Temp-Check: Strategy & Discussion Call (Office Hours)

DAO-Wide Temp Check
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Context

Recent working group minutes suggest a need for a dedicated space to discuss topics that emerge during meetings but often lack sufficient time for in-depth coverage.

Question: Would a bi-weekly strategy and discussion call help fill this gap and provide a dedicated space for deeper discussions?

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Key Community Requests

The following requests have been documented and retrieved from the weekly meeting minutes and/or discussion threads.

Service Provider Program

Meta-Governance meeting minutes suggest the need for deeper, structured discussions on unaddressed ENS ecosystem needs. This includes a dedicated space for Service Providers to discuss DAO tooling and protocol requirements, as well as industry verticals ENS can engage with—such as account abstraction, AI, DeFi, and R&D—in collaboration with ENS Labs’ product and developer teams.

Delegate and Voter Participation

Further discussion indicated the need to improve delegate engagement, introduce incentives, and suggested a technical liaison to support non-technical delegates. Participants also spoke of a DAO focus group to clarify delegate intent in voting.

Debate on ENSIPs

Ecosystem meeting minutes highlight ongoing debate over independent ENSIP editors and whether ENSIPs should become non-canonical to foster experimentation. Discussions also cover AI Agent metadata standards, broader AI standards for ENS, ethical considerations, public data concerns, and implementing onchain verifiable AI metadata standards.

Temp-check: Strategy & Discussion Call (Office Hours)

Would a dedicated, opt-in call, moderated by a trusted and well-known delegate, be useful for addressing these requests? It could serve as an overflow space for niche topics flagged in working group meetings but not fully explored. The agenda would organically emerge from these flagged discussion points, allowing for deep dives into complex issues.

This call could generate insights and produce actionable recommendations, which a volunteer could track, organize, and present to inform decision-making in other meetings. When specific needs arise, relevant product strategy and developer teams could be invited to participate.

To delegates, contributors, service providers, and Labs: Would this call be valuable to you? Is it a heavy lift? Do you have any suggestions for improvement?

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I would join such a call on Labs’ behalf.

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+1 on this. Bi-weekly sounds good. These 3 topics are excellent choices to kick things off with.

To make these calls productive – I’d advocate we have one person in charge of creating the agenda each time and inviting relevant people to participate in the discussion. I’d be happy to take notes for these calls as well.

Another topic I’d add here in the future is Ecosystem Growth (ENS+Namechain).

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I would also attend these calls. I also just posted an idea about how the Service Provider Program could be structured and would be happy to present it, among other topics.

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How is this different from Meta-gov call?

For example l2beat people have “office hours”, but the only reason they have it is because they are such a big delegate within so many protocols. So if people want to go and talk specifically to them, they could attend those.

In case of ENS information flow would either way ultimately go through Meta-gov stewards. Why don’t we just increase the length of Meta-gov call by 30 minutes for example for starters and see where it gets us. This would also allow to avoid confusion of having multiple calls with unclear purpose.

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I like the idea and see a clear need for us to discuss these topics. To me it looks like this could be added in the agenda of the current WGs calls, also because it’s a call mixed with different areas (governance, technical/protocol discussions)

Metagov

  • Delegate and Voter Participation

Ecosystem

  • Service Provider Program
  • Debate on ENSIPs (this is already happening well, but I miss having a more direct iteration towards moving the ENSIPs to a final stage)

The difficulty here is attending all calls and only in one out of x number of calls we go deeper on these subject and in a useful way.

We could experiment something like each call has a main topic so people can prepare in advance and also it would attract folks who are interested specifically in this subject.

Example: first call of the month, metagov focus on delegate engagement and ecosystem focus on service provider discussions.

Looking forward to experiment, I’d attend this call! Thanks for bringing this up @estmcmxci!

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+1 As a potential vendor a space like this is a good opportunity to learn more about the needs of the DAO and ensure solutions presented are aligned.

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Great idea. I would be happy to attend and participate from the ENS PG side of things!

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Agree here with agenda + notes with a potential quarterly round up of progress on the topics in discussion

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Thanks to everyone who has provided feedback over the past couple of weeks. It’s clear that there’s strong interest in these strategy calls, and I appreciate the thoughtful input on how to make them valuable.

Next Steps:

I’ll be incorporating the topics raised in this thread into the agenda, including:

  • Ecosystem Growth (ENS + Namechain)
  • Identifying gaps that ENS Service Providers could address
  • Ensuring structured documentation (agenda, notes, and potential quarterly progress roundups)
  • Addressing DAO bylaws and governance frameworks
  • Advocacy for authentication standards, including pushing for the P256 Precompile in an Ethereum hardfork to enable WebAuthn compatibility (making Universal Logins possible today), while also advocating for quantum-resistant precompiles to ensure future-proof authentication.

I’ll be on the ground in Denver over the next few days and would love to discuss this in person with anyone interested. If you’d like to meet up and game plan for the first strategy call, feel free to reach out.

Let me know if there’s anything else we should prioritize or if you have preferences on format/structure for these discussions. Looking forward to making this happen.

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Update: Insights from Service Provider Program discussions

At ETHDenver, I spoke with several devs from last year’s program. A common takeaway was that clearer insights from Labs on protocol needs would help SPs propose complementary value-adds rather than redundant efforts in development and DAO tooling. If we didn’t get a chance to chat, feel free to reach out.

Today’s Meta-Governance meeting minutes indicate this, suggesting the need for ENS Labs to provide more direction on the program’s direction, including identifying areas SPs could address.

Proposal:

I’d like to coordinate with @nick.eth to schedule a strategy call focused on the Service Provider Program, where he can share nuanced insights on protocol development and ecosystem priorities relevant to the ENS Roadmap. As ENS’s lead developer, his input would be invaluable in shaping the program’s direction.

Given the project’s sensitivity, I propose a closed, invite-only, or application-based format to allow ENS Labs to share protocol insights freely in a trusted environment, where Nick and his colleagues can confidently share information with engaged, vetted ENS builders (past stream recipients are invited by default).

To maintain transparency, discussion outputs will be published in the forum as formal recommendations for ‘Intents’ of the Service Provider Program. Since @cap has volunteered to take notes, I’d work with him to prepare and post them in a dedicated thread.

Objective: Ensure Service Providers walk away with actionable insights into the ecosystem’s needs to submit informed proposals.

Next Steps:

Momentum hinges on ENS Labs’ willingness and availability to coordinate the call. Therefore, I have reached out to Nick.eth for feedback on the proposal and to potentially schedule the strategy call. Since the @Meta-Gov_Stewards have indicated that the stream recipient selection will occur on or after March 31st, I propose the following dates (time TBA):

  • March 12, 2025
  • March 19, 2025
  • March 26, 2025

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Thanks to those who have expressed interest in the call, let’s see how this goes.

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I would be against this, not letting people into conversation is against the very spirit of ENS. Barriers to entry should be zero in this case, so that anyone can attend and make up own mind whether service provider is a good fit for them.

Besides there would be candidates who might no be ready to apply this year, but be well equipped to next years for example.

We should encourage people to try service providers program, instead of creating arbitrary barriers.

In addition such politics would create unhealthy “elite” circle, potential applicants who would observe this dynamics seeing how difficult it is to get in would be encourage to apply their skills elsewhere.

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I am 100% against any closed calls on this subject.
This wasn’t something that was discussed with myself or the Meta-governance working group.

I also want to point out that while ENS Labs is a critical and respected contributor to the ENS Protocol, they hold no mandate to define any aspect of the Service Provider Program. It was a program proposed by a DAO Delegate and passed by DAO members.

The information ENS Labs can share from their view of protocol development will be useful not just for some of the applicants, but also for the delegates who need information to evaluate service provider applications. This information would be useful to all, and shouldn’t be limited to a select few based on invitation.

I’d also like to point out that there will be applications that focus on DAO services or projects tangential to core protocol development. While those won’t be relevant to ENS Labs, they also deserve focused discussion.

I ask that you focus the conversation to this governance forum. This is a DAO project, not a Working Group project and not an ENS Labs project. The most inclusive way to have the conversation is right here.

@estmcmxci , would you mind keeping the conversation to a dedicated thread here to prevent excluding anyone?

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Agreed, would prefer to keep this open to anyone who wants to come and provide feedback and value. I do think that a scheduled call would be a great next step to take this further and would love to be involved when/if we set up a call.

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Strategy calls sound interesting, particularly with the special window of opportunity now where ENSv2 contracts are drafted but haven’t been deployed yet and might therefore be refined if ENS Labs agreed to an idea. Our team would be interested to participate & contribute.

My key concern is how difficult I imagine it would be to moderate open strategy calls. Even with “hardcore” ENS devs, it can be difficult to scale up technical discussions. A format where there’s a formal presentation followed by Q&A might help. Otherwise its pretty easy for group calls to go off track. Brainstorming-style calls are generally better left to very small groups and are best left to ad-hoc informal organization.

I imagine this challenge might have been what motivated the suggestion for a closed-format for the calls? Appreciate where that’s coming from, but I think we should explore other more open approaches for calls that are branded to be “official”.

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I’d love to be included in any calls, parties, or other events.

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You got it Gary, I’ll direct message you the Luma link!