I am voting in favor of disbanding the MSS.
I am one of the signer and have been serving the MSS since the beginning of the term.
The initiative, while well intended, has always clashed with the reality of multisig management that I personally tried to suggest at the time and boils down to the following points:
- the chair role, as it was conceived, had an amount of work way higher than what was planned. The initial role of ownership, and partial administration, became over time almost a secondary PM role for each initiative with a decent lift at the very beginning of the funding of a new proposal. At the same time, only 3 chairs meant (when we had a lot of initiative) that the role was likely underpaid
- the distinction between chairs and signers doesn’t make sense. We need to have general accountability on all people in there, with a potential split in the initiatives to manage. This would be the only way to have also good performance for signers (see next point)
- the performances have been not great. This comes from several factors, the first being a general 7/12 and 8/12 setup. It’s extremely difficult to have transactions signed in 24h when you have to gather 8 people; and, in general, the sheer amount of signers while can increase security posture doesn’t match a reality with several msig, way more important than ours, being 3/5 or 5/7. This is a very superficial take of course since we would have to analyse the opsec of each participant, but is just to convey a general point. A second factor is tied to the performances of single signers. Without going in the specific, we have seen big discrepancies in how fast people were available to first verify all the data and then sign transactions. While this was not noticeable when most of the people were around, during period like weekends, holidays etc it meant that some transactions would be stale way above the 24h sla that we imposed in the proposal.
Is there a way to restructure all of this, keep the initiative in the DAO and make it efficient? Potentially, yes. 5 or 7 signer, a PM (not a chair) that assigns ownership of initiatives, a schedule for unavailability, rules like no transactions being submitted on a friday unless is super urgent, periodic performance audit with rules to replace signers.
But I would still advocate that it doesn’t necessarily make sense, also in the new setup put forward with AAE and OpCo operationalizing the DAO, having the initiative not falling under AF or OpCo itself.
AF is needed, in every initiative, and almost in every transaction. As a signer, we always have to wait for the greenlight of AF from a compliance standpoint; this has also meant back and forth via email with them. Just this point really reduces performances, which to me are paramount here: we have to pay people in a timely fashion to become a professionalized DAO, full stop. Foundation will always be a middle layer, so it makes sense to move the whole function to this middle layer. OpCo will likely be able to have more agile communication with AF as well in future.