Proposal: Transfer the Aragon Project Funds to an Aragon DAO Governed by (Delegated) ANT

I’ve suggested three options for the soft deadline question: Nov 30 (2022), Feb 28 (2023), and Abstain (can be interpreted as “neither”). I view the June vote as a signal vote on the general direction; the dates will need to be reviewed in the context of a detailed implementation plan.

EDIT: Assuming that the proposal passes and the delegative voting system gets implemented, it can be used for making any additional budgetary allocations (which may be required anyway depending on how things progress over the next 3-5 months). Like I said, I personally found it rational to sync funding with implementing the new governance system but if folks have strong opinions on this, please share on the forum so they can be taken into account during the vote.

3 Likes

Hi guys and sorry for joining the party late.
As an AA Core member and a Swiss citizen participating in a lot of associations (Verein) in private, I am in favor of making every DAO member / ANT holder a member of the association.
I agree with the move to a more decentralized Aragon and giving the power to the community but having only a runaway of 6 months could push a lot of core members into a fight/flight mode where we will lose a lot of knowledge, great talent, and power. Which could slow down the project or bring it to a complete stop.

How I/we currently work in other associations is quite simple and more decentralized than I have seen in a lot of other DAOs. For sure these steps need improvements to completely obey the Aragon Manifesto but as a first step, I think they are great.

  • Every year there is a general assembly where we vote on these topics (mostly in this order):
    • Approval of the annual reports from the committee
    • Approval of the financial statements of the previous year
    • Approval of this year’s budget
    • Electing a committee (1 president, 1 vice president, 1 cashier, multiple operative leaders)
    • Electing 2 auditors
  • if the committee needs more money than in the budget there will be an out of order assembly to vote on the requested funds
  • The teams are independent and work within their financial boundaries (controlled by the complete committee)
  • The committee meets every month (can be increased to weekly if necessary) and the notes are publicly available to all members

This move will allow Aragon to benefit from a legal wrapper AA which is governed by the members and avoid a huge tax loss outlined by @Gabriela

EDIT:
Each DAO squad / team / guild or however we wanna call it could have its own committee member(s) and their own budget to run from, which will increase the functionality of the DAO and hopefully prevent vote weary (getting tried of voting all the time)

5 Likes

Please note that the dates in the proposal are somewhat arbitrary. If the DAO decides to move in this direction, everyone affected should be included in working out a concrete implementation plan, which may involve revising the dates, and possibly running additional votes. On this, I’m more than happy to defer to folks who have a better grasp of what’s preferable/feasible once the DAO has decided whether it wants to take the on-chain route or not. The transition will obviously need to be handled carefully. Apologies if the proposal is not clear enough on these details. Keep providing your perspectives, esp. if you feel that something critically important is not receiving the attention it deserves!

3 Likes

Hi everyone and thanks for this amazing discussion. Sorry to join late in the conversation.

As a Brand Designer of the Aragon One team (previously) and AA team (currently), this is not my area of expertise, but after reading all your interesting thoughts I position myself as a more realistic solution to add the ANT holders as a member of the AA.

As @joeycharlesworth t mentioned before,

The Aragon Association articles can be amended to enable ANT holders to stake ANT in order to be members of the General Assembly and as a result, ANT holders could effectively be deciding who should be elected onto the Aragon Association committee.

This is for me the most realistic approximation to a decentralized solution that could benefit holders & make them part of the future decisions.

As a part of the AA team, working hard every day to bring a really top-notch product to the market with the rest of the AA and AL coworkers I want to highlight this important point from @ramon and bring it back again to this conversation:

  1. Aragon Association and Aragon Labs have assembled an excellent core product and tech team that is super motivated to deliver an amazing DAO platform. That being said, having a runaway of around 2 years for Aragon Labs looks like a good compromise between having skin in the game and personal safety, but might still be perceived by some contributors as a deadline that doesn’t have clear goals on how to be extended. How do the proposers see this potential issue (losing motivation, knowledge, etc) if the proposal passes? Are there some interesting previous examples that we could rely on?

Could be great if we can define the next future steps if finally this proposal passes and thinking about the new scenario for the AA and AL team members, that would be good to advance expectations.

As @luis said:

It’s what we always wanted since the Aragon token sale in 2017, which couldn’t happen during those early years due to lack of infrastructure. If we had working DAOs in 2017, we wouldn’t have opened a legal entity to raise funds in the first place – it would have been a DAO.

Since the creation of the first whitepaper (5 years ago) this was the initial idea, for this reason, I know this is the correct direction and decision, but I would like to minimize the risk to break the good traction & motivation that we are creating in this team.

Thanks :slight_smile:

10 Likes

Hey all!

As one of the co-founders, I thought I’d chime in and provide some light on the original vision, and its rationale.

The idea of Aragon has always been quite revolutionary, as you know. Because of such nature, it has historically attracted top-notch talent and produced quite an aura around the project. Fight for Freedom (which we all know) plus this interview I did in 2017 (Aragon's Luis Cuende interview with Cheddar from the NYSE trading floor - YouTube) reflect the original ideals. We were outcasts. We were revolutionaries.

The idea was for the Aragon Network DAO to be a jurisdiction for DAOs, and for ANT holders to be its governors. While I understand that a way to decentralize the treasury (if there was no other way) is to involve ANT holders in the AA and in a sovereign AN DAO, if there’s a way to make the AN DAO sovereign (which there is), why not do it?

Putting it simply: is there any more significant way to corrupt that vision, than to make the jurisdiction we wanted dependent on a trad jurisdiction? A DAO should be a DAO, a DAO should run on-chain and without any trad jurisdiction having a say over it. Now we seem to have the opportunity to achieve that. Let’s do it.

On the matter of the runway for the AA/AL teams: Aragon has always had that massive contradiction. We build DAO tooling, but we are scared to operate as a DAO. I could understand that when we started (there was no DAO tooling, and not even DeFi!), but now the tooling is so advanced that dogfooding and switching to a full-on DAO model is a no-brainer. The earliest, the better. Everyone inside Aragon, a project that builds decentralized governance tools, should be comfortable working under a decentralized model. Otherwise it’s a big hypocrisy that will only stop us from being seen as a genuine project.

PS: Even though right now I have a strong opinion about this, as an AA committee member I will support whatever ANT holders choose (within the boundaries of legality and morality) and will not be a blocker to decisions that I myself don’t agree with.

Best,
Luis

2 Likes

Dear JN, as said, it is possible to have different voting schemes than 1 vote 1 member, as long as such deviation is justified by objective criteria. Here is the example from HOPR. You can download the full articles via zefix.ch.

2 Likes

I am also late to this party. I agree with all of @MathiasAragon points. This entire proposal should have been focused more around progressive decentralization - with objective, defined goals where we allocate an increasing proportion of the treasury to AN DAO so we can operate 100% as a DAO as @luis said.

I don’t think anyone disagree’s with our end goal as a DAO. But without step-wise transitions, we destroy some amazing incentives for both parties to work together to reach goals, key milestones, integrate people in self-organized teams, processes, tools etc.

Instead, we have a ‘zero sum/all or nothing’ approach to treasury re-allocation, w/ no clarification on how AN DAO would seek to integrate AA/AL teams.

To be clear: we have extremely talented people from AA/AL assuming they are on a work contract that ends 190 days from today.

Progressive decentralization is not a new playbook, its been used many times.

7 Likes

100% echo with the sentiment that a proposal needs to follow this one about how the DAO will operate.

In fact, if I was a team member in AA/AL, I’d start working on such proposal now. Instead of asking “what will happen” and succumb to uncertainty, it’s a much better idea to build a future we all want to be a part of.

Also keep in mind the progressive decentralization works for protocols with clear PMF and value accrual – I don’t think it applies to Aragon in its current form. As much as it hurts for me to say this, Aragon has an amazing product out there that has billions of dollars under its belt but hasn’t been improved for years (aOS and Aragon Client) and a half-baked product that hasn’t seen the light of the day yet (I keep running the frontend locally and getting depressed). Also ANT utility hasn’t improved (in fact, it has degraded after Aragon Court not being maintained), and it’s just governance.

Now, a committed team of contributors can turn this around and hack products in a matter of weeks, but it seems obvious now that such thing that won’t happen maintaining the current structure. It seems that it’s not ideal to build products for DAOs organizing as a trad startup (which is quite obvious).

3 Likes

Is it obvious that a team of contributors can take code and replicate what we’re already trying to do in weeks? Has this been A/B tested? You have fair points, but we should not be making this kind of assumption in haste. Let me ask @luis - if someone made this proposal, but instead of saying 100% by Nov. 30th - it was instead10%- moved every season/quarter - until it reached 100% allocation - would you still support it? Outside of economic speculation, I am struggling to understand the “why” for a singular date for 100% treasury redirection.

We look forward to providing a response to the proposal, and hope we can reach a mutually beneficial agreement on the transition path to full DAO. I will kindly bow out of this discussion, mainly wanted to propose simple questions as a new person.

3 Likes

I make this assumption based on my experience building things and investing in founding teams. My latest example is Dework. I met the two founders (young dropouts, of course) in a cafe. They asked me a bunch of questions about what they should build. If I recall correctly, 6 days later they sent me a link with their MVP. There are many reasons why I’ve been very close to them and invested in their seed round, but just the fact that they built a functioning MVP in 6 days made me realize that these guys are gonna make it.
There are more examples like this, but the common denominator prevails: people with hacker/founder mindset can make things happen in days/weeks that would take a corporate/bigco a few years.

In terms of the 10%/100% treasury redirection, you raise a fair point. Why do it all at once? In my view, it’s about starting off without baggage. Keeping both a DAO and an entity with a privileged position within the ecosystem (AA/AL), and having both with their own teams/set of contributors isn’t a good start.

Simple questions like who gets to post to Twitter, who gets to use the website, etc. would be fairly complex and get hairy and political if it’s the AA/AL entity vs. the AN DAO. Also in such scenario, AA/AL are incentivized to retain most funds and consume them slowly, instead of transitioning those funds over to the DAO.

Thanks for the contributions to this thread!

3 Likes

Thank you for sharing your perspective. The proposal focuses on high-level objectives and is intentionally light on implementation details because these require input from more people and careful planning/coordination. Should the proposal pass, a detailed implementation plan would need to be devised and synced with related efforts to organize work under the various sub-DAOs/guilds. At least that’s the high-level idea. If someone is convinced that it’s impossible to implement the proposal by November 30, I encourage them to share their arguments so that these can be taken into account as the DAO prepares to vote and implement the proposal (again, assuming that it passes in the first place).

As it stands, the proposal mentions two dates: November 30 and February 28. The relevant question in the vote will include a third option - “Abstain” - which can be interpreted as “I reject both of these dates.” There’s nothing preventing the DAO from implementing the proposal on any timeline it chooses, should there be broad enough consensus on 6-9 months being unrealistic.

1 Like

Thanks for this - it may have been implied implicitly, but I appreciate you making it more explicit.

@luis thank you for clarifying. It’s accurate to say very small teams can build a lot in a short time - this is intuitively true. It is the scale of coordination that’s hard - this won’t go away moving everything to AN DAO; lags will simply change form. My role at Aragon is to improve agility at higher scales of coordination- scaling issues emerge no matter how perfectly we attempt to structure AN DAO work.

Low structure costs, high transparency, and clarity of purpose are unmatched with DAOs compared to corporations - we have zero disagreements on this. Yet, we hear about ambiguity and coordination challenges in DAOs every day - This is due to scaling laws present in all human organizations - not a lack of a certain kind of mentality. DAOs need explicit, clear structure as they scale - if they don’t, their token stability will eventually falter as game theory breaks down. Ambiguity won’t go away simply because we’re all token holders (although it certainly helps).

I look forward to helping form the basis of the various sub-DAOs/guilds - they are inevitably needed to scale the incredibly important work we’re doing here.

4 Likes

Having recently joined AA as Head of Comms, I am taking an integrated approach (i.e. bridging the AA Comms + AN DAO Growth Guild) to building the comms function from the ground up. I am personally committed to stewarding team(s) towards transparency, alignment and integration and this process has already begun (regardless of the transfer). I share your views on it and do think that comms is one of the first functions to decentralize and fully integrate into the DAO. This said, perhaps the progressive decentralization timeline can be assessed on a team-by-team basis (rather than budget) - based on feasibility. Some teams are ready to decentralize in short order, others may require more runway to adjust. I’m volunteering comms as one of the first to take the leap, building on the success and learnings from guilds such as dtech. Hopefully, we can build on each other’s experiences and progressively iterate without putting undue stress on teams that require more time and support.

8 Likes

Hi there,

After reading the comments in this proposal, I feel there’s a significant margin for improvement in some critical topics. I also propose improvement opportunities in each of those topics, as I believe that the current situation while being highly complex, is indeed an opportunity to improve what doesn’t work well. We should not be ashamed of tackling this.

DISCLAIMER: this is my personal view and analysis, as someone who has had the opportunity to engage with multiple stakeholders in both AA and AL and as a member of the management team of AL. However, I’m not speaking on behalf of anybody else.

Regarding purpose and velocity

  • Velocity can’t be decoupled from the WHAT is being built, which is tightly related to the PURPOSE of any given group with shared goals.
  • The complexity, security assumptions, and constraints associated with building a highly specialized vertical Web3 frontend are significantly different from building at the protocol layer.
  • Velocity is also a function of the operational complexity of any given project. It’s not the same to be 2-person team with full autonomy and ownership, than to have to coordinate across N-parties, each of them having different views on what to do next.

Improvement opportunity:

  • We need clarity on the PURPOSE for ANDAO and we need to think about the possibility of different purposes cohexisting within the Aragon Project. The AN DAO can have a more generic purpose, whereas a given Guild or Sub-DAO may have a more narrow-scoped one. Providing clarity on that will help set the expectations right, and it will allow for greater diversity in velocity capacities (we may have a given guild working in a verticallized front-end with faster velocity, and other working on Zk-rollup infra, which has much lower velocities due to the extreme complexity of the work)

Regarding psychological safety

  • I believe Aragon is in the best position to make DAOs actually work. My belief is that we are still in the early definition phase (we’re so early), and we’re experiencing what in biological terms is refered to as “natural selection”.
  • Instead of DNA strains, we’re selecting for governance configurations that maximize organizational fitness. Those configurations who succeed in making communities achieve their goals will remain, those who fail will disappear from the “solution space”.
  • My hunch feeling is that DAOs will succeed if they are able to keep some of the good parts of traditional organizations, disrupting the bad ones.
  • Among “the good parts”, one of them is social protection and psychological safety.
  • Without those, DAOs will remain a Millenial / GenZ burning machine. A churning beast that consumes young idealists as raw materials, squeezes their mental and physical energy, to moves to the next wave of contributors. While this may be good at a DAO level (if we equal a DAO to an organism), it’s fatal for the individuals (it’s cells). But in the long term, if the cells die and are not renewed at the pace they’re destroyed, the whole organism dies.

Contributors live in a world where a certain degree of stability is required to be able to think long term. People can’t plan nor commit to anything in real life without a minimum degree of stability and psychological safety. We should create the systems that allow for that while keeping accountability mechanisms in place. Otherwise, we’ll make DAOs a dystopian ultra-exploitative reality in which contributors live quarter by quarter and are churned every year, effectively erasing 200y of social advances in labor rights.

While I 100% agree with @luis that the AA/AL team should be proactive in bringing forward a proposal in order to specify how to work as part of the AN DAO, it’s important to mention that we expected to do this by 2023. The consensus was to have at least 1-2y of hyperfocus to advance in the different initiatives that are being pushed forward by the different teams, as I consider that it’s not possible to aim to do it all at once (we can’t focus on building while also paying attention to all the forum posts regarding governance proposals)

The sudden change of $20M allocation to no allocation at all and a 6 months deadline, and the lack of direct communication between AA Committee and the Core team, has caused:

  • A direct hit to the psychological safety across all AA/AL contributors, as it was perceived as the AA Committee doesn’t trust at all in what the team is doing.
  • Important hires have been stopped due to the uncertainty (we can’t ask top talent to quit current incentive packages in other projects to come to work for an organization that has a 6-month runaway. Wouldn’t be ethical).
  • Day-to-day operations significantly disrupted, therefore affecting our capacity to focus on the important initiatives.

BTW, I do believe that this psychological safety needs to span across all AN DAO contributors who devote their professional -and many times personal- lives to the project.

Improvement opportunity:

  • Review the strategic roadmap for Aragon Project together with AA Committee and the ANDAO community, to validate support from the different relevant stakeholders. To this aim, a new proposal will be put forward in the first half of June outlining the strategic guidelines that the AA/AL teams are proposing for Aragon Project to start that conversation.
  • Once that is done, provide budgetary stability so that the different teams currently working in AA/AL can focus on executing in the short-mid term. An ammendment proposal will be made in the next hours in that regards by a representative of the AA/AL teams, speaking on behalf of them so we can proactively signal our opinion.
  • In parallel, set a working group of AA/AL team members to define how that future relationship should be (becoming a fully fledged Guilds, create a Sub-DAO within AN DAO, etc). That working group needs to fully focus on this task, can’t multi-task across multiple initiatives.

Regarding attention
This last point connects to a problem that we clearly have experienced. This problem arises from the premise that:

  • People’s attention is a finite capacity asset and has a max “flowrate” (topics you can focus per amount of time)
  • If the amount of topics to look at increases linearly (or even exponentially) over time fast enough, capacity is soon maxed out.
  • Every new topic that is “important” or that you “need to be aware of” compounds the complexity of the rest. It’s not the same to focus on 2 topics with no interdependencies between themselves, than 15 with non-linear relations between them. The number of possible configurations exponentially grows.

The consequences of this are:

  • Productivity is greatly reduced: great results come people can focus. If they can’t, it’s very hard to reach deadlines or focus on what actually makes the project advance (apart from governance talks)
  • Anxiety levels go to the roof: when someone who has been fully focused in executing reads a Discord thread about “an important” topic that may deeply affect his future, and knows absolutely nothing about how that was a topic in the first place and how this may impact him/her, anxiety levels simply skyrocket. It’s a contant FOMO, but a bad one.

Improvement opportunity

  • TBH at this point I’m struggling to see concrete solutions for this, but I’m sure we could find a tradeoff that aligns both the path towards working on decentralizing Aragon and the ability of the AA/AL team to focus and ship. Would gladly welcome suggestions.

Regarding communication
One of the biggest frictions in this process has been to handle communications properly. The huge load and operational complexity haven’t helped (it’s been super challenging to proceed with the merge conversations between AA/AL teams while participating in this proposal). Without proper communication, the high degree of uncertainty and complexity leaves space for huge amounts of speculation. IMO the significant change in the allocated funding to Core Team and the deadline should have been better contextualized, and even better, direct communication between the AA Committee and the different stakeholders should have taken place beforehand.

For the part that I’m responsible for, I apologize for not communicating more and better. As I mentioned in my previous thread comment, I’ve found it very challenging to be able to focus on so many topics at once, with so many simultaneous moving pieces.

Improvement opportunity:

  • Increase direct communication across AA Committee, AA General Assembly, Core Team Leadership, and AN DAO representatives, with at least one monthly call where all the stakeholders can discuss strategic alignment, potential frictions and unblock blockers.

Lastly, I’d like to say that I am sure that we’re not the only ones facing challenges and complexity in the space. It’s how we deal with them that will either make us succeed or fail. We need to embrace those challenges without fear of having the hard conversations when needed, in a proactive and constructive way. I think that the proposal on the Strategic Roadmap for Aragon can be a great chance to engage in those conversations.

11 Likes

Hello,

My personal view: I firmly believe that we need a 1 year runway for the core team to create stability and focus, to allow for better hiring practises to fill the holes required to ship this product (which is a noted blocker), and to allow for a properly defined transition. I believe the November 30, 2022 date should be completely removed as an option and a 1 year date added.

Furthermore:

  1. I agree with Joan that we need better/direct communication across AA Committee, AA General Assembly, Core Team Leadership, and AN DAO representatives. It is evident that this is a pain-point and has caused severe stress for the core team.
  2. We need to create an environment to hire top talent, this environment doesn’t exist currently, and has been proven to be a blocker. An outside consultancy provided feedback that AA/AL pay “way below” industry standard and is one reason we cannot attract the talent required for certain holes. I just spoke with an ex-Tesla employee who fits one of our needs, she asked me how things are going there, do I tell her she has 6 months before a proposal is created to see if she will continue working at Aragon?
  3. I completely disagree that any blame for the lack of shipment of this product should be placed on the current team, many of whom have joined within the last year. AA’s 2 leading engineers & CTO left due to the reasons above and are being replaced by an entire team from the merge of AL (which is set to be complete in the next 2 weeks) and thus this team has had no real opportunity to succeed as 1 entity.

I firmly believe that we should DAOify but it should be done in a way to empower and support the people currently giving every minute of their day towards this project. The core team are unbelievably invested and talented, and as mentioned above, doing it without the proper support. Can we please remember these are people.

8 Likes

In the context of the current proposal, I think it’s important to separate two things:

(1) Transferring the Treasury and control of the ANT token contract to the AN DAO and implementing the delegative ANT voting system (the core objective of the proposal);

(2) Setting aside funds for AA/AL to continue operations during the transition period, which is separate from any allocations that may be decided through the delegative ANT voting system once it’s been implemented.

In the case of (1), the proposal suggests voting on three options as soft implementation deadlines (to be reviewed during the planning/implementation phase): Nov 30, Feb 28, Abstain (“neither”).

In the case of (2), I’ve been following the AA’s lead while keeping all communication/suggestion channels completely open. Again, assuming that the delegative ANT voting system gets implemented, it can certainly be used to allocate funding after Nov 30 to ensure a smooth transition beyond what’s described in (1). However, if folks feel strongly about preemptively extending the Nov 30 funding period, my suggestion would be to simply include it in the vote, for example through the following options: set aside funds for AA/AL to continue existing operations until Nov 30, Feb 28, May 31 (6-12 months). Again, this does not mean that work won’t continue beyond that date; it merely syncs funding with the new governance system as the DAO begins to organize more of its work through the sub-DAO/guild structure.

I hope this helps. Alignment is needed not only in terms of the core objective but also the best way of achieving it. Let’s make sure both are adequately represented in the vote text. I believe @AClay will be posting the draft for community review/feedback later today.

Keep your thoughts coming, everyone! It’s great seeing so much engagement - this is exactly how DAOs establish shared norms and practices in working through complicated situations.

3 Likes

Definitely, the scaling issues won’t go away by having a DAO, and there are tons of work to be done in order to make the DAO ship meaningful products/services. But I fear that if we don’t focus on that now, we will become meaningless in no time. There has never been a better moment to be a DAO than now.

2 Likes

Hey all,

Have posted a draft of what the vote may look like for comments, should help some get up to speed and focus conversations as well.

Thanks,

Alex

1 Like
  • We need clarity on the PURPOSE for ANDAO and we need to think about the possibility of different purposes cohexisting within the Aragon Project. The AN DAO can have a more generic purpose, whereas a given Guild or Sub-DAO may have a more narrow-scoped one. Providing clarity on that will help set the expectations right, and it will allow for greater diversity in velocity capacities (we may have a given guild working in a verticallized front-end with faster velocity, and other working on Zk-rollup infra, which has much lower velocities due to the extreme complexity of the work)
  • Without those, DAOs will remain a Millenial / GenZ burning machine. A churning beast that consumes young idealists as raw materials, squeezes their mental and physical energy, to moves to the next wave of contributors. While this may be good at a DAO level (if we equal a DAO to an organism), it’s fatal for the individuals (it’s cells). But in the long term, if the cells die and are not renewed at the pace they’re destroyed, the whole organism dies .

Really great points here.

While I 100% agree with @luis that the AA/AL team should be proactive in bringing forward a proposal in order to specify how to work as part of the AN DAO, it’s important to mention that we expected to do this by 2023. The consensus was to have at least 1-2y of hyperfocus to advance in the different initiatives that are being pushed forward by the different teams, as I consider that it’s not possible to aim to do it all at once (we can’t focus on building while also paying attention to all the forum posts regarding governance proposals)

Hyperfocus means:

  • Iterating and launching products in weeks, not years
  • Having a “two pizza” team if you don’t have a product to scale up yet

I’d be in support of that, but what I have seen from inside the AA so far is quite different.

  • A direct hit to the psychological safety across all AA/AL contributors, as it was perceived as the AA Committee doesn’t trust at all in what the team is doing.
  • Important hires have been stopped due to the uncertainty (we can’t ask top talent to quit current incentive packages in other projects to come to work for an organization that has a 6-month runaway. Wouldn’t be ethical).
  • Day-to-day operations significantly disrupted, therefore affecting our capacity to focus on the important initiatives.

I honestly don’t quite understand the rationale here. Placeholder put forward a proposal to decentralize the treasury, and instead of viewing it as an opportunity, it’s being viewed as a threat by some team members. I get the whole point about stability, but if you want to achieve stability under this new hypothetical scenario, wouldn’t it be the best course of action to:

  • Start working on governance proposals for the DAO to fund the initiatives you want to make happen
  • Talk to the relevant actors (ANT holders) that might support such proposal, pitch it to them and get them onboard

In terms of hiring, I know personally that this has impacted some very high leverage hires, but I also know that excessive bureaucracy was impacting them even before. I have lived this very intensely as someone close to me (which is extremely top-notch talent with hacker attitude and successful founding background) was basically pushed away by extremely long reply times, unnecessary bureaucracy and a messy process. And this was probably the most important hire the project could have made right now.

Increase direct communication across AA Committee, AA General Assembly, Core Team Leadership, and AN DAO representatives, with at least one monthly call where all the stakeholders can discuss strategic alignment, potential frictions and unblock blockers.

This would make sense.

I also would like to apologize for not dedicating more time to Aragon. I mean, in general the committee isn’t doing a great job because of having very low involvement. I have encouraged the other committee members to comment on this proposal, because I’m the only one commenting here and I don’t really represent everyone’s opinion. I also gotta say that I have been an extremely supportive voice of the AA/AL teams in the committee (and generally speaking my attitude has been of absolute trust towards the team), but lately it has become very hard for me to defend things when I open the Zaragoza frontend (built over a year+?) and I find something I could code in a hackathon.

3 Likes

I firmly believe that we need a 1 year runway for the core team to create stability and focus

We need to create an environment to hire top talent, this environment doesn’t exist currently, and has been proven to be a blocker. An outside consultancy provided feedback that AA/AL pay “way below” industry standard and is one reason we cannot attract the talent required for certain holes.

+1. There’s a bigger issue at play here, and that’s the ANT that the Association has. It’s not a lot, as compared to other projects that have retained a massive portion of the supply. And I don’t think we’ll be able to attract top-notch talent without the AA/AN DAO (depending on this vote) having at least 2-3x the amount of ANT it has now. A big ANT buyback could help make this happen, but that would require a separate governance proposal.

I completely disagree that any blame for the lack of shipment of this product should be placed on the current team, many of whom have joined within the last year. AA’s 2 leading engineers & CTO left due to the reasons above and are being replaced by an entire team from the merge of AL (which is set to be complete in the next 2 weeks) and thus this team has had no real opportunity to succeed as 1 entity.

I agree but also respectfully disagree on this front. I have always taken ownership very seriously. For me, the CEO is always to cherish when things go well (although a good CEO cherishes their team and not themselves) but also to blame when things go sour. Joe knows this, and he knows that part of it might be that we need someone stronger in the product side of things. BUT it’s not only the CEO. It’s every person inside an organization. Because every person has a choice: to see things go slow and not do anything, or to roll up your sleeves and get to it.

The team must have seen the current state of Zaragoza, right? Hell, even if I wasn’t a programmer but I saw that frontend, I would just learn how to code to make it happen.

Now, ownership must be properly rewarded, and I agree that it’s hard to attract top-notch talent with such a low portion of the ANT supply.

PS: I always remember that team members are people, I have met most of you and you are all super nice (and most of you great professionals too) and I’m trying to highlight the issues that might make this team (even as a DAO) work better.

2 Likes