A public letter to The Safe Team

[theobtl]

Dear b1k00,

As I also told you in response to your messages via PM, I am grateful for your contributions to SafeDAO and glad to see you being so active in the forum.

I can’t speak for SafeDAO or the whole Safe team, but allow me to respond to some of your questions and comments.

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@b1k00

Below is the letter I sent to the team DM, but they did not respond effectively to my query, I sent these two letters as open letters. I don’t know if Safe Team will lock this letter like it locked my SEP, but I will still send this letter.

You have every right to share this open letter and you are raising some valid points, but please be clear that I did respond to your messages and did my best to give reasons, explain things and ask for your feedback. If you mean with “not respond effectively” that I did not fully agree with everything you said, I’m sorry to hear that but I’d also appreciate it if you could make that clear in this open letter.

@b1k00

In fact, the last feedback for SEP #1 came on October 3rd, but it wasn’t entered the snapshot until Oct 18, and many community members expressed dissatisfaction with the delay. (And the team did not put SEP#1 on the snapshot on time as promised, but it was submitted by the community members on the snapshot).

Personally, I find it absolutely reasonable to be wondering why things take so long. I also find that frustrating at times. But then I keep reminding myself that DAO governance is an early discipline itself with major shortcomings in operational efficiency while realizing that the Web 2.0-approach of “move fast and break things” is precisely what web3 is not about. Instead, we are creating immutable infrastructure that is built to last and prioritizes quality and rigor over speed and quick wins. SEP-1 “Participation Agreement” is a good example, as this proposal pioneered how participants in a DAO can limit their liability, but due to the regulatory uncertainty and complexity of this matter, I find it reasonable to leave it open for discussion for more than six days. After all, our governance process requires a proposal to be open for discussion in phase 1 for “at least six days”, not exactly six days.

@b1k00

The team can control the timing of numbering the proposal, and the governance Twitter is also controlled by the team, and the team can actually delay/block a proposal on purpose. Like the last feedback in SEP #1 that it took two full weeks to vote, it was inseparable from the team’s procrastination (whether intentional or not).

This governance forum is where all SafeDAO-related discussions should take place. Truth is also, SafeDAO is still barely a month old and next to team members there are many community members, ecosystem participants and key stakeholders who have not yet made it a routine to communicate here in the forum. The goal is certainly to have all governance discussions take place in this forum, but that’s an ongoing process. As DAO Coordination Lead, I’m doing my best to encourage people to join the forum and have their SafeDAO-related conversations here so that we all know about blockers and outstanding issues related to a proposal.

@b1k00

And my proposal([SEP # ] Make The Safe Token Transferable - #7 by theobtl ) is actually complete in format and summarizing the opinions of the community members, and, it was published three days ago and entered phase 1, but the team directly locked my proposal without my explicit approval (no longer giving me a chance to speak), and listed Daniel’s discussion as SEP #2 (in fact, Daniel himself did not bring this proposal into the phase 1, and my proposal entered phase 1 three days earlier than Daniel), although I agreed to let Daniel’s proposal enter SEP earlier, it seems rather dictatorial for the team to make such a move without asking for consent.

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@b1k00

In any case, you should understand that in fact in the governance of SafeDAO, the team has almost 100% decision-making power, as if my proposal actually entered Phase 1 (three days ago) earlier than Daniel, and it is more complete in format, but You still have no hesitation in numbering Daniel’s proposal earlier without asking me for my opinion in advance.

Let’s take a step back here. The original proposal to enable transferability was authored by the forum user @Daniel and received a lot of feedback. When it was close to being final, you decided to create a second proposal on the very same issue. How is it useful to have two proposals with two separate conversation flows on the same issue?

We can discuss whether we want to change our governance process to have proposals and counter-proposals on contested topics, but in this case I could not even see any major differences with your proposal. You also included an impressive list of people als “co-authors”, although I heard from several people listed there that they did not co-author the proposal nor consent to being listed there. If you were the author of the original proposal, would you be okay if someone just copied your proposal and reposted it as theirs?

The author of the original proposal did agree to move it to phase 1 and asked me to implement the change because he was unavailable. I hope this is to your satisfaction too since we now have a proposal to enable transferability in phase 1.

@b1k00

SEP#1 was assigned a number on the first day of release, and got an announcement on the official Twitter, but this proposal has been released for nearly three days, and still no official response has been seen.

The practice is that proposals are announced once they enter phase 1, not during phase 0. The same applies to the proposal to enable transferability once it was moved to phase 1 earlier today and became SEP-2: https://twitter.com/safegovernance/status/1584559669195915265

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Personally, I would find it unfortunate if you stick to your decision to no longer participate in SafeDAO. After all, we are all in this together and SafeDAO is still immature - in fact not even one month old. The future of SafeDAO is still in front of us, so is virtually all of the work. Only together can we improve SafeDAO’s governance and make sure that this vital piece of infrastructure lives long and prosper.