As market momentum starts to pick up, we anticipate Uniswap governance being more active and important than ever before. In its current state, governance coordination is functioning, but not at peak performance. We believe that it would be advantageous to all stakeholders and the protocol to initiate a community call. Is there appetite for this?
Uniswap Community Calls would be a monthly meeting with the goals of discussing proposals and the general direction of the DAO. The meetings will hopefully be attended by delegates, proposers, various organizations, and contributors of all kinds. During the call, participants can discuss proposals, direction, potential protocol changes, and anything else pertinent to the community. We’d love to invite those with active proposals to discuss their undertaking with delegates and host an open Q&A.
Though we at Blockworks Research are more than happy to host and moderate the calls to start, we should in no way be considered a gatekeeper, and if others are interested in hosting a call or calls in the future please reach out. We think it is best that the calls be open to all.
A sample agenda may look something like the following:
Discuss open proposals
Updates from The Foundation
Open discussion around DAO needs, direction, and potential RFPs
Open Mic
We propose this call be held every second Tuesday of the month at 3PM UTC, starting in December. A Google meeting link can be posted on this thread every month, and corresponding minutes for the call will also be posted.
Thank you for kicking this off. We believe a monthly community call to discuss proposals and the general direction of the DAO is much needed. We are happy to support the call by participating, hosting, and moderating, as needed.
This is a great idea, thank you @BlockworksResearch Based on the description here, the focus sounds more on the side of governance than general community updates. So consider renaming these to Governance calls.
I’d also like to suggest having these calls in the uniswapDAO server
I believe a monthly call would greatly benefit the community and save time for many people who currently reach out to individuals separately.
However, do we require a governance proposal for this? I suggest we initiate the monthly call and evaluate its success before making it an official practice.
This is a great idea! I am strongly in favor of gathering people face to face (either digitally or physically) in order to have nuanced discussions and gather information about the many perspectives that are pertinent to the community and Uniswap’s success.
A few areas that would be helpful to understand:
Do you view that there is a single objective associated with these calls or are they framed as an experiment at this stage? (without a single objective it can be hard to measure if they are successful, for example, is high attendance a sign of success, or is detailed conversation the better metric? )
If these are viewed as an experiment, what is the experiment that is being run? Will there be a process for individuals to provide feedback after a certain number of calls?
Recognizing that there is no gatekeeper for these calls but that there is ‘leadership’ in some sense (for example, the facilitator and the note taker are in positions of power to some degree) how do you think about who sets the agenda, who handles facilitation, and who takes notes? Do you view these roles as rotating?
Community calls are incredibly useful and they can be set up in a variety of ways so it would be cool to hear more about how the group wants to set these up and grow them over time!
To ensure this adds to the conversation, here are my recommendations to the questions I proposed:
Set this up as an experiment! As Kydo said, it could just be organically started and evaluated after 3 months. I would set the experiment parameters, ie 3 months; the primary focus is on proposals, first a review of any proposals that passed, then a review of upcoming proposals; the objective is to gather a shared understanding, specifically from delegates about their understanding and feedback on proposals.
Do rotate facilitators, but not immediately: gathering people requires activation energy and a consistent facilitator adds to the rhythm. It also allows learning to aggregate with one person giving them a chance to improve processes. Once things feel ‘recurring’ and the group understands the drum beat, I would start rotating facilitators which is proven to have a positive impact.
For the agenda, I would have an agenda created 3 days before the call with a request for attendees to propose topics (and then ask at the beginning of the call if any topics are missing). This could be done in a google sheet. For the note taker, I would rotate that! Often that is a job that gets relegated to the same person and it’s important to view that as shared work.
Hope this helps form a great foundation for gathering the community digitally!
I like this idea and personally would attend. I think a live, recorded call would be a helpful touchpoint for DAO stakeholders who want to be aware of most important issues in the DAO.
Fully supportive of this initiative for Uniswap Community Calls. At Bunni, we recognize the vital role these discussions can play in enhancing governance, especially as market dynamics evolve. We anticipate these calls to be instrumental in the governance processes and aligning on the DAO’s direction. Our team at Timeless/Bunni are eager to participate and contribute to these dialogues. Additionally, once the schedule is officially confirmed, we’ll ensure to broadcast the dates and times within our community to encourage broad participation.
The below response reflects the views of L2BEAT’s governance team, composed of @kaereste and @Sinkas, and it’s based on the combined research, fact-checking and ideation of the two.
We agree that hosting a community call can help foster greater coordination among various stakeholders and we’re supportive of the idea. We believe a monthly cadence to be adequate for the time being, but we could also see this call happening bi-weekly as market momentum starts picking up.
We agree with this sentiment around nomenclature and appreciate the recommendation. The Uniswap community extends beyond governance participants and this specification will help reduce potential confusion around the call. As far as having them in the server, we’d like to start with a google meet format to remove reliance on any party outside of this group, at least to start.
This post is purely meant to spark a discussion and make community participants aware of the idea. It is not meant to turn into a formal proposal.
The goals of the call are to discuss proposals and the general direction of the DAO.
These calls do not require a traditional experimental framework but qualitative data around the number of participants, topics of discussion, and tools used (eg miro) will be used to iterate for future calls (or potentially make a judgement that the calls are not valuable.)
We are more than happy to facilitate the calls to start. There will be no official notes taker for the first call, but the call will be recorded and we can bring an AI note taker with us. An extremely rough agenda will be created via a shared workspace tool that will allow those who join to choose the agenda.
We have set up a shared google calendar and recurring community call for the second Tuesday of every month! Our first call will be December 12 at 10am EST.
A potential agenda:
Introduction
Underrepresented delegate program
Update from the foundation
How to spark more conversation and activity from delegates
Open discussion (+ What do we want to discuss on next call)
If anyone has any additional action items they want added please feel free to DM @mattfiebach or @0xpibblez on Twitter and we will get it added. Looking forward to collaborating with you all!
We have rescheduled the community call to the third Tuesday of this month to give everybody time to catch up from the holiday season. Apologies for any inconvenience. Looking forward to chatting with you all on 1/16!
We’d appreciate advanced notice about these calls in the future. It would be great to have a public calender so folks can permissionlessly import it and join these conversations.
