#ESD Funding Request: Funding of the Umbrella Proposal

Summary

The authors request funding of $16,500 equivalent USDC as per budget to bootstrap a three-month project called the Umbrella proposal to pay for GravityDAO services, establish a team to act as a first point of contact for conflicts and problem, and document associated policies. Additional to these reactive measures, the proposal aims to improve communication, error, and conflict culture to which we commit ourselves already in our Community Guidelines.

Funding is requested to deliver the following objectives:

1. Fund mediation-as-a-service by GravityDAO for an period of 3 months
2. 5 interactive training sessions with 2x dates each (to account for different timezones) run by GravityDAO
3. Elaboration of
   • organisational policy regarding mediation processes and for specific conflicts types through GravityDAO consultancy
   • practical communication, error and conflict guidelines as part of the onboarding GitBook
4. Kickstart of the umbrella team. Find ~2 members in the first Gravity training sessions to work for setting up the team (part time with a few hours per week or via bounties)
   • organisational, research, and cultural work as well as networking with other DAO communities
   • documentation of the results of 3.
   • knowledge exchange with other DAO communities and participation in advanced training

Situation/Rationale

Conflicts between persons or groups occur naturally - like bad weather. They affect all kinds of organizations, where they cause strong emotions or reactions and are often related to

• scarcity of resources
• division of functions and tasks
• power relations or
• the role of the organization

Especially in remote-working environments and DAOs conflicts can happen easily with different grafity

An anonymous survey clearly showed that this is also the case in the Aragon Network.

Instead of stigmatizing conflicts or pretending that they are not there, we should allocate time and resources to actively care about and solve them so that everyone feels well and likes spending time here. This will help us to ‘Govern Better, Together’ and establish some of the cultural mandates and a solid foundation from which to grow the Aragon network.

GravityDAO offered their help and services to support this proposal. Their track record speaks for themselves: of the 35 complaints received in the TEC

• 50% settled by just listening to the parties and giving advice
• 18 cases went into a mediation process
• 17 of them were successful in overcoming the conflict
• Only in one case, one of the parties rage quitted the call