Let’s Finish What We Started
In a DAO, one branch unilaterally freezing a voted-on process is a recipe for distrust. I deeply agree with @klaus, by what authority do entropy get to pause a DAO-wide initiative just because a few people privately raised concerns?. This sort of arbitrary halt is an “open-ended evaluation period with no clear resolution path” that kills momentum and violates the deterministic, transparent governance we built. We all voted to start SOS, and it’s now our duty to carry it through.
Stopping a process halfway through is pretty anti-DAO. There was a clear process with space for feedback. We should complete the process instead of fucking around and wasting our time.
Yes, the Foundation’s long-term vision still needs work. But delaying SOS until the moon aligns is overkill. We don’t need perfect clarity to make progress. Instead of pausing until someone feels that they wake up ready, we could ask a few targeted vision questions in parallel and keep refining objectives on the fly. Kicking the can down the road because delegates…fear stress or duplication is exactly the bureaucratic stall that fragments trust. Arbitrum’s governance should be operational, not fodder for endless what-ifs. The right move is to finalize the objectives process now and iterate later, just like any healthy organization would.
It’s a lot of extra annoying bureaucracy. We just need a mission, vision, values, and it can be changed later. Let’s just go with what we can.
We did this same job at the TEC
A perfect real-world counterexample is the Token Engineering Commons’ Mission/Vision/Values update. In the TEC, we did the MVV with a clear process, clear competition, and opportunity for people to give feedback and discuss the merits of each proposal. Then one was chosen, and that was it. We used that mission a lot, and it helped us out a lot. Arbitrum needs some urgent mission vision values to guide decisions.
The TEC kept it lean and action-oriented with only two steps: propose and vote. Anyone could submit a Mission, Vision and Values statement via TokenLog – “super easy, click on ‘new issue’… fill with one statement for the mission, one for vision, and one for values.” TEC members explicitly didn’t write lengthy strategy docs: “we aren’t planning the strategy, just the Mission.” That clarity and brevity focused contributions on what matters, without drowning in detail.
People could easily fork someone’s MVV and change one line, which added depth to the process but also split votes across similar proposals. We solved this by grouping similar ones together - a really tedious job back then that AI makes way simpler today.
Step 1 (Proposing):
Anyone could propose it, just like SOS. We posted it and got feedback. There was also a clear format given - the mission has to be this long, the vision has to be that long, and the values need to be this long. Basically, it should be short, which SOS really didn’t do. If your mission statement is a book, then what are you doing?.The DAO mission should be simple.
Anyone popped their ideas into Tokenlog with a quick issue title and short bullet answers. No one complained about the “unclear process” – it was spelled out in a forum post: two steps, go vote now.
Step 2 (Voting):
The community voted via Tokenlog (quadratic voting). If a proposal got >50%, it won; if not, the top 3–5 went to a final round. If even those were tied, they invited the top authors to a hack session to merge them.
Editorial Refinement:
A professional editor edited all three top submissions so they could be voted on independently of the author, which was really important, and on their own merits. After the first round, they didn’t scrap it. The writers even anonymized their issues to avoid bias. In short in about a month the TEC had a polished MVV ready to adopt. It was clear, community-driven, and done. The one that was chosen, was chosen. And that was it. We used it. We didnt got to change it, but there was a clear process to do it, and we already have it on Arbitrum aswell.
Keep Objectives Actionable and Iterative
Between all of these processes and AI, we should be able to get something quick, not perfect but usable. This shouldn’t be that hard. This should be easy. Why would we stop the process? Did something change that we don’t want in the mission vision values? Or, if people aren’t happy with it, then get your hands dirty and change it.
We should mirror that lean mindset we had in the TEC back then. Our SOS submissions can be concise and adaptable. They don’t have to be multi-page matrices that intimidate voters. We should encourage short, clear objectives (with a few key results). If something is confusing or overlaps with existing work, address that in discussion or iteration, but don’t pause the revision period indefinitely. Be aware that, objectives and visions are living documents: it’s better to agree on a baseline set of aims and refine them each cycle than to stall on “long-term perfect” text.
It doesn’t have to be more complicated than that. It can be changed later. We have a DAO, we have a voting process and we should stick by them.
So let’s stop this bureaucratic delay and finish the SOS as planned. We already agreed to run it collectively, and nearly 100% of the DAO backed kicking it off. Instead of pulling the rug out now, we should finalize the objective proposals, vote, and then iterate. That’s how DAO governance is supposed to work – not by secret vetoes.
Time to move forward, not backwards.