[Proposal] FDD Workstream Season 13 Budget Request

[DisruptionJoe]

@krrisis

I think the thoroughness of your approach & transparency can and should be an inspiration for any DAO.

Thank you. That means a lot!

@krrisis

either they are a part of FDD and for this reason might be biased and/or see things I am missing, or they are stewards who appreciate the thoroughness of the FDD proposal and for this reason are supportive of the proposal, without actually understanding in detail what you are proposing and why.

I think you are underestimating our Stewards. Some might have skimmed it, but take @akrtws for example. She is part of our multisig as a steward providing oversight of our workstream and is not a paid contributor of FDD. (FDD set ourselves up with a 4/7 multisig designed to represent our stakeholders and provide an additional layer of oversight which the other streams haven’t done.)

She participated in a 2 hour overview session giving very tough criticisms and then had multiple one on one discussions with myself and other contributors. After responding to her and other multisig keyholder critiques, we eventually got to this final request.

To say that she, or @bobjiang and other stewards are not fulfilling their duty if they support this budget request is not necessarily the case.

@krrisis

I for my part can honestly say that I do not understand all of it, and it is one of the many reasons I am/was hesitating to vote, I simply do not have the time available to dig even deeper

You have over 700k GTC delegated to you. I think it is your duty to understand it.

@krrisis

FDD is the only workstream who has been ‘saving up’ and I think the argumentation shows we mainly need to work on getting rid of internal politics (which indeed do exist! and are very frustrating)

So you agree that mission critical work might be susceptible to these issues?

@krrisis

However, allowing these (enormous) reserves is counterproductive: it is basically saying that our governance mechanisms of allocating budgets are not working / cannot be trusted. To be honest I agree with that point

It is not new and we are not “saving up” we simply ask for one quarter of funding extra as we have been since the first budget proposal. If we were “saving up”, we wouldn’t explicitly be showing that we are topping up what we currently have to make sure we continue to have 1 season worth of reserves.

@krrisis

The answer however imo is not to keep doing this & have funds ready to allow spinning out as a standalone DAO or to cease collaboration

FDD is not spinning itself out as a standalone DAO. We have no interest of doing that. We may incubate projects that end up having a broader application potential than our mandate in which case we would support them spinning out. A community data collective for sybil detection for example.

I am 100% focused on serving FDD’s mandate which is defending Gitcoin against threats to its legitimacy, credible neutrality, and sustainability.

I fundamentally disagree that reserves for one season, another 90 days, makes it so FDD isn’t accountable for its results. Additionally, I will be bringing a proposal to CSDO before next season to establish a norm around reserves for all workstreams.

Quite frankly, I’m a little shocked that you, as the person responsible for contributor experience, feel as though the way to achieve accountability is by putting contributors financial stability and mental safety at a higher risk than necessary. 90 days of extra funding is not going to strip workstreams of accountability imho.

@krrisis

FDD has been leading the way here, because no one else was

Or because we can’t supply legitimacy and credible neutrality without having a solid foundation. It would be wise to think of our need for proper governance structure as part of our mandate.

@krrisis

However, I do not think these initiatives should be developed under FDD, they belong mostly under DAOops

I agree that DAOops should own this for GitcoinDAO as a whole, but each stream does need to manage its own internal governance. We are explicitly working to do this well. This is less than 4% of our total budget. Whether or not a workstream explicitly identifies these needs in their budget does not mean it isn’t executing and paying for them.

Secondly, our governance process says that after 5 days on the governance forum and 5 steward comments, the proposal should move to snapshot. Even after getting the required amount of comments, our proposal is still not on snapshot 5 days later. (I could post, but I’m trying to go along with some hard work by @Pop to improve steward comms.)

The reason for this delay was cited as stewards requesting more time to review the proposals. No steward posted these requests on the governance forum or in the Stewards channel in Discord. Now, I am NOT accusing anyone of wrongdoing, but you could see how with you being the only steward who has commented during this delay period, one could be see this as delaying the vote so you could post this critique.

For this reason I think you should ABSTAIN from voting on this proposal.

Additionally, it shows the need for multiple workstreams to be actively involved in governance.

@krrisis

With certain elements of this proposal we are actually working towards a centralization of power within one workstream

Please say more? How does FDD managing its own internal governance centralize power for all of GitcoinDAO?

@krrisis

Personally I think it could endanger the focus on the mission of Gitcoin, which is to build and fund public goods, not to become the most effective DAO.

Not sure how you make this connection.

@krrisis

Personally I think it could endanger the focus on the mission of Gitcoin, which is to build and fund public goods, not to become the most effective DAO.

@krrisis

I think this leaves plenty of room for innovation (also on topics of governance, eg the source council) and might be a signal for FDD to focus even more on its core mission, streamline for simplicity and effectiveness

How do you reconcile these two sentences? In one you state that we should not focus on becoming the most effective DAO, then you say that FDD should focus on streamlining our focus for simplicity and effectiveness.

Gitcoin has Top Level OKRs and one of them is decentralization. How do you come to the conclusion that FDD should focus on efficiency in the decentralization and efficiency tradeoff?

@krrisis

I do believe every major city indeed needs its own fire department, and we have one, but we are not a big city just yet

You know what stops little towns from becoming big cities… when they burn down.

@krrisis

But let’s first make sure our city is thriving, viable & regenerative, before its fire department becomes a city on itself.

How about we build all parts of the system to be regenerative individually and collectively. That is alignment.

@krrisis

but I’ve also first-hand seen the risks & failures of bringing too many layers of complexity too soon.

The thesis of your criticism has not had anything to do with the introduction of complexity or the speed at which it is introduced. It has been about whether reserves are justified and who should own certain functions.