I am quite surprised to learn that we will no longer have a DAO Ops workstream in future seasons. I think this is a penny-wise but pound-foolish decision.
I fully understand and share the frustrations w/ the DAOās current Governance/budgeting process and agree it needs to be fixed. The issue is, these are huge problems and solving them isnāt something that happens in 3-6 months. as kris states:
Blaming DAO Ops for not solving these problems is unfair and cancelling the workstream seems like the wrong approach to solving the problems IMO. Especially when this is something they are actively working on. I think a more reasonable approach would be to get DAO Ops to commit to trying X number of new governance experiments next season etc until we start to find better governance āproduct market fit.ā
There are many things that DAO Ops is doing a great at and I donāt think we are giving enough value to those tasks. I suspect many DAO contributors are going to feel the pain of not having the DAO Ops team when all of the sudden no one is owning these tasks. Good operations are like the air we breathe, easy to take for granted when they are working well, but when they arenāt, we feel their absence acutely.
Hey Shawn, super appreciate you pleading for fair and consistent governance practices, and you are right. @DisruptionJoe also flagged this during the CSDO call, so we are putting this on Snapshot, for all the reasons you call out above.
I need the picture of a well-functioning Gitcoin post-DAO-Ops to be much clearer before I can vote yes on this new proposal. How do we make sure important, DAO-wide operation functions are fulfilled in S18?
I have abstained from voting. I have been waffling on and off about voting āyesā to this new proposal (of not funding DAO Ops this season). I do think that Gitcoinās operations need an overhaul and, from what Iāve experienced these past few seasons at CSDO, there seems to be burnout around these conversations by much of the leadership team.
I suspect itās because the decisions weāre trying to make collectively are not directly and frequently aligned to overarching organizational goals and we lose sight on why and how structures can serve us or hinder us season over season.
Questions like: How does our budgeting process serve or detract from what weāre trying to achieve as an org? How is our org structure serving the needs of our business goals? What functions should be consistently funded vs. project-based?
I have not seen questions like these surfaced by DAO Ops and I think we will find that these kind of unanswered questions will continue to remain pain points but now there will be no one accountable to solve them.
This move feels risky to me but Iām also willing to set us loose and see what happens. Iām cautiously optimistic that we can all rally together to make it work and am hoping that in Denver we can lay the foundations for a more thoughtful reorientationā¦
We do not have a guarantee they will be, but weāll do our utmost to find an owner for each and every project by the end of this season.
We will probably transition some of the ongoing (and often invisible) tasks into separate RFPs in S18. We use S17 to get us ready for this in S18. The CSDO Digest will continue to be sent by @kylejensen for this upcoming season, together with scribing the various meetings. Weāll try to āpackageā some of the fantastic work he does into a request for funding for the next season.
I share your concerns and personally also worry about the scenario you describe. Our top priority for this season is to avoid going into S18 without a clear plan for Governance. @shawn16400 and myself will work on building a clear proposal here in the coming months, and bring this both to CSDO and the Stewards. Even with changes to the process, I imagine here as well for S18 an RFP, unless CSDO decides we drastically limit the role of Stewards in the upcoming seasons, and actually decide to function in a more centralized way for the time being. So, a lot to figure out, but we will come up with a plan, just give us a few days to find our balance again, as the decision to not fund DAO Ops is not a decision by DAO Ops, it is a decision by the Stewards who have the most tokens delegated to them.
Alright. It seems like weāre rolling the dice here. Iām going to vote no because I think DAO Ops is important and defunding it completely without a clear path forward seems wrong, but I also am confident that we will be able to build back better. Thank you for your timely and clear responses kris. If you and @shawn16400 need an extra pair of eyes or need a hand on governance work at all please let me know. Shawn knows but I am always looking to help in that department. Thank you.
Also, was there an off-forum conversation that spurred on the new defunded DAO Ops budget proposal? I know there was a lot of dissonance in the forum, but I find it hard to believe that this alone convinced DAO Ops to propose a new, unfunded budget request. In the spirit of transparency, I think itād be beneficial for the community to know how we got from the old request to the updated one.
Guys, I donāt understand, why I canāt participate in DAO voting on snapshot.
I have GTC in my wallet on ETH Mainnet both now and before snapshot block.
WTF? No article or info found on whatās wrong.
Appreciated enormously, weāll definitely call on you and others.
There is not a whole lot youāre missing here. You see above that 3 of our 4 top delegated Stewards would be voting no. Through a conversation on Friday with Kyle we heard Kevin would also be voting no, which means 4/4. We also heard that no matter what changes we made the vote would be no, if it did not include dissolving the workstream. So thatās what we did.
Hey Kris. Thanks for your answers. The following isnāt a critique on this budget, but is important to mention just as a record of where the DAO is today:
For transparency purposes, the top stewards (by voting power) are:
The fact that it takes a handful of stewards to create such a large restructure in a budget proposal is a testament to where we are right now. I think itās important to be transparent that, as it stands right now, this process is not community driven on the decision nor execution layer (although there is a lot of community input through discussion and social layers). Perhaps this fact is good. These stewards are very mission-aligned and perhaps serve as good guardrails for us to progressively decentralize. But the evolution of this DAO Ops budget is an important snapshot of how power and influence (both social and voting) works to produce decision within Gitcoin.
@krrisis @Jodi @sandy_gitcoinDAO Lolu @Rohan @shawn16400 @kylejensen @puncar @safder @daikai joshuadouglas juliet @writeprovidence