I am creating this request for comments regarding our rules committee following a discussion with different community members favouring the reinstatement of this committee.
In the past, the Rules Committee played a pivotal role in ensuring that our DAO operated smoothly and fairly. Their contributions to the DAO rules, to clarify the workflows of different DAO workstreams and governance processes were key to our well operations. However, the committee was dissolved and I believe that we should consider bringing it back to operation.
With all this motivations in mind, we should also discuss how to go about filling the positions. In the past, there were three positions, each representing a different guild within the DAO, where the founding members of this committee volunteered to join it. To move forward with this, I would like to request your inputs on the following:
Nomination Process: How should we select candidates for the committee positions? Should it be a volunteer-based nomination process, or should we consider alternative methods to ensure fair representation?
Term Limits: Should there be term limits for committee members to ensure a fresh perspective periodically, or should we allow for longer-term commitments?
Committee Size: Should we maintain the previous structure with three positions, or should we consider expanding the size of the committee based on our current needs? Maybe a wider group of contributors need to be represented here.
Committee Responsibilities: What specific responsibilities and powers should the Rules Committee have? What areas of governance should fall under their purview?
Please share your thoughts, ideas, and suggestions on these questions. Your input are always greatly appreciated.
There are several critical DAO processes that require establishment and ongoing monitoring with a regular cadence. Additionally, we need to define sufficiently-comprehensive DAO-level policies to govern our interactions with contractors and the tools, products, and protocols employed within the DAO.
To illustrate, let’s consider a scenario where one of our DAO-developed products necessitates integration with a third-party library to manage critical assets. In such cases, we would implement a policy mandating that the product:
a) Undergo an audit.
b) Implements its own dedicated bug bounty program.
I believe that by reinstating the rules committee, we would be better equipped to streamline these essential processes, allowing us to assign clear ownership of each set of policies and thereby ensuring the adherence to our established best practices.
Furthermore, the rules committee has previously proven very useful in serving as a consultative body, resolving doubts and crafting procedures that guide our DAO’s daily operations within the context of decentralization.
Thanks, Luna. I agree with the need for an overall review of the DAO’s security and other practices, as well as determining and implementing ongoing monitoring with specific cadences, etc.
A simple example I’ve mentioned to a few people is the requirement that all guild committee members and Council use a hardware wallet for their multisig activity. Given how critical a vulnerability here could be (@MrsNuBooty shared with each committee a while back an example of a major DAO sending a large amount of funds to the wrong address) how do we know we have 100% compliance at all times? We’ve definitely had new committee members who had questions about this and we don’t have real onboarding either (to be fair, onboarding is something that no organization I’ve ever worked for does really well; but in crypto and with a young DAO the stakes are higher).
Your original post notes, “In the past, the Rules Committee played a pivotal role in ensuring that our DAO operated smoothly and fairly. Their contributions to the DAO rules, to clarify the workflows of different DAO workstreams and governance processes were key to our well operations.” I agree the committee did really important work on governance, which helped the DAO operate better and more fairly.
It may be just semantics, but to my mind greater efficiency in overall operations should be an ongoing effort/review, but that goes beyond rule making/proposing. Do you see the need as rules/governance specifically, or a broader focus that could be a work group of DAO contributors across guilds (and contributor teams as needed)? Seems like the latter to me, and that if such a work group (which I’ll volunteer to join and help organize/manage) finds aspects that require additions/updates to governance we can propose such (or if necessary delegate to a subset that would do what the official Rules Committee did in the past).
Thanks for your comments @JohnPackel, they are very useful to scope and shape this effort.
From our conversation, we are in need of shaping a body that takes care of:
Review of the DAO’s security and other practices,
Determining and implementing ongoing monitoring with specific cadences
Confirm / verify that community members comply with DAO-level critical security measures, e.g., providing a HW wallet address for the guild’s and council multisig
Keep an eye on governance processes and DAO workstreams to make sure they are efficient and fair
Create an efficient onboarding process for i) community members, ii) guild’s members, iii) council members, iv) contractors
Structure:
I absolutely agree that this needs to go beyond rule making, this group of people need to be a working group where we can consult our doubts and help establish process and boundaries that do not burden our community members with bureaucracy but ensures that we operate smoothly.
Additional issues that we need to take care of through a collaboration workgroup:
Guild members accountability: the DAO is funding the guilds to perform necessary tasks and somehow we need to establish some process to ensure we keep ourselves fair and provide the DAO with the hours we are compensated
Managing conflicts of interests / compatibility of DAO roles + guild memberships
DAO Contractors reporting: process for the accountability of the DAO contractors that’s the same for everyone, so the community is able to track the progress and tasks
Process to revoke a contractor: if a contractor is not providing a good service to the DAO, how do we review and revoke their contract?
Guild revoking: if a guild does not perform their tasks according to the needs of the DAO, how do we manage this? who would be proposing a restructure? how do guilds keep true to their purpose and evolve to become more efficient or change functions?
Offboarding DAO contributors: how do we get more efficient on offboarding members of the DAO? who owns this responsibility? To date, I have been working on this, but I am seldom notified of people leaving the DAO, this could benefit of a sound process for it.