PNF's Roles & Responsibilities

Announcements Foundation
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In PIP-26 we outlined at a high-level the roles we expect to play in supporting Pocket’s ecosystem, which are included below for your reference:

  • Nurture Pocket’s values: assist stakeholders with continued refinement and reinforcement of Pocket’s values
  • Advocate for Pocket’s stakeholders: be available to listen to all Pocket stakeholders, track and amplify their issues, and provide them with a platform to be heard by others
  • Empower Pocket’s contributors: support the personal development of Pocket contributors and unblock them from creating value
  • Facilitate Pocket’s governance: help Pocket stakeholders make more informed decisions and build the mechanisms required to make Pocket a true hyperstructure
  • Preserve Pocket’s public goods: help the DAO to protect the integrity of Pocket’s open-source IP
  • Connect Pocket’s community: facilitate meaningful connections and reduce coordination costs between Pocket stakeholders
  • Represent Pocket’s DAO: carry out the DAO’s wishes through governance transactions, contracting with third parties, monitoring counterparty compliance with contracts, and enforcing accountability standards
  • Accelerate Pocket’s ecosystem: maintain a thesis for Pocket’s success, support strategic initiatives that further the thesis, and channel contributions towards opportunities
  • Defend against Pocket’s attack vectors: proactively identify and neutralize attack vectors, protect the DAO’s checks and balances, and eliminate central points of failure

Note that these role descriptions are subject to evolve as we learn more about being an effective steward of the Pocket Network ecosystem.

We also set out the following operating philosophies that we feel will uphold our mission and make us role models for the standards - and stewards for the culture - that we expect members of the ecosystem to adopt and maintain:

  • Gardening, not Gatekeeping: We will focus on helping a rich and diverse Pocket ecosystem to bloom, not on growing the size of (or reliance on) the Foundation.
  • Availability, not Access: We will engage with and listen to all stakeholders, not create an ecosystem governed by proximity and connections.
  • Empowering, not Entitling: We will level the playing field for everyone to contribute, not grant exclusive rights to the few.
  • Clarifying, not Controlling: We will eliminate asymmetries of context, so that stakeholders can understand, align, and participate consensually, not force them to trust us and fall in line.
  • Partnering, not Parenting: We will work side-by-side with the community as peers, maintaining a feedback loop built on conversation rather than curation, being constructive about our disagreements, thoughtful about our communication, and authentic about our blind spots.
  • Continuity, not Conviction: We will provide a stable presence by anchoring around our values and our mission, not by subscribing stubbornly to specific solutions, to create a directionally consistent opportunity space for innovation and evolution.

In the spirit of these principles, we are breaking down our role as PNF further into a full outline of the responsibilities we are delegating to each member of our team. This will serve as context for the personnel expenses in our annual budget, help you to understand who to contact if you’d like to discuss a specific area of PNF’s work, and empower you to keep each of us accountable to our responsibilities.

Note that, like the broader PNF role descriptions above, these individual role descriptions are subject to evolve as we learn more how each team member can be most effective in service of our mission.

All Foundation staff

  • Be available to listen to and support all stakeholders
  • Act as a role model and steward for the culture, values and behaviors of the whole network
  • Help the DAO to develop and nurture its culture and values
  • Evangelize the DAO

All Directors

  • Manage and invest PNF’s treasury to advance PNF’s mission
  • Coordinate efforts to formulate and maintain a holistic strategy for PNF and the DAO
  • Support the other directors and staff/contractors with, and keep them accountable to, their delegated responsibilities (outlined below)
  • Uphold the DAO’s Constitution and reinforce checks & balances
  • Proactively identify and neutralize threats to Pocket Network
  • Multi-sig, including governance transactions

Jack (Executive Director)

  • Keep PNF accountable to its roadmap and mission
  • Maintain the systems and tools to help PNF facilitate its mandate and execute on its roadmap
  • Hire, onboard and manage PNF full-time staff and contractors
  • Define and embed PNF’s communication strategy & procedures
  • Lead improvements to Pocket DAO’s governance, including efforts to design v1’s on-chain governance and disintermediate PNF as governance transaction executors
  • Coordinate governance processes

Dermot (Director)

  • Manage relationships with POKT’s institutional stakeholders
  • Support special projects in our ecosystem
  • Lead formation, negotiation, and management of strategic partnerships
  • Lead negotiations on PNF’s contracts, and manage and negotiate the DAO’s contracts on behalf of the DAO
  • Maintain policies & procedures to ensure compliance with PNF’s policies & procedures and relevant laws
  • Manage PNF’s part-time CFO
  • Prepare and manage PNF’s annual budget

Nelson (Director)

  • Manage relationships with POKT’s institutional stakeholders
  • Prepare and release quarterly transparency updates
  • Manage PNF’s banking relationships and financial tools/systems
  • Maintain PNF’s existing relationships with capital markets institutions (custodians, exchanges, market makers)
  • Coordinate internal admin with PNF’s supervisor and secretary
  • Maintain and reinforce PNF’s OpSec policies and procedures

Ben (Head of DAO Ops)

  • Lead improvements to the DAO Operating System that increase our operational effectiveness
  • Design and coordinate grant, bounty and other contributor or strategic programs and keep contributors accountable
  • Improve the contributor experience - from identifying opportunities, onboarding, delivering work through to rewards and payments
  • Maintain systems that support contributor operations, measure and ensure long-term contributor growth and satisfaction
  • Maintain policies & procedures to ensure transparency and compliance around work and payments

Ming (Head of Community)

  • Lead improvements to the community experience
  • Maintain communications channels to enable productive discourse
  • Coordinate community leaders, community events, and community building programs
  • Ensure a welcoming environment for new community members
  • Track and escalate community issues within PNF and the DAO
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Thanks for sharing @JackALaing

As you said, this list will evolve. It’s a start and hopefully in the right direction.

I do have some feedback and a few suggestions-

You are setting high standards for yourself and will be held to those.

Being open and non-hierarchical with countless individuals in multiple platforms will invite challenges in communication and coordination.

Will give you my example- here are the two questions I asked the PNF team a few days ago- 1 & 2. Am I saying those are urgent and some sort of genius thought, and am I saying I am someone important? Not at all! And I understand that PNF has just started and are dealing with other priorities.

PNF personnels will get bombarded with messages from multiple directions just because of the role you play in this ecosystem and the open nature of this structure. Therefore unless you set a system inside and set expectations outside about day-today communication, there will be confusions and misinterpretations.

And it might require continuous reminders as well because it would have been great if everyone read governance docs but sadly that isn’t the reality.

What are you thoughts about the following functions/tasks?

A) Marketing & PR: @Ming moving to PNF as Head of Community is a perfect fit! Do you think there is a need for DAO and protocol level marketing & PR as well? PNI marketing should ideally do PNI stuff; sure there will be overlaps but they should not be held responsible for representing the DAO and all of Pocket Network.

Or you think you will drive it by sponsoring community initiatives alone? Or there is no such need at all.

B) Industry and Competitor Research: Self-explanatory

C) Macro Oversight: Being highly correlated and affected by all things macro, do you think there should be someone tracking macro at all times as it impacts decisions around managing costs, treasury, maybe decisions around swaps to stables potentially in the future before expected downtrend, etc etc.

I am not alluding to hiring new or delegating to the existing at this point. That comes later after there is consensus whether the above functions/tasks are necessary at PNF or not.

Thank you for reading, I might have more.

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I love the work already being done to formalize the structure of the Foundation in its role of servant to the DAO. Looking forward to seeing it progress.

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Just giving you my quick two gwei:

PNI is planning to bring in a head of marketing that will ultimately market the protocol and Pocket’s ecosystem as a whole, as that is what PNI is selling. We plan to work this person once they’re onboarded. Over time, it would probably make sense for marketing to sit under PNF, but now is now not the time for that. And we do not - at least for now - have the budget for a standalone PNF marketing team, that sits outside of community initiatives. As mentioned in the budget post, we believe that the highest leverage thing we can do at PNF is to invest into the community, as there is so much value we can unlock there.

Coming from investment worlds, Nelson and I would be the most macro-oriented members of the team. Consequently, Nelson and I sit across most of the treasury management and financial ops and strategy roles in the team. However, Jack also has an economics background, and as it’s such a small team, we all help each other and there are no siloes So there is a nice balance across the team, and lots of complementary skills.

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Thanks @Dermot

I assumed this, however I also was hoping that you would agree on-

Just as community, I personally think Marketing & PR for Pocket should follow suit eventually.

Sure and this is great! It might bolster the impact if PNF does some shepherding here, talking specifically about marketing. I have few proposals partially ready, might look at the RAD criteria and submit there or else gratis!

Thank you! Also an area of my interest, will stay in touch on this topic specially when it comes to the DAO.

Sorry, didn’t ask a question here but meant the same. It would really help to incorporate this as a regular function somewhere. Just a suggestion, leave the rest to the PNF team.

Thanks again for engaging.

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