I would like to put forward three DAO-level projects to lead: Media Updates & Comms, a Docs Maintainer & Improver role, and Arrow Compass (a quarterly community-priorities system). This post lays them out so there’s room for anyone in the community to give their input before anything goes to a vote.
I’ve been brainstorming project-based solutions to DAO inefficiencies for the past month. I’ve tried to be as objective as possible and seed project ideas I genuinely think are imperative to succeed in our mission. I’ve chosen three of these brainstormed projects to lead. They’re varied, they suit my strengths and appetite, and they happen to reinforce each other: Media brings people in, Docs keeps the reception area they land on in good shape, and Compass keeps contributors pushing the same handful of goals.
Media & Comms is the one I’m keenest to finally start. A year ago, in the Onboarding proposal, I left marketing out of scope on purpose, the line was “I don’t think we’re ready for that, yet” because we needed the platform first: a focused website, good docs, real onboarding paths. That groundwork is done now, so I think it’s time.
A new approach to how these are compensated: gated, paid on delivery.
Each of these projects defines its payment criteria up front, and they’re deliberately near-binary: clear enough that an AI agent could check whether they were met. Compensation only releases against work that actually shipped, and every period is logged in a simple accountability table (see below) so the project lead can point to exactly when they did the thing they said they would.
We took a bigger swing at comms last year with Project Visibility that never reached execution, partly because nothing tied payment to delivery, partly because of bad timing with project onboarding still finishing up. These proposed projects are built the opposite way, so the DAO is never paying for intention instead of output. I’d genuinely like this to become the default for how we run projects and bounties going forward and I volunteer myself as the first test pilot. This way, we can be certain that the proposed project will come in on or below budget. Great, consistent work by the project lead is rewarded with maximum allocated compensation.
Why these projects matter.
Awareness compounds: a steady, professional presence spawns fractals of influence, where more eyes bring more contributors, more contributors make every other project here flow more easily, and the consistency itself earns Arrow real credibility in the wider hardware and DAO space. The awareness flywheel is the one that turns slow, early progress into momentum, and right now it deserves real focus and real hours behind it. That’s the bet these three are built on. Beyond awareness, doc maintenance and strategic direction are less sexy but essential elements that would otherwise drift and slow our progress sooner or later.
Motivation & Method
All the projects I am putting myself forward for totals ~32.5 hours a week all in, about my ceiling for full-time contributions. This would be my first time in nearly 5 years where I am contributing full-time to Arrow, so it is a strong commitment, but I feel it is a critical time where we need to make moves to grow and flourish. I feel the tailwinds for what we’re trying to build - open source hardware - have never been stronger, so let’s do it now.
The caps below are Arrow’s standard AIP-004 experience-level rates applied to those hours. Each runs on AIP-006 terms (monthly cap, no rollover, start date on passing, a funding expiry so the DAO actively reviews rather than auto-renews).
The schedule I’m proposing: this discussion is live, then the Snapshot vote opens Monday 29 June and runs about a week, and if it passes the projects start Monday 6 July 2026 for a 26-week term (about six months, running through early January 2027). Compensation is disbursed at the end of each month, once the accountability table shows that month’s criteria were met, with a review at the 26-week mark to renew or wind it down.
1. Media Updates & Comms
Purpose
“To consistently document and broadcast Arrow’s work in public: recruiting contributors, spreading our bounties, and building credibility by turning the everyday progress of an open aircraft hardware ecosystem into a steady, interesting stream of media.”
Scope
Sorry, I couldn’t come up with a catchy name for this project. It’s essentially reliable content stream from the official accounts: build footage, CAD and prototype shots, screencasts, memes/GIFs, test clips, audio, in addition to being present in the replies instead of posting into the void. We’ve got multiple aircraft moving through design, prototyping, and testing, and almost none of that work gets published today. It’s happening and it’s documented internally; we’re just not sharing it. As a build-in-public org we owe it to the contributors who haven’t found us yet to show that work louder than we would if we were only building for ourselves. This will also be our opportunity to connect with investors, collaborators, suppliers, workshops, media outlets, co-marketing organizations and influencers.
The formula is: interesting media → link to get involved → call to action → repeat, daily. Ties straight to AIP-008: an open, internet-native org only grows if people can see it happening.
The spirit here is regular-cadence, short-form content: the steady drip that keeps Arrow visible, not big documentary-style productions. Channels are evolving but right now it’s mostly X/Twitter, where a couple of weeks of testing posts and replies has worked well, with YouTube, LinkedIn, Instagram, and TikTok coming in over time as derivative (but still important) downstream channels. The proposal deliberately doesn’t lock the platform mix, I aim to be closely monitoring analytics and follow what’s working. I think it’s probably better at this stage to be consistent and impactful on one platform initially, then work in a pipeline that publishes the same content on alternative platforms downstream.
Not in scope: long-form, heavily-edited video. That’s high-effort, time consuming work, and to meet publication deliverables I’d have to rush or compromise the quality of larger productions. When a big edit is worth doing, it’s better rewarded on its own merits through a retroactive grant or a standalone bounty, not through this project. This is not to say longer form content isn’t important, it is equally as important, I just don’t think it is a good idea to mix and match because this could result in just a couple of posts per month.
Project Lead
Me (Sleety). Media and content is my main area of expertise: I’ve thought about this kind of work for a long time, I hold a high standard for it, and I understand Arrow’s culture, brand and voice from the inside. I’m not the most technical person from an engineering perspective, but with a bit of research and/or guidance I can create and summarize moderately technical content. I ran an experiment in anticipation of this project and posted 10 times, replied/commented 36 times between May and June 2026. As a result of this account resurrection we received 75 new followers on X/Twitter, 341 likes, 326 profile visits, 822 engagements with our posts and over 24 thousand impressions (views). I enjoyed the process, but it is a lot of work that requires daily creativity and commitment to do well.
Screenshot of analytics:
Payment gate
A weekly threshold of short-form content, set against the comp being asked for:
- ≥ 7 short-form posts/clips per week across our active channels (primarily X today), and
- ≥ 3 substantive replies/comments per day or ≥ 15 per week for genuine engagement presence (not just broadcasting).
Posts and replies are scored separately, each against its own share of the cap, so a surplus of easy replies can never paper over thin posting. Posts carry the larger share (they’re the time-consuming, higher-impact work) - replies carry the rest. Once the floor (e.g. 7th post of the week) is met, the eligibility for comp releases in full. If I fall short then only that share pro-rates. The proof of publication is in the social media feed and anyone, human or agent, can count it.
These are floors, not ceilings. The cap pays for the role and the booked hours, not per post, so 7 is the minimum that releases the month, not a number to stop at; in a strong week of viral posts the post/reply count should rise above it.
What that looks like in practice: This accountability table will live in the project repo (or maybe in the DAO forum) updated weekly. I can create a .mdx page for the automatic calculation of the deliverable-based compensation. The cap ($4,480) is split 70% posts / 30% replies ($3,136 / $1,344), scored independently:
| Week | Posts/clips (≥ 7) | Posts met? | Replies/day (≥ 3) | Replies met? | Evidence |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Wk 1 | 9 |  |
3.4 avg | |
links |
| Wk 2 | 8 | |
3.1 avg | |
links |
| Wk 3 | 6 |  86% |
3.0 avg | |
links |
| Wk 4 | 10 | |
3.5 avg | |
links |
So in this example, replies cleared every week, so the full $1,344 replies compensation releases. Posts cleared three weeks; week 3 hit 6 of 7 (86%), docking one-seventh of that week’s posts share (~$112). The posts share releases $3,024 of $3,136. Month total: $4,368 of $4,480, and crucially the strong reply weeks did nothing to rescue the posts miss.
Cost
~17.5 hrs/wk = 70 hrs/mo at Level 4 ($64), so the monthly cap is $4,480, gated monthly, no rollover. That’s pure labour (researching, composing, editing, scheduling) and I have access to several thousand dollars worth of tools/software (Adobe Suite, Cinema 4D, Claude, ChatGPT, Midjourney, Unicorn, Magnific, Raycast AI, Relume, Cavalry and more). I’ll keep lean and absorb any hours beyond the cap. I wanted to be mindful of budget, so I chose Level 4 for this project, as in my opinion it contains a mix of highly skilled (Level 5) work (media/content) alongside moderately skilled (Level 3-4) work (marketing/comms).
2. Docs Maintainer & Improver
Purpose
“To treat Arrow’s documentation as a living product: keeping the global docs experience clear, beautiful, and low-friction as the DAO grows, so any contributor anywhere can find what they need and get started.”
Scope
This is the ongoing stewardship layer for the docs platform the Onboarding project built, not a rebuild. Project Onboarding set up the website, the Docusaurus docs site, and the first onboarding guides as a one-time effort. But docs are an infinite game: someone has to keep asking the UX questions. Can a newcomer actually find this? Who writes the guide when a new feature ships? Who updates the docs when something in the DAO changes? How is Arrow creating an environment of unparalleled remote collaboration?
Right now that’s nobody’s job, so it drifts. This Docs Maintainer & Improver role owns global docs infrastructure: structure, styling, UX, new features, and the guides that should appear whenever something ships or changes. Individual project docs stay with their teams; this is the layer underneath them. It’s the most direct expression of AIP-008’s “minimal friction for global contributors.”
(Uniqueness note for the AIP-006 gate: this deliberately doesn’t overlap the completed Onboarding build. That was the one-time stand-up; this is the continuous upkeep it always implied. Happy to sharpen the boundary in discussion.)
Project Lead
Me (Sleety). I designed and built a significant portion of the current docs platform, so the understanding and context is already there. I have wild ambitions for our docs and what they could be so I will be constantly experimenting, but will also remain pragmatic in addressing incremental improvements, both simple and complex.
Payment gate
A monthly floor of shipped, live-and-merged work, split across the project’s two jobs, improve and maintain:
- ≥ 8 docs copy improvements per month (≈2/week): rewrites, new guides, clarity passes, restructures.
- ≥ 4 docs functionality improvements per month (≈1/week): e.g. an integrated
.mdxdoc-app, an embed, an automation, a new interactive feature. - Maintenance kept current: open docs issues (broken links, outdated/incorrect pages, doc bug reports) triaged and resolved within the month, so the existing docs don’t rot while new work ships.
- New-feature coverage: whenever something ships in the DAO (a new feature, a passed AIP, a process change), a corresponding doc or guide exists within ~7 days. Turns “who writes the guide when a feature ships?” from a hope into a commitment.
Every item is a real artifact an agent can verify is live in the repo/site. When I hit the target, I am eligible for compensation; if I am short of the target, it pro-rates.
What that looks like in practice: the accountability table for Docs project lives in the project repo (or a dedicated place in the DAO forum), updated monthly and the compensation amount is calculated:
| Criterion | Committed | Delivered | Met? | Evidence |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Copy improvements | ≥ 8 | 9 | |
links |
| Functionality improvements | ≥ 4 | 3 | 75% |
links |
| Maintenance (issues kept current) | backlog cleared | 7 of 7 closed | |
issue links |
| New-feature coverage | doc within ~7 days | 2 of 2 features | |
doc links |
In this example, three areas meet the threshold for full compensation, but “Functionality improvements” lands at 3 of 4 this month, so that line pro-rates. Splitting the cap evenly across the four for illustration (~$750 each), the shortfall docks ~$190, so the month releases roughly $2,810 of the $3,000 (exact per-line weighting should go into the final Snapshot-voted proposal, but a four-way split seems sensible). Same principle as Media & Comms: paid for what shipped and every line checkable in the website repo.
Cost
~10 hrs/wk = 40 hrs/mo at Level 5 ($75), so the monthly cap is $3,000. Level 5 in this case as it involves highest quality deliverables and specialist knowledge of our docs, code, design, general culture and infrastructure at Arrow.
3. Arrow Compass
Purpose
“To give the whole DAO a single, visible set of community-voted priorities each quarter, plus the orchestration to turn them into real bounties and progress, so anyone who wants to move Arrow forward knows exactly where to push.”
Scope
A community-voted set of quarterly priorities, locked in via Snapshot, that act as a totem anyone can check and get inspiration from. Two weeks before each new quarter we hold an open working call to debate and pick the goals that matter most. Then comes the part that makes it more than a list: someone (me) orchestrates it, spinning those goals into bounties, running the cadence, and reporting honestly on whether we’re actually getting closer. The priorities are selected to facilitate the AIP-008 roadmap, made concrete one quarter at a time. It is anticipated that the priorities selected will mostly be at the DAO level.
What it produces
Two tiers of priority, voted in per quarter, with me as “Keeper of the Compass”:
- 3 push goals: the quarter’s real focus, where we want measurable forward progress. (Occasionally 2 or 4 if a quarter genuinely calls for it, but 3 is the target; more than that and focus dissolves.)
- 2–3 “don’t-drop-the-ball” priorities: the steady-state commitments that must keep ticking and must not regress while everyone chases the push goals.
Plus the orchestration around them:
- A meeting + brainstorm every two weeks (twice a month) dedicated to creating bounties that move the push goals.
- An honest progress update published every two weeks (are we closer on the three, and are the don’t-drop-the-ball items still healthy?), with wins and losses shared openly so others can step up. This is a document published to Discord, docs and DAO forum.
Example: the DAO votes Q3 push goals (web store, flight-tracking app, token launch) plus a couple of don’t-drop-the-ball items like keeping treasury reporting current and the test program moving. Over the quarter we run the meetings, ship the bounties, and post the updates that turn the three into real progress instead of three things we keep meaning to get to, while making sure the steady commitments don’t quietly slip.
Project Lead
Me (Sleety). I like holding the through-line, and I’m comfortable saying out loud when we’re off track. One thing worth being explicit about: the Keeper is a facilitator, not an executor. The Keeper isn’t on the hook for single-handedly delivering the priorities; that’s unrealistic and not the point. The job is the things a facilitator can actually control: running the cadence, creating and assigning bounties, encouraging participation, and documenting the movement. The community does the building; the Keeper keeps it pointed and visible.
Payment gate
Gated on facilitation, not outcomes: only what the Keeper can actually control, all verifiable artifacts:
- Quarterly: the Snapshot vote held + the priorities published (3 push goals + 2–3 don’t-drop-the-ball items).
- Each month: both meetings held (one every two weeks) + both progress updates posted (measurable movement on the push goals, plus a health-check on the don’t-drop-the-ball items) + ≥ 4 bounties created or assigned against the live priorities (around two per meeting).
Fall short on a line and it pro-rates, same as the other projects. The Keeper is measured on initiating and encouraging the work, not on whether the DAO finishes it.
What that looks like in practice: the accountability table for Compass lives in the project repo, updated monthly.
| Criterion | Committed | Delivered | Met? | Evidence |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Meetings held (every 2 weeks) | 2 | 2 | |
links |
| Progress update posted | 2 | 2 | |
links |
| Bounties created / assigned | ≥ 4 | 3 | 75% |
bounty links |
In this example, everything meets the minimum gate except bounties, which land at 3 of 4, so that line pro-rates. Splitting the cap evenly across the lines for illustration, the shortfall docks its share and the month releases roughly $1,170 of the $1,280 (exact weighting agreed up front, as with the others). Because the gate is facilitation rather than outcomes, none of this depends on how far the DAO actually moved the priorities, only on the Keeper doing the orchestration.
Cost
~5 hrs/wk (20 hrs/mo): opportunity research, the two fortnightly meetings + progress updates, bounty work. Monthly cap $1,280, gated, 20 hrs/mo at Level 4 ($64).
It must be noted that the outcome from this project isn’t “Sleety will solve DAO problems”, but more Sleety’s responsibility is to:
- identify ways to improve DAO
- coordinate discussion
- create solutions (through bounties)
- report honestly on progress
- follow up and liaise with bounty contributors.
My contribution is measured through the successful delivery of the items in the accountability table.
Showing the work: the accountability table
Each project keeps a single, public accountability table in its repo, updated every pay period: each gated deliverable, what was committed, what was delivered, whether it was met, and links to the actual deliverables. Before any payment releases, the table is the thing checked. The accountability tables for each project section above show a worked example with the pro-rated math - only required if the gated targets for each criteria hasn’t been met.
If there is no table, funds are not to be released. It keeps the project lead honest, gives the DAO a clean audit trail, and means nobody has to take anyone’s word for anything.
The combined proposal
| Project | hrs/wk | Level | Monthly cap |
|---|---|---|---|
| Media Updates & Comms | ~17.5 | L4 | $4,480 |
| Docs Maintainer & Improver | ~10 | L5 | $3,000 |
| Arrow Compass | ~5 | L4 | $1,280 |
| Total | ~32.5 | $8,760 |
_Caps follow AIP-004: monthly hours (weekly × 4, on the 48-week year) × experience-level rate. Media and Compass at Level 4 ($64), Docs at Level 5 ($75).
A touch over the 32 hrs/wk I’d call my ceiling. These three reinforce each other on purpose. Compass sets the priorities, Media broadcasts the progress against them, and Docs makes sure anyone the Media pulls in can actually get started. They have a similar cadence too: Compass’s fortnightly meeting is the natural home for Media (and any future Voice or Changelog work) to plug into, so we’re not paying three times over for three separate meetings.
The thread that runs through all of it: gated, paid on delivery, criteria clear enough that an agent could check them. I lead the projects, I report my deliverables and the DAO only pays for work that shipped. I think that’s the ideal setup.
What I’d love feedback on
- Are these the right three for me to hold, or is one better off open for someone else?
- The gates themselves: are the cadence floors (Media: 7 posts/wk + 3 replies/day, Docs: 8 copy + 4 functionality + maintenance + feature-coverage/mo, the Compass criteria) set at the right level? This is the part I most want pressure-tested.
- Does anything proposed here seem unrealistic or overly optimistic? I’d rather catch it now and refine before the Snapshot.
If the shape feels right, the timeline is: feedback here over the next few days, refine anything that needs it, then a Snapshot vote opening Monday 29 June. A pass means a 6 July start on a 26-week term. Please feel free to pull it apart and critique in the meantime.