ENS Retro Draft Final Report

DAO-Wide
1

The Retro Research team has completed a draft of the Final Report, which outlines a 12-month Roadmap for implementing the Retro’s recommendations into ENS governance. The draft (found here) is enabled, so anyone with the link can insert comments in the Google Doc. There are also some rapid case studies we did to inform the Roadmap, which can be found here. We also invite anyone with thoughts to reach out to us via Telegram with their feedback and, as previously communicated, we are available for any type of workshop or discussion (we just need an invite). The feedback period for the draft will be open until April 24th, and the final version of the Report/Roadmap will be available on April 27th.

Additionally, here is a link to a recording that provides additional explanation and an overview of the ENS dashboard that we built, which outlines performance metrics on key problem drivers within ENS.

Lastly, all the design, analysis and other materials used as part of the overall methodology for this entire Retro are organized here by Phase and are open for anyone with a link (this will also be migrated to our project page on GitHub soon). This is part of our intention to ensure that anything the Retro did is fully transparent and replicable to ensure any result we arrived at can be properly tested by anyone.

4 Likes
[Temp Check] Working Group Restructure
2

Thanks @mikemetagov, absent an Advisory Body, the formation of a Governance Advisor role to oversee and execute recommended reforms seems critical to the success of the retrospective overall, though the draft final report never makes explicit mention of how that role will be formed—whether appointed, elected, or otherwise.

The process to stand up the role needs to be explicitly defined by DAO governance.

Given @katherine.eth’s [Temp Check] Expanding the ENS Foundation Board to Strengthen Operational Accountability for ENS DAO, it should be the natural basis for designing the appointment and oversight process—at least as an interim path until broader governance structure is finalized.

—

However, I do not see the pending status of the abovementioned proposal as an impediment to at least begin discussing the role’s formation. Given the soft deadline of June 1st (~6 weeks) to make meaningful change or revert to the status quo, I personally see this as urgent.

Rather than taking a “wait-and-see approach” or playing a game of “governance chicken,” I’ll take the mantle to write a Temp Check on the formation of the GA role, its responsibilities, etc., and post to the forum before the end of next week for feedback.

Obviously, the Temp Check may be outright rejected or ignored, but I believe it’s imperative that someone take a stand on the matter rather than default to a Schelling point or a laissez-faire approach.

3

Update: After sitting with the report over the weekend, here are my thoughts on standing up the Governance Advisor role — both the shape of the role and the process to ratify it.

Role

The existing draft does most of the heavy lifting and sketches the contours of the role: an external, neutral individual or entity that designs, drafts, and facilitates coordination work across four 3-month phases (Foundation Setting; Transparency & Delegate Accountability; Monitoring & Treasury Pilots; Consolidation), while the Board and its constituencies (in this case, the DAO itself) review and decide.

I’d firm that up as follows:

  • Structure: a named lead, publicly accountable, with a DAO-funded support budget for subcontractors (if necessary). A single accountable party avoids diffuse responsibility; the support budget keeps the workload realistic.
  • Scope: drafting, facilitation, coordination, and ownership of the progress tracker as the single source of truth. No decision-making authority — the Advisor packages outputs for decision, nothing more.
  • Term: 12 months, mapped to the Retro roadmap’s quarterly deliverables, with a biannual DAO continuation vote built in.
  • Compensation: paid in quarterly tranches gated on tracker milestones. This operationalizes the Retro’s own graduated-accountability recommendation on the role itself.
  • Conflict-of-interest firewall: no paid ENS work during the term and for 6 months after.
  • Reporting: mandatory public quarterly report and open Q&A

—

Process

Preferably, we execute this in parallel with the proposal to expand the Foundation Directorship, coordinating timing so that both land within the same voting window.

Concretely:

  1. Temp check (within the week): surface the role, gauge directional support, and invite community feedback on scope, budget envelope, COI rules, and the RFP rubric.
  2. Social proposal (Snapshot): Incorporate feedback and move the proposal to Snapshot in order to formally ratify the final scope, budget envelope, COI rules and RFP rubric. This becomes the canonical reference for the Board.
  3. Open RFP, run by the Board: the Board runs the RFP against the Snapshot-ratified rubric — public criteria, shortlist, published scoring rationale, final selection. Bidders with current Retro-linked relationships must pre-declare; affected Board members recuse.
  4. Fallback: if the Board expansion stalls, the Meta-Governance Working Group will run the RFP, per the canonical RFP process: Governance Process | ENS Docs

—

Timing

June 1 is our soft deadline — it’s tight, but workable. Running these proposals in parallel means the Board is seated with a ratified Advisor mandate ready to execute against — rather than spending its first weeks designing the scope from scratch.

If we slip past that window, Q1 of the roadmap (Foundation Setting) compresses into a shorter runway, and the whole 12-month sequence tightens.

—

Temp Check going up in a separate thread within the week — wanted to share the thinking here first for feedback.

4

I proposed to the MG WG to discuss this in next week’s call and add to agenda as well as the election conversation published back in March which is now out of date. I would suggest putting this all in the discussion and then maybe combining feedback on forum and discussion in the MG call before posting temp check…

@mikemetagov would be good to also have you on that call (same time as the all hands was 9am CET Tues April 28th).

5

That’s exactly my intention—I planned to raise it on this week’s call, but bandwidth was limited due to the ongoing discussion re: [Temp Check] Expanding the ENS Foundation Board to Strengthen Operational Accountability for ENS DAO - #53 by estmcmxci

—

Next week’s Meta-Governance call is queued to cover the SPP program, but I agree we should add this to the agenda. The combined notes are already listed above, so I’ll drop them in the chat once we’re in the meeting.

1 Like
6

@simona_pop Thank you for the invite for next week. Technically, the Retro ends as we did not receive any feedback on the final report, except a request to create the RFP for the Governance Advisor, which will help implement the reform roadmap in the final report annex (all the tasks required to stand up the accountability, transparency, and treasury allocation infrastructure). I understand the agenda for next Tuesday’s call is very full, but I can dial in and be there to answer any questions if helpful.

2 Likes
7

Bumping this — I’m asking that @Meta-Gov_Stewards allocate at least 20 minutes for discussion during tomorrow’s Meta-Governance WG meeting.

Given all the moving parts and entanglements (myself included), a neutral third-party perspective would add much-needed balance.

That’s the role i’m hoping a governance advisor can evolve into.

1 Like
8

Good evening and hope all is well. The Retro is finalizing the final report now (using feedback received on the draft released last week) and it will be available by weds this week.

One note, we have been getting a lot of requests for the Retros opinion on the various proposals on a revised Foundation Board, SPP and WG structure and whether/how these various proposals align with or integrate the recommendations from the Retro (as found in the Roadmap in Annex of the final report). After reviewing these proposals and having several discussions on them, it is our opinion that none of these proposals align with or integrate the Roadmap proposed by the Retro. Any proposal that does not explicitly integrate the Roadmap does little to address the root causes of ENS governance dysfunction. However it is important to note that the Roadmap can be implemented within any ENS structural reform, like the three alluded to above, but the Roadmap should be explicitly integrated into that reform with a clear pathway for its implementation (for example a Governance Advisor who is empowered to do the heavy lifting and a WG or Board that is authorized to oversee, approve and monitor). There are many options on how to implement the Roadmap but the evidence from the Retro makes it clear that there is no option for success that does not include the Roadmap.

Happy to answer questions and if we need to schedule a larger discussion happy to do so.

1 Like
9

Hi @mikemetagov thanks for the awesome work and sorry for the late reply, there was a lot to get though and I feel I’ve only scratched the surface.

To aid my own understanding, I created a simple mental model that tracks the lineage of how we arrive at the reforms presented in Annex A in the Retro Roadmap.

Sharing this in case it helps others in forming their own opinions.

How lineage is formed from the work produced.

  1. Hypotheses (identified as H.x)
  2. Data sources (DS.x)
  3. Findings (F.x)
  4. Reforms (R.x)

As such we can discern that R-04 - Baseline Governance Templates is empirically supported by Findings F-05, F-07 from Hypotheses H4.1, H4.2, H7.1, H7.3.

From the information presented, my current understanding is that much of the work revolves around establishing a canonical set of operating documents across all the established DAO entities. Non exhaustive (DAO, Foundation Board, ENS Labs, Working Group (or successors), Delegate)

Across each entity there needs to be at a minimum a public facing policy, across each of the following categories.

  • Foundational, slow moving typically ratified by DAO vote eg. ENS Constitution, WG Charter, Program Remits
  • Recurring, Quarterly reporting cadence.
  • Event-based, How given entity is expected to respond to external events
  • Accountability, What mechanical checks and balances are in place.

Thus, helping define/refine a canonical policy inventory with status, version, ownership, and forcing functions outlined would be the main remit of the Governance Advisor role presented in the Retro Roadmap?

If so — I would support this function, as in my own exploration it is clear there is a deeply complex set of interdependencies.

Given your assessment what common steps could each active proposal adopt to make in-roads to meaningfully address dysfunction presented?

Would committing to formalise these templates/documents be a good first step?

2 Likes
10

Hello,

Thanks for sharing and working on the proposal. It takes a lot of courage to hold a mirror, and I am happy to see that the report (and its authors) fearlessly does that.

My name is Tanisha Katara, and I have been in the Governance and tokenomics space for around 6 years. I worked/have been working with Polygon, Filecoin, EF, Mina, Avail and others on their token value accrual and governance structures. My work and research is public on tanishakatara.eth.limo

While I haven’t been as active in the ENS DAO (— and I hope to change this), what my experience has taught me is that without the right incentive structures, mechanism design or token value accrual, Governance is bound to fail.

I’d love to participate and contribute more actively to ENS Governance innovations, bringing very clear ROIs for the community to participate in governance apart from the good-old-decentralisation ethos (Examples: Vote escrow, AI agentic staking + human decision making, and other experiments working across other ecosystems)

As a starting point, I have dropped comments on the ENS retro draft and I am excited to see what’s next for ENS DAO.

2 Likes
11

Apologies for my delay. This is very good work (tbh we should look for an oportunity to have you present this to the Retro team and maybe some others so that we can better understand how users engage our work, etc. and I will reach out ot you on this). It unpacks our reseach in a very usfeul way as it does underpin a key finding….in that ENS is in need of foundational infrastructure to facilaitate its problem identification, sense making, deliberation, decison making, montioring and learning governance lifecycles. There is no piecemeal solution, much less a purely structural/org chart solution, that will diminish the key barriers to better ENS governance. As part of another project, Metagov org has been doing some work to develop many of the intial tools, guidance, etc. of the Roadmap so once ENS takes the necceasry actions Metagov org can quickly adapt that work to the ENS context and we can start piloting solutions that build the foundational infrastructure in the Roadmap.

2 Likes
ENS DAO Newsletter #112 — 5/15/2026