[GCP-XXX] Gitcoin Partnerships Council

🧙 🧙‍♀️ Ideas and Open Discussion
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Gitcoin just like the Ethereum ecosystem has always been a work in progress. Starting as a simple idea to help open source developers get paid, it’s evolved (as we all know) into a global movement around how community-first funding can and should be done.

Along this journey there have always been helpers and critics who have fought to make us better; who have worked to help us fine tune our mission, our products, and ultimately create forms of impact that echo far beyond just “crypto”.

Although I have stepped away from the DAO the past year I have always tried to emphasize that we need to continue listening to these key community members – our grantees, donors, and funders – because it is through their efforts that we are able to compound our own.

Unfortunately, I do not believe we are effectively listening anymore.

As an organization that prides itself on impact we will always have to make trade-offs and walk the fine line of getting funding to those that need it while staying true to our principles. This is not and has never been an easy task (and I really do know it). But to be a DAO it is imperative that the we that is making these choices is our community and that we are taking these steps together.

The current stewards council is a step in this direction, giving voices to those the DAO has chosen to represent its interests. The problem is that this council does not have a say in some of the most important decisions we make around the kinds of partners we support.

Needless to say, some of our partner choices have sparked some controversy in the community:

https://twitter.com/sassal0x/status/1691259752230313986

https://twitter.com/hudsonjameson/status/1691242732474314753

https://twitter.com/basedkarbon/status/1691119545627369472

https://twitter.com/scupytrooples/status/1691109210564730880

https://twitter.com/LefterisJP/status/1691118667071627264

https://twitter.com/ViktorBunin/status/1691451389174775811

And the list goes on.

The backlash here was not unpredictable, in fact, as others have stated:

We knew this announcement would ruffle feathers, but I really see it as an opportunity for us to push this conversation forward.

And herein lies the problem. In the Ethereum ecosystem, in community-first organizations, we have the superpower of clairvoyance. We can know what the community’s reaction to something might be because we can ask them. We should take advantage of this fact more often and regardless of how we feel about an individual partner we should get their feedback.

I recognize that we are moving to a permissionless world where anyone can use our protocols, and when we get there this may no longer be an issue. But so long as we have a program and so long as we are putting partners next to our brand we need to understand the consequences.

To this end, I’d like to propose the creation of a partnerships council which reviews and reserves the right to veto partners so long as they are contributing to a Gitcoin branded round. This council would be composed of a number of key opinion leaders in the Ethereum ecosystem who can help us avoid backlash in the future and rally what is unfortunately today an increasingly disenchanted base of true believers. None of this would restrict our current work towards building permissionless, open tooling that anyone can use like allo.

If this proposal passes, I would be solely responsible for putting together an initial short-list of 20 prospective council members, 7 of which could then be quadratically voted in through a separate Snapshot vote.

There is a much more nuanced conversation to be had on any particular partner, but at the very least I believe that is a conversation that should be had at the point in time that there is a meaningful decision to be made, not after the fact on social media.

To emphasize, since I am no longer active, I recognize this is not my choice to make but yours. I hope now and always you will strive to make ones where the community is first.

Public goods are good. :pray:

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I was onboard until

This approach seems like a new communication silo in the making.

Something else to consider is the role this council might have in creating partnerships that lead to funding opportunities, not just approving and denying them. If that is also a role of the council, would there be goals/ expectations to meet?

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To be honest this point was put in just for the sake of getting others to step up to be part of the process of sourcing prospective members, starting with some minimum viable level of accountability. Ultimately I do think it should be as open a process as possible (and we could adjust the content in the Snapshot
vote to state explicitly that “anyone can add names to the voting list” beyond the initial 20).

I don’t think in my view this council should create partnerships, maybe this would be a good thing to consider in the future but in my view it’s scope creep for the current problem.

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I appreciate you starting the conversation here, and it’s clear you still care about Gitcoin despite having stepped away some number of months ago. I’m not quite sure what: “building out permissionless, open tooling that anyone can use.” actually means, nor do I feel introducing someone new to the process of PGF to "be solely responsible for putting together an initial short-list of 20 prospective council members" is the right move.

I would love to see some options surfaced here.

I’m a pretty hard no on creating centralization debt around a single person to lead what feels like a wild goose chase to get people involved in Gitcoin (likely who you would advocate paying) who are only here to criticize decisions without much at stake (ie, I don’t like shell… I have no alternatives for you, gl).

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I’m glad someone got the ball rolling on how to learn from this experience.

I’d like to put a few other options on the table that might achieve the same end goal with less overhead.

To be clear, your proposal is:

a partnerships council which reviews and reserves the right to veto partners so long as they are contributing to a Gitcoin branded round

Presumably, the group would do nothing most of the time but could mobilize within a fixed time period to veto something?

An alternative could be to refrain from doing any special co-marketing with partners. They remain Gitcoin-branded. All match donors get the same recognition.

Another approach is to have match donor tiers, which come with different levels of marketing collateral support. $50K you get X support. $100K you get Y support.

I hope there are other ways of addressing the issue without creating an additional governance mechanism.

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@kyle appreciate the comment but I think you might be misunderstanding a few points. I’ll respond to each point in order:

(1) The note on permissionless tooling was just addressing the long-term goal of Allo Protocol, I didn’t mean to distract from the main point / it doesn’t relate to the proposal.

(2) As mentioned in response to @carlosjmelgar the point here is not to create something centralized but rather to open up what is currently a single decision made by folks on PGF to a broader group. I am simply offering to be accountable to surfacing the first possible candidates and I am not advocating for paying them to be sure (it would be a very thin committee and I don’t imagine it taking each member more than a few hours a month).

(3) Criticizing decisions without much at stake is a valid point, but this is largely true of the existing stewards council. I’d be very interested in exploring models to require stewards to stake GTC.

Let me know if there’s anything else I can address!

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Presumably, the group would do nothing most of the time but could mobilize within a fixed time period to veto something?

Yep that’s correct, I definitely agree refraining from any special co-marketing could be a good solution here, but it may not make the community feel heard in the way they would like to be. It also might constrain fundraisers more than the committee approach, because certain large funders donate for the ability to get those additional levels of support.

For what it’s worth, I think veto might also be a strong word here, but one of the major concerns recently was that the community felt blindsided by partner choices, and one way to solve for that is to at least get them together to hear about the partners while giving them a real say in the outcome.

In general, I think I’m open to any approach that the community is comfortable with.

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It seems to me it would be good to have some kind of review for partnerships, like the proposal here.
I could be wrong, but the DEI and now Shell partnerships simply appeared as announcements on the Gitcoin Twitter. There’s no discussion on the forums I can find and perhaps that is because there’s generally not much engagement on the forums.
So in the absence of this I think it would be sensible to have a group on call who can at least give a sanity check. I am 100% certain a sanity check would have at least proposed such a controversial partner needs open discussion or more details or more explanation/justification.
I think Shell is just the symptom. It speaks to what @owocki nails in his tweet: https://twitter.com/owocki/status/1691488210315288576 That with the new Gitcoin messaging becomes even more complex and needs attention. And I think the backlash is all the evidence you need that something is askew.

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first off, let me state for the record that my first job was as an environmental activist, so please don’t label me a big oil sympathizer!

deals with enterprises of this nature take months, if not years. there’s usually one or more champions on the inside of the company pushing it through and lots of diligence done on the partner (gitcoin in this case). imho, i don’t think it’s feasible to go through that kind of a process only to reveal at the end, “now we’re going to have our community vet you and they might choose not to accept your money”.

i would also assume that there was some kind of NDA in place that prevented either party from talking about the grant until it was finalized.

given these constraints, there are at least three important issues your post raises:

  1. what types of partnerships should gitcoin pursue? avoid entirely?
  2. should there be a process for vetting complex / potentially controversial partnerships early in the process? who should be privy to it?
  3. under what circumstances should gitcoin promote a donor partnership alongside its own brand?

i believe in what @owocki says in his tweet:

gitcoin only makes each mistake once.

in my own personal opinion, gitcoin’s mistake was NOT deciding to accept matching funds from an oil company, it was underestimating the importance of having a position on the three questions above.

hopefully this experience results in better answers to those questions.

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Thanks for starting this @ceresstation – I appreciate you getting the ball rolling.

I’m not sure another council is what the DAO needs. More red tape on partnerships with already lots of red tape (as @ccerv1 detailed) complicates things further and slows things down to unworkable paces.

I totally agree with @ccerv1 is pointing to, however.

We need pre-defined guardrails to guide our decision making. We don’t have a codified purpose, vision or values to drive decision-making for the program. We don’t have a business model for the grants program. We don’t have guidelines on what kinds of partners align with these values or a sustainability plan.

I think it’s important to align on these things to be able to answer the questions Carl posed logically and thoroughly.

Fwiw, we have plans to create this after GG18 and we are now planning to involve the community in shaping this strategy.

That said, I think a proposal like this would be generally safe to try and is worth exploring to accompany a strategy for the program.

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I think you nailed it @ccerv1

I would love to see a council of advisors draft guidelines or parameters for partnerships and invite input from the broader community.

There is always a fair amount of informal and formal discussion of partnerships internally and with partners but as Gitcoin attracts bigger and bigger potential partners now would be a good time to engage stakeholders and the community in a more proactive way on what they want to see prioritized or avoided.

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Just wanted to retract some things from my original response because I just realized it totally undermines some of the hard work that the PGF team is doing to both run the grants program meaningfully and make it a sustainable project (which I very much appreciate).

I apologize if I pissed anyone off and recognize that although there are some unanswered questions for me personally, that team shares strategic vision each season with budget proposals.

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Thanks for starting this conversation Scott.

A few things come to mind:

We have a freshly appointed Steward council (elected by the workstreams) and I’ve advocated in the past for a council with more ‘teeth’, so giving them this voting power could be an option? This would address @ccerv1 valid feedback of not creating yet another governance body or mechanism.

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However, more important than who makes the decisions is imo how they come to these decisions, and I think this is the elephant in the room we keep avoiding. We are missing a clear strategic direction for our Grants Program. At some point I introduced the meme: “Grants Program should be the soul of Gitcoin.” I feel this got kind of diluted, but what I meant with this is: with the featured rounds (=Grants Program aka our Grants Rounds) we show the world How to Fund What Matters.

For the majority of people Gitcoin and twitter.com/gitcoin = Gitcoin Grant Rounds (GG) and we should not just honor but celebrate this.

The featured rounds can show the power of Gitcoin Grants Stack and just as important: they can and should be the embodiment of what the OG web3 community believes in. They should focus on the themes we started out with, open source being for many reasons at the heart of this. The grants program and its featured rounds should have very well-defined themes, values and eligibility criteria, both for the grantees as well as for the matching funding partners.

I cannot emphasize this enough, our Grants Program and its existing user base, the web3 community should be our Most Important Thing, at least when it comes to communications.

My personal opinion is that when it comes to featured rounds we would make it much easier for ourselves and focus at least for a few more years on crypto funding crypto, there is a LOT of money here and a LOT more is coming. Again, I’m talking only about the Gitcoin Grants Rounds.

Why does this OG Web3 community matter so much some might ask? Well, next to the fact that none of this would exist without them (so they might be onto something), they are actually our core users. They are the people who donate to the grants, and they are the people who initiated this virtuous cycle - old grantees became funders: they created the magic of QF and everything Gitcoin stands for. Because of this community thousands of projects were founded, +50 million in funding was received and when it comes to true impact we are talking billions.. So we should listen very carefully to them instead of alienating them.

Note: I think we keep mixing up 3 levels at Gitcoin, especially in comms and also when it comes to justifying certain ‘strategic’ directions & partnerships:

  1. Grants Program → not neutral, embodies core web3 community values, Gitcoin’s flagship program
  2. Grants Stack (Allo’s hosted version) → mostly neutral, but not permissionless (ao US compliant)
  3. Allo Protocol → fully neutral, permissionless & forkable protocol

I have no issue with Shell using our Grants stack, and I do not even have any issue with ‘us’ heavily promoting this, but this should be outside of the Gitcoin Grants rounds and extremely important: be promoted through the Grants Stack Twitter account, as @owocki points out here as well.

Of course Shell is greenwashing, and I don’t care one bit, I’m super happy this money will be going to web3 projects, but it should not erode our Grants Rounds reputation. Instead it could be used to show to the legacy world that big corp is getting into web 3, which is fantastic news indeed. To quote @azeem: “Not many orgs can say they work with UNICEF and Shell in the same breath.” We should be proud about this.

But: Gitcoin Grants is not Gitcoin Grants Stack is not Allo Protocol.
It took contributors a while to get this, let alone that our community gets this.

So attracting partners that are deeply misaligned value-wise for Gitcoin Grants in order to promote Grants Stack (in order to get revenue at some point) is a very dangerous and flawed strategy, and I hope some people internally are waking up to this reality. If not, please read some of the quote tweets mentioned above. If you work in comms, please read all 200+ quote tweets of the original announcement, all of them.

So imo what urgently needs to happen next:

  1. A clear strategy about what the grants program stands for, coming out of a deep and humble dialogue with our community, legacy stakeholders and stewards

  2. Definition of themes, values and eligibility criteria, both for the grantees as well as for the matching funding partners for the grants program

  3. A comms strategy coming out of this with our main Twitter account mainly focusing on the Gitcoin Grants rounds

The Grants Program lives 100% within the PGF Workstream, so I think this is where the work needs to be done. I think we are making great strides when it comes to the product itself, but we need to step up our game seriously when it comes to the Grants Program strategy.

FWIW this is very much not me pointing fingers at anyone, I think the PGF team did a great job with the resources available, and MMM also worked with what is available strategy-wise for the program (=not a lot). But it’s time to stop fucking up, seriously. We are/were in a unique position at the very epicenter of the Ethereum ecosystem and we are eroding this trust at lightspeed. If I wouldn’t know the context, the people, the complexity and hard work everyone is putting into this, I would join others thinking people are purposefully sabotaging Gitcoin. :sweat_smile:. But I know this is not true. DAOing is hard, and believe me, been there, done that. :slight_smile:

However, it’s time to be very, very humble, and to listen to what our own community is shouting in our ears. Combined with our poor dealing with the whole DEI controversy (we never even acknowledged where and how we failed) this is another serious strike, and we are losing all credibility with our user base. This is not okay.

But we can do this, and I would love to help in any way I can. Dms are open (discord, telegram & twitter).

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You wrote this while I was writing my response. :slight_smile: Very happy to read this.

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the concern about this particular partnership was brought up within our community - by someone working for the DAO - a very long time ago and yet we did not react. this to me feels no only a failure to “listen to the community” but a shared failure to hear each other and a collective lack of coordination.

similarly, i know there were concerns raised prior to other past inflammatory events that ended up being scrutinized by the public/the broader community.

even personally i often feel unsure of the right place, time and process for raising an opinion or challenging a decision or practice. i dont really even understand what goes to the forum or to a vote vs. what doesnt, beyond our budgets.

I’m wondering if this is a symptom of a larger problem which is lack of codified process around decision making and/or governance as well as when and how we align and engage the DAO in addition to the the wider community in those decisions.

i dont view this as a challenge for only the program, but for Gitcoin as a whole, which extends to all of our products/workstreams. im in no way expecting all of us to always agree, but some kind of codified process in which we all feel heard - and help the community feel heard - feels necessary. and this doesnt pertain to everything; i agree with @Viriya that clear criteria is essential and that there might be different criteria for different areas of the org/types of decisions.

to the point about allo and our permissionless technologies - if Shell wanted to fund an Allo hackathon I do wonder if we’d (Gitcoin, Allo, etc) wouldn’t be equally scrutinized, even if we do say its credibly neutral. it’s still associated with Gitcoin (side note, i do think this reflects the right decision to separate the Gitcoin name/brand from the others, as otherwise they’d all be subject to being under fire) - i make this point because once again, i dont think this is purely a grants program issue.

Rather than see us form a council as a next step, I’d encourage us to look inward to assess our internal DAO operations and simultaneously look at our counterparts in the space, using this to develop org standards, processes and tactics for dispute resolution as well as more process around how we handle things like this, which will just inevitably continue to come up as we grow.

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you also wrote this while i was writing my response. appreciate a lot of this as well - but like i said, im not sure we wouldn’t be criticized and questioned if the Shell partnership was with another Gitcoin product.

i agree that a lot of people still associate us with just the program - but i dont think that means it should be prioritized over the rest. but if we are saying its the soul of gitcoin then yes, we should take better care. but also if that is the case i dont believe that responsibility lies with just PGF as it impacts all of us, so i do think a reevaluation of decision making should involve the other workstreams.

but i do think we’re nearing a time when that might not be the case (although hard to say given we are still pretty much pre PMF for Passport, Allo and GS) and so we do need evaluation criteria across the board.

and i think that criteria can evolve as we become less known for the grants program only.

curious, who is responsible for the forum post to action plan pipeline? CSDO?

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I am generally interested in testing out something like this, perhaps not this exact proposal, but something similar could be worth experimenting with.

However, @ceresstation I can’t shake the feeling your position on this is unfair and disingenuous. Yes, you have now stepped away from the DAO, but when this deal originally came up, you were a PGF lead, and THE partnerships lead. This was debated extensively among many workstreams, CSDO, and across the DAO. Why didn’t you speak up then?

I can’t deny that I feel like half of this outrage is due to the way it was announced and positioned. The marketing and Twitter thread lacked a lot of context and was done in a poor manner. Many of @M0nkeyFl0wer’s suggestions on how to approach the subject and how it was sensitive were not heeded. Taking this money is totally optional for grantees.

Shell is also one of 100’s of entities that have funded matching pools over the years. It’s probably not feasible to have a vote for every single potential funder, but we also don’t need to emphasize any 1 so much more than others. At the end of the day, it’s become extremely hard to raise matching pool funds in this bear market, and much of the loud criticism is coming from people who have benefited immensely from matching pool funds over the years. I think a lot of this outrage could have been avoided, but if we want to turn down Shell’s money (that would be going from Shell to open source and public good climate projects), we can, but any support with raising funds from other sources would be much appreciated.

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I don’t think we would if it wasn’t during the Gitcoin Grants rounds. Plus everything depends ofc on how things are phrased. The announcement felt pretty tone deaf and I don’t think everyone on the comms team realizes just yet how thoroughly this affects our brand equity.

Not only reading all the quoted tweets but also looking into who these people are will help a lot. Just to name a few of these influencers, we are talking the founders of ENS, Makerdao and other defi protocols, founders of investment funds, incl Hasu (!), the organizers of Ethdenver, Devcon, EthBerlin, Molly White (!), and well, about 200 more people, and counting, bringing us soon to 500K impressions.

I think 99% of our audience see gitcoin as the program and that makes sense, so for ‘mass market’ comms, imo it really really should, because of all points mentioned above. For grants stack tailor-made and individual comms seem more appropriate, plus they have their own twitter accounts now, I assume for the reason of creating more (much needed) clarity. Allo & Grants stack is our most important thing resource-wise, but imo it should not be comms-wise, and it feels we are not making this distinction.

:100: I only would applaud to (again) invest in DAO operations. You probably won’t be surprised to hear me say this. :slight_smile:

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TL;dr: We should design a GCP that formalizes (1) when the Stewards Council can intervene in a partnership opportunity, (2) the nature of that intervention, and (3) how, if at all, the partner or the Gitcoin Foundation can appeal the Steward Council’s decision. This GCP design should begin immediately after the partnership development process made transparent to the community.

Hey all, it’s Essem, one of your newly-elected Steward Council members. I spent a good portion of the past two days carefully reviewing community feedback on this forum, our Discord, social media sites, and soliciting some directly from people in and around web3. Here’s my perspective:

The Shell partnership represents a clear and energizing opportunity to improve upon our DAO governance principles, and we have a responsibility to do so given the importance of Gitcoin to the web3 community. We must recognize that when folks are out there tweeting their disappointment, they do it out of love. They want Gitcoin, and the values it embodies, to succeed; those same values were why I was so eager to join the Stewards Council when the opportunity arose! So, in many ways, I’m excited this happened. We’re being called on to do good work.

The community affected by a decision must feel they have a legitimate opportunity to voice their opinion and, if necessary, register their disapproval; this is the essence of democracy. No taxation without representation. The slogan doesn’t mean “no taxes ever.” It just means that taxes cannot be levied without the people’s consent. Sometimes, often even, democracy means decisions don’t go quite to your liking. As someone who cares quite deeply about environmental issues and renewable energy, I happen to agree with the broad swath of folks criticizing the Shell partnership. It feels like greenwashing to me too, and $500,000 does not even begin to address the tremendous violence Shell has, knowingly, inflicted on communities around the globe. Had it come up for a vote, I would have voted Against and actively campaigned for others to do so. I think that is part and parcel of the motivation that led @ceresstation to make this post. It’s not just that folks disagree with the partnership but that it’s something with significant and long-lasting implications for the Gitcoin platform and was executed without any community voice.

So Gitcoin simply cannot say: “trust us, we know what we’re doing.” Nor should it say: “round participants must be universally adored by all.” Instead, it must say: “we will change our decision-making process so that the community has greater voice in important decisions.”

@ceresstation has proposed one solution. I disagree with it. I don’t think creating a new body to review partnership decisions is wise, and certainly not one drawn from a list of candidates hand-picked by one person. (But it also sounds like @ceresstation meant to stoke a debate more than to have that proposal carried out literally.) It may seem self-serving for me to say this but I think this is exactly the type of responsibility that should lie with the Stewards Council.

The PGF team does the laborious work of cold-calling brands and organizations to raise money for Featured Rounds. Let’s not forget how grueling and often thankless that work is and, as frustrating as it may be to accept, generally popular organizations would be unwilling to even tentatively explore a partnership if it meant doing so would subject them to widespread scrutiny. The risks for internal web3 evangelists at these organizations would become prohibitive. And I wouldn’t agree with the idea that Gitcoin should, prima facie, reject partnership opportunities simply because they may be controversial. @ccerv1 was making a point similar to this.

First, to me, the question is when community intervention should occur; at what point do partnership discussions reach a mature enough stage that they should be reviewed by the Stewards Council? Truthfully, I don’t know the answer to that question. But the process by which partnerships are developed should be laid transparent to the community so that we can have a healthy debate about it.

Then, the question is what’s the nature of the community intervention. Obviously, this is going to be relative to the point at which the intervention occurs. The earlier in the process, the more confidential the intervention. Perhaps the Gitcoin Foundation could brief the Stewards Council in private, and the Stewards Council could vote to approve or disapprove the partnership; then, the community would be informed of the fact that the vote has taken place and the votes of each Stewards Council member without revealing the potential partner. I’m not sure how realistic that is, but it’s a starting point for thought.

Finally, the question is by what process, if any, the partner or the Gitcoin Foundation could appeal the Stewards Council decision. I think the obvious venue is a Snapshot vote to all GTC holders. Most partners would probably abandon their efforts here but, regardless, any veto point has to have a paired appeal point.

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Thanks all for the engagement on this so far I appreciate the discussion. Addressing a few of the key points I see so far:

deals with enterprises of this nature take months, if not years. there’s usually one or more champions on the inside of the company pushing it through and lots of diligence done on the partner (gitcoin in this case). imho, i don’t think it’s feasible to go through that kind of a process only to reveal at the end, “now we’re going to have our community vet you and they might choose not to accept your money”.

Firstly, I definitely agree with this and I’ve experienced first-hand the challenges with these processes as with the original UNICEF deal which took over a year to finalize. I think defining a framework rather than structuring a committee that vetos one-off partnerships is probably better and I would support that approach, so long as the strategy around this is defined and visible in advance of decisions. TL;DR, echoing @Viriya, maybe there’s a way to do this without a committee as well and just with pre-defined guardrails.

That said, I also strongly resonate with what @krrisis said here:

The featured rounds can show the power of Gitcoin Grants Stack and just as important: they can and should be the embodiment of what the OG web3 community believes in . They should focus on the themes we started out with, open source being for many reasons at the heart of this.

And would just stress again that any approach we take should consider the history Gitcoin has been built on and listen to the voices of some of the core Ethereum community.

the concern about this particular partnership was brought up within our community - by someone working for the DAO - a very long time ago and yet we did not react. this to me feels no only a failure to “listen to the community” but a shared failure to hear each other and a collective lack of coordination.

@alexalombardo to your point and to @connor yours I alongside others (including you at times) have spoken up about controversial partnerships in the past and tried to emphasize (alongside @owocki) legitimacy as a key measure of a partner’s potential. At one point I even (privately) rank ordered partners in this way and suggested it be adopted more broadly across the team (I’m not saying this is sufficient just something that was done). Admittedly, to your point on groups like CSDO I have tended to eventually defer (although not always happily) to the broader consensus so as not to miss the forest for the trees when decisions became too controversial. This was one of those cases although I don’t necessarily blame anyone for their thinking at the time nor do I in any way blame the current PGF team – this is an exercise in trying to find a path forward.

To be sure, I don’t even necessarily want to insert my own value judgement on a specific partner into this conversation. The fundamental question is: how do we design a process around what partners fit our values and how do we ensure that this decision-making is surfaced to the community.

As @essemharris put it this is all about understanding community intervention and more generally how the community can feel heard in advance of potentially controversial choices.

Critically: I also don’t want us to get trapped in “exactly what process we should put forward here” which is why I suggested the minimum viable path. We need something simple that allows relevant voices like Hudson / Lefteris / others above (who have done a lot for us historically) to learn about and engage on what is happening before it’s on Twitter.

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