[Temp Check] ENS Retro: An ENS DAO Retrospective & Stakeholder Analysis

[estmcmxci]

@James

Centralising the entire DAO to a central admin panel that controls all spending and decisions completely undermines the point of the ENS DAO and decentralisation.

Your warning is addressing a different risk than the one this Admin Panel design introduces.

Read:

@Limes

The goal of the Admin Panel is to eliminate the discretionary, subjective decision-making that Working Groups currently hold and shift DAO operations to a lean, administrative model that removes the perverse incentives outlined in the original post.

This group should:

1. Execute transactions when necessary on stream.mg.wg.ens.eth
2. Pay KPK’s performance fees using investment yield.
3. Ensure all service providers and ENS Labs adhere to objective reporting requirements and provide a consolidated report.
4. Can provide space for a quarterly town hall where Service Providers and Labs can present.
5. Perform reasonable admin roles when necessary.

I’m in favor of lean and well-scoped operational groups that streamline execution while preserving decentralization and community authority.

Regardless, I don’t think halting elections is the right move. We should follow procedure and introduce changes incrementally. Giving delegates the option to either vote on candidates or wind the Working Groups down during the elections, as @nick.eth suggested, feels like the appropriate approach.

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@eugene

I think doing this kind of retro on 12-24 months of spend, combined with a stakeholder analysis of key players in the DAO to better understand desired outcomes and challenges for the DAO, can really set a great tone for the maturation of the space.

Welcome, Eugene! A great place to start is by reviewing the Working Group Spending Summaries and the ENS Ledger. You can perform an analysis based on the figures presented there — they track back to 2022.

I’d recommend using the existing community-provided data to support your retrospective, should one be provisioned. I’m happy to help guide you toward this.

Personally, I think performing a retro in vitro — in parallel to ongoing operations — is better than pausing the WGs. That said, winding them down entirely also seems to be on the table. In either case, the retrospective shouldn’t interfere with the election process.

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@eugene

I don’t know the politics surrounding the DAO, but there is clearly a lot of history here, both officially and unofficially.

Indeed! A great resource is the DAO Newsletter — now on its 100th edition. It’s a bi-weekly summary of the latest news and developments from ENS Labs, ENS DAO, and the broader ENS community.

Hope you can make it to an upcoming meta-gov call to breakdown your proposal for the DAO!