#orglabs by Ada Raimova, raimova#0473 Last updated: September 8, 2022 **Object of the study:** Study organizational structure of VitaDAO and its onboarding process. **Purpose:** To produce a documentation that will be used in DAO tooling. ## About Vita DAO [VitaDAO](https://www.vitadao.com) is a DAO collective for community-governed and decentralized drug development. Its core mission is the acceleration of research and development (R&D) in the longevity space and the extension of human life and healthspan. To achieve this, VitaDAO collectively funds and digitizes research in the form of IP-NFTs. It’s worth mentioning that Vitalik Buterin is one of the generous supporters of Vita. Find the whitepaper [here.](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Mcp5x9JtsLsPmi2UbUCJdPvr4PnPeAbz/view) Vita DAO being one of the most successful DAO in [Decentralized Science](https://hackmd.io/@raimova/HJRjgpdys) (DeSci) is worth studying. Focus of this document is onboarding methods.  Vita allows its contributors to earn in two ways: - by completing small tasks - becoming a contributor in a working group (WG) In this doc, I will be focusing on the latter as for the first (tasks) LFF already has a solution with dework. ## Onboarding processes ### Long-term contributors in Vita * Vita has 7 WGs: awareness, governance, legal, operations, tech and product, tokenomics and longevity dealflow. (e.g: LFF-the forge, love house, thc.) * Each WG has a steward. The role of a working group steward is crucial to the success of a working group. Each working group is led by one or two stewards who usually grow into that position by contributing work of great quality to their working group for a longer period of time. This process, however, has not yet been defined and formalized. *Soft requirements:* - A prospective steward should be mission aligned, have proven their domain expertise in the corresponding working group and bring leadership qualities. - Should have the support from their working group as well as a good working relationship with the other stewards. - A new steward should see the first month as a trial period. - A steward is accountable to the VitaDAO community and should act accordingly. - A steward must adhere to the code of conduct. - A steward must not be absent for a longer period of time without giving a reasonable explanation. - An offboarded steward should remain available as a point of contact for at least two months, except if personal circumstances do not permit this. ### Contributions and commitments * Available bounties in various areas/departments demonstrated on [Airtable](https://airtable.com/shrESy0oaOpHUe0HQ/tbl3piUTanK34uzr6) While bounties give ideas about what work looks like at VitaDAO, this also be a tool that serves for contributor commitment. The Bounty application form looks like [this](https://airtable.com/shrSl9zzOARMfBAeR?prefill_Bounty=Write%20an%20article%20for%20VitaDAO&prefill_Bounty%20Description=&prefill_Working%20Group=Awareness&prefill_Amount=500&prefill_Currency=VITA&prefill_Parent%20Record%20id=rec0dwRbecypMQqga). * *Another tool Vita uses: [VitaDAO Weekly Onboarding AMA](https://www.vitadao.com/community)* * *Incentivizing contributors (coordinape, dework)* Vita DAO is running an experiment with different rewards mechanisms for active and long-tail contributors, by assigning a regular $vita budget from tokenomics to explore these mechanisms. This could include giving them "kudos" that can be converted into a small payment (through something like Coordinape), or providing a decentralized task bounty board (such as https://dework.xyz/) where active contributors can suggest tasks and anyone in the community can apply to do them. They are starting with 5-10k VITA (5-10k USD) per month. Goal is to see if these experiments can incentivize active contributors in a more playful and openly transparent way. I will be following the experiment. ### Personal onboarding experiment at VitaDAO * I joined Vita DAO's discord community in April. * I joined community onboarding on Aug 31th. - I had some hesitations before joining onboarding and before introducing myself in their channel. The message isn't clear. It's not clear if the community is right for me even if I'm not a scientist, PhD as its a DeSci community. On the other hand, any kind of DAOs need contributors for various, from operations to awareness. * I rate my onboarding experince quality 3 out of 5. - Among other 7 WGs I wanted to join Awareness as I was planning to promote DeSci and VitaDAO by writing Twitter threads, articles and sourcing projects for Vita. They said they will be in touch with me soon and give me an access to #awareness WG channel in discord. But I haven't heard from them, nor I did get an access to the channel. **This discoordination may be caused my the common ''onboarding'' problem DAOs currently face.** - I had an impression that Alex Dobrin (Alex Dobrin#4847) who is the steward of awareness WG and who was supposed to run the onboarding was in rush to deal with other tasks and and he handed the meeting over to Hamza (Hamza.#7106), the guy from operations WG. - I see same people (about 5-10) doing many things within a huge organization (about 8k discord members). These numbers may indicate how big the workload and responsibility each core member has. In this case, they actually may need more contributors that will ease the workload, but again onboarding is the challenge DAOs face nowadays.