I did vote in favor in snapshot and i am confirming my vote here, but for reasons that are slightly different that I want to explore.
The premise: ongoing changes in Arbitrum sentiment
The landscape of Arbitrum DAO has changed a lot in the last quarter, both due to the new political landscape, the market dynamics and an higher involvement of AF/OCL. This is leading us, chaotically sometimes, toward new sentiment tied to exclusivity of contributors, quality of works, cutting spending that is not deemed necessary. Nothing wrong with any of this.
But, has also created a concerning byproduct in my view: is becoming complex to work and contribute in the DAO.
The problem: keep valuable entities/people engaged in the ecosystem
We can talk a lot about what contributing to this DAO means, we have a degree of flavours that go from being a small delegate in DIP (deemed, by several, as something net negative, bringing noise at a high monetary cost and also indirect reputational damage outside of our sphere) to being a service provider for ARDC, with all that happens in between. The common denominator is: is becoming harder and harder to be part of programs, regardless if you are “aligned”, want to do a good job, want to bring value to both your team and the ecosystem. We have seen this first hand:
- some established service providers, that did a great job in the dao (previous ardc, adpc, grant programs) have turned down a lot their contributions in our dao
- single meaningful member and contributors can’t find a way to properly be here (one can “use” dip, and the importance of arbitrum, up to some degree to justify the amount of time spent here)
- even introducing new people is extremely hard because there is an amount of time spent to pass proposals, with no certainty of the outcome, that drives these new forces away despite a handshake agreement (saw this first hand in the D.A.O. program).
This is, useless to say, my personal opinion. But also the opinion of someone that engaged, directly or indirectly, with most delegates and participated to several programs. You really need a thick skin to work in Arbitrum.
Governance bootcamp as experiment not for junior hiring, but for methodology of junior hiring
So, why all of this introduction? Because while
- is true what @krst said (i don’t remember when): we are potentially training people for jobs that we don’t know what they will be
- is true what others said: we don’t have any guarantee that these people will be retained by the DAO, and they might just move in other ecosystem
- is true also what @Arbitrum said: costs are high, is not necessary
I think we have to be more proactive and less miopic and think a few quarters ahead.
This, to me, is an experiment to understand if in-house training can partially be a solution to find new workforces. And honestly it could be: when you hire junior people in a company, you hire them based on previous experience and competence, but also you train them to the culture, framework and modus operandi of your company, and you train them to know the intricacy of the people working in there, the overall goals etc.
I think this is a very expensive experiment. But knowing the outcome of this 200k initiative, knowing what things will and won’t work from it, can probably be more valuable than the base cost if the collective goal is to think about our DAO more as a company moving forward. It can help us find our “corporate” identity, and specifically help us try to understand if in this way we can facilitate to have valuable new people in Arbitrum.