As the Meta-Governance group begins to stand up I thought I would share a few potential focus areas this group might want to focus on for the first six months. I am not proposing anything specifically at this point simply sharing some ideas to get the juices flowing. Perhaps some of these ideas might get some traction to move to the temp check and proposal phases and form the basis of some sub-committees or working groups.
Contributor Compensation – I think this is a foundational piece to getting the DAO to function properly.
Investigate how other DAOs have done this well (or not)
Identify frameworks
o Design experiments
o Gather feedback from each working group
o How to measure / value contribution
–delegates and those who delegate to them
–those doing work for the DAO
–stewards
o Align compensation with culture (how do we incentivize contributors to align to the ENS values)
Monetary approaches
o What (ENS, ETH, USDC)
o How (reducing gas costs will be important for low $$ compensation…layer 2?)
Identify Tools
o Superfluid – payment streaming
o Sourcecred – measure/reward
o Coordinape – measure/reward
Non-monetary
o POAPs, NFTS
Transparency/communication – I think it is important to ensure DAO contributors are fully informed about what is going on in the DAO and that the information is easy to find. Transparency is key to good governance.
Internal transparency: What is each working group working on and what progress is being made? This should apply to both work in progress as well as backlog
o Evaluate tools/methods
– Kanban board
– Newsletters
– Community calls
External transparency: How do we build transparency and communication with key outside stakeholders (such as True Names Ltd.) so that they are not working in a vacuum?
Prioritization processes – It is important for a large organization such as ENS to be disciplined around prioritizing the things we work on and spend resources on. Even if something has been voted on and approved we should still consider prioritization and timing as limiting our WIP will help us be more effective. There are good models from the Product Management profession we could leverage.
Culture
o We should start off the DAO on the right foot by encouraging/rewarding kindness and respect while also fostering a culture of openness to new and different ideas. How do we do this?
o Do we want to consider sponsoring events that foster a sense of community? Perhaps both IRL and virtual events? I could see us creating some side-events at popular crypto/NFT conferences for active contributors to connect (maybe POAPs, or ENS with voting/delegation record act as a ticket of sorts?
Metrics – We already have on-chain metrics at our fingertips but perhaps we need other metrics that measure our success as an organization and progress towards our mission. Should we develop some?
Onboarding / Recruiting- how do we support new participants and recruit new participants? Is there more we can do to make it easier to learn and contribute?
I agree that we should setup a sub-group to find ways to reward contributions big and small appropriately. This could be from as small as voting on a proposal.
I think a public kanban board for each WG and each sub-group is an elegant way to increase transparsncy inside and outside of the DAO.
The cultural aspects you touched on probably belong in the community working group.
Agree we should come up with metrics that matter to us and track those.
I will be advocating for these things going forward.
Hey @natebeck, incredible post! any chance you’re interested in leading a sub-group called DAO-governance that moves forward with thinking and actioning a lot of the points you’ve touched on?
Every subtitle in your post could be broken into its own post to start a discussion on each topic. I have thoughts on a lot of these points but fear if we use a single post for discussion then actionable items and resolutions will get lost, given the breadth of the original post. Looking forward to digging into specifics.
Thanks @alisha.eth! I would love to lead a sub-group if there is interest. I do wonder if contributor compensation might need to be a separate sub-group though given the size of the effort. Would it perhaps make sense to have two sub-groups 1) general governance processes and frameworks “DAO-gov” and 2) contributor compensation “DAO-comp”.
I think keeping the sub-groups small and focused will make them most effective. Agile/Scrum best practice would suggest a team size of 5-10 focused on a key theme/feature.
I know there has already been a thread started by @grasponcrypto.eth that kicked off a good conversation on the compensation topic. Perhaps that topic moves under a DAO-comp subgroup.
I would like to participate in both areas but If we land on two sub-groups I could see myself leading the DAO-gov subgroup where I have more previous experience. And perhaps we find a motivated individual to lead “DAO-comp”?
I don’t think there is a need for DAO-comp to be a separate subgroup because contributor/project compensation should be determined by the group with the most context, which will be working groups. For example what works for Meta-gov might not be appropriate for Community. Discussions around contributor compensation can take place within each working group where stewards and contributors have the most context to make decisions as it relates to a specific resource requests. That is not to say that WG members (especially Stewards) won’t be in communication with the Treasury Management subgroup about general budgets and a more macro lens, or the DAO-gov subgroup about DAO tooling used for compensation across working groups.
Where there is a need to collate tools, learnings, and resources related to compensation, I think this could easily be one aspect of the DAO-gov subgroup or the Treasury Management subgroup. It may be useful to have a “DAO-comp” tag that can be used across working groups on discussions that relate to compensation.
Maybe you could start with a DAO-gov subgroup, and if it becomes obvious that the group needs to splinter further, then you can create a DAO-comp subgroup as needed.
Hello Meta-Governance stewards - just curious if you will be posting a request for subgroups in the near future like the other three working groups have done? If helpful I would be happy to post on your behalf to get things started.
