Making LeapDAO process more async

Problems

1 . Chat (Slack) is a focal point for most of the decision making and information sharing. This forces people to spend a lot of time on the chat catching up with conversations. Otherwise, people lose track on what's going on and experience FOMO and sense of exclusion from decision making process.

2 . Information is lost easily and there is no well-known way how to find it. E.g. how to see which payout requests need to be processed, how to see which issues need review

3 . Decision making happens as a loose conversation without focus and clear outcomes. If you weren't present in the chat at the moment of conversation (e.g. timezone difference) you've lost you right to say. Secondly, these decisions are quickly lost in a stream of other conversations

4 . Holacracy calls are sync, and often require a lot of time.

5 . team members don't have coping strategies with lonelyness of remote work

6 . new members don't have "chat etiquette".

Proposed changes (by Kosta)

Avoid using chat for pushing information

Short term workaround: pile up review and payout requests and publish them only once a day.

Long term: use PubSub scheme. allow interested parties to subscribe on updates.

Avoid using chat for decision making

Move decision making in a more permanent environment (like Github issues a-la EIP system or hackmd).

Chat still can be used for quickly clarifying minor things and bonding.

Use more structured chat tool

E.g. Zulip, which provides conversation topics so it is easier to follow particular discussions within a channel.

Better Holacracy

Holacracy itself gives clarity and asyncronisity if done right →

• have properly structured calls, better facilitation
• prepare and share proposals in advance

Proposed improvements (by Johba)

holacracy calls:

→ better preparation by members (only written proposals, no call if nothing in the buffer)

→ better facilitation (facilitator training)

→ try to model tacitcal and governance tensions async (now premium feature, possible: chat bot integration)

lonelyness of remote work:

→ more emphasis on unstructured calls like dev standup.

→ "need some-one to hold space for me" messages, where team members help others to "vent".

→ organize team events and collective travel.

team-chat etiquette

an etiquette could be documenting, containing points like:

→ short pregnant messages in channel (respect screen real estate, channels should move slow, threads can move fast)

→ discussions only in threads

→ no begging, not going off-topic

→ giving people 24h to respond

References

[1] Andreas Klinger: Managing Remote Teams - A Crash Course

[2] Basecamp: Group Chat:
The Best Way to Totally Stress Out Your Team

[3] Zulip: Why Zulip