🏛️📞 MetaGov Working Group – 2025 Meetings: Tuesdays at 2pm UTC (Currently 9:00 am ET)

cap · December 9, 2025, 3:40pm

1. Weekly Endowment Updates - @kpk + @Steakhouse

A couple of more hours before the voting closes.
If the proposal doesn’t pass, the steward election for term 7 will proceed.
Nominations will be posted by tomorrow, and the election will start on 15th.
General sentiment is that the conversation about Retro should continue even if it doesn’t pass now.
The biggest counterpoint to the retro seems to be the working group amendments.
Most delegates and stakeholders seem to be in favor of a retro.
General shared sentiment on a couple of things:
- Feels like the discussion has “lost the plot”.
- The focus shifted from fixing spending and other high-level issues to who attends calls or dissolving working groups.
- Extending the elections is a toss-up with pros and cons to both.
Thomas’s post mentioned, and people are encouraged to comment.
Nomination and dissolving working groups suggested to be separate votes.

Eugene’s involvement stems from stakeholder analysis and conversations about the DAO’s evolution.
The general intention this year is to focus on genuine decentralization.
The retro idea combines a financial review of spending with stakeholder analysis to understand problems and tie them to operations.
A big challenge for most DAOs has been output tracking, let alone outcome and impact tracking.
Evaluation breaks down into stages: money spent to produce outputs, outputs leading to outcomes, and outcomes leading to impact.
DAOs need to become more rigorous when it comes to spending
- Formalizing a retro with stakeholder analysis can signal a unique depth of understanding.
It’s crucial to define who will receive the findings and what their plan is.
The goal is to provide an unbiased view of problems and potential solutions, which should then be acted upon by the community.
There’s excitement about exploring creative ways for the wider ENS community to engage in the process, such as anonymous forms or signaling based on .eth name or token holdings.
Qualitative data from working groups and the SPP side is valuable, and further exploration is desired.
The aim is to reorient, propose different structures, and move forward productively.
A retro and full stakeholder analysis with community interaction cannot be done in less than 3-4 months.
If the timelines are unacceptable, the minimum viable version of getting the answers needed should be figured out.

The Dissonance in DAOs

Dissonance centers on the mission, vision, and values of major stakeholders in an ecosystem.
DAOs have a trilemma: labs with a clear vision and product roadmap, and a foundation/DAO that does “question mark relating to that.”
Many DAOs “wander off to crazy town” and don’t do anything relevant for the protocol, just “having fun, vibing in the corner, doing a community thing.”
Important to understand how aligned or misaligned stakeholders are on the DAO’s purpose in the context of the Labs’ / ENS’s mission.
Need to determine the DAO’s committed mission, vision, and purpose, around which concrete strategic goals and KPIs can be set.

Proposed Action Plan

Immediately start scheduling 1 on 1 stakeholder interviews and anonymous feedback forms.
Determine what ENS DAO is trying to accomplish, why it exists, and where it wants to be in 12-24 months.
Assess whether the community has roughly 80% consensus on the answers to these questions.
Speed run realignment in January-February; if that doesn’t happen, the project may need to be paused.

Measuring Success

Success will be measured by whether the analysis points towards the direction the DAO is trying to head.
The first phase is a 4-6 week sprint through interviews and data collection to determine community alignment.
If the community can’t clarify its goals, the results of the analysis won’t be useful.
Without alignment on the “why,” it will be hard to agree on potential solutions and prioritize them.

Nomination period lasts 3 days, but this time it will be longer to encourage more participation.
Candidates need 10k ENS support to pass the nomination phase
The top 3 choices in the election get a seat on each working group
For this election:
- Compensation structure will be the same (USDC + ENS tokens)
- Voting - ranked choice voting using the Copeland method
- An option to dissolve the working group will be added.
There are concerns about combining a vote on nominations with a vote to wind down the working group.