December Voting Updates
Hope everyone is having a great holidays! Here are the UADP updates from @AbdullahUmar and I for the past month.
Timeline Extension for STIP and Backfund Grantees
Vote: Extend deadline for both
We see no reason to not extend the timelines and thank the teams for their transparency on this matter.
Proposal: Experimental Incentive System for Active ArbitrumDAO Delegates
Vote: Without Karma, then With Karma, then Against
We are in support of more robust delegate compensation initiatives. Most DAOs today don’t have the bandwidth, financial runway, or even the need to pay delegates for their efforts. Arbitrum, however, is a different story. Due to the broad distribution of the token and continual activity by the token holder & delegate community, multiple initiatives have been implemented. Most importantly, Arbitrum DAO has shown a culture open to experimentation, which is the only way forward for DAOs. To make sure the activity from this year persists perpetually into the future, throwing out a carrot for active delegates is not a bad idea.
We’d be curious to see what material changes occur after this initial 6-month pilot phase concludes. One worry that we’ve always had regarding delegate compensation is selecting data points for rewarding certain behaviors. Should voting be the main criteria? Do you get penalized for voting in a non-consensus direction? Does the quality of your comments count towards your reward? The weighted point system described in this proposal makes sense for this pilot and does address some of our concerns behind what is rewarded. We are glad that it takes into account forum participation and not merely voting participation. Again, this has a good side and a bad side. It’s likely that we’ll see multiple throw-away comments just so users can increase their participation rate for the sake of it. Important discussions will become cluttered with fluff. In an ideal world we’d be able to automate reading responses and devise how “thoughtful” a comment was or how much attention it received. From there, thoughtful comments attain points, while fluff is penalized. These intricacies are to be thought about in the future.
All this being said, we are in favor of the manual option for implementing this proposal. Automating this process can be very valuable, but we believe that testing it out manually will help the SEED Latam team become subject matter experts in this compensation process, and with that experience, they can later collaborate with Karma more effectively, introducing more intricate ways to reward participation in the DAO.
Proposal [Non-Constitutional]: Establish the ‘Arbitrum Research & Development Collective
Vote: Don’t Fund, then Abstain, then the values in increasing order
We are not in favor of this proposal due to its overly broad nature and lack of receptivity from the DAO. There are a lot of new functions that the proposal seems to address, and each of these four divisions could easily have their own proposal. Predetermining the cost of each division is also, in our view, premature. We’d like there to be increased discussion around what exactly each division does more specifically—and then ascertain a more detailed compensation plan. Broad proposals like this should start simply by asking for community feedback.
Once enough conversation has transpired, the proposal should be divided up into multiple parts, each detailing more intricately the job of each division and how exactly the RFP process will be conducted. It would also be nice for the proposal author to have potential candidates for this program to comment their perspectives on the program. Post discussion, it should be decided how the voting should take place. One vote may just be a snapshot around the structure of the program, without any mention of compensation. This aspect would determine if there is a need for such a program and what the true job-to-be-done is. Assigning budgets could be a separate discussion and should be better outlined.
Overall, this proposal moved too swiftly to snapshot without nearly enough debate. We’d like to see the DAO create working groups such as the ones proposed—but this must be done in a more precarious manner.