This is a lousy example, the DAO literally approved them a 250M ARB program and they had a seat on the GCP, if they did not move forward quickly having the funds in the multisig is no longer the DAO's fault, it is the fault of those involved in the execution of the program. In the end, they left because someone offered them money somewhat faster, which speaks more about Treasure than Arbitrum DAO.

So in this case I would recommend that you open the process to candidates who are willing to do it for a reasonable salary based on the task at hand. Your argument is like the CEO of Apple applying for a job as a manager at a McDonalds branch and pretending to earn the same salary as his previous job.

On the other hand, I am surprised by the absence of any mention of Alex's failure at Savvy (also a waste of DAO’s funds through STIP/STIP-B) or the multiple complaints (as example this one) about Plurality Labs and their management of the DAO-funded program. It is even more incredible that these cases of failure are presented as a “positive” aspect of Alex and Joe's background. In the case of PL, they couldn't even deliver a framework for grants as promised.

In my opinion, this collides with the work being done by Entropy, who are trying to first establish the Mission, Vision, and Purpose of the DAO and then come up with a proposal with more specific objectives for the next 12-24 months. And to be honest, if PL/Joe couldn't deliver a framework for grants, I don’t think that you can solve a huge problem for the DAO such as outlining objectives and setting budgets for different verticals.

Your reaction to criticism (both now and when you canceled a Snapshot vote because you didn't get the result you wanted) could be one of the reasons why people choose to create an anonymous profile to tell you things. In any case, this is web3, if someone chooses to be anonymous it shouldn't matter.

The comparison with Entropy is misplaced because Stylus is not the only initiative they are working on. It was only given as an example in a series of initiatives.

The following reflects the views of the Lampros Labs DAO governance team, composed of Chain_L (@Blueweb), @Euphoria, and Hirangi Pandya (@Nyx), based on our combined research, analysis, and ideation.

Thank you for the proposal. We had a few questions regarding it:

1. What objective criteria can we use to measure the success of this initiative?
2. Could you clarify how this resource will differ from existing materials?

3. With various calls already scheduled across different initiatives, might adding another monthly call increase operational overhead? What motivation would builders, delegates and contributors have to join these?

This is a lousy example, the DAO literally approved them a 250M ARB program and they had a seat on the GCP, if they did not move forward quickly having the funds in the multisig is no longer the DAO's fault, it is the fault of those involved in the execution of the program. In the end, they left because someone offered them money somewhat faster, which speaks more about Treasure than Arbitrum DAO.

So in this case I would recommend that you open the process to candidates who are willing to do it for a reasonable salary based on the task at hand. Your argument is like the CEO of Apple applying for a job as a manager at a McDonalds branch and pretending to earn the same salary as his previous job.

On the other hand, I am surprised by the absence of any mention of Alex's failure at Savvy (also a waste of DAO’s funds through STIP/STIP-B) or the multiple complaints (as example this one) about Plurality Labs and their management of the DAO-funded program. It is even more incredible that these cases of failure are presented as a “positive” aspect of Alex and Joe's background. In the case of PL, they couldn't even deliver a framework for grants as promised.

In my opinion, this collides with the work being done by Entropy, who are trying to first establish the Mission, Vision, and Purpose of the DAO and then come up with a proposal with more specific objectives for the next 12-24 months. And to be honest, if PL/Joe couldn't deliver a framework for grants, I don’t think that you can solve a huge problem for the DAO such as outlining objectives and setting budgets for different verticals.

Your reaction to criticism (both now and when you canceled a Snapshot vote because you didn't get the result you wanted) could be one of the reasons why people choose to create an anonymous profile to tell you things. In any case, this is web3, if someone chooses to be anonymous it shouldn't matter.

The comparison with Entropy is misplaced because Stylus is not the only initiative they are working on. It was only given as an example in a series of initiatives.

The following reflects the views of the Lampros Labs DAO governance team, composed of Chain_L (@Blueweb), @Euphoria, and Hirangi Pandya (@Nyx), based on our combined research, analysis, and ideation.

Thank you for the proposal. We had a few questions regarding it:

1. What objective criteria can we use to measure the success of this initiative?
2. Could you clarify how this resource will differ from existing materials?

3. With various calls already scheduled across different initiatives, might adding another monthly call increase operational overhead? What motivation would builders, delegates and contributors have to join these?

I think the roles and functions outlined in this proposal are a fantastic idea to bring some much-needed order and keep tabs on what's happening in the DAO. From my experience over the past five months, I've seen how Joe and Alex are both very active participants, and they seem professional enough to handle these responsibilities.

However, regarding some of the comments made in this proposal, I believe there should be a more detailed justification for their compensation. Providing a clear breakdown of how their compensation is determined would help with transparency and ensure it aligns with industry standards. Maybe even considering performance-based incentives could align their interests more closely with the DAO's success. Transparency in this area would put everyone's mind at ease.

I also think it would be fairer to propose several candidates for these roles and have the community vote on them. This would encourage inclusivity and ensure that those in leadership positions have support from all of us. I propose an open nomination process.

Establishing clear accountability and oversight mechanisms would be beneficial too. With regular reports and evaluations on how things are going, we could monitor progress and ensure everything is in order. I do understand Joe’s comment

But a temperature check on main projects and clear follow-up to their development would be very useful for everyone.

Overall, I like this initiative and I think it has a lot of potential to improve the DAO's operations.

We've been asked to chime in here several times, so we're providing general feedback in addition to giving our opinion on where we see the proposed scope overlapping with our current work and mandate.

Overall, having read the proposal several times and hopped on calls with the two initiative leaders (@AlexLumley and @DisruptionJoe), it's still somewhat unclear to us—and based on the above comments, to others—what all of the exact deliverables would be, with some information potentially having been lost in translation. This seems to stem from the fact that additional complexity keeps getting added through widening the scope, some ad hoc deliverables are being talked about in the comments, and two proposals are now entangled (i.e., the one above and the one-click" U/X Package draft).

We want to begin by making it thoroughly clear that we don't want to act as a bottleneck for other actors to become contributors or continue their work in the ecosystem. With that out of the way, we’ll only address the high-level deliverables to avoid adding more convolution and an overly lengthy response:

To simplify, we understand this deliverable as oversight of initiatives across the DAO and designing related processes and frameworks. On a high level, this deliverable doesn’t overlap with our scope of work as we aren’t acting as an oversight-related body. A few things we’d like to highlight, however:

1. Since it's likely that a notable number of initiatives will be rolled into OpCo (either by hiring internal employees or contracting service providers and contributors), the scope of the reporting work not facilitated by OpCo would likely diminish greatly once the DAO-adjacent entity is operationalized. However, we see this as a synergistic area, particularly since the handover process for initiatives that end up being rolled into OpCo shouldn’t be too challenging.
2. The current GRCs are already quite lengthy. While we agree that oversight should be an integral part of how the DAO operates, we’d like to highlight the risk of creating more friction than value by adding operational overhead, which could become too much of a burden on contributors, key stakeholders, and delegates. Having said that, we’re confident in the proposal authors’ ability to ensure that such a situation can be avoided.

In our opinion, this is akin to inserting a new operational model into the DAO. When it comes to the framework itself, we see this as a direct overlap with the work we’ve been facilitating with respect to OpCo. The first workstream, “One-Click” U/X Package to Orbit Chain Builders, would fall within the ecosystem support category, which is one of the focus areas OpCo would be mandated to help facilitate if approved. We see a few likely outcomes as a result of this:

1. OpCo is instructed to absorb the operational model proposed herein, which we expect would be a difficult process. This also means that OpCo’s oversight committee as well as executive-equivalent personnel would be pushed into a system they have no control over, instead of being able to design it from the ground up. We foresee that this would, among other things, restrict the application pool for the aforementioned positions, create internal friction around what authority each relevant party has, and make it challenging to hire suitable candidates.
2. OpCo is operationalized and the operational model proposed herein is maintained outside of the DAO-adjacent entity. We expect that this would lead to increased complexity due to it being unclear which facilitation method should be leveraged in what situations, unoptimized information flows between the two models, added bureaucracy due to two separate operating models being utilized, and even friction between the two models since they might begin competing over which gets to facilitate a certain initiative.
3. OpCo is operationalized and the workstream model is wound down. This would naturally be a waste of resources and in the worst-case scenario, leave some contributors stranded.

Diving deeper into the actual execution of the framework, we have some apprehension regarding the initiative leaders’ suitability to spearhead the “One-Click” U/X Package to Orbit Chain Builders and manage 10M ARB worth of capital. To be absolutely clear, we recognize the leaders’ impressive backgrounds and skill sets but think they may not be optimally suited for facilitating an extremely specialized and technical initiative. As an example, Uniswap carried out a cross-chain bridge assessment process to empower the Uniswap community’s decision-making around the use of cross-chain bridges in governance. The assessment was managed and produced by a committee comprising 9 industry-leading members with backgrounds in engineering, research, security, bridges, risk, etc. Simply put, we feel as though the contributors could bring more value to the ecosystem by leveraging their capacity in other areas of the DAO.

The third high-level deliverable seems to be ad hoc, operational tasks related to scaling and refining the workstream model, which is basically identical to one of Entropy’s mandates but applied to the workstreams instead of the overall DAO. We strongly agree with the proposal authors in that Entropy shouldn’t be the only facilitator in this area. Having said that, one of our focus areas is to decrease/limit the DAO’s OpEx. As such, we feel obligated to point out that we are already equipped to perform the aforementioned ad hoc work and could scale our capabilities further if the DAO were to decide to move forward with the operational model proposed by the authors. At the end of the day, the decision is up to delegates, and we’re more than happy to collaborate with the authors within this area if the DAO wants multiple entities working full-time on such deliverables.

We’d also point out that the compensation model (note that we're addressing the structure rather than focusing on specific numbers); $120K yearly base for gov ops work with a bonus structure based on workstream deliverables which could bring the total comp up to ~$300K (apologies if this is outdated as information is somewhat scattered), might incentivize the proposal authors to overlook some of the gov ops deliverables and put most of their efforts into workstream-related tasks. Continuing on the salary topic, would the proposal authors forego the compensation they are currently receiving from other DAO initiatives, such as the MSS and the DIP, if they were to be hired as full-time contributors? While it’s fair to argue that this work should still be compensated considering that it’s separate from this proposal, receiving full-time compensation in addition to separate payments creates a weird structure in our opinion.

Due to the dual-proposal structure, there is a risk that a majority of the deliverables laid out in this proposal would not be possible in the case that the other proposal isn’t passed. We’ve noticed that the proposal authors have compared this situation to, e.g., “What would have happened if Entropy didn’t pass the Stylus fund?”. We feel as though this comparison is misleading since our main deliverables weren’t/aren’t conditional on passing one single proposal in addition to the one that funded us.

Putting this all together, we agree with Pedro’s comment but don’t see a high risk of overlap on this front:

We believe this to be the most effective way forward, but would additionally like to see an exact, step-by-step plan on how the proposal authors intend to implement the Governance Operations initiative in order to ensure that 1) oversight doesn’t turn into something that prevents contributors from performing at their best; 2) micromanagement doesn’t arise; 3) the proposal authors don’t become the de facto persons who decide whether success was reached or not.

While we understand that the proposal authors have included additional deliverables on top of the gov ops initiative to justify a higher compensation, we feel as though the workstream deliverable and its related ad hoc tasks aren’t the most beneficial route for the DAO to take as they are currently proposed (we may have a biased perspective here due to the overlap with OpCo). Nevertheless, again, we don’t want to act as a blocker for other actors to join the ecosystem or continue their work but will once more highlight that if delegates want to go in the workstream operating model direction, Entropy has the resources to provide assistance in this area.

I think the roles and functions outlined in this proposal are a fantastic idea to bring some much-needed order and keep tabs on what's happening in the DAO. From my experience over the past five months, I've seen how Joe and Alex are both very active participants, and they seem professional enough to handle these responsibilities.

However, regarding some of the comments made in this proposal, I believe there should be a more detailed justification for their compensation. Providing a clear breakdown of how their compensation is determined would help with transparency and ensure it aligns with industry standards. Maybe even considering performance-based incentives could align their interests more closely with the DAO's success. Transparency in this area would put everyone's mind at ease.

I also think it would be fairer to propose several candidates for these roles and have the community vote on them. This would encourage inclusivity and ensure that those in leadership positions have support from all of us. I propose an open nomination process.

Establishing clear accountability and oversight mechanisms would be beneficial too. With regular reports and evaluations on how things are going, we could monitor progress and ensure everything is in order. I do understand Joe’s comment

But a temperature check on main projects and clear follow-up to their development would be very useful for everyone.

Overall, I like this initiative and I think it has a lot of potential to improve the DAO's operations.

We've been asked to chime in here several times, so we're providing general feedback in addition to giving our opinion on where we see the proposed scope overlapping with our current work and mandate.

Overall, having read the proposal several times and hopped on calls with the two initiative leaders (@AlexLumley and @DisruptionJoe), it's still somewhat unclear to us—and based on the above comments, to others—what all of the exact deliverables would be, with some information potentially having been lost in translation. This seems to stem from the fact that additional complexity keeps getting added through widening the scope, some ad hoc deliverables are being talked about in the comments, and two proposals are now entangled (i.e., the one above and the one-click" U/X Package draft).

We want to begin by making it thoroughly clear that we don't want to act as a bottleneck for other actors to become contributors or continue their work in the ecosystem. With that out of the way, we’ll only address the high-level deliverables to avoid adding more convolution and an overly lengthy response:

To simplify, we understand this deliverable as oversight of initiatives across the DAO and designing related processes and frameworks. On a high level, this deliverable doesn’t overlap with our scope of work as we aren’t acting as an oversight-related body. A few things we’d like to highlight, however:

1. Since it's likely that a notable number of initiatives will be rolled into OpCo (either by hiring internal employees or contracting service providers and contributors), the scope of the reporting work not facilitated by OpCo would likely diminish greatly once the DAO-adjacent entity is operationalized. However, we see this as a synergistic area, particularly since the handover process for initiatives that end up being rolled into OpCo shouldn’t be too challenging.
2. The current GRCs are already quite lengthy. While we agree that oversight should be an integral part of how the DAO operates, we’d like to highlight the risk of creating more friction than value by adding operational overhead, which could become too much of a burden on contributors, key stakeholders, and delegates. Having said that, we’re confident in the proposal authors’ ability to ensure that such a situation can be avoided.

In our opinion, this is akin to inserting a new operational model into the DAO. When it comes to the framework itself, we see this as a direct overlap with the work we’ve been facilitating with respect to OpCo. The first workstream, “One-Click” U/X Package to Orbit Chain Builders, would fall within the ecosystem support category, which is one of the focus areas OpCo would be mandated to help facilitate if approved. We see a few likely outcomes as a result of this:

1. OpCo is instructed to absorb the operational model proposed herein, which we expect would be a difficult process. This also means that OpCo’s oversight committee as well as executive-equivalent personnel would be pushed into a system they have no control over, instead of being able to design it from the ground up. We foresee that this would, among other things, restrict the application pool for the aforementioned positions, create internal friction around what authority each relevant party has, and make it challenging to hire suitable candidates.
2. OpCo is operationalized and the operational model proposed herein is maintained outside of the DAO-adjacent entity. We expect that this would lead to increased complexity due to it being unclear which facilitation method should be leveraged in what situations, unoptimized information flows between the two models, added bureaucracy due to two separate operating models being utilized, and even friction between the two models since they might begin competing over which gets to facilitate a certain initiative.
3. OpCo is operationalized and the workstream model is wound down. This would naturally be a waste of resources and in the worst-case scenario, leave some contributors stranded.

Diving deeper into the actual execution of the framework, we have some apprehension regarding the initiative leaders’ suitability to spearhead the “One-Click” U/X Package to Orbit Chain Builders and manage 10M ARB worth of capital. To be absolutely clear, we recognize the leaders’ impressive backgrounds and skill sets but think they may not be optimally suited for facilitating an extremely specialized and technical initiative. As an example, Uniswap carried out a cross-chain bridge assessment process to empower the Uniswap community’s decision-making around the use of cross-chain bridges in governance. The assessment was managed and produced by a committee comprising 9 industry-leading members with backgrounds in engineering, research, security, bridges, risk, etc. Simply put, we feel as though the contributors could bring more value to the ecosystem by leveraging their capacity in other areas of the DAO.

The third high-level deliverable seems to be ad hoc, operational tasks related to scaling and refining the workstream model, which is basically identical to one of Entropy’s mandates but applied to the workstreams instead of the overall DAO. We strongly agree with the proposal authors in that Entropy shouldn’t be the only facilitator in this area. Having said that, one of our focus areas is to decrease/limit the DAO’s OpEx. As such, we feel obligated to point out that we are already equipped to perform the aforementioned ad hoc work and could scale our capabilities further if the DAO were to decide to move forward with the operational model proposed by the authors. At the end of the day, the decision is up to delegates, and we’re more than happy to collaborate with the authors within this area if the DAO wants multiple entities working full-time on such deliverables.

We’d also point out that the compensation model (note that we're addressing the structure rather than focusing on specific numbers); $120K yearly base for gov ops work with a bonus structure based on workstream deliverables which could bring the total comp up to ~$300K (apologies if this is outdated as information is somewhat scattered), might incentivize the proposal authors to overlook some of the gov ops deliverables and put most of their efforts into workstream-related tasks. Continuing on the salary topic, would the proposal authors forego the compensation they are currently receiving from other DAO initiatives, such as the MSS and the DIP, if they were to be hired as full-time contributors? While it’s fair to argue that this work should still be compensated considering that it’s separate from this proposal, receiving full-time compensation in addition to separate payments creates a weird structure in our opinion.

Due to the dual-proposal structure, there is a risk that a majority of the deliverables laid out in this proposal would not be possible in the case that the other proposal isn’t passed. We’ve noticed that the proposal authors have compared this situation to, e.g., “What would have happened if Entropy didn’t pass the Stylus fund?”. We feel as though this comparison is misleading since our main deliverables weren’t/aren’t conditional on passing one single proposal in addition to the one that funded us.

Putting this all together, we agree with Pedro’s comment but don’t see a high risk of overlap on this front:

We believe this to be the most effective way forward, but would additionally like to see an exact, step-by-step plan on how the proposal authors intend to implement the Governance Operations initiative in order to ensure that 1) oversight doesn’t turn into something that prevents contributors from performing at their best; 2) micromanagement doesn’t arise; 3) the proposal authors don’t become the de facto persons who decide whether success was reached or not.

While we understand that the proposal authors have included additional deliverables on top of the gov ops initiative to justify a higher compensation, we feel as though the workstream deliverable and its related ad hoc tasks aren’t the most beneficial route for the DAO to take as they are currently proposed (we may have a biased perspective here due to the overlap with OpCo). Nevertheless, again, we don’t want to act as a blocker for other actors to join the ecosystem or continue their work but will once more highlight that if delegates want to go in the workstream operating model direction, Entropy has the resources to provide assistance in this area.

Here are a few answers to more questions that have come up. Thanks for the engagement and helping to keep us connected to things brought up on the other post.

Bob Rossi

For the specific problem reference, I don't think it was preventable in the first season of doing this. During the second season it was solved. The reason I think it wasn't a "foreseeable" issue is that we had other programs running, that had paid out and didn't have this issue. Due to the experimental nature of each round having different mechanisms, it wasn't unforeseeable, but it likely wasn't a simple oversight error.

I was in the role at that time leading the Thrive/Plurality Labs Arbitrum deployment. The problem was in too many cooks in the kitchen as we had Fractal.ID, the Arbitrum Foundation, and our team along with the program manager. If you look at the responses, anytime Thrive was alerted to the issue, we responded quickly, but we didn't have the power to just override authority and make payments. Seeing that this was one program with only 15 of 40 grants affected (out of 400+ delivered by Thrive in the last year), I really do believe that our learning and adjustments to make season M1B flawless in that regard was the best we could do. It even cost Thrive a lot of money (not recouped) to do the right thing and make it work better for season M1B.

Personally, I'm mixed on supporting the proposal. Everything was denominated in ARB and the risks were clear, if unexpected. I do want to support it, but I worry that there are many others in the DAO who have had ARB price go down from the Tally or grant date. These grants were also community based voting contest grants without milestones and clear outcomes as a requirement. That was part of the nature of the test. For this reason, I think we should move forward and learn from it - which I believe we have.

I do think that if Alex and I were in the proposed roles, we would have been bringing the issue to the attention of the DAO and delegates earlier and could have pushed for a better result when it was happening.

This is a great example. Yes, we would have clarified the objective for that tranche of funding along the way and worked with the initiative leads to communicate earlier giving the DAO more time to utilize the funds as intended.

NathanVDH

The DAO. The problem with all initiatives is this. In a centralized entity, when strategy is set and secures a budget, the executive is naturally responsible for making sure this translates to outcomes from the tactical functions. In a decentralized system, the strategy and budget are set by the collective - which leaves a gaping hole for accountability. This is what "governance operations" is. Forgive the rudimentary slide image, but maybe this helps

For us, we would be accountable to our council - think of the governance operations as a workstream itself. We will also be accountable to delegates and the DAO. Its not perfect, but if we need to trust some people to bring it to existance, hopefully you can trust us enough to get started.

We would be serving and assisting councils for workstreams. We had an deep convo with delegate advisors about going wide or deep in our strategic function and we've landed on the "width" strategy in the slide below.

No, but we will be doing a lot of that by nature of supporting the workstream success.

Juanrah

This is how the structure we've finally come to will work. We will be adjusting the post today.

It's hard to do this for roles that don't currently exist. If we pass this proposal, it is based on a long time talking directly with delegates, builders, and contributors about the issues in the DAO. We have very high context that doesn't come from an election process.

SEEDGov

First, you can refer to this answer almost exclusively dedicated to answering about the overlap between our proposed roles and Entropy. https://forum.arbitrum.foundation/t/dedicated-dao-contributors-enhancing-live-initiatives-and-driving-key-workstream/27296/25?u=disruptionjoe

Second, do we need 2 more people to cover these items? I think it is health to have more entities than Entropy doing work in the DAO. They aren't currently doing the things you mentioned, and in reading our reply I think we fairly showcase how we are not duplicating work.

I really appreciate Entropy, but I don't believe they should be forced to hire us! We believe it is good to create some balance and have others in the DAO funded directly by the DAO.

If we do these jobs well, we will be drafting a role description which could be handed off to the OpCo. They could hire someone for less to maintain the position as opposed to our creating of the position. If we get to work, we are willing to bet that we can create enough value that we will be able to shift roles if that handoff happens sooner than later. And perhaps OpCo would want to hire us... though we aren't pushing for that either.

We believe that "governance operations" is critical in connecting the strategic functions to tactical functions - and that this happens not only from the DAO to workstream layer, but from workstreams to initiatives.

Entropy is focusing (based on their posts) on the DAO level purpose, vision mission and strategy functions in how it defines high level objectives. We are talking about governance operations which connects the strategic to the tactical and does so at multiple layers. We are also talking about repeatable and scalable processes for quickly setting up workstreams - which is a prerequisite to them setting WORKSTREAM obectives for how they deliver their part which is working towards the DAO level objectives.

Personally, I'd like to see OpCo move forward. I don't think it will be up and running in 60 days. I'd make a bet that it isn't doing work other than hiring until Feb 2025 at the earliest. Yes, the happy path for OpCo would be to be setup in about 75 days, but we all know that in a DAO the happy path is rarely what happens!

Do we feel that Arbitrum is in a spot where it can wait for an undefined period of time to begin the work we are suggesting?

While I completely support hiring both Alex and Joe to the DAO, and I genuinely struggle to imagine any scenario where this is not a clear win for the DAO to have these two onboard, I think a couple clarifications are needed as to the future incentives of people hired directly by the DAO.

Who would you work for? Would you be overseeing councils or rather assisting them? Would you consider that role operations or also BD for Orbit chains?

Excited for this, and I think that one year is a worthwhile trial period. It's not a major cost to the DAO and I think the upside is good enough to experiment with that. On a per worker basis, this is probably one of the cheapest options available to hire high context people.

Just wanted to note thanks for the clarification on the call. That makes sense and I'm for it, I originally was concerned as I thought that this would be in addition to the monthly one. I see the value in it.

Tagging @cliffton.eth and/or @AlexLumley --- can we add a discussion thread for the monthly one in the same manner as the Bi-Weekly's Latest Governance/Biweekly Proposals Discussions Call topics - Arbitrum. It probably can just go there (unless this is already happening elsewhere in the forum, and I missed it)

As for Thrive, I guess the crux of me bringing that up is asking however if you two think this is something you could have prevented. It sounds like no based on the response? Is that out of scope issue of the project, or some other reason? I say that fully understanding the limitations around KYC items, but as noted with the Delegate / Builder / Contributor problem I think this situation is one of the issues that leads to that. As far as I know, many delegates weren't aware this was happening and we had builders in this scenario who seem to be (rightfully or wrongly) upset with the experience. I bring up this specifically as it was sort of the example that was actively being discussed and relevant at the time of my post. I have seen other examples of this too so I bring it up not as just a one-off issue.

Apologies if that wasn't clear, but the goal of the question was more of a "if you were in this role at the time, what would you have done" more so then a "what happened here" summary. For example - would you have proactively contacted Thrive in April so they understood how KYC / grant allocation has to be done to avoid delays like this? Would you have made the DAO aware this was going on, if so at what point? Would the Wikipedia address this type of thing? Would you be objectively fact checking the proposal made in the restitution post that is going to vote? Is this a discussion you'd bring to the DAO for problem resolution in the future? Things like that, if that makes sense.

Edit: I'll bring up another example, if you'd rather address the same question above but on a different topic since you were involved with the Thrive project. LTIPP Retroactive Grants - https://forum.arbitrum.foundation/t/ltipp-retroactive-community-funding/26903/55?u=bob-rossi. My thoughts are there, but relevant to this post I think this is another clear example of where the Delegate / Builder / Contributor triangle all left that process 'frustrated/losing faith/disengaged'. As IMO no retroactive grants were funded not due to quality of work but administrative issues. IF this was active what would you / Alex have done to avoid this?

Here are a few answers to more questions that have come up. Thanks for the engagement and helping to keep us connected to things brought up on the other post.

Bob Rossi

For the specific problem reference, I don't think it was preventable in the first season of doing this. During the second season it was solved. The reason I think it wasn't a "foreseeable" issue is that we had other programs running, that had paid out and didn't have this issue. Due to the experimental nature of each round having different mechanisms, it wasn't unforeseeable, but it likely wasn't a simple oversight error.

I was in the role at that time leading the Thrive/Plurality Labs Arbitrum deployment. The problem was in too many cooks in the kitchen as we had Fractal.ID, the Arbitrum Foundation, and our team along with the program manager. If you look at the responses, anytime Thrive was alerted to the issue, we responded quickly, but we didn't have the power to just override authority and make payments. Seeing that this was one program with only 15 of 40 grants affected (out of 400+ delivered by Thrive in the last year), I really do believe that our learning and adjustments to make season M1B flawless in that regard was the best we could do. It even cost Thrive a lot of money (not recouped) to do the right thing and make it work better for season M1B.

Personally, I'm mixed on supporting the proposal. Everything was denominated in ARB and the risks were clear, if unexpected. I do want to support it, but I worry that there are many others in the DAO who have had ARB price go down from the Tally or grant date. These grants were also community based voting contest grants without milestones and clear outcomes as a requirement. That was part of the nature of the test. For this reason, I think we should move forward and learn from it - which I believe we have.

I do think that if Alex and I were in the proposed roles, we would have been bringing the issue to the attention of the DAO and delegates earlier and could have pushed for a better result when it was happening.

This is a great example. Yes, we would have clarified the objective for that tranche of funding along the way and worked with the initiative leads to communicate earlier giving the DAO more time to utilize the funds as intended.

NathanVDH

The DAO. The problem with all initiatives is this. In a centralized entity, when strategy is set and secures a budget, the executive is naturally responsible for making sure this translates to outcomes from the tactical functions. In a decentralized system, the strategy and budget are set by the collective - which leaves a gaping hole for accountability. This is what "governance operations" is. Forgive the rudimentary slide image, but maybe this helps

For us, we would be accountable to our council - think of the governance operations as a workstream itself. We will also be accountable to delegates and the DAO. Its not perfect, but if we need to trust some people to bring it to existance, hopefully you can trust us enough to get started.

We would be serving and assisting councils for workstreams. We had an deep convo with delegate advisors about going wide or deep in our strategic function and we've landed on the "width" strategy in the slide below.

No, but we will be doing a lot of that by nature of supporting the workstream success.

Juanrah

This is how the structure we've finally come to will work. We will be adjusting the post today.

It's hard to do this for roles that don't currently exist. If we pass this proposal, it is based on a long time talking directly with delegates, builders, and contributors about the issues in the DAO. We have very high context that doesn't come from an election process.

SEEDGov

First, you can refer to this answer almost exclusively dedicated to answering about the overlap between our proposed roles and Entropy. https://forum.arbitrum.foundation/t/dedicated-dao-contributors-enhancing-live-initiatives-and-driving-key-workstream/27296/25?u=disruptionjoe

Second, do we need 2 more people to cover these items? I think it is health to have more entities than Entropy doing work in the DAO. They aren't currently doing the things you mentioned, and in reading our reply I think we fairly showcase how we are not duplicating work.

I really appreciate Entropy, but I don't believe they should be forced to hire us! We believe it is good to create some balance and have others in the DAO funded directly by the DAO.

If we do these jobs well, we will be drafting a role description which could be handed off to the OpCo. They could hire someone for less to maintain the position as opposed to our creating of the position. If we get to work, we are willing to bet that we can create enough value that we will be able to shift roles if that handoff happens sooner than later. And perhaps OpCo would want to hire us... though we aren't pushing for that either.

We believe that "governance operations" is critical in connecting the strategic functions to tactical functions - and that this happens not only from the DAO to workstream layer, but from workstreams to initiatives.

Entropy is focusing (based on their posts) on the DAO level purpose, vision mission and strategy functions in how it defines high level objectives. We are talking about governance operations which connects the strategic to the tactical and does so at multiple layers. We are also talking about repeatable and scalable processes for quickly setting up workstreams - which is a prerequisite to them setting WORKSTREAM obectives for how they deliver their part which is working towards the DAO level objectives.

Personally, I'd like to see OpCo move forward. I don't think it will be up and running in 60 days. I'd make a bet that it isn't doing work other than hiring until Feb 2025 at the earliest. Yes, the happy path for OpCo would be to be setup in about 75 days, but we all know that in a DAO the happy path is rarely what happens!

Do we feel that Arbitrum is in a spot where it can wait for an undefined period of time to begin the work we are suggesting?

While I completely support hiring both Alex and Joe to the DAO, and I genuinely struggle to imagine any scenario where this is not a clear win for the DAO to have these two onboard, I think a couple clarifications are needed as to the future incentives of people hired directly by the DAO.

Who would you work for? Would you be overseeing councils or rather assisting them? Would you consider that role operations or also BD for Orbit chains?

Excited for this, and I think that one year is a worthwhile trial period. It's not a major cost to the DAO and I think the upside is good enough to experiment with that. On a per worker basis, this is probably one of the cheapest options available to hire high context people.

Just wanted to note thanks for the clarification on the call. That makes sense and I'm for it, I originally was concerned as I thought that this would be in addition to the monthly one. I see the value in it.

Tagging @cliffton.eth and/or @AlexLumley --- can we add a discussion thread for the monthly one in the same manner as the Bi-Weekly's Latest Governance/Biweekly Proposals Discussions Call topics - Arbitrum. It probably can just go there (unless this is already happening elsewhere in the forum, and I missed it)

As for Thrive, I guess the crux of me bringing that up is asking however if you two think this is something you could have prevented. It sounds like no based on the response? Is that out of scope issue of the project, or some other reason? I say that fully understanding the limitations around KYC items, but as noted with the Delegate / Builder / Contributor problem I think this situation is one of the issues that leads to that. As far as I know, many delegates weren't aware this was happening and we had builders in this scenario who seem to be (rightfully or wrongly) upset with the experience. I bring up this specifically as it was sort of the example that was actively being discussed and relevant at the time of my post. I have seen other examples of this too so I bring it up not as just a one-off issue.

Apologies if that wasn't clear, but the goal of the question was more of a "if you were in this role at the time, what would you have done" more so then a "what happened here" summary. For example - would you have proactively contacted Thrive in April so they understood how KYC / grant allocation has to be done to avoid delays like this? Would you have made the DAO aware this was going on, if so at what point? Would the Wikipedia address this type of thing? Would you be objectively fact checking the proposal made in the restitution post that is going to vote? Is this a discussion you'd bring to the DAO for problem resolution in the future? Things like that, if that makes sense.

Edit: I'll bring up another example, if you'd rather address the same question above but on a different topic since you were involved with the Thrive project. LTIPP Retroactive Grants - https://forum.arbitrum.foundation/t/ltipp-retroactive-community-funding/26903/55?u=bob-rossi. My thoughts are there, but relevant to this post I think this is another clear example of where the Delegate / Builder / Contributor triangle all left that process 'frustrated/losing faith/disengaged'. As IMO no retroactive grants were funded not due to quality of work but administrative issues. IF this was active what would you / Alex have done to avoid this?