IIP: 179 Title: Modify the Organization Structure & Pod Representatives Status: IIP Author(s):@anthonyb.eth Reviewed By:@0x_Dev, @jordan.t Created: 02 October 2023
Summary
This proposal changes the organization structure to remove the Engineering and Treasury Pods, as well as changing the composition of Operations Pod.
Motivation
The model has been effective, but nine representatives across three distinct pods has proven inefficient. This proposal reduces complexity of the organization structure – Index Coop will have a single Operations Pod with three representatives elected by token holders.
Specification
Changes to Organization Structure
Update the Delegate Safe (index-delegates.pod.xyz) from a 3-of-5 to a 2-of-3 with representatives as:
What are the real world implications of removing the engineering and treasury pods and giving control over their respective safes to a reduced ops pod?
Engineering: To deploy and maintain Index Coop smart contracts and products
Treasury: To manage the Index Coop treasury, pay expenses, collect revenue, and deploy capital to investments
Previously these functions were split over a wider group of individuals to enhance decentralization, and reduce time commitments for signers.
Will both of these signing functions now be solely executed by Tonani Collective, Gaddon Leaze and Gateman Digital in a 2/3 multisig? If not, then what is the intention and what will normal operations around maintaining products and managing the treasury look like?
Also, in your post you mentioned that the proposal “specifies the mandate of the Operations Pod”. However, I don’t see a specific mandate included in the text. Could please explain what is the intended mandate of the Operations Pod according to this proposal.
Welcome back and I hope all is well your end. Thanks for the thoughtful questions, I will try to respond to all of them below:
There is basically no impact in practice. As you know, there was never a scenario where one of the Pods had to sign a transaction for another Pod. The primary role of each pod was managing signers on the subordinate pods.
As you said these were the roles of the Engineering and Treasury Pod. These roles do not change – the only change is the Engineering Operations Pod signers and Treasury Pod signers will be managed by the Operations Pod. These signers are still responsible for the same function.
The signers of the subordinate Safes will remain the same. TC, GL, and GD will not need to sign more as it was very rare for one of three Pods to need to change signers out. The main goal here is to reduce the effort for INDEX token holders to do due diligence to ensure that the pod representatives represent their values. This IIP will bring the number of representatives from 9 to 3 which should be a much more manageable task to do well.
Just to clarify again, normal operations around maintaining products and treasury management will be handled by those signers on the Engineering Operations Pod and the Treasury Pod, but the Operations Pod will have the authority to change the signers in those Pods if they deem it necessary.
This was an oversight while drafting this post. The specific mandate will be the same as specified in IIP-170 with the only change being the added responsibilities of appointing signers to the Treasury and Engineering Operations Pod.
Note: I’ve edited the post to remove that sentence.
Thanks for your response @anthonyb.eth and for clarifying the operational changes this IIP would impose.
I have voted AGAINST.
Giving sole control to ops pod (3 contributors) to add and remove signers to both engineering and treasury multisigs is overly centralizing and a risk to the protocol.
This seems extremely rushed - it was posted on a Saturday over a long US weekend and is now going to vote today.
There is a personnel change in the ops pod that is a significant change to IC leadership and deserves it’s own vote and engagement from the community.
To be frank, Ops Pod has not performed an effective function at leading product and business strategy. This IIP seems like a further encroachment on the decentralization of the protocol, and clearly does more to advance Ops Pod’s agenda than anything to improve operational efficiency or extend more influence to token holders, as you have suggested in your post.
I would urge all contributors and token holders to vote against this proposal in order to spur a much needed discussion on the future direction of Index Coop.
