Arbitrum GovHack Track: Strategic Big Bets
Challenge Statement:
How might we improve the experience of working groups, protocols, and providers by defining strategic pillars in a repeatable and reliable way?
Members:
Antoine Verge
Drea
Daolexa
Omni
Main contact
Andrea Gallagher @Drea
Pitch
Proposal
tl;dr:
Arbitrum DAO, delegates, protocol builders, and service providers suffer today with noise and confusion about what the strategic goals are at any given point in time. The current process is ad hoc and requires constant work to answer questions and inform contributors. A better structured process would be efficient about
- documenting pillar definitions that different members of the ecosystem understand,
- prioritization where the rationale is visible, and
- budget allocation that has the right ROI and flexibility.
We recommend a strategy assembly with randomly selected stakeholder participants, an agreed structure and process, and facilitation for both async input and real time deliberation.
The Problem:
We in RnDAO identified this pain point as we were trying to contribute to Arbitrum and observing the Plurality Labs grants program. Delegates have told us about having to explain and re-explain strategic goals on calls with builders and service providers, hoping they are staying consistent with other delegates. Service providers have told us about the friction of getting teams working together on the same framework. Builders have told us about the high cost of figuring out the ecosystem dynamics and crafting proposals with low probability of success. Many people are working hard today to improve the operational excellence and contributor experience, but all those efforts have to be built on top of clear and agreed strategic pillars.
At the end of any good strategy process, there a proposal should pass the forum that includes:
- A list of clearly defined pillars
- Ranked by priority with shared justification
- Approximate budget allocation for each pillar
The Assembly:
The first part of the solution is to bring together a group that is small enough to deliberate together and put in valuable time on this topic. This group should include representatives of the types of stakeholder who contribute to the ecosystem but have different knowledge, goals, and needs. We suggest an assembly of 50 people, balanced between Delegates, Protocol Builders, and Service Providers. Each participant would be randomly selected from a pool of volunteer addresses and compensated for their time (approximately 15 hours over 1 month).
The process:
We would structure the process and discussion so that each step is clear and builds on the last. To make real time discussions as productive as possible, we would have 20 min surveys between each session that collects the raw material for the deliberation. The flow would be:
Session 1: Share Values and Propose Pillars
Intersession survey - Describe pillars you care about
Session 2: Define Pillars and discuss value
Intersession survey - Initial prioritization
Session 3: Prioritization rationale
Intersession survey - Revised priorities & suggested allocation
Session 4: Allocate and Finalize
Forum Proposal
Throughout this process, our facilitators and scribes will document the decisions and key points, so that work is not dropped and lost.
The team
Our team is uniquely qualified to both run this process well and then make it an efficient governance tool. Mission Publiques has been running Citizens’ Assemblies for the EU, European governments, and global organizations for 25 years. RnDAO has partnered with them to run these programs in Web3. We also bring 20 years of software user experience research and design expertise to the process.
Rough Overall Cost
Based on our experience in traditional politics and also running global online assemblies in Web3, we expect the first cycle to cost 140,000 Arb.
This project is important
because it will create a world where:
- The DAO can move faster
- Delegates are less overwhelmed
- Contributors and protocols have better UX
Because
- The process is legitimate and trusted for users and holders
- Funds are well allocated (medium to long term thinking)
- Quality of process and discussion is better, less energy is lost in FUD, FOMO, polarization
- KPIs can be defined for a coherent domain and assessed cleanly
- Arbitrum has the lowest “Risk Country index” of all chains: Investors, teams, and projects know they can trust the governance and workflow and choose Arbitrum