While I appreciate the initiative that some of the ex-council members show here, it rings as pretty self-serving in my view to float a proposal that bakes in another 3-month term with no election. I’m of the STRONG opinion that a retrospective by both non-council contributors and council contributors is needed given this was termed an experiment.
The proposers here would all be reinstated via a forum sentiment poll and I find that unacceptable to the extreme given that the remit of council v1 was poorly defined and termed an experiment. There was no effort to gauge broad organizational context ahead within a group of contributors that wished to be elected to shepherd an organization and imo there were parts of this DAO (read contributors) that experienced pain as a result with only 57% of the council making it to term. If there’s a desire to push forward in this manner by previous members of a council, imo there hasn’t been sufficient discourse and informed iterative improvement around:
- What worked in v1
- What didn’t work in v1
- For contributors
- For the council
- For external partners
- What was the remit in v1?
- What was delivered?
- What was done outside of the remit (and should we include that in a subsequent remit if a new council forms)?
- What does an ideal council look like in terms of:
- v2 remit
- resource allocation
- core hiring
- nest feedback process
- resource allocation
- term length and periodicity
- enhanced COID considerations for council members
- methodologists
- contribution to other DAOs and companies
- ability of council members to propose new initiatives in secret or entertain same
- requirement of council communicate (took a lot of requests to get a weekly touchpoint up/repurposed the leadership forum, no channel for ad-hoc requests and discussion)
- clarity around whether communication is coming from an individual or ‘the council’ as this was unclear at times
- onboarding and offboarding considerations for active council members
- v2 remit
And not the least of which: What is expected of every contributor and how does that differ from what we expect from a good council member?
One of the things I found most concerning I also find extremely hard to communicate, and may require some signaling by contributors. There seemed to be a palpable decrease in the level of concern and participation by contributors around holistic organizational strategy, while a group of elected, yet perhaps not holistically informed contributors shaped this DAO and whittled down to only 4 people deciding strategy in the end. My again STRONG feeling is that stewards of this DAO should have broad organizational context (this can be measured and tracked with forum stats, required activities and outputs, etc). If the feeling is that such stewards would not have the functional expertise to effectively consider the functional areas, then let’s get a functional counterpoint stood up (nest leads would be a good option here) if only to provide an execution-level check to give a council validity and maintain resonance.
I’ll support the will of this DAO, but I feel the DAO was woefully underserved by v1 of the council and will endeavor to make ANY delegated-decision-making entity as fair, robust, and effective as possible. I believe that electing a council that isn’t equipped to serve this DAO is about the most dangerous thing we could do in terms of broad organizational risk. While this DAO has had a council for less than 20% of it’s existence, it is being touted as successful: the nesting process was pulled from Community, was rough on a lot of people, and ultimately the council was unable to shepherd it through IIP while in session. Further, there is no reason why a council should have delayed assigning DRIs to the 8 listed initiatives above while in session; imo this council failed to deliver on it’s remit and I say that having served for 2/3 of my elected term and bear all due responsibility here for my time on and off the council.
Further. There has been no effort to stand-up a more reliable distributed consensus mechanism for this DAO and there are efforts underway to change that; we have this forum for polls and use a centralized service for elections. Roughly 1/50th of all INDEX tokens are in the hands of DAO contributors, so a reliable proxy for DAO consensus cannot be inferred there. In short, we have made little to no attempt to implement or iterate on DAO consensus outside of a centralized command structure. I don’t believe that the council if re-elected in it’s current form would be supportive of establishing a DAO consensus tool given that remuneration for council service exceeds that of standard DAO service (by council design) and contributors to the council would have to move against their own interests in that regard (I’m speaking more to incentive bias than anything). In essence, if there is to be a decision function, the body of DAO contributors who will be required to execute should get more voice than they’ve had to date in helping shape what a good decision function looks like.
Finally, to reluctantly echo our founder’s point, the price of INDEX is down ~70% from when we took office while the price of ETH is down ~40% and I’d like to have some discussion that includes other participants in the INDEX token economy as to what an ideal interface with this DAO would look like and what can be done to prevent the value this DAO and our partners create from escaping our ecosystem. This is not a challenge unique to a council; however, the council attempted to address this challenge in ways that were perceived as deleterious by our INDEX economy partners and ‘delegated’ tokenomic responsibility for shepherding this endeavor to a DRI that sat on the council; I believe this is a larger conversation than one that is internal to this DAO and would like to make sure that we’re serving everyone on the INDEX token economy in this regard.
To be clear, this reply is not a retro and these thoughts are a bit blunt but they’re mine. I realize that I’m of the minority opinion regarding the efficacy of a council to date, but I was on it and I feel that this DAO as a whole is better without one as opposed to the remnants of one reclaiming power in this manner without retrospection. I have asked privately and publicly for reconsideration of this proposal and sufficient time for a retro, and have been told that’s been done in the view of the remaining council (via the leadership forum meetings run by council); if I’m in the minority to the extreme I’ll endeavor to adjust as I have not found the proposers willing to adjust, so I’m bringing these concerns directly to the DAO for consideration and will execute the will of this DAO and INDEX holders given that the council session ended on 28Feb22 and in my view a forum poll is not a sufficiently trusted mechanism for DAO or INDEX holder consensus around such a powerful and centralized entity (move funds, deprecate create pods, engage externally as representative).
My clear asks, to the proposers in this post:
- Partake in a retrospective with DAO contributors that’s run by someone that isn’t an ex-council member;
- Use a more robust framework for electing a new council than a forum poll, should another council be the path forward;
- Run a clean election rather than extending a term given that this was pitched as an experiment with a defined timeframe and remit.