Hey Pedro,
Sorry we missed answering on the previous proposal and thanks for the new questions! I’ll try to address them all today!
Builders losing faith
Yes, some work is getting done. The ones you mentioned are great. When we say “builders”, we are referring to the stakeholder group of builders of protocols or dapps using the Arbitrum tech stack whether that is Orbit Chains or Arbitrum One/Nova.
Just look at Treasure DAO who clearly sighted lack of the DAO being able to progress at reasonable speeds. Another indicator is how few protocol builders are regularly participating in DAO calls. Even the most hungry have pulled back - so you have to ask yourself why @Soby @IronBoots @dk3 and other builders aren’t spending the time they were in the DAO?
While the programs you mention are great, we need people actually talking to builders. Where are our user interviews with new orbit chain builders asking what they really care about when deciding where to build? This is the point.
(For the record, delegate incentives has been a highlight and example of a well run initiative.)
Contributor retention
I think its an unrealistic request to ask for the data - talk about a circular problem! We’ve never had operational work done to track contributors. Do we have more contributors or louder people? Whats the membrane? Who counts as a contributor? I’ll cede that we could be wrong in this assessment, but I doubt many have done a wider set of stakeholder interviews on which they base their assumptions.
Governance operations
Starting with building an initiatives db, checkins with current initiatives, and exit interviews with past initiatives. We also have a lot of other key stakeholder engagement to do.
Workstream stewardship
This is what people always miss about operations, especially governance operations - it’s not just you! To start, NO, we would not be the council supervisors - we would conduct the processes of drafting role descriptions (ie. must have one relevant person from OCL) selecting potentials, and organizing calls.
This in between work to get it done is governance operations. In a centralized system, the executive makes a decision and then is responsible for their reports receiving the message accurately and overseeing their accountability. In a decentralized system, the community decides in role of the executive - and maybe even decides who tactically does the work - but puts no one in place to oversee or act as a counterparty.
Our work would be in service to the council, acting as a budget steward while defining the role well enough to hire/elect or hand it off.
Necessity on Orbit Chain Mesh workstream proposal
Our feedback from large delegates was that governance operations isn’t enough to earn the salary needed to keep us here - that would require us doing more strategic or creative work.
The budget is an opportunity for us to drive some strategic work that requires strong multi-party alignment unlike any collaboration we’ve see this far in the overall Arbitrum ecosystem.
We are currently combining feedback from the foundation and top delegates to put together the exact comp package.
Not speaking for Alex, but for me - I need to make at minimum what I’ve made in the past. There is no reason for me to take a role without benefits, travel expenses, bonus, commission, equity or tokens AND do it for less than my salary the last 4 years. While I’d like to stay working with Arbitrum, that is a hard constraint for me - I’m willing to not negotiate to match my opportunity cost, but I can’t take a role that is a huge backward step financially. (Which I’ve done before with early team roles at startups - because we negotiated for higher equity.)
Yes. I have left Thrive protocol. We had a fork in the road: I wanted to design pluralist grants governance which is capture resistant and they want to refine and scale their method of funding grants at critical milestones of value creation. They do great work, but the governance design requires different motivations. I am taking the risk of leaving them because I believe it the right thing to do as my interests don’t lie in product refinement & scaling. I’m still very supportive of them and see many ways they can help our grants programs in the future.
I’ve actually never been paid from it - I don’t believe so anyway. I always put my rational on snapshot or tally, but don’t have a thread. I’m such a small delegate anyway that I almost felt embarassed collecting because I was earning from Plurality Labs/Thrive. I’ll admit it was a little frustrating this last month since I see tons of delegates putting short sweet answers in their thread while I spend a lot of time actively participating!
We’ve offered them a seat on the council for the Orbit Chain Mesh workstream budget and have been in communication around the OpCo. While we haven’t seen any details related to OpCo yet, we fully intend to collaborate.
I also have a history of making good on my word. I shut down the FDD workstream at Gitcoin when the protocol launched because it was time and I had previously committed to doing so. I also started up and spun out multiple workstreams there. We had needs like DAO Ops and Support which we had budget to kickstart and some delegates worried I was “power grabbing” but we spun out and handed off responsibility every time.
Thanks for your questions and valuable time spent considering our proposal.