Index 2.0: Autonomy Next Steps

Authors: @setoshi [CEO Set Labs], @Etienne [CEO DeFi Pulse], @DarkForestCapital [FT Contributor & MVI Methodologist], @Matthew_Graham [TWG Lead], @Pepperoni_Joe [POC WG Lead]

Summary

  • Index 2.0 is the community’s effort to tackle the community’s toughest organizational and structural questions and begin building the foundations for further growth
  • These challenges span the themes of: Financial / Administrative Capabilities, Third Parties / Methodologists, Protocol Ownership / Compensation, Leadership & Strategy, and Product & Engineering Autonomy
  • The proposed plan is to host a series of educational workshops led by high context subject matter experts to build common understanding. This will lead to solutions that can be implemented via IIP and the community voting process
  • The Index 2.0 team’s role is to steward the process impartially and to support subject matter experts in providing context and next steps.

Background
Faced with complex internal and external-facing challenges, the community held the “Autonomy Work Session” on July 14th [slides here], which led to the formation of the “Autonomy Kick-Off Group” on July 27th [forum post here].

The Autonomy Group was formed to develop a plan to work through the Index Coop’s biggest autonomy and/or organizational issues with an initial deliverable to be shared by August 25th.

Progress Update
For the past month, this group met 1-2x a week on Tuesdays / Thursdays to better define the community’s issues and work towards generating a comprehensive path towards the general goal of autonomy.

Through the collaboration and input of all members, we aggregated a list of major issues and potential solutions which were categorised into the following themes:

  • Financial / Administrative Capabilities: Transitioning the Treasury wallet authority to the community, transfers funds to the Operations and Investment Accounts for the community to manage. Define signers composition of various multi-sig accounts and develop community competency for managing the various accounts. Defining decision-making, feedback, and conflict-resolution processes as well as administrative processes such as payroll, billing, etc.
  • Third Parties / Methodologists: Defining clear responsibilities between methodologists and Index Coop partners, establishing robust communication channels between the Index Coop, establishing a clear way to design and honor fair agreements, protect IP and trademark from methodologists, and define guidelines for fair play.
  • Protocol Ownership and Compensation: Defining hard power impacting the community (e.g. movement of capital and voting), designing the protocol ownership and rewards system to properly compensate and align key contributors, and revisit how decisions are made (e.g. voting).
  • Leadership and Strategy: Defining soft power impacting the community (providing direction, gathering support), defining the parties responsible for generating a vision, strategy, and roadmap. Defining the structures to coordinate resources for tackling strategic initiatives and keeping counterparties accountable. Ensuring foundations are in place for executing and tracking results.
  • Product and Engineering Autonomy: Development of mature Index Coop product and engineering capabilities, increases in visibility of direction of Set’s priorities re: product and engineering development processes, and ability to uphold the Index Coop brand promise of safety, security, and functionality.

Index 2.0
We recognize that autonomy is intricately linked with complex organizational and structural issues. To overcome these challenges, we recognize that we need to reflect on what type of organization we want to be and types of ways that we need to grow or “level up” to handle these growing pains.

The entire process of tackling the community’s toughest organizational and structural questions and building the foundations of a prosperous organization is what we call Index 2.0.

Goal and Principles
The ultimate goal is to co-create a vision of autonomy together where all parties are aligned, there is empathy and common understanding of the subject matters, and we are able to create a top-down plan while also making bottom-up / tactical progress.

In determining next steps, we believe it is important to:

  • Support Community Led Solutions: Instead of the Autonomy Group providing a Top-Down solution for others to adopt, we aim to undertake an approach that enables the community to co-create a solution
  • Foster Open Communication and Build Common Understanding: Increase common understanding so we can have meaningful and productive conversations
  • Start with Foundational Elements and Build Up to Complex Topics: As some topics require common understanding on other topics, we recommend establishing fundamental building blocks that can be progressively built upon to handle more complex topics.
  • Identify Stewards for the Process and Clear Owners for Next Steps: To ensure productive conversation and accountability for next steps, stewards of the Autonomy Process will strive to create a productive environment and ensure there are owners that own action items / next steps.

The Plan
Utilizing the above principles, we propose a plan where we host a series of public educational workshops led by the respective domain experts to build common understanding.

The outputs of these workshops will help inform our understanding of the problem (which feeds into our master list on pain points) and will allow the community to craft well-considered plans which can be executed upon. The intention is that these plans for issue resolution are presented as IIPs for further discussion ahead of formal snapshot voting

The Index 2.0 team (previously Autonomy Kick-Off Group) will be responsible for stewarding this co-creation process and will support domain experts stepping up to research, design and drive workshops/discussion across key themes and topics. Please note that the stewards uphold the process, but do not influence the outcomes anymore than any other individual.

The Workshops
We plan on hosting a series of workshops over the course of September and October that cover the various themes and are led by their respective functional experts. Each workshop will have pre-reading (which will be published on the governance forum) and publicly published minutes summarising the workshop discussion.

Please note that workshops, even focused on a particular topic, may be run over multiple sessions. Our intention is not to rush the conversation as these are complex topics and will take time to work through.

Date* Workshop Theme Running workshop
[31st August] Future of Finance Financial and Administrative capabilities TWG, Funding Council
[2nd September] Democracy, governance and attack vectors Protocol Ownership & Compensation Noah, Cormac, Eduardo, Meg
[7th September] Organizational Feedback and Action Planning Independent research related to all themes Mary Quant
[8th September] Multi-sig signers and Treasury transition Process Financial and Administrative capabilities TWG, Funding Council
[14th September] Leadership & WG Accountability within Index Coop Leadership & Strategy tbc
[16th September] Genesis Distribution** Protocol Ownership & Compensation tbc
[21st September] Compensation & owl levels Protocol Ownership & Compensation POC
[9th October] Methodologist - Partnering with Index Coop Third Parties / Methodologists DFP / Titans of Data / Product
[9th October] Set Engineering, priorities, vision and goals Engineering & Product Autonomy Set
[23rd October] Future of Engineering & Product Engineering & Product Autonomy Eng & PWG

*Specific workshop agendas will evolve and so the scheduled agenda is likely to be subject to change
**The “Protocol Ownership Group” post shows there is a strong desire from the community to revisit genesis distribution. Individuals interested in exploring this topic should flag their interest by following the steps detailed below. They will then research, facilitate discussion, and work towards a solution as part of the broader Index 2.0 transformation.

How You Can Contribute
If you are interested in playing a more substantive role shaping the vision for Index 2.0, please complete this google form to flag your interest in researching/facilitating a particular topic/session or supporting the process more generally.

Community Temperature Check
Ultimately, it is the community’s decision on whether we embark on the Index 2.0 transformation. Please share your thoughts, and vote, on how you would like us to proceed:

Should we move forward with this approach?
  • Yes
  • No
  • Abstain

0 voters

17 Likes

I am unable to access this form - can you please enable access? Thank you!

1 Like

Apologies - we now made it accessible to all folks

3 Likes

Cannot overstate my support for this plan put forward by the Index 2.0 Group (formerly Autonomy Group)!

Huge kudos to @Pepperoni_Joe , @setoshi , @Etienne , @Matthew_Graham , @DarkForestCapital for their efforts to bring this strategic plan forward.

Excited to be a part of building Index Coop 2.0 :rocket: :rocket: :rocket:

9 Likes

Onwards and upwards. Happy days!

Thanks to the fine gentleman who have made this possible. @setoshi @Matthew_Graham @Pepperoni_Joe @Etienne @DarkForestCapital

8 Likes

Looks like a well calculated approach and I am in favour :grinning:

1 Like