Pre-Proposal for a Strategy Framework for Arbitrum DAO

Governance
5

Notes on Arbitrum Strategy Discussion 1 (non official) - Thursday 1st Feb 2024

Full recording: AplOttr's Meeting Notes

Summary

The discussion centered on a strategic initiative aimed at defining strategic priorities, and thus informing the creation of KPIs. This initiative seeks to build a solid strategic foundation, facilitate the grant selection process, and enhance collaboration across projects. The initiative is in its early stages, focusing on gathering feedback on whether it should go ahead and input on the approach to do strategy in a DAO.

Strategic Initiative Overview

  • Origin and Evolution: The initiative began with Alex and Dan and has gradually attracted more participants. Currently, Daniel Ospina (RnDAO) is leading facilitation (informal appointment).
  • Current Stage: Very early stages, with efforts concentrated on assessing the viability of a strategy-making process in the Arbitrum DAO and discussing the approach we can take.

Goals and Objective of the initiative

  • Building Foundations: Establishing a solid strategic foundation is key to defining concrete goals and incentives and can also reduce delegate fatigue by providing criteria that can be referenced, thus streamlining discussions.
  • Complete Work in Progress: There’s an acknowledgment of existing ideas (e.g. PluralityLabs sensing exercise) and discussions across various groups. The initiative aims to consolidate these efforts and create a strategy that can be ratified by the DAO to foster greater alignment and collaboration.
  • Synergy and Focus: By identifying and concentrating on specific strategic areas, the initiative intends to create synergies between different projects and sharpen the DAO’s focus both in internal resource allocation and comms and positioning.
  • Careful stakeholder consideration: the initiative proposes to include a careful assessment of stakeholders (building on top of PluralityLab’s work) and ensure the different stakeholders are well represented in the strategy-making process.
  • Feedback Loops: The strategy encourages ongoing evaluation and adaptation, using insights from KPI assessments to refine and evolve strategic objectives.
  • Community Engagement: Effective channels for questions and discussions are emphasized to ensure the community’s involvement and input into the strategic process (ensuring critical reflection of implications to prevent a backlash at the implementation phase).

Conclusion

  • The initiative is positioned as a foundational effort to align the DAO around a shared strategy, optimize resource allocation, and enhance collaboration within the ecosystem.
  • By focusing on strategic planning with a comprehensive set of stakeholders and the effective use of KPIs, the initiative aims to streamline operations, clarify objectives, and maximize the impact of the DAO’s activities.

Next Steps:

  • We aim to prepare, gather feedback on, and agree on a process for strategy-making for the DAO. Enabling us to leverage EthDenver as a key occasion to advance this process.
  • More concrete next steps to be defined (see how to get involved).

How to get involved:

Miro Insights

The notes below are the collection of insights from 20+ participants in the KPI workgroup call. They are in no way binding but serve as initial points for discussion.

Link: Miro | Online Whiteboard for Visual Collaboration

Hopes

How would strategy help you personally? (points after voting)
TL;DR: mostly Efficiency and Effectiveness

  1. My governance team would know what they’d need to focus on for our Arbitrum Contributions for that particular timeframe.(6)
  2. Confidence to bet my time, skills, effort towards a strategy I agree looks promising & my skillset is fit to contribute to. (5)
  3. Allows us to move faster, we don’t have to realign on strategy and higher level thinking every time we have a decision. (4)
  4. We wouldnt end up doing work that others have already done. (3)
  5. it would help me justify my votes as a delegate, I sometimes need a reference point that I could use instead of my best judgement (3)
  6. Feel I would have to work less - the DAO wouldn’t be as exhausted because we have agreement. (3)
  7. Shit gets done more efficiently. Instead of focusing on Quantity of proposals, we can focus on less, harmonise, and get stuff done quicker [Increase in quality is expected as well due to more harmonised and focused participation on a particular set of tasks for ex.] (2)
  8. Not just a list of strategies but prioritized so that stakeholders have clarity on what the DAO should focus on (2)
  9. Will give us much needed ‘north stars’ to ladder up into. Especially for KPIs / OKRs / whatever we land on. Streamline conversation. (2)
  10. The ability to easy-track fund things optimistically (2)
  11. Easier to align with other delegates and stakeholders (2)
  12. I personally think we might need a plurality of strategies (2)
  13. More effective proposals in line with what we actually need could be worked on with this as we’d have a direction to strive towards.(1)

Fears

What Concerns do you have?

  1. We can’t get agreement on the strategy (5)
  2. The DAO wont fund work like this and encourage contributors like us to keep building.(5)
  3. The DAO stops funding anything outside the strategic pillars and this kills outside-in innovation (makes the DAO too rigid) (4)
  4. ratifying for the DAO as a whole vs ratifying for a subgovernance structure (4)
  5. The term “Strategy” doesn’t resonate with our community (gives too corporate association) (3)
  6. Strategy becomes focused in the hands of the powerful few builders (3)
  7. that most of the key players in the DAO will not be aware of its existence - like in Optimism most people have no idea of what Optimistic Vision is and what’s the background of RPGF (3)
  8. That we don’t have a representative sample of delegates in the meeting. (2)
  9. What if the strategy doesn’t work? (2)
  10. removing autonomy before it starts working (1)
  11. The PL strategic framework was not ratified by the DAO (1)
  12. This initiative could be viewed as a blocker to other work that may or may not fit within the goals of the DAO (1)
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