralorca @cdt.eth)

Again, my only concern is with the language of “auditor”, “officer”, “devil’s advocate”, “watchdog”, etc. and any official status that such adversarial terms convey.

In summery: NO to the racoon wearing the police uniform, YES to the cat taking notes on progress.

cdt.eth

happy to add! maty can create in Notion and manage, and then I’ll pull in the table/list data.

noun22

i think it would be so helpful to have a single place that has up to date information on all proposals

we are scaling very fast and it is so hard to keep up with what’s going on

i’d love to have it all in one place with status updates

seneca

hey maty, thanks for the proposal.

wrt prop house, we have plans to implement systems to incentivize accountability and would prefer not have one person “watching” over builders. ultimately, i think high quality builders will build, regardless of needing to report or not.

echoing 99’s thoughts, i am against any sort of protocol-wide role (“officer”) holding people accountable. i am for documenting what’s happening within the ecosystem (similar to what nouns.center is doing). in that regard, you have my full support!

Coralorca

Yes, we need a dashboard that is documenting proposal status and progress.

Oni

love the idea of a publicly available dashboard that is neutral and credibly maintained for on-chain props, and agree with 9999 and others that this shouldn’t any singular role/title, but I would support a prop that is funding maty to build this type of thing out.

as the data set grows (and we potentially add new columns/data points) this could be a powerful tool for various insights

maty

Here is a link to the proposal dashboards/databases I have been building:

Notion link.

  • check out “additional information” sections for valuable info about reading these lists
  • you can find updated info on uncomplete proposals like On-chain prop 7, 11, 28, 36 and Prop House props Coffee Mugs and Nounify bot.

Any feedback is appreciated. Is there any info missing?

While creating the lists/databases of proposals, I thought it would be cool to have the option of looking at “profiles” of individual builders, so I created a third list called Nounfolk where you can see all these builders. Most of the profiles don’t have much information (apart from the automatically synced Proposals), but I tried to get Nouncillors to personalize their profiles, so feel free to take a look at these. A list like this could be used in projects like Prop 63, Nouncil´s proposals etc, since it contains basic data about builders (discord and twitter IDs, ENS, proposals).

noun22

thanks Maty, this is great work!

noun22

just as an update to this - maty has been hard at work on the dashboards and SG is renewing this for another month of service

thanks Maty!

fiveoceans_dev

Inspector Maty!
image

mmmatto

As someone making a proposal right now I have to say having a clear single or limited number of folks to keep in sync with about progress is really valuable. For us it’s important that the DAO as our client knows and understands that we are doing what we promised to do. Raising awareness around project updates can be its own significant effort in addition to whatever work we’ve committed. Having a clear, semi-centralized process for project updates and accountability where we can feel like we’ve made reasonable efforts to be transparent and keep our client up to date is really important for us and reduces friction for prop creators IMO.

maty

Wanted to share some comments on few of the proposals:

7. Nouns x NOIR - behind schedule, Thierry has not found a suitable location yet, funds have not moved
11. Nouns Comic - seems to be abandoned, 3 ETH leftover, cant get a hold of the builder
28. Send Noun to Space - NASA shot it down, funds returned
46. Marketplace - Beta went live @ https://noun.market
63. Retro rewards - Based on point 6 of the proposal (Any funds which the administrators conclude they are unable to disburse constructively (in accordance with Covenant) by 07/01/22 will be returned to DAO.) the funds should be returned to the DAO since as of now, none of the 100 ETH have been distributed.
65. Mad Realities - 20 ETH leftover funds, not clear yet how these will be/were used.

Blowned.eth

@Maty can the DAO pay you extra for a deep dive into accountability like how ZachXBT goes in for the kill?

Haha, guess I just want to see more juice lol

Sov

Hi there everyone.

I research grants and incentives programs and would like to dive in and learn a little more about Nouns.

I was curious if any kind of tracking like has been proposed here has been implemented yet?

If there is a place I can see a consolidated view of all the past grants that have been submitted and then those approved without going through all of them here on the forum that would be great.

yekim

for some reason i picture a dominos tracking order bar “proposal submitted”,“proposal passed”, “building”, “quality analysis”, “shipping”

2014-10-07-Pizzaxsmfg4vutfyvk0nyw8tr

noun22

Hey Sov, there are a few places to get that information. Nouns DAO offers builders a few different ways to get funded:

Here is a link to everything the Small Grants group has funded.

Here is a link to a tracker with info on proposals made On-Chain and on Prop House

Sov

This is great … thanks for the information. I will dig in a bit and review!

noun40

Thanks for the updates! Very appreciated.

Any more notes on why the administrators of prop #63 deemed the funds were unable to be disbursed constructively?

maty

The administrator structure of the prop has been kind of loose - the onchain prop only mentions wag specifically and other admins were supposed to be appointed from those who were willing to help (nouncil is only holding the funds till distribution, this is not a nouncil prop).
Toady, Joel, me and others showed interest.

Before wag went MIA, he has been trying to create a list of all builders within the community (with their respective projects and funding amounts) to give an overview for the future coordinape. But due to the loose admin structure and wag being MIA, the fact that there even was a hard deadline was forgotten, and nobody stepped up to take over the prop in time.

This is not meant to blame it all on wag of course, all of us who showed interest in administrating the prop are to be blamed.

noun40

No worries. Appreciate the transparency. Also the fact that I’m reading this is a testament to the value add of your work here!

Sov

Hi there … sorry for the delay just circling back on this a bit now that I am digging in more.

I reviewed the notion sites you have linked and found them very informative, thanks for that. I was curious on this image that you sent across and was wondering where I might be able to go to find where it was taken from? I am particularly interested if the totals (in terms of # of projects and ETH distributed) were kept updated over time as I would like to share this image out in the research piece I am writing but want to make sure it is current when I publish.

Thanks again for the help!

maty

You can find it here - Funding | Nouns Center but im not sure how frequently its updated.

cdt.eth

will be updated today.

Sov

Awesome thanks so much for the quick reply!

Sov

Hey there … it’s me again. I wanted to ask another question here related to the information provided. I was able to review the small grants funding page along with the notion site. I did have a couple more questions related to the small grants if you might be able to help with some insights?

  • I noticed on the notion site that the “cause” columns are linked to external content but when I try to click on each of those it seems the links aren’t working for me. I just wanted to check out some of the projects and where the rows linked and wanted to see if some way to allow view access?

  • I wanted to know how nouns has been tracking the impact or completion of the grants that have been submitted? In the documentation it mentions that the funding committee will monitor the community and I just wanted to see if any kind of other tracking mechanisms in place I could take a look at that show how the projects progressed and if they met the milestones that were agreed upon?

Thanks for any help you can provide. I am getting some great details in the research report I am compiling you guys have done a great job in putting together a lot of information that is not so easy to find with other programs I have researched.

maty

(1) Could you please provide which links are not working for you? I recently copied this database from the original small grants notion page so there might indeed be some things that dont work properly.

(2) I do not think anyone has been measuring the impact of proposals/projects. i think by “monitoring” they meant they will search for people who deserve retroactive reward as opposed to tracking the impact of funded proposals

Sov

You are seriously so helpful … thank you. I can tell you that the response I have received from other programs is nowhere near like this so know I really appreciate it :slightly_smiling_face:

  1. This is the notion page where the links don’t seem to work for me:
    Notion – The all-in-one workspace for your notes, tasks, wikis, and databases.

  2. no worries on this just curious. I did find where you are tracking the grants progress in a separate page so I think that would probably be ample for the research that I am conducting.

Thanks again … I may have some more questions as I progress. I am probably half way through the research report that I am writing at this point!

maty

that is the original Small Grants Notion page, but I am able to open all the links so this might be an issue on your side? also feel free to contact me in Discord (maty) and I will answer any questions you have in DMs