Hi all. Eugene from Metagov here.
tldr: I think doing a retro could set a great precedent both for ENS and for DAOs more broadly. It sounds like there are a few different ideas (between retro, pausing WGs, rolling WGs into Labs, or a bridge proposal) that can potentially complement each other and bring up interesting elements of the appropriate order of operations, depending on the desired outcomes.
One thing to note on assumptions. I am fundamentally assuming that this community wants a) ENS to succeed as a product/ecosystem, and b) to find the most sustainable way to manage it in the future (which involves some amount of decentralization via the DAO to maximize resiliance). Please let me know if I’m off base here.
Importance of Retro
As @simona_pop mentioned in this comment, there is an overall trend towards contracting DAOs and/or generally centralizing. This trend comes with some real problems, as well as some over-correction.
One of the major criticisms of DAOs in general is that they don’t get things done, or if they do, they do so at tremendous cost and inefficiency. We saw that as part of the grant research we have done within the Grant Innovation Lab at Metagov, and I don’t know how many times I’ve heard the general DAO premium - that you can 2-3x the cost of a service or good for a DAO relative to more mature orgs, and that’s just accepted.
To put it lightly, this is not good for the future of DAOs and decentralized communities more broadly. If we, as a space, want to show that DAOs can actually be effective orgs, then we need to show a level of financial rigor that has mostly been lacking.
That’s where I got really excited by this idea of a retro. 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. I think it’s also important not to just to the standard over-correction of DAOs didn’t perform as well as a centralized org, so let’s not bother with any decentralization, as opposed to figuring out the specific problems dealt with and where/what kind of decentralization helps deal with the problem.
Phases
I strongly believe that the community should consider this project in a few phases:
- data gathering to collate all of the relevant information and to get confirmation from relevant stakeholders
- spend analysis and presentation to the community (this would be the bulk of the work as it could entail creating dashboards, contributing relevant data to OSO or Open Grants, potentially following up with some of the service providers or previous grantees, beginning an outcome/impact analysis, putting in place the infrastructure and processes to track impact in the future, and communicating this to the community)
- stakeholder analysis to help clarify the role of the DAO relative to Labs, and to gather what are seen as open problems for the DAO (politics, lack of talent attraction, lack of clear mission/vision, no COI, etc.)
- research on how other decentralized communities address some of the identified challenges
- a proposal with potential solutions to some of these issues
All of these components could help get the relevant information for the community to be able to make data-driven decisions about the future of the DAO.
Important to note: this is a really rough sketch of activities. If this goes forward, I’d want to talk to some more folks to produce a much clearer roadmap of activities.
Retro in the context of other discussions
Candidly, I haven’t been living the DAO like y’all have so I don’t have as clear an intuition around extending the WGs vs doing a temp or permanent pausing of the WGs vs @estmcmxci’s bridge proposal.
The questions I would want to know if I were one of the voting delegates would be:
- if there is an extension of the current WGs, who would actually stick around (it seems at least one steward has committed to not renewing or resigning)? what about the others?
- how difficult is it to conduct the retro if elections are not paused/there is a new election now? is it possible to get those rolling off of WGs to commit to at least being interviewed by the independent reviewer? I get where 184 is coming from in terms of whether all WG members really need to be involved, though it would be ideal to interview all of them at least for a one-time convo if possible.
- if Labs takes over functions for now or the bridge proposal is followed in some way, what kind of commitment might there be to give back power to the DAO if that is deemed best by the community? or does the community lose its power absolutely if that happens?
- is there a version where Labs helps build an oversight structure to WGs or their future alternative in collaboration with the DAO? Is that deemed desirable by the community?
- is the problem with the DAO the fact that there is a DAO, or that it’s missing things like a conflict of interest policy (with enforcement), more accountability, more structures for combating capture, etc.?
Final thoughts
I don’t know the politics surrounding the DAO, but there is clearly a lot of history here, both officially and unofficially. This seems like a good time to revisit some of the goals for the ecosystem, and then what the best structure is between Labs, DAO, an OpCo-style org, or whatever else might make sense to accomplish said goals.
I get some of the criticism that spending money when there’s a lack on confidence in the legitimacy of the exercise sounds like a joke. At the same time, jumping to a new chapter without understanding the details of what happened (which seems to be the logic of a retro in the first place) can increase the chances of further mistakes.
If the idea of a retro of some kind is exciting to the community, I/we would love to be considered (whether for a small portion of the majority of it). I think ENS has a lot of potential to lead the next evolution of DAOs, and I hope y’all find a path forward that maximizes the chances of success for the ecosystem. Excited to see how this evolves.