Before the Nomination Window opens for the Second Term steward elections next month (9am UTC Monday June 6), I want to start a discussion about possible amendments to EP4 (Working Group Rules).
Once I have received feedback here in the temp check, I will draft the appropriate wording and move the EP4 amendments to a draft proposal in the coming days for further discussion.
The proposed amendments are:
Amend rule 4.6 to change “March” to “April”.
Amend rule 4.6 to make the Funding Window last the whole month rather than the last 15 days of the month.
Add a new rule in rule 4.5 stating that each WG must appoint a lead steward.
Amend rule 4.1 to take the number of WG stewards in each WG down from five to three.
Remove the requirement for TNL stewards in WGs by removing rule 8.2 and amending rule 8.3.
Amend rule 9.1.2 to state that stewards can only be removed by a vote of the majority of elected stewards across all WGs.
Interested to hear everyone’s thoughts. If you have any feedback or other amendments that you would like to see, please comment below.
Ideally these amendments will be drafted and go to a vote before June 1 so any amendments that are passed are implemented in time for the next steward elections.
This fixes an error I made when drafting the rules, as the Funding Window should be every three months.
This alleviates any time pressure associated with completing an offchain vote AND starting an onchain vote within 15 days.
A lead steward is responsible for the overall management of the WG to which they are elected. It is the responsibility of the lead steward to maintain communications within the WG, and on behalf of the WG in the governance forum. Reflecting on the First Term of 2022, WGs with active lead stewards, including the Community WG (coltron.eth), the Ecosystem WG (slobo.eth), and the PGs WG (avsa.eth) benefit from having a single steward that is empowered to make decisions on behalf of the stewards of their respective WG. The lead steward will be selected by the current WGs stewards in each respective WG.
Reflecting on the involvement, or lack thereof, of stewards across WGs leads me to believe the best path forward for the Second Term of 2022 is to reduce the number of stewards in each WG to three. With fewer stewards, each steward is likely to feel a great sense of responsibility for the role. In conjunction with formalizing the appointment of a Lead Steward for each WG, this should improve the efficiency and productivity of WGs.
TNL will no longer appoint team members as stewards. TNL team members can participate in steward elections if they want to be a steward. This also means that any number of TNL team members can be WG stewards, so long as they are elected in a DAO-wide vote in the steward elections.
If the number of stewards in each WG is taken down to three, then removal of a steward requires a majority of elected stewards to vote in favor of removal. Instead of the decision to remove a steward being an internal WG decision, it becomes a vote amongst all elected WG stewards.
Some of the delegates (daylon.eth, inplco.eth, neiman.eth and cthulu.eth) have been pondering about amendments to EP4 as well. May we also add those proposed changes? We had a few but seeing that elections are soon, we’ll only propose the critical ones.
I suggest keeping to five at least for another term. If we narrow down the number from five to three, it’s more likely that the majority of current active stewards remain and making it harder for new members to try to join.
@daylon.eth suggested to include a rule requiring some form of (quantifiable) accountability on part of stewards. Our recommendation is that stewards should be required to post at least a short monthly report of, say 200 words, and join at least one public call per month. We recommend this for the case when there are five stewards. If there are three stewards, this amendment is probably not as meaningful but it doesn’t hurt to add it. We believe a written clause on accountability will go a long way in ensuring that the nominees don’t take their responsibilities lightly.
Amendment to Rule 4.3
Six-month term seems short, especially considering that stewards spend the first month drafting the plans. We recommend to increase this to one year. This will aid in continuity and better retention of work and ideas. This, of course, comes with risks such as long-term logjam in a WG (as is the case now) but this could be avoided if there is an accountability clause in place. This is a big amendment and probably requires more thought and input from everyone.
New Rule
EP6 raised concerns such as a delegate voting for their own appointment in the DAO. I’ll recommend adding a rule that prohibits a nominee from voting for themselves (I think this is critical but I do not know if others share the same opinion)
Amendment to Rule 3.2
UTC times are usually accompanied by 12 AM. 9 AM seems a little random (not critical)
@neiman, @daylon.eth, @cthulu.eth: I have selected the few items from our review that I thought are critical. If you want to bump other issues on the review doc, please feel free!
@alisha.eth: I am in favour of your amendments, especially three stewards instead of five.
I’m overwhelmingly in favour of the changes proposed as well. Something I’d like to add is that stewards in elections are required to state the amount of time they’re willing or capable of dedicating to being a steward.
I think that this is something that can be addressed by increasing the amount of active stewards next term if there are more active candidates, who could use the time to show that they’d be a good steward by working in workgroups first.
I’d ideally like for stewards to be recruited or naturally emerge from workers in the workgroups who are active and has experience working with what they’re supposed to oversee.
I’m strongly in favour of some type of quantified accountability metric so that the steward elections don’t just boil down to a popularity contest. I think that the specifics of how to implement it might need some further thought.
I’m in favour of this as well. A lot of time was spent holding the first election, and it feels like there hasn’t been enough of a time window to complete work in-between.
I think that this is necessary, and there might also be a need to prevent those running for steward from voting in the steward elections altogether. There might be a need for some type of emergency clause added if something like this is implemented.
I think that’s because UTC 12 AM is midnight New Zealand-time which would cause a lot of communication difficulties.
I agree with all amendments point forward by @alisha.eth and all by @inplco, except the extension of terms. I think the current six months is better than extending to one year.
Thanks for this Alisha! Love to see the acknowledge for areas of improvement and proposed iteration.
Overall I am supportive of the proposed amendments #1 - #5.
My only concern is with proposed amendment #6.
Technically, from an Orca Protocol pod perspective, we cannot prevent internal WG members from removing a WG member via pod consensus through the Orca web app. If pod threshold is 3/3, however, you’d need all WG members to vote yes.
However, if this amendment is aimed at outlining a social contract and process amongst WG members, I am fine with it. Just know that internal WG members can technically remove another WG member through Orca web app if they wanted. If we don’t want this we’ll have to play with on-chain pod structures.
To execute the process outlined in this social contract, you’d have to set up a Snapshot strategy just for WG members and then execute pod membership removal via Tally.
@inplco already shared my comments, so I’ll just add one more.
I oppose it as long as there’s a mandatory TNL representative in the stewards but support it once there is no such requirement.
Meaning, next term (where there is one TNL representative in each group) I support 5 stewards, but in the following terms (of 2023), 3 stewards sound fine.
The reason is that TNL has 1-of-3 stewards as a mandatory (instead of 1-of-5) is too high at this stage of the DAO.
Edit: I take it back since amendment 5 removes the requirement for TNL stewards.
I can see problems with someone using their own tokens to vote for themselves. But I see no problem with someone using tokens that were delegated to them by others to vote for themselves.
Six months in crypto is a very long time. Especially for someone to be getting paid for literally no reason, all while nothing can be done about it. As it goes now, someone can be elected to be a Steward, walk away the next day (or after long enough to pass a budget), and absolutely nothing can be done about it but wait. It’s broken.
Performance metrics are necessary precisely for that reason: so that people can know if the person they’re voting for has performed well historically. We can’t have functioning elections without that.
If a steward doesn’t summarize what they do then you can vote against them for lack of documentation. The reasons you may choose to vote for or against is up to you.
If what happened when @inplco tried to hold the Meta-Gov WG accountable (with specific grievances) is any example to go by, that would be extremely unlikely to happen.
