V2 Index Council [contributor vote update]

Authors: @Pepperoni_Joe, @Matthew_Graham, @Metfanmike

Summary

The Index Council was appointed on November 29th 2022, with the first term formally ending on the 28th of Feb.

This post summarizes the achievements of the Index Council to date and outlines a proposal for the next iteration of the Index Council.

What has the Index Council achieved?

Over the three months of its existence, the Index Council has delivered the following.

  • Vision & Strategy
    • Laid out a vision for the community to rally around.
      • “We build decentralized financial products that unlock prosperity for everyone.”
    • Outlined a high-level strategy and primary objectives for Index Coop to support the Nest creation process.
  • Hiring
    • Coordinated the Priority Hiring process, successfully transitioning 28 contributors onto new fixed yearly salaries and equity packages
  • Season 1 budget and proposal
    • Provided feedback on Season 1 Nest Proposals
    • Worked with Finance Nest to refine Nests budgets and develop a holistic financial plan for Index Coop
    • Approved move from 20-day to 5-day moving average for contributor rewards payments
    • Approved a budget rollover whilst Season 1 Nest proposal were created
    • Supported the comprehensive restructure of Growth Nest
  • 3rd parties
  • Emergency spend
    • Approved emergency for Liquidity Pod for FLI products and also for the GMI launch
  • Delegated:
    • Tokenomics → Finance Nest
    • Liquidity → Liquidity Pod

Season 1 - Leadership Model

During the Leadership Forum on Wednesday, 23 Feb (slides, video) we explored the need for some group within Index Coop to:

  • Set overarching strategic direction
  • Allocate resources and capital to best support strategy
  • Ensure Nests are accountable for delivering on strategy
  • Delegate decisions which lack a clear owner to win teams

We discussed three different models for how this could be achieved. These slides summarize the pros and cons of each approach.

After discussion, it seemed that the general community sentiment was strongly in favor of continuing with a V2 of the Index Council in comparison to other alternative decision-making frameworks.

However, we also recognized the need for any future iteration of the Council to:

  • Improve transparency and communication
  • More clearly define the remit and decision making power of the Index Council
  • Be better at delegating decision making responsibility to high context “win teams”

This proposal seeks to move the conversation forward on this important topic.

Index Council V2

For the next iterations, the Index Council will be laser-focused on:

  • 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

Thus, the next iteration of the Index Council could almost be seen as a “Resource Allocation and Strategy Pod” (RASP). It is worth highlighting that whilst the Index Council may be the ultimate “approver” of some decisions, in most instances another group will be “recommending” and/or drive activity on a particular topic.

This framework for how Index Coop will handle decisions in Season 1 can be seen as follows:

In this framework, the Index Council will have the following delegated decision making authority.

Responsibility / Decision Notes
Define Season 1 & 2 Strategy and facilitate organizational alignment with this strategy The primary role of Index Council is to determine Index Coops overarching strategy and get the whole coop “rowing in the same direction”. In Season 1 this will be heavily focused on Product Strategy.
Approval of commitment to, and T&C around, major strategic parternship Major strategic partnership will be approved by the Index Council. However, engagement around partnerships, and crafting the framework will be led by a high context “win team”
Approval of S2 Nest Proposal and Budget process Recommendations for the process will be provided by Finance Nest
Approval S2 Nest Budgets Coordination of the Budget and Proposal process will be facilitated by Finance Nest.
Approval of S1 in-flight budget reductions This decision will be informed by data provided by the Finance Nest.
Approval of core team recruitment Recommendations for contributors recruitment provided by Talent Pod
Approval of core team compensation changes Recommendations and practical coordination of compensation adjustments will be led by a Compensation Win team (to be stood up)
Approval of core team offboarding Recommendation for offboarding trigged via a formalized offboarding process
Approval of strategic or emergency or spend of under $250,000 per month Approval must also be provided by Finance Nest
Approval of Owl Level changes Recommendation for Owl Level changes provided by respective Nest

The Index Council will also stand up the following groups with delegated responsibility to engage and drive progress across the following areas

Responsibility / Decision Notes
Scalara relationship owner Group to engage with and coordinate around Scalara and confirm revised fee split deal and terms of engagement.
Fee split strategy teams Group to develop a new standardised framework for fee split with a number of pre-determined options and corresponding T&Cs
MVI / DATA / Bankless relationship owner Clear relationship owners for each of our methodologists will be appointed. This will enable clear and transparent lines of communication with our methodologists and ensure they have “point person” to raise request and questions with.
Contributor rewards approach Determination of contributor rewards payment approach delegated to Finance Nest (i.e. changes to moving average)
Ongoing recruitment Process to be designed and coordinated by Talent Pod. They provide recommendations for new core team recruitment to the Index Council and practically coordinate the process.
Budget & proposal process Design and management of the Seasonal proposal and budget process delegated to Finance Nest
Nest “deep dive” reviewers For Season 2, each Nest will have nominated “deep dive reviewers” who will be responsible for working with Nest Leads to develop their Season 2 proposal. This group will contain representation from Finance Nest.
Set <> IC Growth / Product / Organizational Collaboration Group Leads Leads from both Product, Growth and Organization collaboration groups will attend regular sessions with Set focused on their particular area, and will also attend a regular Set <> IC Leadership session.

Council term length

We propose updated details on the Council as follows:

  • Index Council member are elected for a 6 month term
  • An Index Council election will take place ever 3 months to fill vacant positions on the council arising due to:
    • Council members coming to the end of their 6 month term, OR
    • Council members who have left the organization
  • Council members can serve a maximum of two consecutive terms (so 12 months)

This means we will seek the following election cycles Council Members

Date Type Details
November 28th (completed) Election #1 Elect: 7x PJ, MG, Mike, LA Cav, JD, Mel
March 7th Nominations for Election #2 Prospective nominees flag their desire to be considered for the position.
March 14th Election #2 Elect 3x to fill spots vacated by: Cav, JD and Mel
May 30th Election #3 Elect 4x To fill spots of Council members whose term has ended (PJ, MG, Mike, LA). It is worth highlighting these members are eligible to run for one further term.
August 30th Election #4 Replacing nominees from Election #2

Syncing the cycles of Index Council with our Seasons, we see new Council members will be appointed either 1-month after the start, or 1-month before the end of each season. This enables any new Council member to be involved in the entire lifecycle of a Season and play a critical role in shaping Index Coops Seasonal strategy.

Details Start End Time
Season 1 Feb 1st June 30th 5 months
S1 offseason June 30th July 31st 1 month
Season 2 July 31st December 31st 5 months
S2 offseason December 31st Jan 31st 1 month

Compensation

To provide clarity on Council compensation, all members elected to the Council will move to Band 6 as per our priority hiring guidelines. If a Council member’s compensation is higher than the Band 6 level, no additional compensation will be provided.

Providing additional compensation for Council service is intended to incentivize running for Council and actively contributing.

Council members will return to their previous compensation Band when they no longer serve on the Council.

Council Processes

In V1 of the Council, we reflected on the need to improve the transparency, efficiency and effectiveness of Council processes. We are also striving to delegate more actively to contributors and increase decentralization.

Towards the aims of transparency and efficiency, we are introducing Council meeting agenda, minutes and roles. Additionally, we are introducing a Council agenda queue to give more visibility on pending agenda topics, as well as a channel for contributors to propose and prioritize agenda topics.

Ahead of every meeting the Council Secretary (described below) will complete and circulate the meeting agenda according to this template. The agenda is intended to focus the discussion on topics within the Council’s remit and to focus on decision-making. The agenda will be distributed on the contributor Discord.

Additionally, the Council will distribute meeting minutes according to this template. The purpose of the minutes is to provide transparency as well as a record of decisions. There may be occasions where the Council needs to discuss sensitive topics in which case some content may be appropriately redacted. The minutes will be distributed to contributors in the contributor’s Discord.

Finally, we are introducing the Council Agenda Queue which gives full transparency on pending agenda topics, as well as a mechanism for contributors to propose and prioritize agenda topics. The agenda queue is a new platform that provides a way for contributors to raise potential agenda topics as well as to upvote topics they consider important. The Council Secretary will be responsible for managing the agenda queue and working with the Council Steward (described below) to get prioritized topics onto the agenda. It is important to note that the agenda queue has a means to label topics out of the Council’s scope as well as to delegate decisions back to contributors. Both mechanisms are intended to focus the council on topics squarely within its remit and to actively promote contributor empowerment and decentralization.

Council roles

In order to better facilitate the Council meetings, one of the Council members will serve in a Council Steward role. The Council Steward will be responsible for:

  • Finalizing the agenda in advance of Council meetings
  • Ensuring the agenda and minutes are approved by the Council
  • Preparing for and facilitating the Leadership Forum

The Council Steward is determined by the Index Council. We anticipate a single person playing the role for approximately 3 months, but we leave this up to the discretion of the Index Council.

Furthermore, to support increased transparency and accountability, one member of the Council will serve as a Council Secretary who will be responsible for:

  • Taking the meeting minutes and distributing them via the contributor’s Discord Server.
  • Managing the agenda queue.

We hope these new roles and processes improve the transparency and efficiency of the Council. Additionally, we hope these changes will increase delegation to contributors and decentralization. As always, we are eager for your feedback and questions.

V2 Council method of election

We have seen success using rank-order voting in similar election processes such as the Funding Council, Autonomy Group and the Index Council.

For Index Council Election #2 we will use ranking order voting via choicevote.

Details

  • 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
  • There will be three slots available for the Council in Election #2. There are no requirements on which Nest prospective Council members can be appointed from .
  • Pepperoni Joe, Matthew Graham, Lemonade and MetFanMike will remain in position until May 30th.
  • Voting will be conducted via choicevote. Voting will open on March 14th.

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 nominee 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
Community 17%
Product 35%
Finance 6%
Governance 7%
Growth 35%

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.

Nominations

Nominations will be flagged via a governance forum post. Candidates must self nominate to be considered for the Index Council.

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

  • 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

Next steps

Please see supporting comments for further details on the next steps around the Index Council.

9 Likes

I have a few – hopefully constructive – suggestions:

  • Focus. Clarify who owns the agenda. Whoever controls the agenda will heavily influence the priorities and remit of the Council. In a company, this would typically be the Chairman, CEO, or executive leadership team. If the Council jointly owns the agenda then this should be specified.
  • Accountability. I am of the school that accountability requires consequences. Currently, there are no consequences or incentives for Council member under/performance. I’d recommend a small stipend or even better KPI options for Council members which would also help with retention.
  • Transparency. I think decision-making and transparency would be improved by making the agenda and minutes public with sensitive material suitably redacted. Minutes would also help memorialize decisions which otherwise tend to get misremembered or diluted over time.

Also, I’m surprised that a financial plan to profitability isn’t top of the agenda. I would expect that to be one of the highest priorities.

As you can probably tell, my suggestions are based on trying to extract the best aspects of the executive model and adapt them to the new model of management by Council which we’re pioneering.

11 Likes

While I appreciate this has been well discussed in the leadership forum the past two weeks, many contributors are unable to attend that meeting so I would I’d like to see some temperature checks here in this proposal to ask the broader community

  1. Is a retrospective required prior to the next elections. Where a retrospective would look for council members to share challenges and learnings from season 1 (successes are already highlighted) and the community can feedback about what they believe did /did not work

  2. Should council season 2 proceed as proposed above?

4 Likes

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
    • 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

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.
2 Likes

@mel.eth to be clear in asking for a temperature check it is because I heard that the contributors at the recent leadership meeting did not support this proposal as presented. Given the number of (positively framed) concerns expressed at the leadership meeting, I am surprised this proposal was published, seemingly unaltered. While I am FOR a council in some fluid form I believe the IIP process is now required to reestablish both the need and legitimacy of the council.

From a personal perspective, I agreed to the council experiment because there was at the time urgent decisions to be made and I am FOR experimenting. I do not see that we are under the same time pressure now and the lack of community consultation is concerning given the timeframe proposed.

There are many questions yet to be answered about the results of the experiment. The former council has had time and opportunity to develop and present options but I am FOR a retrospective given that our functional stakeholders remain largely unheard and surely more people deserve the opportunity to weigh in on this, and ask questions, given we rallied to support v1.0.

I am FOR alternative forms of consensus and a more fluid council format. Given how quickly we were able to establish IC Council v.1 I believe we can elect contributors as needed to empower WIN teams so that the best people are making the tough decisions, as they are identified. These teams could have very specific, measurable and achievable realistic and timebound objectives. A more fluid structure would mitigate the risks I believe exist when highly visible executive decision-makers hold long-term positions in any form of organisation.

5 Likes

@lee0007 @mel.eth
I have added a retro onto the calendar for Tuesday 1700 UTC to give all of us dedicated time and space for a reflection on the first iteration of the ICC. That seemed to be a commonly shared request in last weeks leadership forum.

5 Likes

Over the last month, a great deal of focus has gone into exploring lessons learnt from v1 of the Index Council and discussing what comes next.

Thanks to everyone who provided thoughtful and considered feedback on how they believe Index Coop can best-set strategy, optimize resource allocation and ensure decisions are effectively delegated.

Based on this discussion, I have added several additional sections to the V2 proposal covering:

  • Council processes
  • Council compensation
  • Council roles

It is important to recognize the diversity of opinions on whether a Council is needed and the speed at which a new Council should be elected. Broadly there are two competing perspectives:

  • We should move forward with a V2 of the Council as outlined in this proposal, with an appreciation that we will iterate and improve whilst V2 of the Council is in flight, OR
  • We should not elect a V2 Council until further discussion, exploration and research on leadership, governance and decision making take place.

To get a clear directional indication on these topics, we are proposing an Index Council contributor vote starting Thursday 10th March at 6pm UTC running to Monday 14th March at 6pm UTC.

The contributor vote is designed to provide clarity and direction on the following five questions.

Contributors can choose to abstain if they prefer further discussion on a topic and/or feel that an alternative option is worth exploring. A majority vote for abstaining would indicate that no clear decision be made on the particular topic, and further work would need to be done to identify an alternative solution.

Contributor Vote - questions

1. Should we move forward now with a V2 of the Index Council?

  1. Yes
  2. No

A vote of “Yes” would indicate support for commencing nominations for V2 of the Council from the 10th of March. This council would have responsibilities as outlined in a new proposal, and with term details determined based on the responses to contributor vote questions 2-5. A Vote of “No” would indicate further discussion on decision making at Index Coop is required before any new Index Council is appointed. Regardless of which options are selected, work will continue to improve the Index Council and/or alternative governance and decision making processes.

2. Should we implement a maximum term limit of two successive 6-month terms?

  1. Yes
  2. No
  3. Abstain

A vote of “Yes” would indicate that no Council member can serve more than two successive 6-month terms. A vote of “No” would indicate that Council members can serve any number of consecutive terms on the Index Council.

3. Should the remaining four Council members elected in November automatically serve out a full 6-month term ending May 30th?

  1. Yes
  2. No
  3. Abstain

A vote of “Yes” would initiate the MG, PJ, Mike and Lemonade would not be required to run for reelection in March and would serve the remaining 3 months of a 6 months term ending May 30th. A vote of “No” would mean an entirely new election for all 7 Council seats. If any of the above-named contributors were successful in the election, they would still serve until May 30th. This is unlike the three new Council members who if elected, would serve until August 30th. This enables the staggering of Council seats regardless of which option is selected.

4. If a Council member leaves, should a new contributor be nominated to step into their seat until the next election?

  1. Yes - nomination by remaining Index Council members
  2. Yes - nomination by the Council member who is departing
  3. Yes - nomination should be determined by a snap vote by contributors using the standard Index Council election process
  4. No
  5. Abstain

A vote of “Yes” would indicate that if a Council member takes extended leave, or steps down, the remaining Council members [1] OR the departing Council members [2] have the right to nominate a replacement to take up their vacant Council seat OR the community nominate a replacement [3]. This contributor would become a formal member of the Council for the remainder of the term. A vote of “No” [3] would mean that if a Council member stepped down, their seat would not be filled until the next 3-month election cycle. In the case of a “yes” vote, replacements would be chosen at the time the Council member leaves, not at the outset of a Council member’s term.

5. Should two members of the Index Council be nominated to serve as “Council Steward” and “Council Secretary”

  1. Yes
  2. No - these formal roles are not needed
  3. No - non-Council members, chosen by the elected council, should serve in a Steward and Secretary role
  4. Abstain

A vote of “Yes” would indicate that two Council members would take on these roles as outlined within this proposal. A vote of “No” would indicate that no Council member formally play these roles and completion of stated responsibilities will be done in an adhoc / informal manner.

Creating a culture of iterative improvement

We will use the same voting process proposed for the election of the Index Council within this contributor vote (ranked order voting, weighted by owl levels). We are optimistic that this contributor vote will enable us to disagree and commit and offer clarity on what comes next.

We hope that community voting will continue to be used to solidify and refine the ways of working and remit of the Council and/or alternative decision making structures in future. Topic which may be addressed in a similar way could include:

  • Index Council feedback mechanism
  • Conflicts of Interest for Council members
  • A mechanism for flagging disagreements

These nuanced topics have not been included in this contributor vote as no clear proposal has been presented on a specific framework or process to address these topics. When a formalized framework has been shared and discussed, we hope to hard code it into the Council’s remits via a similar approach to the one taken above.

We are optimistic that we can use the Contributor Vote to get a clear directional commitment for V2 of the Council and set a precedent to enable iterative ongoing adjustments to our decision making structure over time.

This will allow us to move decisively toward a resolution on a number of key questions and ensure our organization is best equipped for success in Season 1 and beyond.

6 Likes

Looking forward to the vote.

Quick question, we had an idea at the leadership Forum to add a couple more roles within IC, to be present at IC meetings to take notes and publish outcomes for transparency to the community. I see this has been mentioned but currently presented as not additional outside persons, but as an additional responsibility of 2 of the IC members.

Wanted to know why the change to adding more responsibilities to the IC?

2 Likes

As Joe mentioned, we now have an Index Council Agenda Queue. With the objectives of decentralization and reaffirming decision-making belongs to contributors, it’s very important to think of the agenda queue as actually an anti-agenda queue, ie, it will show which topics that are out of scope for the council and/or have been delegated, eg, to a contributor vote. With that in mind, @shawn16400 had the excellent recommendation to add a required Alternative Decision Maker column to specify who should be making the decision instead of the council.

We’ll give a mini-tutorial in today’s Leadership meeting. In the meantime, have a look and let us know your feedback. All IC Notion members have full edit access. Please post any support requests on the C.Nest channel in the contributor server.

Index Council Agenda Queue

5 Likes

I recognize this is late in the day but during the governance meeting this morning (Thur) the upcoming vote execution was a discussion topic and it looked like most of the questions were just yes/no/abstain options. After this weeks leadership forum, it seemed there was openness to alternate options for some of the questions being posed to create a more complete picture if the proposal moves forward. I have no desire to stall the process in any way. If the ability to include alternate options exists there were two areas of discussion among the group that seemingly warranted inclusion:

4. If a Council member leaves, should a new contributor be nominated to step into their seat until the next election?

  1. Yes - nomination by remaining Index Council members
  2. Yes - nomination by the Council member who is departing
  3. No
  4. Abstain
    Add “Yes - active contributors should snap vote on the replacement member”

5. Should two members of the Index Council be nominated to serve as “Council Steward” and “Council Secretary”

  1. Yes
  2. No
  3. Abstain
    Add “2 non-Council members, chosen by the elected council, should serve in a Steward and Secretary role to support the facilitation of the Council.”
2 Likes

As per our discussion at the Wednesday 9th Leadership Forum, I want to confirm we are moving forward with the contributor vote on the V2 Index Council.

The vote will go live on Friday 11th @ 2am UTC and end on Tuesday 15th March @ 9pm UTC.

Not a problem @StepvhenH, the V2 election includes those amendments as requested.

I do want to flag that this requested (and included) option seems a touch strange. To have the Council appoint a non-elected contributor as Council Steward who will drive the Council’s agenda (and so priorities) to me seems counterintuitive?

3 Likes

@Pepperoni_Joe
Thanks for including those options!
My apologies for the confusion. I don’t think I, or anyone else who spoke up on Wednesday, meant for the 2 scribe-type positions to drive agenda or participate in any ‘active’ manner. I was simply trying to include an option where the transparency and communication channels between the community and council were sourced from the community instead of added duties to council members. I could envision those 2 individuals helping to deal with administrative tasks as well to relieve some of the operational burden from council members but never as active participants. They would be ‘fly on the wall’ type interactions only.

I know originally when the scribe position was being considered, the idea was to have 2 members able to fill that position to allow for redundancy, that may have been my mixup attributing both positions. A more accurate description might be 2x individuals filling the above described Secretary role and the Steward Role is appropriately an ICC member.

Hope that helps!

2 Likes

Posting my responses to the vote below for transparency. Thank you for using this voting style as these are all unique questions. While I am against the council, I believe it is critical that there is continuity throughout Season 1. Another separate community vote would be counterproductive and less efficient than a decision made by remaining council members. While the US Congress should have term limits, I do not believe it to be necessary here.

Regarding Question 5, are two added roles necessary? Seems like it would add more operational processes and higher costs (if these are paid positions).

Funkmaster, here is a record of your recent vote(s)

Index Council Contributor Vote

Should we move forward now with a V2 of the Index Council?
NO

Should we implement a maximum term limit of two successive 6-month terms?
NO

Should the remaining four Council members elected in November automatically serve out a full 6-month term ending May 30th?
NO

If a Council member leaves, should a new contributor be nominated to step into their seat until the next election?
YES - nomination by remaining Index Council members

Should two members of the Index Council be nominated to serve as “Council Steward” and “Council Secretary”?
NO - non-Council members, chosen by the Council, should serve in as Steward and Secretary

3 Likes

Please @Pepperoni_Joe can the actual link to the voting be posted here with this post thread?

I have always not been a fan of the council because of it’s lack of transparency and accountability to the entire coop. Great efforts has been put in by the council initially, we only now need to re-examine it’s entire scope of operations and transparency. I havn’t been pleased with the overal decisions relating to contributor rewards and compensations, but I believe it would be a collective resolve for the entire contributor community.

I must further highlight that during the first deliberation and discussions that lead to the previous ICC vote, we discussed points, heat checks and measures to review the ICC experiment! One of which was $Index Value.
I think the ICC performed poorly upholding the $Index Value.

I have been a passive Owl :owl: observing conversations and decisions generally within the coop, at least the ones that are visible and not
“above my owl level”

It’s my considered opinion that the coop has transcended to a semi-structured Decentralised Autonomous Organization, where what happens at ICC stays at ICC.

What I believe though is we all need to revisit and reaffirm our commitment to our guiding principles.

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The choice-voting facilitated by GovNest has concluded and results can be found here. Thanks to all voters for participating. Given results are permissioned to DAO contributors, screenshots directly from the voting website are being posted here for awareness:





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