Open letter to Brantly Millegan, in reference to EP6.1

🌱 ENS Ecosystem Community
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Open letter to Brantly Millegan, in reference to EP6.1, Removal of Brantly Millegan as Director of The ENS Foundation

Hello Brantly,

First of all I would like to say that I hope you are doing well and taking care of yourself. The backlash you faced was harsh and swift and although I was not a part of it, I want to apologize for the witch hunt behavior that you were subjected to.

That said, I am writing this to ask for your consideration. I ask that you please consider the impact your actions have had and will continue to have on the success of ENS as a “neutral protocol of the internet.” These are your words.

Currently you have chosen to vote against your own dismissal from the position of Director of the ENS Foundation. As you have over 300,000 votes, including many, many that have been delegated to you, I ask that you consider whether or not that choice feels “neutral” to you, and what type of precedent it portrays to the public that enjoys what ENS stands for.

I ask that you kindly consider revising your vote on EP6.1, Removal of Brantly Millegan as Director of The ENS Foundation from “Against” to “Abstain.” Alternatively, I kindly ask that you consider creating a Snapshot poll in which the people you represent are able to voice their preference on how you choose to vote while representing them.

@nick.eth has already chosen to do this, and you may find that the majority of those delegating to you do indeed want you maintain your position at the Foundation.

The reason I am making these requests is only to serve to benefit the integrity of the democratic process of the ENS DAO.

I’ve said it elsewhere and I will repeat here. Nobody is perfect and all of us have made mistakes. I have certainly made huge and unforgiveable mistakes. But the way we choose to address these mistakes is much more important.

Please consider what is best for the community and for the future of Ethereum Name Service.

Thank you,
Daylon.eth

and the undersigned (or not)

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People delegated to Brantly because they trust him as a delegate. His current delegators have had plenty of time to redelegate if they wish – with free redelegation no less! – and have chosen not to.

If the proposal was concerning the removal of someone else, then I think it would make more sense to abstain or create a local proposal as Nick has done. But since the proposal is concerning his own removal, I think it makes sense for him to vote Against it if he disagrees.

@brantlymillegan, I think that you should vote however you wish on EP 6.1, and know that many of us in the community (many perhaps less vocal members) absolutely do not see that as a “mistake” or “without integrity” whatsoever.

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Just want clarify here - I am referring to the lack of damage control, not the opinions/beliefs he expressed.

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Thanks, and understood!

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@daylon.eth

I have spoken on this a number of times and agree with @serenae, but I will sum up my primary argument: I am not in favor of disenfranchising members who have delegated their votes to brantly, including brantly. This was consistent with the position I took for the other nominees.

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Well said. If I am in the minority on this that is fine, I just wanted to express my feelings and address some criticisms I have seen floating around that can potentially impact ENS for a long time going forward. The main one being “how can he just vote to keep himself.”

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@daylon.eth your concerns are real and I think that’s why they offered the option to change delegation for free. I appreciate your feedback and write ups! I also do not think everyone is done voting. thank you.

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Thank you for the thoughtful response. I get with what you and @serenae are saying about the redelegation, and I’m even inclined to agree. However after looking into it more, there are over 4000 addresses (edit - 5675) delegating to Brantly. I’m not going to press it any further, but I find it pretty hard to realistically say they would all want to vote in his favor on this matter. But I seem to be in the minority on this, so I’ll leave it be.

I’m glad we can all continue being constructive about this though. Thank you. I don’t imagine Brantly will read this, but I didn’t want to regret not saying anything about my concerns, and concerns that are not entirely mine but I can understand.

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Off topic- i took notes on the twitter space convo that just ended and will submit a summary to you and what ever else i gather moving forward if thats cool.

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Please do that. DM me. I am also gathering a report of the events around this proposal for an editorial.

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Appreciate you being a voice here. The amount of power Brantely has to keep himself in power is unnerving from a DAO perspective. I appreciate your diplomatic approach. I can not be so generous to Brantley for the blantent disregard that his words and actions have AFTER the issue came up is my true issue. No apology. No I understand this can do harm and it was wrong instead “the church supports me and I have the right to say and believe others are sinful therfore evil.”

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Agree with @serenae here.

Instead of this open letter, I think a better way is to contact people who have delegated to brantly.eth and get them to change their delegates. This would be the appropriate way to reduce his voting power.

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Indeed, and that did happen as well, on Discord, Twitter, and elsewhere.

image

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Of those 274 who have voted: For 96 (36%), Against 141 (51%), and Abstain 35 (13%)

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This is good, sign of reasonable distribution in the voting power and a healthy-ish democracy. I was also counting and there is little to no divergence between number of voters and their share of vote in each category. However, some of the abstainees are heavyweights and Brantly voted for himself, so the statistics may not be accurate as of yet.

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I’m not in any of the groups mentioned in his tweets, so I decided to not speak much about them. I’ll keep it that way regarding his tweets, as I personally couldn’t care less what he thinks or believes in not regarding ENS. I’ll just say I understand why some people got offended.

However, this is getting ridiculous. It’s one thing that the centralized entity decided to let him go, and I have no particular opinion on that. Maybe I would’ve done the same.
But he can’t even cast his own vote now? Let’s not forget that he was amazing for ENS - he got ENS names to times square ffs. What is this? As @serenae said, everybody had plenty of time to re-delegate. I now I didn’t.

But I can’t understand the goal of posts like this one. To me they have the clear intention of swaying the vote in a particular direction, in this case it’s removing him. Maybe I’m wrong and, if so, I apologize in advance.
Ultimately the community should decide what happens, of course, and like it or not he is part of the community.

Botttom line is: He has tokens of his own and delegated to him, let him use them.

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Brantly was not prohibited from exercising his right to vote his votes, including those that were delegated to him, and he has exercised that right.

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What a sad statement. You don’t even see what he said as a mistake?

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But, morally should he? What DAO allows a person with the most power to keep themselves in power? This is not decentralization.

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That’s not what I said. His act of voting Against is not a mistake, and is well within his rights as a delegate.

The entire point of a delegate system is to delegate your votes to someone else you trust to vote on your behalf. And many trust Brantly. His thousands of individual delegators have had plenty of time to redelegate to someone else, and with free redelegation available to boot. Many of them did, as you can see above. And many others chose not to.

Anyone can change their delegate at any time.

If the majority of delegators think that he should be removed, then that will reflect on-chain via redelegations away from Brantly, or via the current proposal, which has not yet ended. So “what DAO allows this”? All DAOs do, and should.

Yes, the DAO allows Brantly to remain as the largest delegate, because the DAO is the community of tokenholders, and the community is expressing their will through their individual delegations and votes.

This is decentralization, regardless of whether you like the outcome of a particular vote or not.

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