As we progress towards a future where Safe is sufficiently decentralized, and driven by its Guardians and community. This post aims to add more clarity over the role and responsibilities of V1 Safe Guardians.
What are Safe Guardians?
Safe Guardians are:
Verified contributors to the Safe ecosystem
Active participants in SafeDAO’s governance
What’s the purpose behind them?
Safe Guardians govern and protect SafeDAO, enabling the DAO to sustainably scale in its path to decentralization. They are governance stewards, who align with Safe’s vision to drive the adoption of smart contract accounts, and they have verifiably proven their commitment to this vision.
Responsibilities
Guardians have the following responsibilities:
Regularly:
Check @safegovernance on Twitter for announcements and discussions
Check the SEP (Safe Ecosystem Proposals) section in the Forum and comment opinions and give feedback on SEPs which will also serve as a signal to other community members SEPs - Safe Community Forum. Guardians should also consider doing the same for pre-SEP proposals in the general sections Proposals - Safe Community Forum.
Push new ideas that could transition to proposals e.g. an iteration on the existing governance process.
Occasionally:
Become a delegate and advocate for voting delegations - boost responsibility by campaigning for other SAFE holders to delegate to your address.
Collaborate with other Guardians and community members to post proposals to Snapshot which requires the proposer to own or be delegated 20,000 SAFE.
Communication Hubs for Safe Guardians
Governance Forum - https://forum.safe.global/
The forum is the source of truth of governance discourse. Everyone is free to discuss governance wherever they want. However, for SafeDAO to truly decentralize governance and reduce information asymmetries, all summarised opinions (both current and changed), positions and proposals should be routed through the governance forum.
Telegram - Reach out to a Guardian for access
The Guardian Telegram group is currently the go-to place to reach Guardians and have informal high-level discussions. Though keep these discussions close to SafeDAO governance-related topics, and try to avoid any posts that do not directly relate to SafeDAO governance that affects or involves Guardians. Also remember that formal proposals are exclusively discussed on the Forum and decisions are only made there and on Snapshot.
Communicating your role as a Guardian
A Safe Guardian is not a typical delegate role that you just bought into, it’s a title you have earned. Everyone who’s currently a Guardian went through an application process and has a proven / verifiable track record of positive sum contribution to the SafeDAO ecosystem.
Enshrining Future Guardians
An updated Guardian framework is currently in the works and will be discussed as part of an SEP.
Kind of frustrating to learn that the Safe Guardians have their own private Telegram group when I have been trying to get a Discord channel for governance discussions for two weeks and have been getting a ton of pushback from the Safe Team.
@theobtl can you explain to me how a Telegram group is different than a Discord channel?
I totally get that you may feel frustrated to hear this, but let me clarify that:
The only open remark wrt the discord channel you suggested is not the question if, but how, so it’s purpose. Your initial suggestion included a Discord channel as an additional place to discuss governance which creates problems of collective attention which we’ve discussed at length in your thread. I’m waiting for alignment to adapt the purpose accordingly.
The Guardians Telegram chat, from the beginning, does not serve the purpose of introducing an alternative place to the forum to discuss governance.
We can have as many informal, non-official channels as we want. In fact I’m sure that across SafeDAO token holders, there are many communication channels that nobody knows of where SafeDAO topics are being discussed. The point is that they’re informal, not lead to any binding decisions and must not contain information required to comprehend the decision making process leading up to a SafeDAO proposal.
Let’s move this back to its thread if you don’t mind but IMO it’s just about specifying it’s purpose accordingly, since „ad-hoc governance discussions“ can be taken as misleading. The phrasing from above could serve as a template?
I disagree with your characterization of my discord messages and efforts. I’ve been trying for weeks to get a discord channel for informal and ad-hoc discussion, and you (here on the forum) and John (a Safe guardian on discord) have been telling me that the information asymmetry and silos would be detrimental to our governance. And yet, based on this post, it sounds like both of you are okay with the informal, ad-hoc telegram that you have set up.
This kind words of misalignment between your words and actions (and lack of transparency over the last two weeks) doesn’t make SafeDAO feel like a decentralized organization. It is demoralizing and feels like centralized-org culture.
If the Safe Guardians truly “enable SafeDAO to scale” beyond the existing Safe team, avoiding situations like this would be beneficial IMHO.
I totally get that it could be perceived like that. I’d just put the idealism in the context of pragmatism. The Guardian TG channel was set up quite a while ago, around the time or even before the launch of SafeDAO itself. It helped coordinate the very creation of SafeDAO. From a normative perspective, it should not be there, like any other communications channel that is not within this governance forum. Practically, having it was just extremely useful if not necessary for SafeDAO to get off the ground, given the important role that Guardians als SafeDAO’s initial group of governance delegates play.
We’ll need to continuously question SafeDAO’s setup and whether it is still appropriate as it is. There will be a time where SafeDAO is autonomous enough and operationally enabled to function on its own, without any such side channels. That is just not yet the case, I believe, but it must be our priority to get there.
There’s also the fine line between discussing SEPs or discussing anything else but SEPs, so informal governance discussions. As pointed out above, the Guardians TG channel from the beginning has always been created to host those informal conversations among Guardians, but not to have a separate place to discuss SEPs. That has always remained with the governance forum and the same applies to the newly created Discord channel.
Which isn’t untrue when SafeDAO is still in the process of progressively decentralising. The DAO has yet to be filled with a purpose, a governance framework, a tokenomics/resource allocation framework and so much more. I’d encourage everyone to help shaping it and bring forward proposals that contribute towards SafeDAO becoming an increasingly decentralised organisation. Curious to hear your ideas and happy to help you bring forward such proposals!
