These are my recommendations to move Arbitrum DAO forward successfully.
Triage
Stop the governance process until clarification happens
The special council & foundation directors are already set. Immediately pause all governance for 2 weeks. Let it be known that any attempts to pass a proposal on Tally will be stopped until a constitution and proposal process is ratified.
Clarify that the 750 million was an initial allocation decision
The DAO didn’t get to decide how much went to team/investors either. Whether the DAO likes it or not, if this had been an allocation decision it would all be mute. I do believe the foundation or whoever is driving this governance process (very mistakenly) thought this was a more democratic way to launch. It wasn’t. Let’s get over that.
Ratify the constitution and AIP proposal process and a start date.
Set a date that a new AIP-1 will establish a voting process and pass that proposal without the pork. I’d also recommend adding 1 week on the forum for discussion with at least 5 stewards commenting in support of a proposal before it goes to snapshot.
Interim Guidance
Foundation/Arbitrum/Off-Chain
Show us how we can guarantee that 750 million ARB immediately available will not fully own the DAO making all of our participation moot. Maybe a vesting schedule. Maybe give some of that number up as a show of understanding. The way it is done isn’t important outside of it being enforced onchain.
Community: Shift our focus to what is most important
Let’s keep the eye on the prize, our ability to direct a massive amount of funding for the Arbitrum ecosystem. If the top stewards can gain consensus on the initial allocation being just that, then the community can shift to thinking about all the development and innovation 3.5 billion $ARB can support! Forgive the foundation for making an error in how they approached this.
We also need to understand that just like other initial allocations, we may have lock-up info shared, but not doxxing of each individual.
If you are here to govern the funds that are allocated to the DAO, and you accept the mistaken approach was just that, then you should be ok with the Foundation maintaining some level of acceptable cover. Other DAOs have not doxxed every single director and multisig keyholder.
Solution
Ensure the viability of community governance
If the foundation has 750 million ARB and the turnout for this vote is 100 million ARB, then the governance we have is meaningless. Fix this for the next version.
Another way you can address this would be to enact a novel mechanism for making participation governance something that must be earned through staking $ARB. Perhaps something like I mention here: Active Governance - #2 by DisruptionJoe
The ability of the DAO to replace foundation directors
This is great. If the foundation can clean up this mess, then let’s give them a year to get it right. If things are moving in the right direction (not talking about price), then we wouldn’t vote them out.
Saving face through competency
The only way for the foundation to save face now is to actually support decentralization and proper functioning of the DAO. We have learned a ton in the space over the last year. Here are a few things the foundation can do to hopefully survive the first year and maybe gain back the trust of the community.
- Commit to pluralistic funding. The one model of funding at a time thing isn’t working. Have some workstreams for long term projects where high context and low turnover are needed. Start running Quadratic Funding and Quadratic Voting rounds at a regular cadence. Commit to using new mechanisms which run on Arbitrum. Actually LEAD the space as you have done so far with tech!
- Own the fuck up and the brash solution. We all hate long political answers that don’t say anything. This launch of governance fucked up. Thats ok. The overall ideas and premise were mostly in line with industry standards (which have a lot of room for improvement). Maybe adjusting the overton window in favor of the people isn’t your thing, but make it reasonable for people to want to govern by fixing the overt governance problem with issuing 750 million ARB immediately.
- Talk with any partners you might have previous arrangements with and find another way. Trying to have confidential deals is not going to work. Everything is on chain. Its tough seeing you stumble on this 101 shit, but get it together. One more issue like this Wintermute thing is going to crush the DAO.
In Conclusion
Pause governance. Own the fuck up. Present a viable solution. Win with competency from here forward.
I do trust the intentions of the Offchain team and the foundation, but at this point they will need to earn back the trust from the community. It sucks when you try to do something great for others but it wasn’t done perfectly and you get shit on for it. This is an opportunity for you, us, and DAOs as a whole to get our thumbs out of our collective asses and do something right. Or not… that is up to you.
One last thing
Remember that assholes are the loudest people. The people that will help this project succeed are the constructive ones who aren’t saying ridiculous things about being owed some commitment to making number go up.