If this proposal goes to a vote, I will be voting for the dissolution of the community working group.
As @alisha.eth stated in the original post, I was consulted on this topic. I believe that the Ecosystem and Meta-governance could undertake the work being done in the Community Working Group.
One of the issues with the current structure (12 stewards) is that I don’t believe we have a broad enough pool of nominations. We need individuals in this role who are present, not only qualified. Something we ran into the last term was stewards with undoubted experience but with varying degrees of activity in our DAO.
This was not beneficial for the first term of the DAO and resulted in the CWG working out of scope, reinforced the “safe bet” mentality, and allowed for steward bystanders.
CWG Working Out of Scope
Nobody wanted to take drafting a proposal to remove Brantly, but from my view it required active handling by DAO leadership. Considering the governance precedence, it should have fallen under the Meta-Governance’s scope of work. Similarly, the Code of Conduct should have begun as a joint effort but was only initiated because the CWG picked it up.
I don’t care about the who, whats or whys of this situation, but if certain stewards in the CWG were in the Meta-gov working group, we would not have needed to operate out of scope. We’re spread too thin, consolidating WGs would be beneficial.
“Safe Bet” Mentality
We can’t expect superstar contributors to work in all areas of the DAO at once. Instead of worrying about bad actors filling in the talent gaps, we will be compelled to nominate a “safe bet” who has a lame-duck term… the lesser of two evils. Although safe, this outcome is a net-zero impact for the DAO rather than a positive one.
My hunch is that if we chose a safe bet it will likely be a core team member who could otherwise be working on the protocol. Removing the CWG may contract steward seats to a smaller number that can all be filled with high-quality stewards without burdening the core team, and reducing the need for safe bets.
Steward Bystanders
A low-quality steward may remain with more stewards because someone else will pick up their slack. Working groups operating out of scope and safe bets compound the risk of bystander stewards.
With extra people to take on the work we may avoid governance mechanisms that remove a faulty steward.
Edit: I suppose the case could be made to keep the Community Working Group for some of these reasons, but I’d rather see us consolidate.
To address some concerns about what happens to existing contributors, this shouldn’t impact the existing subgroups. Everyone still has a home, and I would advocate for that even with these changes.
The case can be made in favor this proposal to make changes early in the DAO’s life while we are still nimble and able to restructure without larger impacts. We usually want to scale up to meet a demonstrated need, but we may have started too large.