Hello everyone.
Sandow Podcast number 52.
Today we'll be doing a reaction to Digging in the Sand episode 2.
And with a little bit of commentary mixed in.
Disclaimer is that I do not represent the sandbox game or the sandbox foundation.
I'm not your financial or legal advisor and nothing I say is to be taken as financial
legal advice.
When I say the word SIP I mean Sandbox Improvement Proposal.
When I say the word DAO I mean Decentralized Autonomous Organization.
And when I use the word SANFAM I'm talking about the sandbox community.
Those who participate in the people, products, and purpose of the sandbox ecosystem.
That ecosystem looks a little bit like this.
There's people.
Everyone from gamers to the sandbox team to product from the game client all the way down
to the DAO and the purpose which is described in the white paper and frequently talked about
by Sebastian Bourget, Arthur Madadid, and Yatsu who are some of the key leaders in the sandbox
ecosystem.
Yatsu being chairman of the Animoco Brands.
That altogether equals that ecosystem and today's episode is talking about the DAO and an episode
by one of the sandbox teammates.
For the scoreboard there are two developments.
There are two SIPs right now.
SIP number 19 and as yet unannounced SIP.
SIP 19 is for the Sandow Podcast which is what you're listening to right now.
It's on draft for another week before it goes to voting.
And the other one is team selection for the user generated platform development where
there are two proposals that we can select from.
There are two SIPs right now open for voting.
SIP number 16 and SIP number 17.
16 is one of mine.
Insert an in-game inventory filter for equipment and then SIP number 17 is a new horror game.
It's looks like episode number two for animation and experience.
For the SIP checkbook we're still at 15% of our $15.5 million budget having been spent.
And still 211,000 token holders with 2,000 voters having casted almost 10,000 votes across
15 proposals.
My name is Lancer.
I am the podcast host for Sandow Podcast.
Also president of the MetaWorlds group.
And we currently have two experiences.
I'm a landowner and an avatar owner and DAO participant.
So a little bit of a recap.
So the DAO was announced May 28th and there were immediately some SIPs, a bunch of AMAs
that happened to include me, about and Seb.
And here's some episodes that I did on these things.
Sandbox Game hosted an AMA about the Ambassador Program and about October 14th, DAO admin
team announced the new communications manager, Bobby Kunta.
Then November 17th, so about a month later, the first Dign in the Sand podcast episode
released which is the official podcast of the Sandbox DAO.
And it was a discussion with Cyril about the survey results and as well as some rationale
and some accounting of the early days of the Sandbox DAO.
The second Dign in the Sand episode came about a little over 10 days ago.
And this was an extended discussion with Cyril about progressive decentralization.
The third one released today, I'll do a reaction video although it's more about the introduction
of the official DAO delegates of which I've interviewed 10 of the 12.
Check out episodes 40 through 58.
Today we're going to be doing that second episode there about progressive decentralization.
Speaking of which, if you have not subscribed yet to Dign in the Sand with Kunta, please
do so now.
So go to the YouTube page over here, like that subscribe button and then you can see
all of the videos that are currently released.
And most of them, some of them are call to actions, some are his introduction, delegated
voting power, and then his episodes.
So some context, in the previous episode, episode 50 where I did a reaction video to
the first episode, I did the context here from the October 7th Medium article which
was covered in episode 33, Birth of the Sandbox DAO which covered episode 31, then the introduction
of Kunta as the communication manager episode 32, the new SIP submission process which is
episode 35, and then Dign in the Sand episode 1 which is episode 50, Sandale 50.
So check those out for some context for today and we're going to get right into episode
2 which was called Progressive Decentralization and the SIP process.
Alright, Sam Fam, what's up?
We're going to jump right into the fun with this one.
Welcome to episode 1 of the official Sandbox DAO podcast.
I'm your host Bob...
Oh, that's episode 1.
Let's move to episode 2.
There it is.
Alright, Sam Fam, what's up?
Bobby Kunta here, your host at Dign in the Sand and we're going to dig in it again right
now.
We left off episode 1 digging through community concerns from the community poll that we took
in 371 participants.
It felt a little rushed there at the end so like we promised you we're going to jump back
in and try and give a little bit more air to these topics that it's what it deserves.
Again it might feel like we're not digging into everything or answering the questions
you might have if you've got additional questions or concerns.
We're totally here for everybody so drop the comments, drop the questions in the comments,
hit us up on the forums wherever you guys know how to reach us.
So with that we'll just jump right into it.
I mean the next three bullets we're not even going to try and tackle everything.
I think we're going to do another recording for you guys here too in the next week or
two to dig through more of these concerns.
But we want to give everything the air it deserves.
So right now the next three bullets are just progressive decentralization in general.
People have brought up that phrase in a lot of ways and have various levels of I don't
know distaste or concern or questions about it.
So we want to address those.
The SIP process in general and the influence that the DAO admin team has over the advancements
of SIPs and the bullet that came out of at least a half dozen comments on the poll and
that we've seen also on our admin side which is just everybody just wants money which was
actually one of the quotes from the poll.
And it's a very real concern that we've got to address and tie into these three bullets
together.
So with that I'm going to pass it over to Cyril and we're just going to have a little
bit of a back and forth candid unplanned conversation here about these topics.
And here we go.
I mean what do you think?
Alright, as you can see, I'm less supportive of SIPs.
I'm really, really happy to see that they're doing this unplanned.
I think there's a level of authenticity, credibility and just straight transparency that results
from something like that where they're unplanned.
They're not necessarily doing it off the cuff, but they are prepared to know what they're
talking about even if they don't know how they're going to talk about it yet.
I think that's great.
The first episode they did really gave some needed insight into transparency, the progressive
decentralization, SIP process, the things that they were thinking about how the DAO
was formed, the preparation that went into it.
Cyril really, I think, showed himself as our DAO admin.
Speaking as a DAO admin, I felt that he was speaking to me, to the community, to San Fam.
And it didn't feel like a press tour, it didn't feel like a prepared speech.
It is a closed format, so just like here it's just a pre-recorded conversation between the
two of them, but it did feel real.
It did feel like he was our DAO admin speaking to us.
And I really liked that.
I thought that was awesome.
So let's continue.
We're happy to be here for episode two.
Like you said, let's tackle some of these hard questions and let's hope provide some
good answers to them or something that will help reach a common understanding.
So the first one on your list was progressive decentralization.
There was an article that was published some weeks, a month ago by The Sandbox.
And basically this was a declaration of intent or a reminder to the overall strategy about
the DAO.
And basically, if I were to summarize the article for listeners that haven't got the
chance to read it all, it was basically highlighting what's our strategy, like why we're doing
things the way we're doing things, like why, for example, the admin team has such a quote
unquote heavy hands on curation and why these SIPs are categorized the way they are categorized.
And I myself saw that early days because I submitted six SIPs to them in the old process,
not the new one where you have to be invited, but I submitted six in the old process and
that curation was extensive.
Like I said, my first SIP went to vote a month ago.
So it took what six, seven months for my first SIP to go.
My second SIP isn't voting right now.
So that's seven months now.
And then Sando podcast just cleared admin reviews.
It's in public comment now.
So that took about seven months as well.
So there was extensive back and forth that I did with DAO admin team on everything from
the price to the risks make sense, where the milestones, you really had to come to an agreement
with the DAO admin team for it to reach the light of day.
And where my SIP, my Sando podcast SIP, for instance, was originally 60 episodes and it
was much, it was much higher.
Now they negotiated me down to 15 episodes for about $15,000.
So about a thousand dollars an episode.
And so their rationale was that they had a lot of rationale for it being a trial run,
wanting to tie it to visibility and value added metrics, that sort of stuff.
So 15 was the number that they ended up asking me to come down to.
And so that took as long as it did from when I submitted my first SIP, I think in late
May to now.
And what is the type of SIP we encourage versus the one that maybe we don't feel are necessarily
aligned with the vision of the DAO or the vision of the sandbox had for this DAO.
There was quite a lot of feedback.
I think most of the comments were more about the autonomous part of the DAO, the A in DAO.
It's not entirely an autonomous endeavor.
But we're getting there.
And the idea behind that is much like when you're learning how to walk as a kid, you
always have an adult next to you that is holding your hands or when you learn how to bike.
And that's kind of the idea is the hand holding is a necessary step that we think is going
to take us towards a better quality of SIPs going forward.
And I'm not saying the SIPs we've got so far as of low quality.
What I'm saying is we want the first SIPs to be the beacon, to be the benchmark for
all of the future SIPs to come.
So by having the admin team that is heavily involved in the creation process, challenging
the author, making sure the SIP is compliant, negotiating prices, and et cetera, et cetera,
the idea behind that is to set up a benchmark.
This is the type of SIPs because that's a natural incline that what people do.
One year, two years from now, when people will try to write a SIP, they will look at
the SIPs that were successful.
The one that have been voted yes has been received very well by the community.
And I want when people look back at those SIPs, I want them to see SIPs that are actually
like well-documented, well-written so they know, OK, if I duplicate that, maybe I have
a better chance of success.
So that's the idea.
And that's also our idea to make sure we align with the vision of the sandbox, which is a
bit different from the other data that we saw.
This is not necessarily data that is here to finance all of the dreams.
The SIPs has to be about the sandbox or the sandbox ecosystem.
It has to fit into that narrative.
It cannot be about, let's open a donut shop and sell whatever.
I think here he's commenting on how Apecoin doubt, for instance, its first tweet out to
everyone was, we're here to fund the business ambitions of the Apecoin holders.
And so some of them funded things like a donut shop or a T. They funded a T shop.
And Serial here is saying that that's actually not what we're here for.
We're here to fund the things that add value to the sandbox ecosystem.
And again, that ecosystem looks a little bit like this, where you've got either it's benefiting
the people, the products that there are, the game client box at a game maker market or
the DAO or the purpose, which is to be the cultural capital of the metaverse or to empower
creators and that ecosystem making everything go round.
Well, what he's saying is that it has to be connected to those things.
And another thing he mentioned was that the hand holding thing that where as a parent,
you teach your child what to do.
And what that what that immediately reminded me of is the the admin when Mia bowed at her
AMA with Seb in August there, I covered this already in episode number episode number
19.
But I'm going to just do a few seconds here of where Seb says that and his AMA with me
about back in August.
Like activated everybody was in the community.
So also there's a question that because like the court is pushing some of the direction
directly and also the community is doing some similar stuff, probably at the same time.
So how do you balance the work between the cartoon and also the community?
And also I've noticed there's balance between the community coming from part of the cartoon.
Right.
So does all of this kind of like operational activities actually push into the Dow and
get approved and get some of the budget?
They are not getting the budget from the cartoon directly.
How does this thing kind of get balanced eventually?
Well I believe like, during speaking, I always believe like in the greater good, like that
if you, your mission, if you're committed to like drive positive impact, if you're committed
to show that creator can actually make a revenue on the platform and share those stories.
If we've been able to do the journey of sandbox for many years to drive like new job, new
possibilities for people to earn, etc.
Like good things spread out and they spread out not just because they get very viral,
but because like you want to recommend something that has done a good impact on yourself to
other people.
So I believe again in that notion of greater good and like if we show like we've done until
now the cap, the direction in a centralized manner and progressively we've been educating
our community to about that and we hand over that forward to that community.
Hopefully, like just like a child that you've been educating as a parent, they would have
a quite certain value, they would have a quite certain concept and hopefully they will also
carry those by themselves because of that education.
So that's a very similar way that Seb spoke about just now with Mia back in August and
Cyril says something similar now as he describes when he's approaching progressive decentralization,
we're approaching it from someone who is trying to teach the community the way that they would
like us to go when we're handed the reins fully or in some ways fully and that for Seb
he hopes that we will continue and for Cyril he's trying to demonstrate here's this bright
sip that we're looking for you to do and then here are the different actions that we're
hoping that you'll perform and continue on.
So very similar analogy there.
There has to be something about the game and the closer it is to the game client, the game
maker, the Vox edit, the closer it is to those topics, the better it will be.
So that's the idea and that's I think what was behind our thinking when we designed the
categories of budget that we also remind in the article.
Like there's the article maker point to remind the reader, okay, we've got platform, we've
got sandbox for good, et cetera, et cetera.
We have all of these categories and this is what they're here for.
So normally every sip should naturally adhere to those categories and if your sip does not
fall under one of these categories, it means potentially this is not a sandboxed out sip.
This is not a sandboxed out idea because these categories are supposed to be broad enough
and capture the type of sips that are wanted by the sandbox.
And I think that's an important point.
And the article also make a difference between dow centric sip and sandbox centric sip, which
I think is also an important point because we've seen a lot of suggestions on how to
make a better dow and frankly that's awesome.
I love it.
But that's exactly what we're trying to do as an admin tip.
We're trying to have a better dow, we're trying to connect to these API, have a better way
to capture, to monitor our KPIs, capture feedback, make sure we are transparent, we make sure
the sip process in terms of milestone being paid, et cetera, is captured in a way that
is more transparent to the community.
And the idea with, I think what this section of the article was saying is that there's
no necessarily a sip that is required for that.
You can just make a suggestion to the admin team, which is here to better the dow and
its mechanics.
This is what I still disagree with Sarah on this because it puts, I don't think the dow
admin team are the only ones who have or should have the power to suggest dow centric things.
Here he's saying that you, you don't have to do a sip for it, meaning don't do a sip
for it because we can submit a sip for anything we like, but not everything will become a
sip and he's saying we don't want that because we can use the operations budget that were
already approved in sip number two or three, I believe that approved the dow admin team
to use the operations budget.
And you can just submit it in the forum, that forum being over here.
So the way we found it was under here, dow features request.
So you go to this dow features request and then like you can already see me here, I put
something there.
And then there's, there was another one somewhere where I recommended asked for them to have
a mobile version and then they ended up implementing it through discourse on the mobile app.
So that that worked out well.
I didn't have to do a sip for that.
Maybe I'll find it here.
No, not there.
It's somewhere around here.
But I didn't have to do a sip and he's saying you don't have to do a sip either.
However, the big asterisk is that suggestion box can go right into a shredder and a sip
goes to a community vote.
So different type of shredder if the community rejects it versus it going into the forum
and you're not really sure if it's being given its its fair consideration by the dow admin
team or the dow admin team just says no, I don't think we should really do that.
A sip compels the ad the San Fam to vote on it to acknowledge it.
Whereas the suggestion box can be disregarded.
And it's kind of like the power of control that that we're looking at here.
So I disagree with Cyril and that I don't believe that the dow admin team should be
the only way that you do Dallas nitric things.
That said, I think he's going a really long way a really good way here to explain his
reasoning I before I was suspicious, just the way that our article was read.
And the article that we're talking about here is the Dow, the new sip process and the decentralization.
It was.
Where is it?
Here the medium article I did episode 33.
Ref reads that said we've heard the community's feedback and under so I've shown that one
a few different times.
And it was the medium article about progressive decentralization and I had a lot of questions.
I was very intense in my questioning there.
And that was because there was so little information except a one way here's how it's going to
be and I'm saying why is it supposed to be like that?
Or it seems like you all are exercising too much aggressive power there.
And there doesn't seem to be a way for the community to check you on your power and and
counter anything that it feels is abusive or offensive or overbearing or excessive.
There just wasn't a way for the community to to deal with that.
And there still isn't.
However, the way that Cyril is explaining his rationale here is a lot more.
I get a lot more now, even though I still don't fully agree.
I feel less concerned that we don't have that power.
And he seems to he drops his sense every now and again that it's not we're going to iterate.
We're going to give more power.
Just like a parent teaching a child, we're trying to teach the ad the community how we
want it to be.
So I have confidence that it's going to it's going to improve in the way the community
can can exercise its own power, maybe one day even propose its own DAL centric sips.
Yeah, so I feel less concerned about it than I did when I when I did episode 33.
So yeah, that's good.
We should be focused about bettering the sandbox, the sandbox game, the sandbox platform.
There's also an article published maybe about a month ago as well for submission guidelines
and just updating that, which also clarifies this whole process.
I noticed that in the new SIP guidelines as of today, they they I think they made some
of the suggestions that I that I asked for in SIP number 35 episode number 35.
So stand out 35.
When I covered the new stuff like that, it's cool, the new.
What am I trying to say the new SIP guidelines.
And so yeah, the like steps number zero through eight, they they change it to one through
eight.
So I thought that was really helpful.
It better it makes a lot more sense now.
Because before when I first showed up, there were some things that didn't make as much
sense.
It seemed like it made the process harder and more complicated and that sort of thing.
So I can see them iterating.
I can see them doing better and better.
Like here's is the I could see them doing just a lot more.
And so that was episode number 35.
Yeah, so this one here.
Yeah.
And in the beginning, the portions, I was going over the new SIP process, which was
an eight step process, but on the website only showed like four or five steps.
But when you actually sounded it out and wrote it down, it was it was eight steps.
So you had this, this right here, a changing of the old way from May to the new way, where
it went from it went from five steps, eight steps.
So it got a little bit more complex.
And I went through here on episode 35 exactly how that went down.
But then when you go to the website that first time, you can see there's the categories.
What I'm looking for is very beginning.
Somewhere in here, I showed the steps at the very top.
But now it looks a lot different.
And it looks really good.
So take a look.
Sandboxdown.com.
And then you go to up here and proposals, submission guidelines.
And then there it is.
Step one, you submit an idea to the SIP idea.
Excellent.
There's the link right there.
So anyone can see it now.
Then step two, your idea receives interest.
The DAO admin team invites you to submit your SIP.
That's so much clearer.
That is so much clearer.
Step three, submit your SIP by filling the form.
Step four, the DAO team will review it, help articulate the SIP in a shared document, leaving
comments.
So then there's the review.
Then step five, the DAO, the council issues recommendation.
Step six, you refine your SIP.
So you're doing two admin reviews, basically.
Step six and step four, which is more complicated than the old process.
But this is clear.
This is very clear what the process is.
And there's the categories, different SIPs.
I went over this in episode 35.
It was a long one because that's how long it took to get through all of these things.
All of this.
I see them iterating though.
I see them improving.
So just for the listeners out there who might not understand what we're talking about, are
we referring to juice boxes or what?
Maybe you're new to the DAO, but a SIP is a sandbox improvement proposal.
And that's the way that community members in the DAO can advance an idea to improve
the sandbox gaming ecosystem.
And what Sarah was referring to is we want game-centric or TSB-centric SIPs, not DAO-centric,
that the DAO admin team can in fact just use the operational budget to make improvements
or to make quick changes to get things done.
So we encourage community feedback in regards to that.
I like that they can do that.
I just still disagree that they should be the only ones with the power to do DAO-centric
things.
The only ones with the power to implement because we can just submit things and they
can disregard it.
Whereas with a SIP, a lot harder to disregard.
Just a DM or a comment on the board instead of a SIP can sometimes make...
I do understand where they're going with it though.
I get it.
Quicker and more effective change.
So just to speak to what you said right there, we want as little curation required as possible.
So the reason progressive decentralization and the SIP process are getting lumped together
here is because we don't want to have that heavy hand that Sarah referred to.
We want the SIPs to be coming in the way that they should be and require a little curation
or handholding that you mentioned.
So that's one of the kinds of benchmarks that we're looking at for what progressive could
mean.
Others could include things like Quarant being consistently met.
That was a problem and we don't want that that can't be a part of any DAO that's going
to be sustainable.
So to that end, we just implemented delegation.
We've got high hopes for it.
It should look pretty good.
We've got 12 verified delegates now, each with over 2 million voting power.
So we should be making moves to get Quorum all the time, but that needs to be consistent.
So we've got to look at that.
Other things are just having a framework that's really in place and functioning healthy for
how this is happening.
So that's just the processes to make things work.
A self-governing community with inclusive, responsive, and responsible leaders that step
up.
And to that end, including more of the community is also a comment that we've heard consistently
in the community poll, which is again what this episode is trying to speak back to.
So to that end, I'm just going to give a little not a leak, but a little hype mode here is
that we are working on a way that we think is going to be really well received by the
community to bring in more people into leadership roles to represent the community.
So stay tuned for that in December.
I think everybody's going to receive that really well.
So now, I want to tie this bullet in there.
So far, our discussion has really focused on progressive decentralization, the influence
of the Dow admin team in the SIP process, and how that has not been as well received
by the community as possible.
But the other bullet in there is everybody just wants money.
This idea of everything being extractive is something that we've seen in other Dows in
preparing for what we're doing here and just spend some time on spaces and you'll hear
what's going on in other Dows.
And from the background here as the admin team, we've seen the SIPs that are proposed
and see that people are seeing a big pot of money in front of them and maybe asking for
more than is needed.
The community also sees that and it's been a consistent comment on the poll.
That's a quote right out of the poll.
Everybody just wants money.
So for that extractive community principle to kind of shift towards something that's
building is important.
It's hard to put a metric on, but we all see that.
Yeah, definitely.
And I think it's back to our point about the progressiveness and decentralization and the
role of the admin team.
If you see consistently SIPs that are within a certain bracket being approved and SIPs
that are over another bracket being more challenged, more difficult to pass.
Because obviously if you ask for half a million, the community is going to be like, you better
deliver and we better understand what you're trying to do here.
Otherwise, I'm not going to vote for you.
But if you ask for maybe five grand, it's an easier conversation.
It's natural.
My experience right now though is that even a SIP that is low dollar figure, but either
runs afoul of certain DAO admin team perspectives, it's still difficult to get through.
Like my Sandel podcast.
I think I submitted that thing four, five, six months ago, but early feedback was, well,
we have another podcast we want to do and we're not sure we want to fund you.
And I persisted like, well, even if you have a podcast that you're going to do, it's not
here yet.
Mine is.
And I think that was like episode seven or think when I started that I'm at episode 52
now, and it's about to go to vote.
And so it was still really difficult a lot back and forth.
I had to change a lot of things about the SIP in order to get it to to compromise with
the DAO admin team.
So a lot harder than some of my other SIPs, which still had quite a bit of discussion,
but ultimately five, six months later now are going to vote.
So it doesn't feel like even my zero dollar SIPs are are easier to pass.
They all feel equally difficult.
Difficult, maybe is the wrong strong word.
They all feel equally challenged by the DAO admin team.
And maybe that's by design.
Or so.
OK.
And now that I can start to see the rationale behind Serial's point of view, I feel a lot
better about it.
But back then I had didn't have a lot of of access or or communication with why they were
doing what they were doing.
They were just doing it.
They were saying, oh, it needs to be like this.
It needs to be like that.
We don't want that.
And like, well, but this is this should be going to the community for vote.
And we just in some ways we're at an impasse.
So it was I was challenged quite a bit.
And I feel like maybe that was just the early growing pains between myself and the DAO admin
team, the DAO admin team trying to figure out how it wants to challenge SIPs.
And then for me, just learning how to propose a SIP that the DAO admin team believes is
beneficial to the community.
And I think that's just kind of learning, learning to be a community.
And I submitted six of them.
So I had a lot that were submitted.
So while I might disagree with Cyril on the DAO centric thing, I am beginning to understand
a little bit more and I'm less concerned about them challenging my SIPs to the degree that
they had.
They did challenge them a lot.
So I feel better about it now, especially that I hear SIP Cyril explaining his rationale.
What is the aiming for here?
Right.
So we're trying to find that sweet spot of being like for a SIP to be big enough to be
meaningful, but also not to deplete the entire treasury of the DAO in one or two SIPs that
could be also meaningful, but also so big that there's no room for everybody else.
So there's always this back and forth, this kind of a tug of war between, OK, there's
an author that has a lot of ambition, but also we have to make sure there's room for
everybody, right?
Because everybody has ideas and everybody has the chance to formulate that idea through
a SIP yet.
So we need to make sure we can last with our budget for the whole year.
And this was one of the ideas behind that.
And I think something you said also about the new guidelines that was published.
There's also an element of guiding the user more and more by now it used to be a template
with an email address, right?
And it was a bit disorganized because some people will write directly to us using the
email.
Some people will post on the forum.
Some people will try to get a SIP done directly.
Some people will go through Seb or through me directly.
It was a mess.
And so now we're trying to bring it to have like a one single funnel.
Like if you work on it, it felt like a mess.
It felt like they were overwhelmed and I think maybe they learned from that.
So I only did mine via email.
The only time that I ever went outside of that was by Google Doc, I mean an email.
I think I might have emailed Cyril once about one of my podcasts or one of my SIP ideas.
I think about the Sandel podcast when I first got the feedback that they didn't want to
fund it because they planned on a podcast.
And I think I emailed Cyril and said, hey man, this shouldn't just be up to you all
telling me that you can't fund my SIP.
Like my podcast is going right now.
And eventually I think that, I think he did listen to that and now it's going to vote.
So clearly something happened there.
And I was grateful that we found a compromise between myself and them on that.
But it felt like a mess because I would send comments.
They would then post comments on the Google Doc and then I would send, we'd go back and
forth, but there'd be like long stretches.
It would be, I would send comments, then they would have, there would be a week, then they'd
send something.
And then that same day or the next day I would send comments back and then another week.
And it seemed like they were overwhelmed.
Now I understand.
Okay, it wasn't just email.
People were trying to work with Seb directly and Seb was trying to work with Cyril to
get a SIP in.
That's exactly what it felt like too.
Seeing some of the other SIPs, like the sandbox ambassador SIP or the, maybe the blockchain,
like some of the really, the blockchain events where some of the studios who were, who've
been a part of the sandbox for a long time, probably was working through Seb and through
the, their, their contacts at the sandbox game because they have project managers, like
account managers for them.
So I can see how like there's many different ways that Cyril and the Dow admin team were
getting hit for these SIPs.
And it felt, it felt disorganized.
And now they're moving, they moved to a type form and the type form seems, I mean, it's
a type form.
So we'll go straight to whoever you hit the send button.
And yeah, so he's about to talk about the funnel.
E-commerce is like an acquisition funnel.
You have one funnel and you go in there on the forum, you test your idea and we look
at it and how we see, we're trying to assess whether the community likes your idea, which
is a conversation in itself, you know, how we do that.
And then we invite you to write a SIP and there's always one way to do a SIP and when
we invite you to do a SIP, you'll be guided through a series of questions.
So even without the...
And I went over that, which was Send Out Podcast number 35.
So we go over those questions at the end there where we do the interview process or the,
the rehearsal of the actual type form.
I go through all of the questions here and you can see what is that's being asked.
That's Send Out 35.
The intervention yet of the admin team and the project management team is not in charge
of SIP duration.
Like all of these questionnaires, and I think there's like 20 or 25 questions in there,
is already in itself guiding the hand of the author, making that, you know, education piece.
This is what we think a good SIP looks like.
And this is the question you should ask yourself.
And that's why we ask you those questions right now in the questionnaire, in the type
form.
And the second point was also about efficiency on our end.
Like receiving SIPs for multiple, you know, entry points was making it hard for us to
keep track on all of them.
And now with this whole process, it goes into database directly, you know, it's much more
easy to search through it.
You know, we also streamlined the way we handle those SIPs, which eventually will means more
SIPs gets processed per minute.
We're not per minute yet, but you know what I mean?
Like our cadence increase, which is the whole idea, right?
That's great.
That is the whole idea.
And I'm happy to hear that that that Cyril is very aware of that.
And that's what he's aiming for.
Efficiency and effectiveness.
So yeah, those have been noticeably hard to achieve in a lot of DAO experiments.
I like that we keep coming back to the word experiment because it always feels like a
grand experiment of just trying to do this right.
So as far as DAO admin team goes, I'm going to make a little step back and say to the
community here, I think we're probably the most transparent and vocal with our faces
out in front and of any DAO that I've seen out there.
So I might disagree with with Kunta on that one.
There are DAOs that have published their entire roadmap, their entire organizational structure.
Bankless DAO comes to mind now called Black Flag DAO.
I did a podcast episode with them, I think episode number 48, 47.
Sandow 4847.
And Apecoin DAO publishes who all of their their foundation people are.
A lot of different DAOs are transparent in different ways.
I wouldn't say that our DAO is the most transparent.
Now that we're at episode number two for digging in the sand, we are a lot more transparent
than than I've seen up until now.
The big thing that I noticed that we've done that I haven't seen of other DAOs is SIP one
or two published the the DAO Constitution and the DAO Foundation articles of association,
the memorandum of association.
They I have not seen another DAO do that.
So let's take a look.
It was down on Sandow.
I'm tripping all over myself.
It is SIP number.
I think it was SIP number one.
Right.
At the very bottom here, there's the elections there and the appendices, the Constitution.
So you get to see the Constitution also called the bylaws and for SIP number two and three,
you got to see the actual foundation articles of association and the memorandum of association.
So here they are right here.
I'm going to be doing a podcast episode on them soon.
I'm about 50% of the way through my analysis of all of this.
But I haven't seen another DAO release these.
This first one I've seen who have released this.
That's pretty cool.
But other than that, we didn't really know who the key players were.
We didn't know who was even part of the admin team and nor the foundation.
The SIP number two did say it.
The foundation is chaired by Michael Robinson.
Don't know who he is.
I don't have a LinkedIn for him.
I've been able to find out really exactly who he is.
But apparently he's very important in the process.
So it's kind of unclear how everything fits together as of right now.
And up until doing the same with Kunta and hearing Cyril's thoughts, very unclear how
everything was structured, how everything was going together.
So in the past, I'd say three, four weeks that the transparency really started with
episode number one here, November 17th.
We were not as transparent as a lot of other DAOs.
But now we are quickly closing that distance and I'm very happy to see that.
Where I can be commenting on stuff like this instead of spending time Google searching
who people are and making connections and sometimes getting it wrong.
Like I did, I did a little bit of wrong of Sandow podcast, I think 30, or the Sandbox
Dow where I did those episodes on, there it is 34 here where I was trying to figure out
what the relationship was between everyone.
I was wasn't necessarily guessing I did a lot of research and all of these things, but
I do a lot, a lot, a lot, a lot of research to do that.
Whereas the Dow admin team could have just told me these things, but he's told us these
things.
So here I am stepping through the process of what I thought was happening and I got
some of it wrong.
But I did get, I think a lot of it right.
Just the sort of transparency that I had to figure out for our for myself, just to understand
what was going on.
But Kunta and Cyril here, Cyril here are doing that now they are disclosing revealing
and being transparent and I love it.
Absolutely love it.
Hopefully this this new and increased level of transparency and communication from our
team is appreciated by the community here like it is Kunta.
It is.
We are trying to like stepping back out of my rewind back to what you were saying here.
What's these what these SIPs should be looking like is making clear improvements to the sandbox
gaming ecosystem.
So when we see that these SIPs are coming through consistently with high quality and
better quantity, that quorum is consistently met, that the SIPs aren't extractive, that
they're consistently making improvements to the sandbox gaming ecosystem, that Dow centric
ideas are being channeled through the Dow admin team so that we can make those effective
and efficient changes.
Those are those are the kinds of benchmarks that we're looking at for a progressive decentralization.
Yeah.
And to the experiment piece, I mean, I mean, you know, Kazen is dear to my heart and the
principle of, you know, iteration and experimentation.
Yeah.
And the fact that the Dow is in a in a legal like gray area, even though we've put, you
know, a foundation wrapper around it and we're doing everything we can to make sure this
is, you know, as by the book as possible.
Like I was saying last time, there's no school on how to build a Dow.
So the best way to build the best possible Dow is to be able to experiment, fail and
learn from our mistakes.
And as soon as we find something that works, we know iterate upon it.
For example.
That sounds a lot like like a like a program manager, like a product manager would say
make mistakes, fail fast, but do better and iterate on that on that so that you can succeed
over and over again that that Kaizen spirit that that I'm sure they'll say here in this
episode later on.
But ultimately, that legal gray area that he spoke on, I think that's referring to kind
of the ways foundation companies and the Cayman Islands and and regulation laws across all
the different countries, regulatory agencies like the SEC or there could be a lot of different
things that they're referring to.
So when I do my episode on the Constitution and on the Cayman Islands business law, I
read all of their business law and the Cayman Islands to figure out what exactly the foundation
company was, how it works.
And that's an episode I'll be doing here in the future.
But I think that's that legal gray area that Sarah here is talking about.
And to me, I don't think it's a legal gray area.
I just think it's an area where it doesn't have a lot of case law around it, as in people
haven't been suing each other too much over this yet.
They have a little bit, but that case law is really helpful where people judge disputes.
And in those disputes, you create new laws and new rules to better the atmosphere.
So it's not necessarily a gray area, so much as it is an untested area.
So like the United States sued a Dow in California, I think it was there was an another Dow that
just got sued by like a class action lawsuit by one of its members sued the Dow.
So these things help bolster Dow regulations and laws so that people feel like it's less
gray, which I think they're saying is it's like the Wild West where it's unproven or
untested and then more stable, like where you can make a business now in your country,
wherever you live.
And those business laws are much more concrete and real because it's been tested.
It's been proven itself and it's resilient.
So I think that's what they're talking about here.
But I'm sure as they do more episodes, we'll find out.
One thing that I think doesn't necessarily work today is our budget categories.
I don't think these are the best categories you could have.
These are categories that we've designed on the back of our head kind of replicate some
of the categories we thought the community will gravitate towards or replicate the way
the sandbox is organized as a company.
But it doesn't necessarily work.
So for 2025, there will be a new SIP that will be, you know, every year there will be
a SIP about the budget because every year the sandbox will be making a donation to the
Dow.
So as part of this new year.
I was surprised to hear him say that, that the categories and the categories he's talking
about are under the dashboard.
If you scroll down, you'll see here, SIP initiatives, LiveOps, game content, other operations,
staking, sandbox for good platform, NFT.
So here, here's all the categories and the new SIP process took some of these categories
out from being able to propose.
So like staking, you can't propose a SIP for staking anymore.
You can't propose a SIP for I think LiveOps.
And you can't do one for, I think four of them.
There's four of them you can't do anymore.
But here they are.
So he's saying that these categories, he doesn't think they work.
And okay, I don't, I neither agree or disagree on that.
I think that they're fine, but he sees something there that isn't working.
There will be a new SIP that says these are the proposed category.
And I want to do this a bit differently.
I really want to involve the community too.
So we're going to make suggestions.
This is what we think is best.
I really want to engage the community more.
I think back to your first episode when we were talking about the launch of this DAO
and how some of these things were rushed because we had to start from somewhere.
Now that we've done it for the second iteration of budget, we're going to make a proposal
that we were really going to take the time to iterate with the community.
Do you think this makes sense?
Because some of these budgets today are buckets that are reserved from the sandbox, for example,
and like LiveOps or staking and whatever.
I actually did not know that.
I did not know that LiveOps and staking were reserved for the sandbox.
That makes a lot of sense.
Now that I understand how things came down and the resistance I got in different stuff,
different SIPs, I think now, yeah, I just didn't know any of this.
If I had known that some of these were reserved, then I would have known not to select them
in my SIP drafts that I sent to the DAO admin team.
This doesn't necessarily make sense for the community to have access to those categories
because they cannot make a SIP that, you know, tap into those categories.
So why having them in the first place?
So we're trying to have all of those conversations.
That's a great question.
And some of my frustration and not knowing why they took away those SIPs, what happened
in episode 35 here, where I was trying to figure out, yeah, in the new SIP process,
where was it?
We were talking about the rules.
There are categories.
One of these, I go over the categories.
I note that those categories are no longer accessible.
There's some around here.
There you go.
Missing four of nine categories.
So 52% of the budget was now ineligible here.
And see if I can get to it.
The difference between disclosure of close family spouse, appreciate some clarity.
And so then we move along down the guidelines checklist item number four.
We're missing four of the nine categories, which accounts to roughly 52%.
So please clarify what's supposed to happen there because it's not clear right now what's
going on with those four categories.
By the reading of the definition of things, I think that means we're no longer allowed
to apply for the four that I mentioned earlier, which is over 52% of the budget.
So that's a lot of sand budget that's going away.
So where does it go then?
So that was only a month ago, episode 35.
And there just wasn't any clear explanation as to why they cut four of those nine categories
that you used to be able to submit SIPs for.
Now episode two, we have that answer that they looks like some of them, if not all of
those four that they cut from being able to SIP for money.
It seems like some of them were reserved only for the sandbox game company.
Okay.
Thank you for explaining that.
I just wish we had known that sooner and then I wouldn't have been so harsh on some of my
criticisms.
But I think that's a good way to think about that and think about the future as well, improvement
in the iteration process.
Yeah, that's great.
You also went into some of the community concerns that we want to jump into on our future recording
here.
So just to give a little preview of what's ahead and a reminder of what we've said in
episode one, some of the additional concerns that we want to wrap together into our next
quick discussion for you is going to be the special council and advisory board, their
selection, what their roles entail.
Some of them are compensated.
How just staking in general and how the staked lands and sand are how we're making advancements
towards including them in voting power or VP.
What you already mentioned, the Dow operating in this legal gray area and what that landscape
looks like, how we're navigating it, the language barrier that we're working to overcome
and what that looks like both in our marketing of the Dow in general, as well as in our internal
communications like on the forum and stuff and how we're trying to overcome that because
this is a global community to the fullest.
And what low participation looks like and how we can bring that back up and also how
that's partially that's everybody's responsibility.
If you're part of this, if you hold sand, if you hold land or a member of this, if you
want to improve it, bring in those other sand and landholders that you chat with online
and tell them that they can be part of this too.
So that's that's on all of us to bring up our.
It is, but until they see more, they've been Sam fan people until they see more of the
sandbox Dow transparency and more of what you're doing right now, content and zero until
they see more of that.
I think a lot of people are still going to be skeptical to bring other people in.
I'm bringing people in just because I'm bought it.
I believe that we're going to end up in a in a good place, transparent and disclosure.
I believe we will get more of this.
I have every reason to believe now that serial is a force for good and that the Dow admin
team that they're trying to do as best they can with time and resources that they have
there, that they're trying to improve and iterate on success.
And it's episodes like these that help me see that.
So I have no problem bringing in other people, but a lot of people who have left the Dow,
who have stopped caring about the Dow, they probably need a little bit more convincing.
They need to see more of this before they risk their reputation with others to bring
them back or just risk them feeling like they're wasting their time with something that doesn't
really grant them a voice, which is what a lot of people said.
And we saw that in episode one for digging in the sand that I that I responded back to
an episode 50, a send out 50 that that really showed the results that a lot of people were
saying a lot of people were saying things like I didn't feel heard, felt rushed, the
sips felt rushed and and I don't think that my voice matters and all sorts of things like
that.
Episodes like these that they're doing with serial and Kunta that is turning that around,
it's really showing that the team does care.
They are listening.
So I really like that.
So those are some of the things we're going to lump into our next conversation.
But where else do we go with this?
We're tying together right now, progressive decentralization, the SIP process and the
influence of the Dow admin team and how everybody just wants money, which is something I can
totally relate to because I'll tell you what I want money to planning with my wife trying
to think about how we're going to afford a vacation for, you know, Q1.
And it's always all about money.
So how we manage that in a non-extractive way, we have reviewed some of the benchmarks that
we want to look at.
There's no formal benchmarks are not being recorded.
There's no metrics anywhere.
There are things that we're all going to sense, not just the admin team, but you guys, the
community at large is going to sense all of these things as well.
And we want your feedback, the quality and quantity of SIPs when there's less curation
involved.
Quorum is consistently being met.
There's a framework in place that's functioning on how operations are carried out, which,
you know, Cyril just admitted, you know, like we're learning as we go and some of these
things, too.
But that framework needs to be in place, a self-governing community with inclusive,
responsive and responsible leaders that are stepping up a non-extractive principle in our
community.
That's just where everybody sees that the SIPs being advanced aren't about just getting
as much sand as you can.
They're about making as much impact as you can, which means talking about value in the
SIPs and how you're going to get the best deals.
I'm thinking like financially in a financially sound way, like business minded.
That's going to be important.
That's part of self-sustainability.
There's also been communication on the forums about how are we going to bring money back
into the DAO?
That's got to be something that's on the horizon, too.
So there needs to be channels, revenue streams opened up to bring some money back into the
DAO for long term sustainability.
These are important benchmarks.
There needs to be clear improvements out of all the SIPs for the sandbox game.
The game needs to be improved.
We all know that the creators, the ambassadors, the players, the investors, everybody has
pointed out where the improvements need to be made.
Now it's part of the DAO's job to figure out what those are and to propose solutions
to them.
Yeah.
And to your point about platforms, it's also a challenge in itself because I think this
is like where we encourage people to make suggestions because the players and the landowners
and the creators is our community.
But also we haven't figured out.
Well, I just said that the creators and the players are our community.
For a while, I think a lot of people didn't feel like that was true.
I think a lot of people felt like the DAO admin team didn't believe the creators and
the players were its community, that they had just given themselves power and they were
going to do this and that and just give the community something to do while the DAO admin
team really ran the DAO.
I think a lot of people felt that way.
I think they still feel that way.
Some people do.
And where Kunta said it's our responsibility as well and Sanfam to communicate with each
other, to DAO, to do DAOing together.
I agree with him that I think it is part of our responsibility to do that.
And it's important that Kunta and Cyril continue to disclose and reveal their thoughts so they
can turn that negative cynicism and skepticism around.
Without a way, to be honest with you and the listeners, to really make it work with the
sandbox.
The sandbox already has a team of professionals that is working on the backlog, that is working
on improving the game, that is doing all of those things.
And when we come to them with our request that comes from the community, it feels like
this is something parachuted on their desk and they're like, what the hell do I do with
this?
Because I already have a job, I already have a backlog.
I already have stakeholders breathing down my neck and telling me what to do.
And I'm already struggling to negotiate with all of these different stakeholders because
in the eyes of these different stakeholders, their stuff is priority number one.
But I have to address those.
And now the DAO is another stakeholder on top of it.
So how do we make it work?
What's the best way?
I completely understand this.
I'm a program manager and I have, I think, over 60 stakeholders, each one with a priority,
each one believing that their priority is number one.
And I completely understand how the sandbox team feels on this.
And now we're adding the DAO, which is a bunch of community and sometimes can be seen as
like a mob vote.
And how do they integrate that?
Well, I guess we're about to find out.
If my SIP number 16 makes quorum, it will be entered into the sandbox team's backlog.
And we'll see how it gets treated then at that point.
And it's a zero dollar SIP.
So it's not going to take any resources except time and effort of the sandbox team's product
team.
So here, Serial is talking about how they seem to be getting pushback from the sandbox
team about the DAO wanting to put things on the product team's backlog at the sandbox
game company, which is a separate thing than the DAO.
So product team has all these things that they have to do to do Game Maker, VoxEdit,
and the game client and the launcher.
And then here comes the DAO saying, no, no, no, we want you to do window resizing.
Or no, no, we want you to put in an in-game filter and kind of disrupt the product backlog
and the flow for what the DAO, that the sandbox team, that product team is doing.
I get that.
I get why that there's a little bit of pushback there.
The good news is that Seb has said many times where he wants the DAO to have a say in the
game's backlog.
So I have a feeling that's going to go okay.
We're going to find a way to compromise between us and them in the end because Ser Seb, who's
the co-founder and chief operating officer of the sandbox game company, he I think is
in alignment with what my SIP right now is doing for an in-game filter where the community
has said, oh my gosh, we want this.
We really want this.
And check out Sandow 51, so just the one I did a couple of days ago for a read through
of my SIP on that.
We have a placeholder in our backlog.
We agree on some sort of SLA.
All of these discussions.
I think SLA is like a service something agreement.
I think.
Yeah.
We're trying to figure this out behind the scenes.
And there's no magic one.
There's no like a magic formula to do this.
This is all like service level agreement.
A contract between, I'll show you.
Service level agreement is a contract between a service provider and a customer that defines
the level of service to be provided, how performance will be measured and what will happen if the
agreement is not met.
Trying to narrow it for the moment.
Yeah.
That's really awesome extra context to give everybody.
Just putting these things in place.
You're talking about a billion dollar plus company with employees across the globe, amazing
teams of engineers that are already doing really hard work and we're dropping more work on
them through the down.
And hopefully.
Now that I completely understand that.
And I think that's a fair, valid criticism.
So I'd like to find a way for it to be to be built for as long as Seb is willing to
ask the product team to do that.
And as long as willing as the community is to wisely do that.
I think we're going to find a pretty good middle ground.
Like we just talked about, we just spent 20 minutes, half hour talking about how we want
to drop even more work on them.
So how is that going to be?
How's that going to function?
So there are challenges on the back end of implementing all of this that aren't also
just readily acknowledged or even visible to the community at large.
So thanks for making that apparent as well.
I think we really hit everything we want to talk about here.
I don't want to drag this conversation on.
We've said it, we've summarized it already.
If anybody has any questions, thoughts, any ongoing concerns, go back to episode one.
I scrolled through all the responses to the poll.
You can hit pause on it and look at them yourself.
Drop any comments, questions.
We really want to be here.
Everybody is heard.
That was a common concern raised.
I think people's comments on that poll were coming from their experience months ago, but
now it is almost December 2024 and you are heard.
So you guys all know where to reach me.
You know where to how to jump on the forums.
We're here for you.
So let's do this together.
What more do we got?
Any final comments, Cyril?
No, looking forward for episode three.
That's it.
We're going to have one final more of these discussions here where we tackle those topics
I told you guys about before.
I'm reaching out to our delegates.
We're going to do an episode with some short video clips from them that highlight what
they're listening to and how they want to hear from you.
And that's it.
We're going to sign off here.
Hope we get some good comments, more good conversation.
Jump into the forums if you're not in there.
Send your friends over to X, follow, engage, subscribe, like the YouTube channel.
We're really grateful for everybody out there and excited to be doing this with you.
So that's it.
We're going to wrap it up.
I love you all.
Sam, Sam, keep coming back.
Cheers.
Keep digging in that sand.
Right on.
That's nice.
Keep digging in that sand, he says.
Cool.
That was a good episode.
That's a good episode.
I really like that.
So yeah, they talked about progressive decentralization, how everyone wants money.
Cyril talked about the legal gray area and then they went into the budget categories
and why they reduced it.
They also talked about how the TSB has a backlog and the Dow is trying to contribute to that
backlog where I think that's a valid criticism.
Seb said that he wants that to happen.
So we'll find the middle ground there.
And yeah, great episode.
I didn't have any community questions that I haven't already answered and I have no open
topics I need to jump into.
We're on episode number 52 and then episode number 53.
I'm not sure yet which one that'll be, but hopefully it's another delegate interview.
For SandboxBases, be on Discord, be on SandboxDow forums, on Twitter.
There's some hashtags here that you can look through.
And then on YouTube, there's a SandboxDow page, there's also LancerYT, which is what
you're listening to right now on the Sandow podcast, SandFamCafe.
On Mondays is MogaverseHall, on Saturdays is Bulls on the Block, Monday through Friday
is Coffee with Captain, and on Tuesdays is Whale Members.
See if there is someone to raid.
Or is it just me?
Oh, it looks like there are a number of people on right now.
Let's raid the sandbox game, the actual sandbox game.
All right.
Thank you all for your time.
Today was a reaction to the official SandboxDow podcast called Digging in the Sand, episode
two, they talked a lot about progressive decentralization.
I'm Lancer, and yeah, keep digging in the sand.
Thanks, SandFam.