Jumpstart fund for DAO improvement

Call to discuss proposal

Jumpstart fund Q&A [Live on Snapshot]
Monday, 22 Jul • 16:00–17:00 (GMT+1)
Google Meet joining info
Video call link: https://meet.google.com/rep-hfdi-akb
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More phone numbers: https://tel.meet/rep-hfdi-akb?pin=7943353645992

(Voting ends on Tuesday)

1 Like

Thank you for your thoughtful replies. While we appreciate your intentions, we remain unconvinced:

  1. “Problems brought up during sense-making”: This still creates an incentive to find problems, potentially manufacturing issues where none exist. As History proved it, central planning, committee, working group, or whatever you want to call it, often fails to accurately identify real needs.

  2. “3.5bn treasury and pilot testing”: Size of funds doesn’t justify their use. Pilots often become permanent, expanding government-like structures in the DAO.

  3. “Renewal based on results”: Once established, programs tend to self-perpetuate. It’s easier to continue than to dismantle, regardless of efficacy.

  4. “Expensive proposal development”: This natural barrier ensures only well-thought-out, strongly-backed ideas progress. Lowering this bar may flood the system with half-baked proposals.

  5. “Proactive problem mapping”: This assumes central problem-finders/planners can better identify issues than emergent, decentralized processes. History shows this often leads to misallocation of resources.

  6. “Unpaid work risk”: This risk is inherent in entrepreneurship and innovation. Removing it may reduce the quality and commitment of proposals.

We believe allowing natural, market-driven processes to surface and solve issues will ultimately lead to more efficient and effective outcomes for the DAO.

For these reasons, and the others mentioned by delegates, we will be voting against this proposal.

2 Likes

thank you for the through reply! A few clarifications

  1. we’re not proposing a central planning, committee, nor working group for sense-making. We’re proposing a decentralised sense-making mechanism based on surveying delegates for problems, and then in-depth user interviews and a couple of workshops to define what problems make sense. Then we might just fundamentally disagree in our belief that there’s a lot to improve in the DAO vs there are no problems.

  2. Agree that pilots tend to become permanent, but they also often evolve. And we’re now likely seeing an example of the contrary with the incentive programs. And although I do believe the incentive experiments could have been executed more cost-effectively, I still see value in the learnings gained.

  3. see above

  4. We’re not suggesting to lower the barrier for which proposal gets accepted, on the contrary. We’re proposing a mechanism so proposals can be thought through. If you belive the DAO already has enough proposals of enough quality coming through and nothing needs to be changed, then we can just agree to disagree.

  5. See point one. We’re actually proposing a decentralised process. The difference is in being proactive (mapping problems) vs reactive (responding to proposals for solutions).

  6. Except entrepreneurship offers big returns, and a big problem in entrepreneurship ecosystems is the lack of funding for SMEs. In the case of a DAO proposal, we don’t want to offer people outside returns (e.g. I shouldn’t get a MASSIVE bonus if this proposal passes). So the incentives are actually broken.

I understand we might not agree on this but I thank you for your thorough and civil engagement in the discussion :slight_smile:

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The following comment represent the views of @SavvyDAO as I’m part of their team as Governance Analyst:

Savvy DAO voted for this proposal because we believe early-stage funding and problem definition are very important to improve Arbitrum DAO governance processes. We also supported including the playbook, as it could offer valuable insights and documentation for new proposals.

We’ve reviewed the feedback from other delegates and, while we don’t fully agree with all the concerns raised, we think these points should be discussed in the upcoming call to dicuss the proposal. It seems there may be some misunderstandings that need clarification.

3 Likes

At ~16:25 in this call, there’s a question about how this proposal could work with the Firestarter program but it doesn’t seem like there’s a lot of clarity around that at the moment. @DisruptionJoe can you please help explain this a bit more?

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Arbitrum is not the only DAO with this problem. The suggestion that Daniel makes would put Arbitrtum squarely as the leader in strategic thinking. This type of strategic thinking, prioritization, and preparation for grants rounds is one of the main contributors to many DAO failures. Obviously, there will be many who oppose this because it threatens the current situation where popularity is the primary factor in getting funded. However, for the long-term viability of the DAO, this is absolutely essential. It should be seen as a first experiment to show how a DAO can coordinate its strategic thinking.

4 Likes

I see the potential of such a proposal on the long term. However after reading the discussion I’m still not sure about the 350k which seems too much for a pilot fund in my opinion. Also, I agree with @mcfly that it would be interesting to find alternative approaches to push for organic problem-solving. The proposed approach doesn’t fully convince me. I will wait for the call to take place before voting.

1 Like

Some questions:

  • Instead of a volatility buffer, why not just sell to a stable coin right away?
  • What is the expectation of the top 30 delegates when mentioning “must be referred by at least 3”?
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I guess it could be converted into stables although that departs from the current practice with Questbook tracks. I have no strong preference, just trying to keep this as standard as possible.

For the 30 top delegates, they’d have to say ‘i support this’ (referring to the grant proposal). So in practice the Questbook track is a lighter weight mechanism to get going investigating a problem before a full DAO proposal but it’s still dependent on (some) buy-in by the people who ultimately make the decision.

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Hey Ultra, thanks for the feedback. What do you mean with organic problem solving please? I’m curious to understand more what’s the concern/desire here

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Gonna vote abstain on this @danielo.

Again, we spoke about it: as posted before, i firmly believe the bulk of a payment on a proposal in a stream like this should come mostly through the confirmation of a snapshot voting. I don’t see this being less than 50%, because 10 or even 20-25% would be a “nice bonus” on top of the work. If at least 50%, if not more, is instead tied to the success of it (and here to me success = approval from the dao = “for” vote), the proposers would work toward this goal, from the foundation of the problem.

I see your point about failure = lesson learned, so still valuable. I can see that, but in this specific stream to me we should push for the other side of the coin, a succesful proposal more than anything.

1 Like

Hello!

While I see the merits on this proposal, I believe some things were missing:

The post was created on July 14th and the snapshot on the 15th, leaving little time for discussion and for improvements on the proposal (IMO, there were several good suggestions). Not all delegates attended GovHack and/or knew about this project/proposal beforehand.

I echo @JoJo comments about having the incentives more aligned by having a % of the grant to be released after the proposal is approved on snapshot.

It is not clear to me what is the differentiation between this and firestarters. The Treasury WG came from Firestarters, for example. So why not use the current structure in place?

2 Likes

A few of the points I want to echo here are how there was no time for proper discussion and that this proposal as a whole seems very rushed.

Overall, when looking at the DAO’s proposal metrics, we personally don’t think it is lacking in this area. Everything is going relatively smoothly and there are a lot of great ideas being constantly presented. Having more funding to do something that is already being done well seems counter intuitive in our opinion.

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I want to like this, and I agree that long term strategic thinking and ideation is valuable and worth incentivizing.

But I would prefer much smaller up front costs with potentially larger retroactive rewards. Basically impactful results are worth generous pay, but identifying future results is a very speculative exercise.

I think it’s 100% worth continuing to iterate on this idea for a future proposal though. Maybe there’s a way to wrap the rewards in something like an option. The initial payout is very low but the potential upside is high if the ideation is correct/useful.

1 Like

Voting against the proposal because I think funding for these intiatives should be channeled through the Firestarter track, through which I was paid to draft the STEP proposal, for example.

I am unconvinced that we need another Firestarter track when there is already a capable team currently implementing it, with an evaluation method baked in.

1 Like

I think this could be a useful program.

First, let’s discuss the differences between firestarters in our first and second milestone and questbook grant programs.

Questbook programs - A domain is selected by questbook admin (could be any process), an election is held, then that domain allocator is delegated authority to give up to $20k grants on their own ($50k with additional approvals).

Firestarters M1A - I happened to have extremely high-context on the needs of the DAO. If I saw that some effort was suffering from the cold start problem or had insight to unique needs, we would fund it. I would go and find the people I thought best for these needs, sometimes through a process, sometimes through intuition/experience/relationships. These grants led to STIP, STEP, ADPC, along with data procurement such as Open Block Labs for the first STIP.

(Remember that Firestarters was only 1/12 programs that we ran in M1A. Out of the 250 grants funded and 17,000 token holders rewarded in M1A - I only made decisions on about 15 grants! It is also legitimate in my view to test how a trusted person with high-context in relation to other mechanisms. When we say not every decision has to be decentralized - this was a test of that. The DAO was in a very early stage and needed some funding to get things moving.)

Firestarters M1B - “Disruption Joe doesn’t scale” - This is the main problem with how the program was conducted during M1A. The way our team decided to experiment in M1B was to have a group of badged reviewers all review every application from an RFP call. This produced a different set of results which lacked the longer term vision and context of an individual deep in the weeds.

The M1B model for Firestarters hasn’t been funding high profile projects with with vision to become more. It took more safe bets on things with clear milestones and kpis vs innovation with expectations around good communication and drafting proposals as milestones.

This change to Firestarters along with Questbook not having a mechanism to add new domains created the gap which this proposal seeks to solve.

We don’t know that our Milestone 2 proposal will pass, but if it did, one of our programs would likely be another version of firestarters where instead of decentralizing by consensus, we decentralize by granting higher authority to more in context participants.

I don’t want to say that this shouldn’t be approved because we have an upcoming plan to solve the issue which may or may not be passed.

I do encourage collaboration, which it looks like they are intending by using Questbook software. I’d suggest that if this passes, they plan on integrating to some of our “ecosystem allocator” processes. In fact, this could be a good test for how our “ecosystem allocator” program can continuously add and retire new programs in a continuous way.

Our current’ program is going great, but we are continually learning. Remember, this is halfway through the second iteration of the first ever pluralist grants program. Our Milestone 2 will need to address the gap we have left creating the need for this proposal, along with a few other key learnings:

  • New programs to pop up and be added to our decentralized accountability assessments and share other infrastructure to reduce redundant costs
  • A pool of funding be available where more programs that address specific needs can be spun up quickly with just a snapshot vote.
  • Multiple “allocation” programs can spring up to own specific pillars of our strategy
  • PATHWAYS for builders are made possible by having the funds and consistency for builders to see that was can indeed provide support from -1 to 100, not just 0 to 1.

I hope this helps for decision making. While there is a real need and there is nothing wrong with another grant program popping up - grant programs not tied to an ecosystem allocation system isn’t something I can recommend as the best way forward. I do however trust that RNdao would be happy to collaborate - so either way this goes is safe to try for the DAO.

9 Likes

Apologies, I misunderstood a point. What I meant is that this proposal seems to look for problems when they are not necessarily there, while there would probably be other ways to have the same outcome in a more efficient way (I’m thinking about what @jojo proposes). Either way looking forward to today’s call

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@PGov @jameskbh for context, the proposal was put on the forum right before GoveHack. And then I did move it after Ethcc to a vote quickly, intentionally. The rationale is that it’s too time-expensive for me to be DMing and having calls with enough delegates. Most messages get ignored, and those that not, lead to having to spend more and more time engaging and then addressing the feedback, which when you add it up, it’s a huge opportunity cost. So the only way I could get this through was finding a faster and more cost effective way to get feedback e.g. moving to a snapshot vote.
The DAO has no priorities, and so things get prioritised either by putting a huge budget (e.g. GCP) or otherwise by pushing for a decision where people then react (via votes).

5 Likes

Thanks @danielo for the proposal!

How do you define the top 30 delegates? There would be delegates that hold delegated tokens, but don’t disclose how they can be contacted.
Also, why 30? For example, Optimism governance defines Top 100 delegates to approve some types of proposals.

We have decided to vote against the ‘Jumpstart Fund for DAO Improvement’ proposal at this time. We believe initiatives should be funded through the existing Firestarter track, which has a proven record with projects like STIP, STEP, and ADPC, and has a capable team and effective evaluation method. Creating another fund may lead to redundancy and inefficiency. The DAO’s proposal metrics show that things are running smoothly, with many great ideas constantly being presented. Adding more funding for something already done well seems counterintuitive.