Hi Griff! You have made a great point about voter apathy, popularity contests, and gov capture previously and we appreciate your support in the need for The Coalition. In the comment you said “Distributing this much money deserves a dedicated group of thoughtful decision makers, who’s top priority is distributing the funds.” and we absolutely agree! The stakes are high and opportunity cost of doing nothing is real. The goal of The Coalition is to bring together experience from outside and within the Arbitrum ecosystem to facilitate growth and decentralization. Its primary mandate is to reduce the bandwidth requirement of a delegate with tools and detailed research so that they can make more sophisticated decisions. Additionally, we will be able to aid in decision making that allows for more efficient proposal + execution processes. For example, we would have advocated (and created) a custom voting solution in place of 105 votes for the STIP process.
Similarly, one method of thinking about potential compensation for The Coalition is the man-hours saved across governance participating stakeholders and additional value add in terms of efficient directing of resources within the ecosystem. Using the Arbitrum STIP example, had The Coalition existed during the time, we could have created a custom comprehensive framework for delegates, evaluated all the Arbitrum STIP proposals as a baseline starting point for delegates, and combined that into a more user friendly voting solution. If for example, it would have taken all delegates 50 hours each to evaluate proposals, talk to applicants, give feedback, and vote on proposals, it could have saved 46 (no of delegates with more than 1M ARB) x 50 hours = 2,300 manhours across all delegates. In addition, perhaps the end state of the Arbitrum STIP votes would have benefited the overall ecosystem more due to a more effective distribution.
The members of The Coalition have full time employees with benefits, and weeks will be allocated across the best suited team. For example, within Gauntlet, it may be the Applied Research team which is currently leading various incentive proposals for Uniswap or Market Risk team doing the USDC migration on Arbitrum. We do not bring single members but rather professional organizations with diverse expertise. With BWR, our onchain analytics team, governance team, grant/incentive frameworks team, or other domain experts may be utilized to the adapting need of the project.
Additionally, as stated before, BWR takes on the risk of any additional workload beyond the minimum hours in order to achieve the scope of our work.