Onboarding Pilot Program: Final Report (Milestone 3)

We are excited to share our final update for the Arbitrum Onboarding 3-Month Pilot Program.

Our small team is comprised of the following five Arbitrum delegates: @Manugotsuka from @SeedLatam, @ocandocrypto from @web3citizenxyz, @krst and @Sinkas from L2Beat, and myself, @RikaGoldberg from @404DAO.

Please note that throughout the report, “we” and “our” will be used to refer to the collective Onboarding working group.

As a refresher, the Onboarding working group was formed to create and test an Onboarding MVP, also referred to as “Pilot Program.” Our North Star was to help newcomers navigate the DAO and start to contribute meaningfully.

We attempted to solve the following three issues:

  1. The lack of an outreach pipeline — how and where to find new contributors for the DAO.
  2. Scattered initiatives that pop up up in the DAO — how to ensure that new initiatives get visibility and avoid getting lost (as long as there are interested people).
  3. Initiatives that fizzle out — how to sustain initiatives in the long-term, including funding, organizational support, and operational support.

Our solution was multifaceted, as detailed in the “Completed Deliverables” section, with Fellowships playing a key role in facilitating ideation and collaboration amongst new participants. While we provided each fellowship with a structure (e.g, post recurring calls to the Arbitrum DAO calendar) and broad goals (e.g, publish a proposal to the forum), our approach was hands-off.

Some parts of our solution were successful, while other parts could be improved. This report captures both the positives and the areas for growth. You can expect to find the following items:

  • Completed Deliverables
  • KPIs
  • Reflections and Retrospective
  • Participant Feedback
  • Fellowship Resources
  • Next Steps
  • Appendix

Completed Deliverables

We completed the following deliverables for the Pilot Program:

  1. Onboarding Hub: an Onboarding Hub in Notion that consolidates fragmented information across the DAO and helps newcomers acquire context, as they ideate and collaborate in their fellowship groups.

  2. Telegram Account

  • A dedicated Telegram account, managed by all members of the working group. We monitor this account regularly and use it to post announcements and answer participant questions.
  1. Onboarding Calls
  1. New Contributors List
  • A new contributors list to share with working group leads across the DAO. This list consists of active contributors who meaningfully contributed to their fellowship. Note: for privacy reasons, we will not share the list here but instead will reach out separately to working group leads.

KPIs

We worked towards meeting both qualitative and quantitative KPIs, as outilned in our first post.

Qualitative KPIs

  • Increased participation and contribution from new members.
  • Increased understanding of governance.
  • Enhanced community bonds.
  • Better internal organization within the DAO.

Qualitative KPIs are innately subjective, however based on internal discussion and participant feedback, we believe that we met all of the qualitative KPIs with the exception of one: better internal organization within the DAO.

Although we attempted to meet this KPI by creating an Onboarding Hub, it was difficult to find the bandwidth for regular updates and maintenance. Therefore a hub is likely not a sustainable solution.

Quantitative KPIs

  • Engagement: Number of people joining onboarding calls and showing interest in joining the DAO.
  • Placement: Percentage of participants who join a working group in the DAO after the onboarding program concludes.
    Retention: Percentage of program participants who remain active contributors in the DAO for at least 3 months after the onboarding program concludes. Active contribution is measured by taking on a role in a working group.

Detailed data for the Engagement metric is provided below. Placement and Retention rates will be measured later, as participants from the New Contributors List join working groups and start to take on roles.

Engagement

Over the course of three months, we hosted 16 onboarding calls with a total of 86 participants.

The purpose of the onboarding calls was to present beginner friendly information about the DAO, and to collect basic information about each participant including their skillset and general DAO experience.

Across all of the onboarding calls, 66 participants from the total 86 responded to our messages on Telegram. From the 66 who responded, 52 clicked on the invite link to join a Fellowship group chat.

Most people who joined the Fellowship group chat were lurkers and did not contribute meaningfully to shaping their group’s proposal.

Only a small percentage of participants (~20%) or 17 participants, meaningfully contributed to their fellowship’s proposal, as measured by active writing and editing of the proposal draft.

These 17 participants were added to the New Contributors List.

This data is summarized in the table below.

Program Results Number
Onboarding Call Participants 86
Responsive on Telegram 66
Joined a Fellowship 52
Meaningfully Contributed 17

Reflections and Retrospective

Program Reflections

Broadly speaking, the Pilot Program was a success. We sourced new participants to the DAO and created a structured environment with Fellowships where newcomers could meet one another, ideate on DAO problems, and learn about Arbitrum DAO’s governance process.

Only a small percentage of participants (~20%) meaningfully contributed to their Fellowship, but this was expected. Some participants left the program early because of other commitments while others expressed a disinterest in the program because of misaligned expectations. For example, one participant told us that she expected the fellowship would be less demanding on her time and energy.

DAOs are not for everyone, and that’s okay, but one thing we may want to consider is providing participants with retroactive compensation for successfully completing the program.

As far as challenges, there were several notable ones.

The Fellowship program was designed to be challenging. But we didn’t expect that participants would struggle in the earliest stage of the process, when they were tasked with identifying a DAO need.

To mitigate this problem, we could have done a better job of communicating the necessary DAO context to participants.

How could we have done this?

Although context is acquired with experience, there are several things that upon reflection we could have done to help transfer context.

For example, we could have held workshops and invited working group leads to present on their area of expertise. We could have also assigned a mentor, a high-context DAO participant, to each fellowship. And we could have held office hours where one person from our team answers questions and provides feedback, helping to unblock participants.

These solutions would have been possible only if we re-assessed our directive to be hands-off, something that we would like to change in the next phase of the Program.

Furthermore, we realized that writing a proposal may not be the most effective final deliverable for Fellowships.

Writing a meaningful proposal that passes a vote is a rigorous endeavor that can take several months — even for existing DAO contributors. Therefore it’s likely unreasonable to expect that newcomers, with very little context, will be able to write a quality proposal in only three months.

As we work on designing the next phase of the Onboarding Program, we will likely double down on the Educational component, focusing on helping newcomers to acquire the necessary context through workshops and mentorship.

Our North Star remains unwavering: to help newcomers navigate the DAO and contribute meaningfully.

Program Retrospective

We conducted a team retrospective to discuss what went well, what didn’t go well, and what we can do better in the future. Below are the key points along with the insights gleaned.

What went well

  • We worked well together as a team and had good rapport, enabling us to effectively coordinate internally.
    Insight: We would like to stay together as a team to continue working on the onboarding initiative. With that said, we may need to recruit new people to the working group to share responsibilities so we will need to be mindful about how any new individuals will impact our existing team dynamic.

  • Krzys and Sinkas provided good direction on the group’s goals and approach.
    Insight: Leadership is important for team morale and for the working group to not fizzle out.

  • Social media amplification of the program’s onboarding calls was most effective when big accounts retweeted and quote tweeted (e.g, official Arbitrum DAO account)
    Insight: Target social media outreach by working with the Foundation and Arbitrum media influencers to amplify relevant information.

What didn’t go well

  • Two coordinators (a.k.a. "Gandalfs’) abandoned their fellowships, causing some short-term chaos as participants regrouped.
    Insight: Consider Gandalf’s self-selecting (rather than us choosing them) and also making a formal commitment to fulfill their responsibilities for the duration of the program.

  • The Fellowships struggled to understand their goals and what they needed to do.
    Insight: When putting strangers into a group, there will be many questions and some initial panic. The working group can help build camaraderie and rapport by facilitating icebreaker exercises.

  • The Onboarding Hub in Notion did not sufficiently communicate context to participants. It was also difficult to find the bandwidth to update and maintain it.
    Insight: Consider not continuing to work on the Hub in the next phase of the program.

  • Fellowships inefficiently spent time “planning to plan”, rather than focusing on the task at hand which was to identify a DAO need and propose a solution.
    Insight: Consider adding mentors to each fellowship and also hosting workshops with working group leads as guest speakers. Also consider holding office hours for fellowships.

  • The ecosystem mapping fellowship stopped responding and disbanded.
    Insight: Some fellowships may naturally fizzle out.

What we can do better

  • Refine individual roles and responsibilities in the working group.
  • Iterate on our internal processes so we can eventually scale the program (e.g, add more fellowships).
  • Proactively connect with other initiatives in the DAO (e.g, establish a communications channel with GCP, Questbook, M&A, and others).

Participant Feedback

We asked the coordinator of each Fellowship (a.k.a “Gandalf”) to provide us with their feedback. The following is a summary:

What they liked:

  • The grassroots/bottoms-up approach of the fellowship program.
  • The team environment, specifically the high-level of autonomy, collaboration, and transparency, of each fellowship track.
  • The opportunity to speak on the Open Governance Calls about their fellowship.

What they think we can improve on:

  • The cadence by which we add people to each Fellowship’s Telegram group (add people quicker after the Onboarding calls).
  • The process by which we ease people into Fellowships (one suggestion was to create a “Sandbox” or smaller test projects for learning purposes) helping participants to acclimate to one another before starting real tasks.
  • The communication with DAO stakeholders (e.g, notify Offcain Labs & The Foundation that Fellowship participants may be reaching out to them).
  • The commitment from Gandalfs so that they don’t back out mid-fellowship.
  • The process by which we communicate to participants the DAO’s goals, as well as the Fellowship’s goals, purpose, and objectives.

Fellowship Resources

We instructed each fellowship to create the following resources:

  • A delegate communications thread on the forum.
  • A document repository (preferably using the fellowship-specific page that we created in the Notion Onboarding Hub).
  • A proposal published to the forum that addresses a specific DAO-need (and garners written support from 3 delegates with significant voting power).

Note: The Ecosystem Mapping Fellowship failed to gain traction, with participants becoming unresponsive after one month. The other four Fellowships continued to collaborate throughout the program’s duration.

Below are links to these Fellowship produced resources.

Business Development Fellowship

Social Media Fellowship

Developer Relations Fellowship

Education/Content Fellowship

Ecosystem Mapping Fellowship (R.I.P.)

Next Steps

First and foremost, we are excited to continue refining the Onboarding Program, incorporating lessons learned from the Pilot to make improvements and continue reaching towards our North Star: helping newcomers to navigate the DAO and contribute meaningfully.

We have already started to work on the next iteration of the Onboarding Program. An initial version can be found in this GovHack submission by one of our working group members @ocandocrypto. I will be reaching out to delegates directly to get feedback and thoughts on the framework and this report.

If you are a working group lead and would like access to the New Contributors List, please reach out to me directly on Telegram.

Appendix

Acknowledgements

Thank you @krst and @sinkas from L2Beat for serving as valuable advisors to this working group, despite opting out of compensation.

Thank you to @hammertoe from The Arbitrum Foundation for willingly jumping in and advising the Developer Relations Fellowship.

Thank you to @cliffton.eth and @raam from The Arbitrum Foundation for your unwavering support.

8 Likes

I highly appreciate the team that worked on this. Many of the lessons we now know in hindsight, but I want to clearly address them here.

The root cause if this problem is there isn’t anything to onboard people to.

  • job placement
  • receiving a grant
  • building infrastructure
  • operations admin

I’m a bit confused about the desired output, outcome, and impact expected by the program. I don’t know that retroactive comp is the answer. The real answer may be that people need roles to onboard to - roles with compensation. And if these roles don’t exist, then we don’t need an onboarding function.

At GovHack, writing a proposal is a great forcing function to help newbies learn about the DAO, but it isn’t a great output to have newbies draft mediocre proposals which use up delegate time to then get denied and leave a sour flavor for the proposer.

Before thinking about a next version, think about the need for onboarding at all. What are we onboarding to? How does a program educating people about how DAOs work help us?

I’m scared this program will give people false hope for opportunities while also creating a situation where we have a lot of unpaid labor - both the leaders of this initiative and those who join the fellowship.

Is this role paid? (I personally hate that DAOs have a reputation for people having to do free work. Me doing a couple months of work to pass a proposal which pays me is me agreeing to the earnings, but the people who are onboarding have way less of a chance of getting there.

All said. Thank you for the effort and the lessons. I’d be happy to help brainstorm ways we can develop roles which could bring value to an onboarding effort continuing.

6 Likes

@DisruptionJoe Thanks for sharing your thoughts.

You asked, “How does a program educating people about how DAOs work help us?”

We don’t intend to design a program to educate people about how DAOs work. We’re considering to create workshops and mentorship so newcomers understand the specific needs of the DAO. For example, you can imagine a member of the M&A or the GCP working group giving a presentation to Fellowships on what the DAO’s needs are for M&A or Gaming, and how their WG is approaching solving that need. The working group member can then become a resource to Fellowship participants, creating a more interactive experience with high-context DAO members.

This is the kind of guidance that newcomers told us they wished they had.

7 Likes

Great job, appreciate the detailed retrospective.

Something that should be explored as well is how the onboarding process can be wrapped up with official channels like the Arbitrum website.

It’s a bigger project than it sounds like so don’t expect this group to tackle this alone, but certainly an important consideration when we think about how onboarding can be improved.

2 Likes

Hi Rika and friends,

Thank you for the hard work you’ve put into this. It’s nice to know that people are interested in joining the DAO and that there’s been successful efforts to do so.

We agree with your conclusions based on reading the notion pages and feedback from the groups involved. It would be best practice if the DAO could possibly assign a mentor to help lead these groups. Additionally, maybe we could consolidate resources and have specific days where onboarding groups overlap with core DAO groups to gain actionable insights from current DAO participants. Something like 1 committee/working group meeting per quarter must overlap with an onboarding group, so that DAO participants are kept in the loop. This might be good in place of workshops.

Moving forward, there should definitely be some official communications on the Arbitrum website so that there’s better and perhaps more manageable inbound.

As for compensation, we agree that there should be some retroactive compensation policy for onboarding participants who have used a significant portion of their time and effort in becoming an active DAO member. Other DAOs use retroactive grants/funding in some manner, though if we pursue this we would like to discuss clear delineated paths for onboarding groups moving forward.

Finally, given that the DAO is currently in an experimental phase and has multiple ongoing and pending initiatives/working groups/etc, we understand that the onboarding hub may not be useful or possible to maintain at this point in time, and thus it is understandable to deprecate this. Although, we will say that, the onboarding hub does not necessarily have to be the central place for all DAO initiatives, just a hub for all that an onboarding participant might deem as important/immediately actionable to them.This may mean working/core groups playing a more active role in posting/updating outsourced community/onboarding tasks.

1 Like

Thanks @RikaGoldberg and the rest of the Onboarding team for this effort. This is a largely unsolved topic across the space, and there isn’t a clear recipe for success yet. So, I really appreciate the proactive approach in taking this first step, even if it requires a lot of guidance and learning for the DAO!

Esp. in terms of infra/processes, and awareness, I think you’ve done a great job to extend the surface area at least for a set time (i.e., people got excited, and knew where to go). The drop-off in candidates that actually contributed meaningful work obv. is a learning and something to consider for future iterations when we think through onboarding individual contributors. At the very least, we are much smarter now about what it takes to onboard these and whether they can drive meaningful value in the DAO for major initiatives or if they need a specific subset of smaller tasks that need to be managed by a key party/individual in the DAO (my default view).

Would love to see this progress in any shape or form.

2 Likes

As someone who just recently joined and wants to contribute with time and research, I found these kind of initiatives super useful. I don’t know if this program is still going, but if it is, I will completely participate. Thanks Rika for this initiative.

@Juanrah I’m glad to hear that! Yes, we are working on designing a V2 of the program. Stay tuned in the forum for more updates!

1 Like