Stepback Event Next Steps

Author : Beeradley
Reviewers : Meg, Mary, Shawn
Purpose : Information and feedback

Summary:
During the leadership forum (Wednesday, June 8) we hosted the step-back event. The step-back event was designed to take a holistic contributor assessment of the DAO.

What’s working, what’s not working, steps we can take to improve in Season 2.

The recording should be accessible to anyone with an IC address:

And here’s a link to the Mural:

We plan to take the key themes below, create some actionable next steps, assign owners and bake these into the S2 planning process.

We are aware that (a) not everyone was able to attend the call, (b) sharing critical feedback live can be uncomfortable (c) some ideas might have surfaced after the call, and (d) grouping and prioritizing can be subjective.

Because of this, we want to give everyone the chance to discuss, ask questions, add any feedback and make next step suggestions. We will continue to update the Suggested next steps (action items and owners).

  1. Index Council + Leadership

What’s working?

  • There is generally a feeling of stronger leadership direction, communication, cohesion and collaboration and an ability to make more difficult decisions.

Things we get to improve?

  • We still need more clarity from leadership around remit, delegated token use and conversations defining our reliance (being used as a crutch?) on ICC decision making
  • While communication was improved, we still need better communication and transparency from leadership

Suggested next steps (action items and owners)

  • Index Council remit to be holistically addressed before next election (not started) @catjam
  • Index Council to set up a weekly open office hours meeting for open questions and communication with the community (thank you @funkmasterflex for the idea and help coordinating!) @catjam
  1. Org Structure, Roles, Responsibilities & Operational Excellence

What’s working?

  • The new nest structure and verticals was viewed as a big improvement over WG’s
  • Moving to the contributor server was helpful

Things we get to improve?

  • A strong feeling that we need more operational excellence, efficiency, execution and stability
  • We need better prepared and more efficient meetings and to revisit our meeting cadence (less meetings, but better use of that time)
  • Better defining how we view centralization versus decentralization
  • More collaboration between Product and Growth
  • Improved ability to discuss issues in real time

Suggested next steps (action items and owners)

  • S2 Org Structure, Proposal, Budget and KPI process shared on forum next week (in progress) @Pepperoni_Joe
  • Framework/template for meetings: cadence, transparency and efficiency. Less meetings, but more efficiently prepared, facilitated and communicated. (not started or assigned)
  1. Team Communication and Cohesion

What’s working?

  • A feeling of good chemistry, team problem solving (icETH example), more professionalism and generally working well together.

Things we get to improve?

  • Narky comments, poor tone and internal communication at times, and some examples of low trust (fewer keyboard warriors and more collaborative talking)
  • There is a general inability to have difficult conversations

Suggested next steps (action items and owners)

  • Updated code of conduct shared for feedback this week (in progress) @catjam
  • Conflict management process for S2 (not started or assigned)
  • Leadership training (in progress) @shawn16400
  1. Financial Sustainability

What’s working?

  • Reduced spend and increased focus on profitability/sustainability

Things we get to improve?

  • There is still a lack of strategic financial plan and forecasting

Suggested next steps (action items and owners)

  • Stable coin runway analysis (posted today by finance) Finance Nest Community Updates - A Thread - #8 by Finance.Nest
  • Identify triggers for meaningful inter-season budget cuts, analysis and define the minimally viable organization (MVO) - in prep for an extended bear market (not started or assigned) Suggestion by Shawn
  1. Product Strategy, Design and Launch

What’s working?

  • Product launches and prioritization (icETH flagged several times as a win)
  • The new product strategy and roadmap and product development is more streamlined

Things we get to improve?

  • Still too reactive with product prioritization, there is a general disconnect between product roadmap and market
  • IIPs were approved without profitability assessment
  • We need to improve measuring and reporting potential risks of products
  • There is a lack of engineering urgency, product launch planning was messy and rushed at times

Suggested next steps (action items and owners)

  • To be addressed with Product S2 proposal creation process (not started or assigned) @afromac @edwardk
  1. Tokenomics

Things we get to improve?

Tokenomics is non-existent and has not been addressed.

Suggested next steps (action items and owners)

  1. Talent, Hiring & Accountability

What’s working?

  • There is a strong team of core hires and a highly capable team

Things we get to improve?

  • Become more technically proficient where necessary
  • Some difficult decisions need to be made for those core contributors who aren’t performing and harming the culture, we need
  • Clarify expectations around flexible hires - progression, budgets, and roles
  • Too much dependency on certain individuals - develop depth in key at-risk roles

Suggested next steps (action items and owners)

  • Implement consistent and equitable performance reviews to drive accountability (not started)
  • Impact alignment/performance review process S2 (draft complete)
  1. Focus, Prioritization, Goals + Mission, Vision, Values

What’s working?

  • We are successfully Bridging the gap CEFI <> DEFI,
  • We have more customer focus

Things we get to improve?

  • Still not enough strategic focus and prioritization - we still lack clearly defined success metrics
  • There are too many distractions from important work
  • More focus on community/customer
  • Still lacking a clear and aligning vision, mission, value statement

Suggested next steps (action items and owners)

  1. Decision Making

What’s working?

  • Fewer IIPs required to take action,
  • Dedicated resourcing to metagov
  • Growth leadership unifying (Dev)

Things we get to improve?

  • Decisions not being communicated/discussed before going to IIP (the process doesn’t feel transparent)
  • IIPs being rolled back post decision
  • Low trust in governance efficiency

Suggested next steps (action items and owners)

  • Governance incorporate feedback in S2 Planning focused on: (link) (in progress) @shawn16400
  1. Partners

What’s working?

  • We started developing touchpoints with partners
  • Gemini, Coinbase, Argent partnerships/listings were a huge win
  • We opened conversation with Set and 1kx

Things we get to improve?

  • We need to improve our relationship and communication with Set, DFP and partners in general - including more attention towards establishing DRI’s
  • We handled the situation with ForeFront poorly
  • We need to build a robust and repeatable relationship model
  • GOV house situation is messy
  • We are still missing crucial infrastructure to secure large partnerships

Suggested next steps (action items and owners)

  • Formally appoint DRI’s? Suggested previously by (unsure) @JosephKnecht

Special thanks to @MaryQ for hosting the event, to everyone who facilitated, to Joe for collating and theming the responses, and to everyone who attended and provided valuable feedback.

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Gm @bradwmorris.
Using the opportunity of going through these reflections I would like to ask a few questions I haven’t found the answer for, or to just confirm and clarify everything.

  1. What exactly is the Governance House?
  • How is it different from Governance Nest and/or MGC?
  • What is it responsible for, and what role does it play in Index Coop infrastructure?
  • Who are the members of that pod/group/subdao?
  • What does it mean that “GOV house situation is messy”?
  1. Has there been redistribution from Set Labs?
  • My question is based on the informal poll that took place here
  1. According to the Treasury Committee - Handover Roadmap topic, as of May 2022 the Committee should be made up of 3/4 signers from IC. Could we have some update on that?

  2. Is there any off-chain information on governance backing per $INDEX?

Thanks in advance!

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Thanks @bradwmorris and @MaryQ for the heavy lift to get us to this point.

Related to the above, find the GovNest S2 planning document that incorporates feedback collected by @bradwmorris and @MaryQ and documented here. We are open-sourcing the creation of this plan and welcome any feedback as we make progress. Please reach out to @mel.eth @sixtykeys or myself for any input, and join us in any of our meetings listed on the contributor calendar, or join us on the discord channel "Governance Nest > Governance admin >

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Hey @ELI5ofTLDR ,

Great questions, thanks for taking the time to read.

The plan for Governance House is detailed here: Governance House. There has been ongoing debate the best way to approach this, and how GovHouse overlaps with existing MetaGov. We hope to have more clarity on this before commencing Season 2 (so within the next 6 - 8 weeks). I think the forum post should answer most of your questions - if you have anything additional, please let me know.

The funding council was updated, but there have since been a number of changes - all should have been documented via IIP. Treasury decisions are made in-house. @ElliottWatts @Hammad1412 are probably best to answer any additional questions re funding council and existing execution.

Can you elaborate on this question?

2 Likes

Thanks for clarifying. I went through the entire topic but I still had doubts what form Governance House will finally have/ or already has. My doubts came from the discussion where you could feel a lot of tension.

Is there any public information for people who aren’t too familiar with on-chain research about the amounts of UNI, COMP, AAVE, YFI, and BADGER per one INDEX?

Example: there is User X that wants to vote on some proposal on AAVE. He heard that with an INDEX token he can have influence on particular protocols’ voting; including AAVE. User X wants to know how many INDEX tokens he has to buy to reach a particular outcome. He isn’t specialized in on-chain research so he seeks a simple sheet where he can see some data on (meta)governance backing per one INDEX token.

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This is a really good question, and something we need to get far better at explaining if we really want to communicate our MetaGovernance potential to the broader ecosystem.

For now, I think the main data we have is on-chain, which as you’ve explained isn’t very helpful (or visually appealing) to most. You could check the DPI address for holdings for example (Set: DeFiPulse Index | Address 0x1494CA1F11D487c2bBe4543E90080AeBa4BA3C2b | Etherscan), and determine the vote weighting.

The answer to this in my opinion, is every vote counts - and it’s more about creating awareness for other fantastic protocols in the ecosystem to engage.

Here’s a really good example for recent AAVE: Snapshot

The quorum for this vote is 213,874 INDEX - 5% Circulating Supply.

This is a whole other conversation for us to have, but I’d love to see us get better at in S2:

  1. Really owning and explaining metagovernance 101
  2. Creating something with a great visual UX
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