Agenda for Weekly Meta-Governance Meeting, July 12, 2022 @ 1900 UTC

šŸ—³ļø Meta-Governance Meetings
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Google Meet link : meet.google.com/xjq-pcvg-htu

Term #2 Elected Stewards : @nick.eth , @simona_pop and @coltron.eth

A) Establish call times and frequency
B) Establish working group intentions for term
C) Budget Review
C) Code of Conduct Proposal
E) Endowment RFP Update

Call Minutes

Attendees: coltron.eth, nick.eth, simona.eth, slobo.eth, Alex Michaelson, Ashu, alisha.eth, oakgroup.eth, anthonyware

A) Establish call times and frequency

  • The time for the Meta-gov calls will be on Monday at 3 pm EST.
  • An update to the master calendar will be posted with a link for the new call times. The DAO is working on setting up a google workspace to enable uniform meeting permissions.
  • The DAO will strive to use one meeting link for the DAO-wide calls.

B) Establish working group intentions for the term

Term Intentions

  • Provide clarity on processes
    • Establishing better documentation on proposal processes.
    • Funding the creation of automated processes.
  • Establish an Endowment (RFP Pending?)
    • Establish clear treasury management intentions.
  • Improve DAO Tools
    • Look into creating better Discourse plug-ins to show voting/delegations records.

Discussion

  • A priority should be getting a governance flow in place, so we have an established reference point to fall pack on and ultimately reduce situations where people feel left out.
  • It was discussed to put forward a budget to reimburse gas costs. The Metagov stewards supported this pending technical viability and a way to produce the transactions.
  • The Meta-gov stewards will begin determining what processes from the last term need to be improved, so we can identify what changes need to be made and track the progress of these changes.

C) Budget Review

  • A budget draft will be posted in a forum post in coordination with the other lead stewards.

D) Code of Conduct Proposal

  • Deferred to next meeting. Time.

E) Endowment RFP Update

  • Deferred to next meeting. Time.

F) Additional Comments

None.

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Please be advised, I have spent the last two weeks onboarding members of the ENS community onto the ENS DAO Forum and I have received reports from multiple community members that are new to the forum that they have attempted to join DAO WG/Steward Google Meet meetings on more than one occasion and not been permitted to join. Some of these instances are documented; therefore, I thought it was important to memorialize this in writing to put the DAO on notice.

Following the dissolution of the Community WG, I understood the Community WG would become a subgroup, since there is no public discussion I am aware of, I will work with the greater ENS community directly to create a proper subgroup proposal with a request for funding. I publicly supported the proposal for dissolving the Community WG for organizational purposes based on support from @alisha.eth @Coltron.eth and @slobo.eth who I felt were in the best position to make that call, but hearing the community has been blocked from DAO meetings is very troublesome, and the fact that community members have come to me to voice their complaints is even more troublesome, because it seems there is no WG or subWG to provide support or advocacy for the community.

Are the numbers of new ENS DAO Forum accounts from the last 2 weeks publicly available? Iā€™d like to see if I can trace those numbers back to my onboarding efforts, it would assist with my analytics, and I think that would be a great place to start gathering support for the community subgroup proposal.

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Thanks for bringing this to my attention.

For ecosystem calls we have used the same link for the last 15+ meetings and until this post I was not aware of anyone having issues joining.

In addition, the meeting links are posted every week in the :calendar: Events section of the forum along with a publicly available calendar, which is pinned in the dao discord channel.

I believe both @Coltron.eth and I are available by many different means of communication. You are free to contact me by any method listed in the text records of slobo.eth.

If this is true, this would be troubling indeed. I donā€™t believe anyone has blocked anyone. Maybe there are technical problems that led to this issue, so Iā€™d advise we consider which words we use.

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Are you saying that community members have been asked to not join a call, or they have gone to a Google Meet link, pressed request to join, and were stuck waiting? If the latter, they very likely got the time of the call mixed up. This has happened to me too. I do think that the DAO could benefit from better timezone coordination, but would be extremely surprised if this issue is anything more than that.

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The tone on this post is disheartening; The tone, itā€™s the wrong tone.

I do not appreciate [what sounds like to me] the accusations; You are attacking & making accusations, w/ no facts-discovery. It is suspect. Youā€™ve been onboarding people for two weeks; but for being here only two weeks, your attack/tone is suspect.

You posted, ā€œcommunity has been blocked from DAO meetings is very troublesomeā€.
Question: Do you have proof for this attack & accusation?
ā€¦Do you have facts, or even DAO response? No.

I agree we want to understand this underlying situation, which is lacking facts.
I would rather we state facts, and ask questions, before we start putting people ā€œon noticeā€.
Otherwise the focus is on the attacker, and we want to actually address the problem,
ā€¦which may NOT be malice & could be a growing pain.
The tone sounds like it is attacking the ENS DAO, not building or resolving an issue.

Further, you say, ā€œseems there is no WG or subWG to provide support or advocacy for the community.ā€, but from what Slobo.eth says, this has NOT even been brought to his attention before this post! Very disingenuous, seemingly.

If I didnā€™t know the poster, I would speculate more, but this might just be a poorly worded and unprofessional post, seeking to help with a real issue, which is now known to the DAO.

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I just want to clarify my post is not attacking the DAO, Iā€™m just conveying what was reported to me. Iā€™ve already been attacked for this post as pumping my bags and even personal attacks like:

image
image828Ɨ1282 112 KB

I hope we can all agree that is an attack, whereas using the word ā€œnoticeā€ is not an attack.

In response to @gregskril and @slobo.eth

One community member told me a Google meet link was non-functional or outdated. It is my understanding that has been corrected.

Separately, two members have reported attempting to join Google Meets meetings and not being allowed in, per Greg they were left waiting to be admitted, tbh I didnā€™t even know Google Meets gave hosts (if that is a correct term) control to allow/disallow participants from joining the meetings. Since this post I confirmed at least one community member has a time stamped screenshot waiting to be let in and has represented they never were let in. I was specifically asked I not share their screenshot after they saw me get attacked, and I donā€™t think it really matters, but some people labeling me an ā€œattackerā€ are demanding evidence as if this was just made up out of whole cloth.

I hope we can give everyone the benefit of the doubt and assume good faith of all parties, from me, to the community members, to the DAOā€¦community members took their time to join these meetings and were left waiting to enter, and then walked away feeling as though they were excluded, it would be one thing if one person had this experience, but it was multiple people that independently had the same experience and feelings of exclusion from multiple meetings. Iā€™m sorry that somehow my verbiage and tone overshadowed my post and the focus.

Let me know what I can do to help.

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Gary, I do not think the comment is as attacking or negative as it may have appeared to you. You and I both know ENSPunks.eth, have heard him speak countless hours in favour of the DAO on twitter spaces, and seen his love for the community first hand, the very community that has brought $50 million in revenues so far this year to the DAO. His simple yet educational content goes well and beyond anything the DAO has produced so far. So letā€™s give credit where it is due and assume the best in him. He has been attacked in public for his passion as well as in DMs on this very forum by very well-known current and ex members of the DAO, falsely and wrongfully accusing him of fraud and extortion without evidence, forcing him off the platform at least once in the past. Those actions are now easily against several clauses of the upcoming Code of Conduct, but letā€™s not get into that as of yet. The DAO is a massive organism and it surely can handle a bit of criticism; it is part and parcel of the job. He has brought up key issues in his comment, perhaps only laced with well-founded frustration that ENS DAO is an extremely inefficient system in its current form. Perhaps we should instead focus on correctly merging the Community aspect into the Ecosystem WG.

Slobo is well aware of this. He is part of the think tank that dissolved the Community WG and I am sure he is aware of the lack of Community representation since then to that effect. It is possible something is being worked on in the background but so far there is no sign of it on the forum.

Lastly, there is nothing wrong with attacking the DAO for reasons that are justified. Underfunding of independent contributors and lack of community interfacing after dissolution of Community WG are the messages to take from his comment. I am personally able to see past the ā€˜poor wordingā€™ and take it in the stride.

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ENSPunks says he is a lawyer. His post says:

How does he know they were not permitted to join? How do we know there was not a technical error or oversight? How do we know this was known, or not an honest mistake? Where else was anyone in the DAO notified about these reports from multiple people?

I did not accuse him of fraud and extortion.

But Slobo.eth said:

SO: Is Slobo aware of that people are being blocked?
ā€¦as you say, ā€œSlobo is well aware of thisā€?
ā€¦or is Slobo not being truthful and he knows people are being blocked?
Because your comment seems to be in contradiction with Slobo, now.

Finally, when you say:

Justification has not been shown; Due diligence has not been shown. Itā€™s all a bad tone, with guns blazing, accusations flying, and no professional communication to bring the problem to the DAO.
We know that people have not been able to join some of the meetings, but the approach to fix could be more inclusive of the Stewards who are doing the work, and less accusatory of the troublesome intentions of the ENS DAO/Stewards.

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I meant Slobo is well aware of the lack of Community interfacing since the dissolution of Community WG. I do not imagine for once that Slobo will partake in any censorship.

I never said that you accused ENSPunks of fraud and extortion.

I also donā€™t see any guns blazing honestly. Perhaps a bit of frustration but thatā€™s about it. Perhaps we are reading his message differently so I will take my leave from this thread :v:

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I can speak on this and I appreciate enspunks for bringing this topic to the forefront.
I have tried, on multiple occasions, to join the onboarding Google meetings on Fri @ 10:30am PST and was unable to. I want to make myself clear, I am not attacking anyone as this could very well be a technical issue of sorts. I donā€™t believe this is a ā€œgatekeepingā€ concern whatsoever, although the word was brought up by a community member after hearing several others were having similar experiences trying to join. I personally talked to one of those members as this topic came up organically. He, similarly to myself, waited to be accepted into the meeting, but after some time eventually left.
Enspunks is a staple in our community and he is speaking on our behalf, with no malice intent. I can assure you of that. The first time I tried joining a meeting, after less than a minute my request was denied. The following two weeks I tried joining, I waited approximately 10 minutes after the request, then chose to leave. I do believe this is a technical issue and Iā€™m glad itā€™s being discussed.

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Hi, perhaps @vegayp can speak more on this. He often runs the onboarding process. Eduardo does a great job and truly cares about Community. This is more than likely a coordination failure, honest mistakes happen. This space encourages new members to actively participate and join the onboarding calls.

For your reference, I have linked to a new membersā€™ thread, which is meant to help orientate participants within the forum towards active work streams.

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Meeting Links

Some of the frustration expressed above is likely due to the state our of meeting links. The links are not dynamic, and we currently do not have a Google workspace account that allows for shared hosting and organizer permissions. Last week I discussed getting this allocated in our budget and set-up as soon as possible.

For context, it almost rugged an entire working group this week. Itā€™s not an isolated problem.

Onboarding Call

There was also a bad link in a HackMD agenda floating around for the onboarding call. The official source for call links should always be in the Master ENS Calendar. A public access link can be found here, and you can integrate it into your calendar here.

This past week I had a schedule conflict that required me to be on a call with another ENS contributor. There was no onboarding call due to the link issue :point_up:. This is definitely a failure on our part that is being corrected.

Community Onboarding

@ENSPunks.eth Thanks for doing this! I know that I have recently fielded questions in my DMs on different platforms specifically related to forum onboarding.

Forum Onboarding

I donā€™t think any lead stewards have access to the Airtable onboarding form. I know this was set up during the inception of the DAO. I am under the impression that any incomplete form will get automatically denied.

Common points of failure in this process relate to providing incomplete or malformed responses to the required fields. Discord handles and e-mails need to be provided, and the long-form responses need to be coherent or appear to be generated by a human.

Transparency Concerns

Gating Calls

Iā€™m not aware of any steward gating official DAO calls. If someone could not join, I suspect it was due to a linking issue. If anyone is in a call and aware that someone is unable to join, let the host know so we can resolve it on the spot.

If the call had ended early due to low attendance, this may have created a situation where nobody could let an attendee in.

I know a few people can attest that weā€™ve seen instances of tomfoolery in the onboarding calls and had to restrict access after someone posted NSFW content and spammed disruptive audio. Other than this, my policy as host has been to allow everyone in.

Iā€™m happy to see people are looking out for the best interest of the community.

Call Recording

Currently, itā€™s not standard to record calls unless the host deems it necessary. If this is done, everyone will be alerted and have the option to leave if they are uncomfortable with this. If the community wants calls to be recorded as policy, we can revisit this.

Steward Contact

Iā€™m working to build a definitive contact list for lead stewards this term and will suggest regular office hours where they can be reached. Despite all of us having open DMs, messages on Discord, Twitter and the Forum can often get lost.

I hope to provide better clarity on how you can contact elected DAO members.

Edited: Added clarity and fixed typos.

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If you would like to add an item to the Meta-Governance call agenda, please directly request it in this thread.

I may move this original post if the discussion deviates from specifics about the upcoming MG call.

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Relocated minutes to original post.