You’re absolutely right that SafeDAO as an organisation does not yet distribute information and knowledge effectively between its various stakeholder groups, including users, Guardians/delegates, investors and the Safe team. To me it seems we need to improve here on two fronts:
-
Spaces and channels to increase the visibility of information on each stakeholders’ goals and intentions
-
Norms and routines to increase the depth/richness of information on each stakeholders’ goals and intentions
For both 1) and 2), this forum is currently seen as the ‘source of truth’ where the governance process should take place exclusively so that anyone reading this forum can comprehend the governance lifecycle of a proposal. Specifically, phases 1 and 2 must take place here and conclude with a Snapshot proposal. Practically, large parts of the pre-phase 1 process are not systematically transparent yet where individuals or small groups often start brainstorming on a proposal outside this forum using other tools. Surely, that’s useful and appropriate for the brainstorming process – the question to me are just the conditions and timeline when the conversation is initiated on this forum. Nobody should be forced to publish an immature draft they don’t want to share yet, but we can tweak the conditions of phase 0 and phase 1.
For 1), spaces and channels, we currently have:
- a) interactive discussions as part of the official governance process
– this forum - b) interactive discussions around governance but not part of the official governance process
– the Discord channel “governance” for non-essential, informal conversations
– SafeDAO community calls and roundups - c) one-way communication and notifications on current issues in SafeDAO
– email notifications through this forum (enabled by default)
– the ‘safegovernance’-Twitter account tweeting four status updates on each SEP
– a Telegram group for Guardians to direct their attention to the forum
– In addition, I wonder whether a SafeDAO newsletter would be useful - pls let me know your thoughts.
For 2), norms and routines, there’s less structure yet:
- The nature of the forum should allow every governance participant to express their thoughts through comments in each SEP thread
- Some governance participants have been using Snapshot’s comment feature to explain their vote
- Guardians are encouraged to create a “delegate thread” in the ecosystem section to introduce themselves, present their goals and explain their intentions behind their votes (e.g., Luuk @LuukDAO, Bankless DAOplomats @daostewards, Stable Node @Matt_StableLab; others did so directly in the thread of each SEP)
- Investors: no structure yet, though @AccelXR-1kx took the initiative to explain 1kx’s rationale on their vote as a comment in SEP-3’s thread
- Team: no structure yet, except that since SEP-1 there’s still a policy in place encouraging team members not to vote while other stakeholder groups are still setting themselves up to widely participating in governance
Notes:
- The above focuses on qualitative data which is most useful to understand goals and intentions. We also have (and need more) quantitative data analyses, such as Flipside Crypto’s @quasimatt’s dashboard or exploring Showkarma who are working on a proposal for SafeDAO.
- Questions on how and where we communicate have been brought up by @links before here and that thread may be a good place to continue the practicalities and specifics, but that conversation should be informed by this thread discussing the high-level objectives around transparency and governance participation in SafeDAO.
So, back to the question of how to more effectively distribute information across SafeDAO stakeholders & and how to make the intentions of each voter more explicit:
What’s your view on the state as summarised above, and what else would you like to see done?