I think that’s a fair pt on community input between board meetings. So the full-time support roles could include something like a governance relations role- ie a dedicated point of contact for the community, responsible for fielding questions, publishing board decisions, and maintaining an open line between the board and the broader DAO between board meetings. I would be fine to include that in the formal proposal.
[Temp Check] Expanding the ENS Foundation Board to Strengthen Operational Accountability for ENS DAO
I’m assuming this is directly replying to my above post where I highlight the $15 million dollar budget. If highlighting the proposals budget is off topic I have no idea how to progress.
You haven’t responded to any of the above budget discussion and that speaks volumes to your (and Labs’) incentives.
OR it creates space to discuss structural changes to a billion dollar project to ensure the best possible outcomes.
Just give up some concessions @katherine.eth - Read the replies here without trying to be defensive. We all want ENS to win, just with some level of decentralisation and accountability. But every comment you’ve left over the past few days has been consistently met with justification and defensiveness rather than understanding.
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Interesting debate! one question that could be helpful to break from the impasse is clearly outlining the role ENS DAO is expected to play in the long run.
the 3 functions ive seen in this thread are around resiliency, growth and accountability. Once we nail down the long term function of ENS DAO, the governance structure becomes downstream from there.
My own view is that the DAO should certainly plays a role in resiliency. This is already taken care of here, by continuing to keep protocol changes with the DAO.
It should not play too significant a role in growth of ENS, which is oftentimes better undertaken by full time contributors rather than a legion of part timers. However, DAOs are good as a recruitment pipeline where promising contributors can be taken to full time contribution.
which leaves the final question on accountability, which is the nub of the disagreement between @James & @katherine.eth . If we go by corporate analogy, tokenholders certainly hold final accountability over performance of the company, but their role is limited to being able to fire the board. which in turn is limited by being able to fire management and set budgets. not to say ENS should be run like a publicly traded company, but in a nutshell this seems to be the solution proposed here. Are there better ways of doing accountability? is the open question. i dont think an expanded board of 7 members is a particularly good idea for that.
One aspect i am surprised by is the search committee being the only one empowered to put up names. I would rather a more formal governance structure like either “only existing board members have the power to nominate new board members for ratification by the DAO” or even “board members ratify candidates to stand for election in a tokenvote”. A formalized system for board expansion setting a good precedent is preferred over a temporary, stopgap solution like an empowered search committee getting the power to nominate board members before tokenholders.
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I think it is common to have boards of 6+ members. Five would actually be on the low side. Why do you think it would hinder accountability?
- 6 seats — Mozilla Foundation
Discover Mozilla Foundation’s Story & Vision - Mozilla Foundation - 21 seats — Linux Foundation
Leadership | Linux Foundation - 14 trustees, including 1 non-voting ex officio seat — Internet Society
About the Board of Trustees - Internet Society - 12 seats — Wikimedia Foundation
Leadership – Wikimedia Foundation - 9 seats — Apache Software Foundation
Apache Corporate Governance - Board of Directors | Apache Software Foundation - 12 seats — Open Source Initiative
Board of directors - Open Source Initiative - 16 voting directors, plus 4 non-voting liaisons — ICANN
About the Board
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Mainly because rapid expansion of a board is a bad idea. You don’t want to choose “best of 5 candidates”, going with best of 3 and then a possible later expansion ensures you can get a deeper talent pool.
Like even the EF only recently expanded its board last year to 4 members. There’s a lot of lessons to be learned in expanding the board very slow and carefully, and not just meeting some arbitrary number with whatever talent happens to come across your way at that time
I think this would only be true of active boards that have a history of close collaboration and execution, but the ENS Foundation has been inactive. So it does not have that history and is basically like setting up a new organization.
As I’m sure you’re aware, nobody is proposing an additional spend of $15m/year - this would replace the existing budgets for Labs and the streaming program. ENS Labs’ budget, as you observe, is 9.7 million a year. The streaming program is 4.5 million. 15 million covers those two budgets with little to spare.
Neither of those statements is remotely accurate, and if you would like to have a reasonable discussion, I think it would serve to avoid such hyperbole.
Worth a bump — operational centralization ≠ protocol centralization, and it’s worth reiterating that the DAO is the mechanism by which the status quo changes.
If we define credibly neutral naming infrastructure by this standard, then the DAO is succeeding in its decentralization efforts, despite the pejorative remarks otherwise.
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Regarding the following:
Good direction. I’d like to see it defined in the formal proposal (i.e. scope, reporting cadence, and accountability), rather than left ad hoc.
If independent teams and delegates have no way to interface with the board, it risks becoming less effective over time, even if it’s structurally sound.
Hey everyone just want to to note here what I said on the metagov call today:
I support the direction of this proposal, but I propose two changes:
- Open Nominations
There should be some mechanism for an open nomination process. This is important for the legitimacy of the process.
The existing board and ENS Labs can produce their candidates, but other people should be able to as well. I think some basic rules like “the nominee must have the endorsement of 100k tokens” (the same to put a proposal to vote) could filter out most noise. I’m open to other rules as well, and I’m confident we can have an open nomination process that is still orderly.
- Board Composition
The existing proposal has five board seats, two of them filled by ENS Labs. I’m concerned this creates a perception of DAO capture by the entity that is its biggest recipient of funding.
My counter proposal: Still five board seats, one is a permanent seat for Nick Johnson as the creator of ENS, and the remaining four are open to be filled by the DAO in the nomination/voting process. I believe this takes into account many of Katherine’s legitimate arguments above while maintaining better neutrality.
My Vote
I support the direction of Katherine’s proposal. However, in it’s current form I would vote AGAINST. But if the above changes were made, I’d publicly support it and vote FOR.
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FWIW, I flagged this at the onset of this discussion:
The suggested fall-back mechanism introduces a veto loop:
Delegates can simply continue voting ‘No’ on successive slates, creating a ratification deadlock that exposes nominees to prolonged process fatigue.
My read is that the current Foundation body is unlikely to accept an open nomination process, while delegates are unlikely to accept a fully closed one.
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This is a classic prisoner’s dilemma: both sides are incentivized to hold hardline positions to protect their own process preferences, even though mutual rigidity produces the worst collective outcome—deadlock, fatigue, and delayed execution.
For the sake of ENS, we need a bounded compromise on process design (input pathways, screening, and a convergence mechanism) if we want to move forward productively.
I can also post publicly what I said today on the call.
I pointed out that there are two intersecting but key ideas when it comes to how decentralized the ENS DAO will be after we have a funded foundation, and those are the composition of the foundation’s board and the mandate of the foundation.
There has been a lot of discussion about the composition of the board, but not so much about the mandate of the foundation. I have pointed out that because the current ENS foundation has been largely inactive, in many ways this will be very similar to a new organization.
Do you have an opinion about the scope of responsibilities that should be handled by the ENS foundation? I have offered some that I think are natural fits, including legal, admin, interprotocol relationships, etc.
Let’s qualify this statement before taking it at face value.
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Question: Is the ENS DAO decentralized now?
Writ large, yes. However, the report warns ENS risks remaining “a DAO in constitutional form” while becoming “managerial-elite governance in practice.”
The tension here is less about decentralization in the abstract, and more about structured vs. unstructured participation.
In practice, structured participation tends to concentrate among:
- Working Groups
- Service Providers
- Delegates with > 10k Voting Power
This proposal removes at least one structured pathway (Working Groups) without specifying a replacement. The result is one less channel for structured participation—anxiety is downstream of that gap, and the question “Is the ENS DAO still decentralized?” is symptomatic of it.
The core issue is not simply power concentration, but how participation is structured, accessed, and made legible : who can shape decisions, through what mechanism, and with what accountability.
The shape of qualified participation should take form as a mechanism for DAO participants (delegates, Service Providers, protocol contributors, among others) to interface with the Board.
Interfacing can take several forms, but here I define it as a formally recognized channel and system of record for receiving and acknowledging input, and responding to public and expert inquiry as a lever for accountability.
As for concerns of procedural legitimacy: the DAO has precedent for electing new Foundation directors. Thus, as proposed, the ask breaks precedent. The governance impasse is inevitable.
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So my recommendations are as follows:
- Create a mechanism for qualified participation (preferably programmatic).
- Establish a way for the public and experts to interface with the Board.
- Respect precedent and allow for at least a single “special status” DAO-voted, term-bound Foundation director.
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