The Metagov Research team would like to thank everyone who contributed to and supported the Retrospective. We have completed our work and issued the final report, which can be found here. We will be presenting these results on May 7th at noon in an X space. We would be very happy to have a workshop, presentation or discussions on this with ENS so please reach out to us. We will be scheduling other events to discuss these results and are planning follow on research projects to produce various governance decision support tools, risk management frameworks and enterprise readiness assessments. We hope we can continue our collaborations with ENS and thank you again.
Thanks, Mike! The report shines a light on many of the areas within ENS DAO that could benefit from improvement. I believe the roadmap, while robust, can be tailored to address more immediate needs in the near term while still keeping the broader convalescent approach in focus.
Specifically, the ENS DAO Working Group should use the roadmap as a goalpost and produce a mandate that stewards can execute against, with coordination from the Governance Advisor role proposed in the Final Report, which assumes that specialized external support.
Now that the governance model for ENS has shifted to aFoundation/Labs lead approach, it is important to recognize the limits of this change, how it impacts the security and sustainability of the ENS protocol and the actions a repsonisble Foundation and Labs need to take to steward the protcol. A full risk assessment of the ENS protocol is underway but in the meantime the hope is that this helps motivate action. ENS still has a governance crisis….it just moved it..
Unfortunately these hopes are too high. The foundation/labs are convinced they know better, so unlikely there’s any willingness to engage further in this topic or even read any content produced.
Incredible work though @mikemetagov, hopefully the work done on the retro can inform future DAOs and digital collectives now ENS has moved away from transparency and community.
@James Thank you. The call to action used the best evidence available (including from entities like ICANN) to outline how relevant orgs with proportional mandates and resources govern themselves and thus offer data on the standards the Foundation and Labs could use to ensure the protocol stays safe and effective. In short, unless the Foundation or Labs has A.) some internal process or other type of innovation that mitigates the need for industry standards, or B.) there is a plan to use the standards, then the protocol will be under increasing risk until A or B materialize.