ApeCoin DAO lacks established communication channels, 0xAmplify defends $1 million proposal

Communication is needed for the effective governance of decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs). Given their status of no central leadership, members of a DAO can quickly become overwhelmed and uninterested if there is a communication gap.

Realizing this bottleneck, some members of the ApeCoin DAO proposed the creation of a communication team. Called “ApeComms,” the group will establish and maintain communication channels between the Special Council, Ape Foundation, and the ApeCoin DAO through Discord and Twitter. ApeComms has asked the DAO for funding of $998,000 in $APE to implement the idea for a 12-month period.

In this exclusive interview, DAO Times speaks to DeFi consultant and strategist 0xAmplify, who is one of the initial eight members of the ApeComms team. 0xAmplify shared some insights into how the communication team would operate, its functions, and a rough estimate of what the funds will be used for.

From the proposal, it is obvious that the primary aim of ApeComms is to streamline the dissemination of information between the Special Council, Ape Foundation, and the ApeCoin DAO. How would you describe the current state of things within the ApeCoin ecosystem in terms of communication?

I think there is an overall lack of established communication channels. What I mean by that is, currently anyone can reach out to the Foundation, or the ApeCoin Administrators, but without having an established understanding of that relationship there’s little incentive to provide the same info over and over to the same 20 people individually. Currently there lacks an understanding of who is reporting to who, and when. The ApeComms proposal attempts to create these standards, as well as appoint users who will act as direct lines of communication between the Foundation, the Administrators, and the community.

If approved, the ApeComms team will be offering its services to the community for 12 months. What is the big picture? What improvements do you think would have been rolled out in the next 3-4 months?

Long term we want to establish a consistent relationship between the Foundation and the rest of the community while creating onboarding and educational materials to encourage users to contribute and help grow the DAO. If approved, we will become the first working group of the ApeCoin DAO, and we plan to utilize our relationships and community to scout individual contributors who may be able to join and form new working groups, like a grants council, governance policy group, or treasury management teams.

The ApeComms Team will perform five primary functions upon launch. Do you expect the scope of your work and contributions to the community to extend beyond these core functions?

Absolutely, yes. We intentionally left the proposal rather open in scope of our abilities and duties. We don’t want to cage ourselves into a specific niche by stipulating the exact nature of our daily work. We are not only ApeComms team members, but ApeCoin DAO members as well. So many of our initiatives and goals have a lot of overlap between “official work” and “personal projects.”

Beyond building and maintaining an official Discord server for ApeCoin DAO and creating educational content to assist users during AIP activities, are there other plans to boost community participation through incentives? One could argue that the set of people also active in the DAO are familiar with how things work.

I suppose you could argue this is true, however it won’t be the main focus of the Comms team. Naturally we help any AIP Author who wants us to look over and give meaningful feedback on their proposal, but we are not planning on creating any incentive mechanisms out of our Core Team. Instead, we are encouraging other AIP Authors to put forward these initiatives, see: https://forum.apecoin.com/t/8564

You have requested $998,000 worth of $APE for the initial setup and the first-year operations of ApeComms. $110,000 out of this amount has been earmarked for operational expenses. Can you highlight what expenses fall under this category?

Like the ApeCoin DAO, the ApeComms initiative is exploratory in nature. I don't want to sound vague here, but our expectations for ongoing expenses fall under the following categories:

• General operating and setup costs
• Maintenance and security costs for a community Discord
• Potential developmental & ongoing tech expenses
• Content creation
• Legal support

This is akin to a contingency fund or an as-needed budget for any line items that may come up. In short, this budget is to help support the Comms team where needed, as it pertains to completing their job descriptions in a timely and professional manner.

Each member of the team will be compensated with $110,000 or $9,250.00 of ApeCoin/month. Are there any mechanisms in place to checkmate the activities of team members?

We have twice weekly team meetings and constant text conversations happening on multiple channels in our internal ApeComms Discord. If we feel any one of us are not meeting expectations we can discuss and position appropriately.

ApeComms is starting off with just eight members drawn from the BAYC/MAYC community and the ApeCoin DAO. Are there any plans to expand the team beyond these core members? What would it take for a regular $APE holder to join ApeComms?

We’ve discussed internally how to deal with both disputes, deadlocked voting, and adding or removing team members with a majority vote. There are absolutely opportunities for the regular $APE holder to get involved and on boarded into the ApeComms team. Showing initiative and proactively working towards our goals of transparency is a good way to get onboarded.

At the moment the $APE price is highly correlated with the performance of Otherside and Yuga Labs. What do you think about that?

1 $APE = 1 $APE

What other DAO projects should we keep attention to? Maybe some of the ApeComms team members are also participating in other DAOs that are worth watching closely?

Besides the two big ones, MakerDAO and Synthetix, I’m a huge fan of (and participant in) Nexus Mutual. I think they’re goal is very ambitious and I’m stoked to try Nexus V2.

How do you keep track of DAO news? Maybe you can recommend news channels or influencers.

I work full time in Web3, so my day typically starts with checking emails, prices, news, governance proposals, and finally Twitter. A huge amount of my daily news intake comes from Medium and newsletters I’ve subscribed to over the years.

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