👋 Update: Imagine... a new form of work. A new form of collaboration. A new form of community. At Forefront, we are building this future, together. Season 2 Contributor Applications are now open. Join us, and experience the Vibez Infinity Flow.

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Forefront Season Two has finally arrived.

If we’ve learned one thing over the last year, it’s that DAOs are hard. But working through those challenges are exactly what creates a community worth fighting for.

There has been a recent shift in the ecosystem's dominant narrative, with many DAO operators and contributors realizing the need for more nuance in current conceptions of decentralization, autonomy and hierarchy.

Community is at the center of all that we do at Forefront, so our overarching aim will always be to nurture and enhance human flourishing and well-being.

Season Two will be all about supporting people in tokenized communities to do their best work.

Off-Season Recap

As Season One came to a close, we realized we needed to reflect, recover, and recalibrate to truly make Forefront a valuable and mission-aligned space for everyone involved.

Thus came the Off-Season.

The purpose of the Off-Season was to give the community ample space, time, and structure to answer three key questions:

1. What is Forefront’s North Star?
2. Who is Forefront for?
3. How can Forefront build a community that takes care of its people and makes a consistently positive impact on the ecosystem?

Candidly, these are questions that every DAO should be answering from Day 1. But during Season One, it quickly became clear that the answers to these questions were increasingly diverging at every level of the community.

For Forefront to continue to grow, there needs to be sustainable frameworks and systems that create appropriate structure for contributors, so that we’re all headed in the same direction. This requires time, better processes, and deep focus.

Our core team structured Off-Season sessions to address these questions in-depth, leveraging a variety of existing frameworks and innovating on new ones.

The Vibez Infinity Flow

To this end, we have crafted an approach to DAO Design & Governance that we call “The Vibez Infinity Flow.” This approach seeks to place the human being at the center of DAO Design. More specifically, the Vibez Infinity Flow recognizes a primal reality that exists within each human being: the inner impulse toward Autonomy on the one hand, and Community on the other.

In the context of a DAO, this primal Polarity expresses itself on two levels:

1. Individual-Level Polarity. At the level of the individual who is a Contributor of the DAO, the polarity is between Autonomy (freedom and unique self-expression) and Contextual Awareness (belonging and being a part of something greater).
2. Org-Level Polarity. At the org-level, the polarity is between Decentralization (that which is emergent, fluid, and adaptable) and Coherence (deliberately designed structures that give alignment and continuity to the community, ie, the North Star).

At the heart of Forefront’s DAO Design is the intentional creation of avenues by which these complementary opposites are brought into relationship, so that they may be reconciled and harmonized, again and again, by each Contributor.

During Season One, Forefront experienced fundamental issues arising from an imbalance of these two forces. This manifested as:

• Onboarding as fast as we can vs. as much as we need to, creating substantial overhead and degrading the experience of existing contributors. This prompted us to pause onboarding before the end of S1.
• Lack of appropriate scaffolding or structure to direct creative energy. Lots of ideas, little execution.
• Contributors felt confused with DAO priorities and/or overwhelmed by perceived “messiness.”
• Systemic contributor over-commitment led to abandoned projects and sub-par work quality.

Seeking Alignment: Forefront’s North Star

After this necessary Off Season work, the community landed on Forefront’s North Star:

“Forefront is the launchpad empowering web3 explorers to create at the frontier of tokenized communities.”

In Season Two, this implies a focus on three primary objectives:

1. Develop an intentional "A-Z" Onboarding Program that activates and delights Contributors and Community Members.
2. Build out a Web3 media engine focused on research, deep storytelling, and curation for social tokenized communities, their development, their philosophy, and their use-cases.
3. Develop a collaborative product strategy to support social tokenized communities and solve key ecosystem problems (think DAO Terminal, FF Staking, etc…).

A lot falls within the scope of those objectives, so we need to get really concrete about the principles and practices that we discovered during the Off Season to maintain the balance of the Vibez Infinity Flow:

1. The Forefront Forum (F3). A bi-weekly live discussion forum convening Core Staff, team Stewards, and all active Contributors. This continually refreshed contextualization ensures that the actions of sovereign individuals and groups cohere with the mission and priorities of the DAO community as a whole.
2. “Maximal trust and delegation” and Decision-Mapping. This philosophy explicitly grants specific decision-making authorities and constraints for all core roles (Staff, Leads, Coordinators and team Stewards) and working groups, with the goal of pushing decision-making to places of highest context.
3. Alignment Triangle, OKRs & Reflection Epochs. The Forefront DAO integrates into our production cadence rhythmic periods of rest & reflection. During these Reflection Epochs, the entire DAO is engaged in reflection, evaluating the impact of our activities against our shared commitments and OKRs.

Forefront Season Two

So what will we be working on in Season Two? The DAO has aligned on some inaugural working groups that will kick off with the start of the new season. Some of these may be familiar, and others are brand new:

• Onboarding (DAO Contributor & Community)
• Web3 Creator Residency
• Community Programming
• FF Journal & Museum
• FF Daily
• FF Newsletter & Wrapped
• $SOCIAL Index
• Metagovernance & D2D
• FF Product Labs

We’ve also revamped our approach to Onboarding and our Contributor Framework. The Vibez Infinity Flow is powered by Contributors who have wherewithal and resources of time and attention. Without these basic resources, Contributors are stymied in unfolding their autonomy in service to the North Star of the DAO.

Our Season One experience showed us that the “base layer” of our Contributor Community needs high-commitment Contributors. We’ll be onboarding contributors using a new Role designation to indicate their level of work commitment.

1. Pioneers. Forefront is the Contributor’s sole work focus [in terms of hours, minimum 30-35 hours/week].
2. Oracles. Forefront is the Contributor’s primary, or top 2, work focus [minimum 20-25 hours/week].
3. Alchemists. Forefront is a Contributor’s "part-time" commitment [15-25 hours/week].
4. Voyagers. Forefront is a low-priority commitment for the Contributor [10-15 hours a week].

The Core Team will seed initial working groups, acting as informal stewards and progressively decentralizing as “2nd generation” stewards naturally emerge. We will be prioritizing Pioneers and Oracles in the onboarding process, although not every working group will require them.

Join Forefront: “The Pulse of Web3 Social”

Forefront is The Pulse of Web3 Social.

In Season Two, we’re doubling down on what we do best: rapid experimentation, creation, and curation for social tokenized communities and their members. Some contributors have considered this vision a mix between a “web3 Rolling Stone” and a “web3 MSCHF.” Our core focus will be to empower web3 explorers to create at the frontier of tokenized communities.

We’re actively looking for new contributors to join us on this journey. If you’re as excited as we are about the future of Forefront, join the Discord and reach out to any Forefront core team members.

There will be a formal contributor application going out soon. Additionally, members of the Forefront team will be hosting Twitter Spaces and other events over the upcoming weeks to talk more about Forefront, Season Two, and contributor needs.

We’re building a new world for creators and organizations. Join us.

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