[ELECTION CLOSED] Index Council V2: Nomination Thread and Process

Governance Elections
1

Author: @sixtykeys
Review & Edit: @Pepperoni_Joe @mel.eth @shawn16400

Summary

This post will serve as the official nomination post for any contributors who want to run for a position in the Index Council (v2 term: 01 April 2022 to 31 August 2022). This post also outlines the nomination and election process that will be used to determine and vote in members of the Index Council. The new Index Council will have a term of 6 months, after which the nomination and election process will take place again.

Background

The Index Council was a group of seven Index Coop contributors established back in November 2021. Their term started on December 1st, 2021, and ran through to February 28th, 2021.

After their term ended, time was spent to engage with the community on whether the Index Council was successful or not, and whether the community wanted a continuation of the Index Council or not. A contributor vote was run with the overwhelming majority of contributors voting FOR moving forward with a second iteration of the Index Council.

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Achievements of the first iteration of the Index Council include laying out a vision and strategy for the Index Coop; “We build decentralized financial products that unlock prosperity for everyone.”,coordination of the Priority Hiring process, Season 1 budget and nest approval process and more that is highlighted in detail here.

The next iteration of the Index Council will be responsible for:

  • Determining Index Coop strategy - especially relating to product and strategic partnerships
  • Supporting Resource allocation to deliver on our strategy.
  • Delegation decisions that lack a clear owner and empower “win teams” to solve problems

Further, alternative governance work sessions (spearheaded by @anthonyb.eth and @JosephKnecht) have formed an early agenda queue as a way for the incoming council to prioritize decision and delegation flow from the contributor body. Admittedly the remit of the v2 council is not fully scoped; highlighting, prioritizing, and delegating currently-undelegated external engagement will be the responsibility of the council as it stands. We expect this tooling and process-flow to continue to develop over time.

Key Action

Move forward with the formation of an Index Council V2 as specified here. With a term starting April 1st 2022 and running for 6 months to September 30th 2022.

Structure and Composition

The Index Council will be composed of a group of seven contributors, the seven members of the council can come from any of the five nests. It is believed that seven people are the optimal number of individuals for this group to make rapid progress whilst still bringing in representatives from across Index Coop. There will be no hard cap on the number of Index Council members which are required from a specific Nest.

In addition:

  • Index Council members will have a maximum term limit of two successive 6-month terms.
  • All 7 seats on the Index Council will be up for re-election, no previous members will continue their terms without being re-elected.
  • If an Index council member leaves during their term, the nomination and election process outlined below will be used to fill in their vacant position.
  • Two members of the Index Council will serve as a ‘Council Steward’ and a ‘Council Secretary’. These positions will be determined by the the seven members of the Index Council once the election period has ended.

Nomination Process

Nominations will be flagged via comments on this governance forum post. Candidates must self nominate to be considered for the Index Council. Index Council candidates from Owl levels, Bronze, Silver or Gold (Gold+) can self nominate.

Candidates are expected to write a short summary (max 300 words) which may cover topics including:

  • Position statement on decentralization vs. centralization at the Index Coop
  • Position statement on ICC transparency
  • Link to a current conflict of interest disclosure, public to voters
  • What they think Index Coop’s strategy should be
  • What is their stance on resource allocation
    • i.e. level of overall spend; any Nest, Pods or initiatives which should receive more or less funding.
  • What their stance is on delegation of decision making,
    • I.e. what activity would they like to see the Council focus on, what activity would they like to see delegated.
  • Why they think they would make a good Index Council nominee.

Election Process

Voting System

  • Choice Vote will be used to enable contributors to vote for their Index Council representatives. We have seen success using this platform in similar election processes such as the Funding Council, Autonomy Group and the first Index Council.

  • The seven positions will be filled using the voting system of “Electoral Reform Society STV 2”. This is a type of rank order voting designed to maximize the significance of each individual vote, reduce vote gaming and minimize the frequency of “wasted votes”. This 7 minute video, and this 2-minute video do an excellent job explaining how STV works.

Eligible Contributors

  • Bronze, Silver and Gold Owls are all eligible to participate. Silver Owls will get 2x vote weighting and Gold Owls will get a 4x vote weighting.

Details on the Owl Levels of contributors for Season 1 can be seen below. This provides the following relative vote by voting group:

Owl Level # of Owls Weighting multiplier Relative vote
Gold 34 4 65%
Silver 22 2 20%
Bronze 32 1 15%

This means the selection of Index Council nominees will be heavily influenced by the perspectives of our highest context and impact Gold Owl contributors.

The breakdown of voting weight for Nest can also be seen below:

Nest % Voting Weight
Product 35%
Growth 35%
Community 17%
Governance 7%
Finance 6%

This table indicates a broad distribution of voting power across Index Coops 5 Nests. With the largest Nest of Growth and Product having a significant share of the overall voting weight.

Timeline

  • Nomination Period: [ NOW CLOSED ] The nomination period will last from: NOW until 25 March 2022 00:00 UTC. ( 2022-03-25T00:00:00Z )
  • Election Period: The voting period will last from: 28 March 2022 18:00 UTC until 31 March 2022 18:00 UTC ( [2022-03-28T18:00:00Z→2022-03-31T18:00:00Z] )

Nominees (FULL LIST)

(in order of acceptance)

Nominee Nest Term End Nomination Post
@MrMadila Product 30 September 2022 nomination post
@anthonyb.eth Product 30 September 2022 nomination post
@afromac Product 30 September 2022 nomination post
@catjam Product 30 September 2022 nomination post
@LemonadeAlpha Growth 31 May 2022 nomination post
@lee0007 Growth 30 September 2022 nomination post
@pujimak_in Community 30 September 2022 nomination post
@Metfanmike Growth 31 May 2022 nomination post
@Matthew_Graham Finance 31 May 2022 nomination post
@edwardk Product 30 September 2022 nomination post
@BigSky7 Growth 30 September 2022 nomination post
@DocHabanero Product 30 September 2022 nomination post
@0x_Dev Growth 30 September 2022 nomination post
@StepvhenH Community 30 September 2022 nomination post

Election Results

Changelog (post nomination close)

Timestamp Action
0000 UTC 25 March 2022 Term-end of ex-council-members adjusted to month-end (31 May 2022 from 30 May 2022), by @Metfanmike request.
1426 UTC 25 March 2022 @MrMadila Nest affiliation changed to Product, by request.
1300 UTC 28 March 2022 @sixtykeys change start time from 28 March 2022 1400 UTC until 31 March 2022 1400 UTC to 28 March 2022 18:00 UTC until 31 March 2022 18:00 UTC.
1430 UTC 14 April 2022 Corrected term length in table from 5 to 6 months per body of of post above
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My nominations in no order of preference
@LemonadeAlpha
@Metfanmike
@Matthew_Graham
@0x_Dev
@Pepperoni_Joe
@mel.eth
@anthonyb.eth
@lee0007
@JosephKnecht
@edwardk

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Cont.

@ncitron
@allan.g
@DocHabanero
@ElliottWatts

Now all I have to do is choose which 7 :thinking:

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Hi @mel.eth,

There are rumours going around the election tooling has some embedded biases built in. I hope to clarify these concerns. Can you confirm there are no inherent biases built into the model? Concerns have been raised that there is preferential treatment within the voting to support someone from each next being elected. The rumour goes that 4 people from one nest could be disadvantaged relative to a single applicant from another nest.

Are there any ranking orders beyond simply adding the votes up? Perhaps a detailed breakdown of how rank order voting works is needed.

Say someone from Product gets equal 7th with someone from outside product. Both have say 10 votes before rank order voting kicks in. In this instance, if someone for Product was already in the top 6, then the rank order system will elevate the non Product Nest person belonging to a nest where no one in the top 6 is elected. If this is true, we can game this by colluding within a Nest by only nominating a single candidate per Nest.

Also, can someone point me to where the guideline are on in regards to this ?

If I am to write one, then some insight into what is or is not to be included should be detailed. Otherwise, there will be a discussion to determine if a Conflict of Interest post qualifies for which there is no measure.

Further to the above, I think 7 people is too many. There are several long serving members of the community who favour a smaller group and there is intent from a founder to move to a more CEO led organisational structure. I believe it would be a mistake to repeat the mistakes of the last council and run V2 with 7 elected members. I believe 5, or eve 3 is preferred by many within the community.

Would you be open to a sentiment poll here to gauge feedback ?

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Hey @Matthew_Graham – a quick Google reveals that this is quite reputable software :slight_smile:

I’m personally a big fan of ranked choice voting – here’s a 101 overview of it! It’s gaining considerable popularity in government elections in the US and UK. What Is Ranked-Choice Voting? Here's How It Works | Time

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gm @Matthew_Graham -

The current structure does not give preference in any way to any contributor based on nest affiliation and voters are free to collude or vote independently as they see fit. I believe your questions relating to how the voting mechanism works can be found within the linking here:

Great call-out on the COID requirement. There is not (afaik) COID guidelines that have been widely accepted by the DAO, and COID disclosures have been voluntary. A call for action in this regard was surfaced here, but nothing formalized. That said, this is not a ‘requirement’ but rather a suggestion within the main post:

I’m watching you edit your response in real time while I’m responding to it, so if there are additional questions or concerns I will pick them up in a subsequent response when this space cools off :slight_smile:

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Hi @mel.eth

I suspect a lot of very strong candidates are unable to serve on the Council because of the large time commitment. I wonder if this is one reason (among several) why there are so few women nominees since women disproportionately work for the Coop part time. We have some exceptional women leaders and it’s a lost opportunity that they’re not serving on Council.

In the interest of making the Council more inclusive could you give a rough estimate of the time exposure? I appreciate that that’s difficult without knowing the Council’s full remit but looking at the agenda queue it’s difficult for me to see the Council’s work taking more than 5-6 hours a month. I’ll add that this is one more reason among many why responsibility should be delegated away from the Council and to the organization.

Cheers,
JK

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Hi @JosephKnecht,

Some context here, in the past people have made comments along the lines:

  • I left the council to tend to nest responsibilities because doing both was to much at the time
  • Council is a full time commitment
  • Full time is 50 hours a week

The larger the council the longer debates tend to go on for. Are we a business or a social group is a somewhat philosophical debate for Index Coop, and the council, at times.

Personally, I think realistically it ranges from 2-3 hours per day incl. weekends or basically 4-5 hours per business day. There must be a lot of admin work if we considered having two stewards. I believe “Win teams” could also be intended to have council members on them. My suggestion would be plan to have >4-5 hours per business day available, otherwise intend on using the weekend to catchup. A fair expectation is the Council member is still to be managing their Nest responsibilities in a semi reduced capacity.

I know I worked a lot of the christmas break to create a preliminary financial budget for the coop to meet a council timeline commitment.

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Thanks Matthew. Could I ask you to please add any proposed Council topics to the agenda queue? I think that would help nominees and the community get a better sense of the time commitment and the topics that the Council will be addressing.

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While I won’t speak to the right size for a council in my capacity as GovNest Lead I can speak to precedent in establishing the processes that GovNest facilitates. Given that this is a nomination process that is underway and mostly informed by the v1 iteration and polling that was done by the outgoing v1 council I believe there was ample opportunity to have surfaced this concern ahead of this time.

As an INDEX holder and contributor, given you’re expressing an opinion here, I will as well. On a personal note I find further centralization in the form a of a smaller council to be unappealing and would vote AGAINST a smaller council were it to be polled. That said - any contributor can create a poll in a comment to this post if they wish. I’d urge care in framing any question you pose to this DAO (please remember that this is a DAO election and not an INDEX holder vote; target audience is not the usual), and believe that an ex-council-member such as yourself (high context, heavily involved in the v2 scoping process) calling into the question basic council composition at this stage would be disruptive. Having previously experienced you pivoting on a proposal that you helped craft to disruptive effect; and given the council composition that you yourself put forth less than three weeks ago is 7-members, I urge prudence in this regard and would prefer to see this be a consideration for v3 as opposed to a poll within this post.

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The all-in time worked out to something like 5-hours/weekday. Whether necessary or not, this felt like an on-call position (in that the DAO looked to the council to manage emergent problems in real-time). I think that outside of season-to-season adjustments the time requirement would be reduced. A well-defined remit (relative to v1) appears to be taking shape and will also help reduce the time commitment imo.

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I think one solution would be to relax the quorum requirements, eg, Steward plus 2 other Council members.

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My previous nominations still stand due the outstanding merit of the candidates! :yum:

I hereby throw my own hat in the ring:

If elected into the council I would consider my purpose to guard against over centralisation and look for ways for decision making to be pushed / appropriately delegated out. We have spent a lot of time, energy and resources engineering an org structure, let’s use it!

Thb I have been concerned over a culture developing that is anti-decentralisation, the recent decentralisation OR profit narrative has been particularly disappointing.

Centralisation really is not something we should be playing fast and loose with, for our own benefit as well as our users and investors. It is worth remembering that some of the most costly decisions at IC to date have been when the community was ignored and unilateral decisions were made by a few individuals (Liquidity Mining).

Speed and efficiency is great but not when you are being driven off a cliff. As with many things in life I believe it is a question of balance > over-simplified binary thinking.

I commit to being fully transparent.

I have no conflicts of interest and will immediately declare any should they arise.

Crypto can be a macro emotional rollercoaster. The current risk off environment effects our users as well as our own community finances. I would like to see us more pro-actively focus on strategies to be ready for all type of market conditions and stages of the adoption cycle, bull, bear, crab, from “institutions are here” to “mass adoption” . The recent pivot to allocate more resources to DAO treasury sales and yield type products to help our users as well as our bottom line is a good example of this. Our strategy should be to be nimble, resilient and attentive to what the market is telling us.

Overall spend is still higher than revenue and our run way is only so long. I’d like these numbers to be much more front and centre so everyone is acutely aware of the challenge we face and at what point we will have no choice but to raise capital again to sustain growth. If elected I’ll continue banging the drum to allocate resources to product, engineering and growth to focus on product development, UX, UI, distribution and marketing in favour of other ares. We grow or we die.

As previously mentioned I’d like to see the council focus on delegating as much decision making to the many high context nodes within the IVM (Index Virtual Machine!). I’d like the council to focus on areas of mis aligned profit / cost centres as in my experience these are highly corrosive to organisations and partnerships over time. (Gas costs) As well as focusing on finer details such as NAV decay and harmonic liquidity dynamics that are fundamental to whether products can run a positive or negative profit margin. The council v2 should spend the majority of it’s time on issues that effect our users and be much less “internal” facing.

Hell bent on making IC the Apple of crypto products.

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I’d like to also nominate @funkmasterflex and @catjam

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I’ve got some questions around how we’re thinking about this. If we take a step back, does this even make sense? What are our primary lenses for how we’re vetting candidates?

A few thoughts.

  • Builders > Bureaucrats

  • We need strong, product focused, humble, tenacious leaders who are AMBITIOUS and drive us to create / grow / maintain products.

  • They need to be the highest/executive level thinkers and people of a character that embody the values IC wants to be known for.

We’ve been focusing on only a part of the picture, and therefore starting from inaccurate assumptions and unhelpful lenses. Let’s fix this for this conversation and the future conversations around leading well in the Coop.

Let this be one of the primary filters when vetting candidates as we consider our options.

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I would like to nominate the following Owls​:owl::owl:

@funkmasterflex - Funk has done an incredible job for IC over the past year. He is a servant leader who puts the needs of the community first. Every project he touches becomes better🌟

@chasechapman - Chase is a strong leader for both IC and Web3. She has driven major initiatives within IC and has earned respect across the organization. She is also a world-class communicator and will be a powerful voice for IC to the broader community.

@Static121 - Over the past year, Chavis has significantly increased his leadership and become a force of nature within the Coop. He has helped drive many major initiatives over the past six months with excellent results.

All three community members are people I look up to as examples of great leaders within the community. Each has dedicated tremendous time and energy getting our community to where it is today.

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Throwing my hat in the ring as well… here are my thoughts below:

Centralization vs. Decentralization

Tokenholders, contributors, and community members deserve a voice in Index Coop. I’m an efficiency maximalist, with a strong preference for anti-fragility via decentralization. Right now, we are disorganized and chaotic. We need strategic thinking to set the agenda. My preference is for progressive decentralization and progressive governance minimization. I would like to move towards a system which allows for permissionless innovation and fosters emergent order. I like meritocratic decision-making, particularly reputation tokens, and have already begun spear-heading this effort through the Alternative Governance workshops.

Transparency

Open Source (Almost) Everything, sums up my position. Be transparent as a default, with exceptions for things that “represents core business value.” Transparency breeds innovation.

Conflict of Interest

No conflicts of interest.

Resource Allocation

I would like to be cash flow neutral by the end of S2. I think flexible budgets will help us get there. We currently haven’t found product-market fit, and we’re spending too much money trying to fuel growth for products the market is demanding yet. This could change at any time, possibly with products like icETH, FIXED, and BASIS, and we need dry powder when it does. I favor investing more into strategy and technology. We need to be innovators first, find product-market fit, then fuel growth - in that order.

Delegation of Decision Making

The promise of DAOs is automated management, not delegated management. Pushing decisions down to middle management from upper management is less efficient and doesn’t accomplish any decentralization goals. I will promote bottom-up solutions for operations, top-down for setting strategic objectives, and delegation to individuals when there are important tasks without a clear owner.

Why I think I would be a good council member?

I’ve worked quite a bit in every Nest and have a broad understanding of value created across Index. I have an acute understanding of what drives revenue and growth. The talent across this DAO is incredible and we can make Index Coop a fast-growing, yet sustainable organization that paves the way for the future of web3 as long as we are all focused on the same objectives.

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Just highlighting this incase it’s getting lost in the stack. Fully aware I was the first person to shotgun the forum with a host of nominees. My bad.

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Hi @nic,

I think organizations require very different leaders at different stages. There are very few leaders who can stretch from org inception to customer validation to product-market fit to scale-up. The question then is which stage is the Coop at. Putting it bluntly, I think we’re probably in-between customer validation and PMF but not firmly at PMF yet. I also agree with catjam and your sentiments that we need a turnaround. I think there are signs that that turnaround is underway but it’s only just beginning.

With all of that in mind, at our current stage, I think leaders who can make hard decisions, execute a turnaround, and bridge to PMF would be preferable to a visionary or C-level exec who can scale a growth business. Once we’ve firmly achieved PMF and have a proven scalable business model then we’ll be in a much stronger position to recruit or recognize the leadership that we will have earned.

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I would like to nominate myself for Index Council.

This was not something I had intended on doing. I would much prefer to focus on building out the product team as a world-beating organization. That said, I believe there are massive opportunities for Index Coop in the near future - that we run the risk of missing out on. I want to at least share my views with the rest of the organization, so everyone has the opportunity to decide if these are goals we should work towards.

Index Coop Mission Statement

I believe we aim WAY TOO LOW as an organization. While we have retired our original statement - “be the Blackrock of crypto”. I still think it does a fantastic job of reminding us of how narrow the scope of what we originally set out to do actually was - lets take a successful business model and apply it to a new niche within the industry.

We should not model ourselves on financial institutions. They are dinosaurs. We should instead model ourselves on the tech giants of the early 21st Century. And we should aim to surpass them in time.

We need to want to disrupt finance, not ape into it through a regulatory back door before the dust settles. Co-opting a line from Google, lets organize the world’s financial system and make it useful for everyone. That’s bigger than crypto. Crypto and blockchain is not our business - it’s just a substrate for us to build our business on. What our business should be focused on is creating access for the individual to the kind of financial opportunities that have only previously been available to experts and insiders. This a the key trend we see in DeFi right now, and we would be foolish to ignore it. The BASIS-ETH is a perfect example of this. A large part of our business model should be based on identifying middle men and removing them from the ecosystem. This is how we generate massive value. The REAL index is an example of this. We can disrupt billions worth of credit markets by enabling liquidity to easily flow from on-chain to off-chain. Our mission statement needs to evolve to encompass this understanding - that decentralized finance requires the active disruption of the paradigm that currently exists. This awareness will prime us in our understanding of the landscape and inform our decisions to pursue opportunities like BASIS and REAL.

Centralization vs Decentralization

Right now IC would benefit from operating far closer to a traditional startup than we had previously. There is an enormous amount of wasted energy and overlap in the coop, and at times it’s extremely hard to identify who should be in charge of what initiative.

I would suggest, we abandon the KPI model and instead focus on OKRs (Objective & Key Result) as our key metric. The main difference being that KPIs are purely quantitative and run indefinitely. OKRs are tied directly to an Objective, and run for a defined time period. As the owner of the OKR, you have limited time to reach your Key Result. Well designed OKRs start at the organization-wide level and cascade down to Nest > Pod > Contributor. Each level down on the cascade should design their OKRs to serve the OKRs on the tier above them. OKRs should be published and publicly viewable.

The Index Council should be tasked with creating 3 to 5 OKRs, and Nest and Pod leads tasked with creating OKRs to serve those goals. Each contributor should be tasked with creating their own OKRs to serve their Pod and Nest. This is how we create real alignment around goals in a diffused organization.

When a contributor receives a request to participate in an activity that does not help meet their OKRs, they should decline. This is how we save time and energy.

Creating greater alignment now is what will enable us to decentralize more successfully in future.

Product Focus

We need to make some smart big bets. As mentioned above, there is a clear lack of product market fit for on-chain indexes right now. We may simply be too early. It is our responsibility to operate as if that potential lack of PMF is an absolute fact. The organization is in the middle of a pivot, but I believe that pivot merely takes us from drowning to threading water. We need to make some smart choices and use our limited resources wisely. There are a number of fantastic ideas germinating in the coop right now - we need to clearly define what those are and decide what to focus on.

A couple of points that are important in making that decision:

  1. Launching 30 products in a year might not be a wise use of resources. It will massively overly extend our marketing and distribution capacities, as each of our launches fights for bandwidth every couple of weeks. Instead we should focus on creating a smaller number of products that cover all bases, and also on building and distributing them as well as possible. This narrowed scope of action in the now, enables us to allocate more resources on the innovations we need to bring to market in 12-18 months. That should be at least 50% of our design and engineering investment. We don’t need 30 products to stay afloat. We just need to kill it with 5-7 that are attractive, reliable and profitable to run.
  2. We need to remind ourselves that we are in an exponential tech explosion. The near future will look very little like the past. Much of what we recognize about DeFi today will be redundant incredibly soon. We need to focus less on what is around us, and more on where we see things going. This involves taking risks. If we don’t take risks we will be left behind.
    I strongly recommend we shift our focus to zero knowledge solutions as we prepare for a future when most computation and data storage is executed off-chain, and far more sophisticated apps emerge that are not limited by the current constraints of executing on the blockchain. We already see this model emerging in dYdX. There is no good reason right now to believe that the future will not follow this trend. We can be ready for it or we can try to catch up when it happens.
  3. We need to double down on our efforts to work with Set Labs. No marriage is perfect. IC and Set have fundamentally different business models, and divergence over time is inevitable as both of our organizations grow. This already creates much tension, and much work has been done to improve communication and alignment between our teams. We need to focus less on where we differ and more on where we compliment each other. Set wants to be the premier asset management platform. IC wants to the premier asset manager. The scope for synchronicity here far exceeds what has been accomplished to date. Historically, Set has acted as the initiator in much of the strategic communications between our teams. We need to reverse that relationship. Set is a service provider - they should not be leading the dance. IC needs to set clear objectives and then align Set on our roadmap. Both parties will be much happier in the partnership if we can get this right.
  4. To be a great service provider, we first need to be a great product team. Partnering with the right teams can 80/20 our growth in the near future in a way that almost no other activity can. First we need to demonstrate to the market that IC’s internal product team can win without partners. I know that the product team as is today lacks some degree of legitimacy in the eyes of the rest of the coop - we have never designed any big winners in house. This will change soon. This current pivot towards FIXED, icETH and BASIS is the result of months of development and cultural shift in the team. We are now ready to deliver. A strong product team that can stand on its own two feet will build confidence in the coop, but also in our external partners.

Resourcing
I think the liquidity pod should be disbanded and the treasury function of the organization scaled back. The liquidity pod has never served it’s function properly - existing either as a lame duck that underperformed, or as a frustrating arena for contributors to push an agenda or pursue a pet project that does not tie directly to their remit in their home nest/pod. I say with absolute certainty, that @allan.g, @overanalyser and I could perform all important functions of the pod in a couple of quick messages a week. I strongly encourage the excellent research and analysis of @anthonyb.eth and @jackiepoo to continue under the analytics pod. They are adding a tremendous amount of value. I also thank @MrMadila for stepping up to lead the team when it needed it. However, the output of the group is not justifiable considering the time burden it places on high value contributors.

Having an activist treasury with resources dedicated to asset management is a distraction from our core business model. It should be paused completely until a later date when that function would be more appropriate to the business. All of the accounting and reporting done by @ElliottWatts , @Hammad1412 et al is excellent and should be enhanced and supported.

We need a far more focused traditional media marketing function in Index Coop. My previous experience in the music industry has shaped my perspective here. Music, as a business, has essentially been in decline for 20 years. People in that industry know how to get shit done with very little resources. We overly optimize for social media. Social media grows our awareness, but our legitimacy comes from association. This needs to come from traditional media and advertising. Sharing one article where we are featured by the WSG or equivalent is worth 500 of our own tweets. Orienting our organization towards Crypto Twitter is a huge mistake. We need to be far more focused on working with publicists and agencies that can bring our products into the reach of normal people who don’t follow web3 DAOs on twitter. I have had a number of excellent conversations about the opportunities we can leverage with @dev in recent weeks and strongly recommend he run for council and take a leadership role over our marketing function.

Edited the last paragraph to specify that I am talking about marketing via traditional media - PR agencies and ad campaigns.

Conflict of Interest Disclosure
Employment: None
Directorships: None
Paid DAO contributor: Index Coop
Consultancies: Arbolus - DeFi advisor
Financial arrangements: None
INDEX token holdings: None substantial
Significant token holdings: None
Significant token equity holdings: None
Non-Disclosure Agreements: None
Management Fee arrangements: I stand to receive a management fee icETH, MNY, FIXED.
Token voting delegations: None
Any of the above disclosures for family or connected parties: None
Other: None

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