A Brain Dump on Service Provider Program Season 2

[estmcmxci]

@AvsA

I, too, hope it continues. While the DAO must reapprove the program, I’m optimistic. MetaGov stewards have asked me to continue leading it, even if I’m not on the working group (WG).

Thank you for continuing to spearhead this initiative! Your thought leadership and experience serve as a guiding North Star for the DAO, and I believe this program truly stands out!

Re: Shifting Votes to Q1

I agree that this is better left to a vote in either February or March. This timeline gives delegates and Service Providers sufficient time and space to prepare, along with considering other factors.

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Re: Ranked Choice Voting with Round Robin

After exploring the Copeland Method, I agree that the DAO should seriously consider adopting this voting mechanism. Its structure is more familiar and reminiscent of tournament rankings, which are inherently intuitive to most people and likely easier for Delegates to grasp.

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Re: Two-Year Streams for Top-Ranked Projects

The SP program is quite generous, but nonetheless competitive. Personally, I do not think it is that much of an onus for a Service Provider to reapply to this program (there are far more challenging endeavors in life that pay significantly less).

Service Providers can use a portion of their budget to hire a Governance specialist if need be. Even ENS Labs, despite being the OG team, must navigate the political and unpredictable nature of the DAO to secure additional funding, as demonstrated by their recent ENSv2 proposal.

The two-tier funding system provides Service Providers with strong support, offering the time and bandwidth needed to prepare for their renewal, along with sufficient runway to focus on building ENS.

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Re: Allow current providers to make two asks

I’m not sure about this one. I agree with @nick.eth that it seems to introduce unnecessary complexity and might place additional strain on the Service Providers. Instead, consider allowing them to request a Minimum Viable Budget, with any remaining funds from the overall budget added to their base budget (Let me know if that’s making sense, I may have misunderstood the concept).

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Re: Lower-Tier “Talent Provider” Program

Yes! I think this also addresses our very flat organizational structure and will encourage experimentation while enabling the creation of new roles beyond those defined in the Working Group rules.

I agree with @ENSPunks.eth that we should give it a more dignified title, by the way!

@AvsA

This lower tier could nurture talent and grow the ENS ecosystem.

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Re: ‘Graduating’ from Service Provider

@AvsA

Regardless, there should be opportunities for teams to ask for additional funding from the DAO (as Blockful did) or to ask for a large project with a much broader scope (as unrugabble intends).

This created some tension within the DAO, as we could not clearly determine whether @blockful’s work on the Security Council fell within the scope of their Service Provider proposal. Ultimately, after extended discussion, I believe we reached a consensus that it was indeed outside the scope of the original proposal and therefore merits additional funding.

I think that it’s important for Service Providers to clearly outline their projects, how it impacts the ecosystem and comunciate the utility, with planned milestones similar to how the @PublicGoods_Stewards are structuring their Builder Grants application process.

In fact, we should take it a step further by creating a UI for this, or at the very least, providing a template to give Service Providers clear guardrails when submitting proposals to the DAO.

@AvsA

I think it would be important to create a proper standard format for that, both on the process of asking and the tech behind, to make sure we don’t end with different technical solutions to the same means.

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Re: Mandatory Quarterly Reports

I believe most Service Provider teams have independently adopted this approach and have set a strong standard and model for others to follow. I am fully in support of this.

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Re: On a Meta Budget

@AvsA

My suggestion is that at the end of each Metagov term, the working group should take a holistic look at the DAO’s finances and calculate an annual spending cap using a formula like this:

1. Take all DAO income from the past year derived from registrations and renewals.
2. Deposit half of this total into the endowment.
3. Calculate the yield from the endowment and halve it.

I agree with this as well. Do we have sufficient talent within the existing active community to set up and deliver this? It should fall under the purview of Meta-Governance, but perhaps the Working Group could consider issuing an RFP to find a financial planner to delegate this workload to.