The following reflects the views of L2BEAT’s governance team, composed of @krst and @Sinkas, and it’s based on the combined research, fact-checking, and ideation of the two.
We will be voting AGAINST the proposal in its current form.
While we strongly agree that a hub such as the one outlined can be a very useful tool for delegates and other contributors interested in what’s happening in the DAO, we have concerns regarding the approach that the proposal suggests.
As others have already pointed out, the overall costs are rather inflated. In addition, we find some of the items redundant in the sense that they might not necessarily provide additional value. There’s also no mention of KPIs through which we can evaluate whether or not the initiative was successful or not after its completion.
Our understanding of a hub like the one outlined is that it will continue to be maintained and updated in perpetuity for as long as the DAO exists and operates. With that in mind, we should have ways to understand whether it’s creating the impact we want it to while also having feedback loops in place to iterate and improve the things that might not work.
Overall, we want to see the proposal succeed, but there needs to be more discussion on how to make an Arbitrum Hub that is as useful as possible, what that would entail, and how much it would reasonably cost to set up and maintain.
We understand the current state of ArbitrumHub as a proof-of-concept both from a technological and organizational point of view. While it’s great that the team pushed it that far, it definitely needs improvement and gathering more community feedback before we decide to scale it further.
While the website seems very versatile and comprehensive, in practice many topics were covered quite superficially, there’s also a lot of data that is simply outdated. The section about grants, the developer hub, or community initiatives - almost every part of the website is just scratching the surface of the topic and does not even allow for a deeper dive.
To be clear, we are not blaming the team for this, as maintaining such a hub is a very challenging and resource-intensive task. But right now we just don’t think that what the team is proposing - in terms of cost, structure, and process - addresses these issues and maximizes the chances of success.
As L2BEAT, we’ve been writing a weekly Governance Review for a few months now, so we know first-hand the amount of time and effort required to stay up to date with what is happening on the DAO. We also understand the challenge of aggregating all that information and presenting it in a digestible way.
To conclude, we commend and appreciate the efforts expended towards the proposal and the creation of arbitrumhub.io. We’d like to work with the proposers to improve the scope, cost, and structure of the proposal before attempting to go through the governance again to secure the funding needed.