Over the past few months, CityDAO has become very decentralized - moving from a core team to a guild structure. To keep us united, we’ve developed a mission statement and key metric as a glue that binds together the guilds and project proposals.

Every organization needs is a north star. Our Mission Guild converged on the following mission:

The mission of CityDAO is to build the blockchain-native network city of the future.

This means we are building a decentralized city built on blockchain - a network of properties owned by the DAO united by our community. Perhaps it could even encompass a real incorporated city in the future.

Most successful organizations have a clear way to quantify what they are working towards. At CityDAO, we have a new key metric called Citizen Time at CityDAO Property.

Citizen Time at CityDAO Property = Number of citizens x Number of days at CityDAO property.

For example, if 7 Citizens spend 2 days on CityDAO land, that’s 14 citizen-time. This metric will align us around creating a useful network of CityDAO properties.

Examples:

• Someone proposes building a structure people can use for living / camping on Parcel 0. This would likely increase Citizen Time ✅

• Buying a new Parcel for co-working / community retreats. This would likely increase Citizen Time ✅

• Building a Metaverse Game ❌

Why is this important?

Our Mission and Metric are not just lofty ideas. Since we don’t have CEOs or executives calling the shots - saying what we can and can’t do, a metric can help us find alignment. When we evaluate new projects, we should be thinking - does this move us closer to our mission? Does this increase Citizen Time?

Everyone assumes Tesla makes cars, but Elon Musk explained how it’s the factory, not the car, that’s the product. The factory is the thing that enables everything. For us at CityDAO, what it looks like is switching our mindset from debating implementation details as a collective towards focusing on enabling project teams to get things done.

Moving towards project teams

The best way to enable stuff to get done in a decentralized organization is to allow small groups with a clear plan to come to the DAO, propose something concrete, and execute. Proposals should outline a few basic things like who is working on the project and their qualifications, what the success criteria is, how much funding they need, financials, and if it’s a big real estate purchase - a thoughtful analysis of what could go wrong. They should have a clear plan for how their proposal gets implemented and be compensated for doing so.

While the DAO superstructure is decentralized, within these small teams, a leader has total autonomy to decide things like who they want to work with, how to get work done, and how people get paid.

Abundance mindset

In our previous structure, guilds had a monopoly on execution. Now, guilds are more like resource pools, and citizens may execute freely, creating a healthy, competitive market for talent among project teams.

Numbering our Parcels 0, 1, 2 also creates a zero-sum mindset where multiple ideas are competing to be “Parcel 1.” For that reason, we will shift the naming convention to project names like Parcel Agartha so that the mindset is shifted from competition to abundance.

To seed the factory, we are releasing the CityDAO Proposal Guide to clarify the process and provide some examples.

Let’s build the city of the future.