F8 Meeting 1 - 14th July 2022
Fund 8 Community Governance Oversight - Meeting 1 - Thursday, 14th July 2022
Agenda
Attendees
| Name | Role |
|---|---|
Allison Fromm | Member |
Kenric Nelson | Member |
Matthias Sieber | Member |
Phil Khoo | Member |
Stephen Whitenstall | Member |
Tevo Saks | Member |
Vanessa Cardui | Member |
Andre Diamond | Treasury |
Miroslav Rajh | Treasury |
Information
Community Governance Oversight (CGO)
Agenda
1. F8 CGO Treasury
00:55 - Andre - F8 $ 6860 incoming next month. We have already paid for the F8 CGO meeting commitments and $ 4200 for Kenric's research budget.
02:21 - Phil K - The rest of the payments will be variable based on deliverables ?
02:27 - Stephen W - Yes that is right.
Action: In August 2022 pay reminder of the research budget to Kenric.
Action: Pay Allison $75 for Town Hall Slides X 2 ($150) in July 2022
Action: Pay Stephen W $500 for Project Management for July 2022
2. Town Hall Slides
07:21 - Allison - Updates on Town Hall Slides
Allison went into a little more depth about CGO history and where we came from and what we're trying to do. We did ask people to comment on parameters this time around either in the chat or in discord.
08:01 - Thorsten - Do we have a publicly accessible register of all the parameters which we have identified?
Stephen - No we do not. Do you think we should do that ?
Thorsten - I think it would be helpful. Yes.
08:41 - Phil K - IOG have forewarning now that CGO are noting parameter changes at Town Hall slides. So I think that is a good place to start.
Stephen - We are doing oversight of parameters. And I suppose that's what the question is, is how we are going to approach that? Allison's obviously you're doing you're doing a kind of an overview for every town hall slide presentation.
Allison - That is meant to be only the most recent changes that we have informally observed. I agree that, ideally, documenting all parameters and logging when they change, how that decision is made and how it's communicated would be fantastic. But that is a lot of work.
3. CGO Project Board Review
09:59 - Stephen W
A quick view of the project board. A bit frightening because there's a lot in the backlog. But it's mostly to do with Fund 7 stuff in progress.
We have spoken about the Town Hall Slides.
Mostly, today's meeting is going to be a scoping meeting.
4 F8 CGO Scope & Deliverables
4.1 Challenge Setting
40:56 (discussed later in meeting)
What is the scope of Challenge Setting Oversight ?
I'm presenting categories and contributor recurring model to IOG on 22nd July, will be recorded, will share into CGO Discord - George
Documented ? - Vanessa
With challenge settings I am pushing contributors as a recurring model. There's a lot of parameters in contributor model that would need thought.
(documentation) Wasn't planning to - can do, either way - George
But it feels like the whole issue of the scope of challenge settings is kind of different from catalyst contributors. And I'm not quite seeing how CGO has a take on catalyst contributors. What am I missing? - Vanessa
I'm a little lost, too. I understand the funding categories. But I'm not sure how contributors fits into that. - Allison
It's because funding categories are looking to replace challenge settings and contributors is a big part of that - George
Discussion from Nadia/Tomi work - bit confused by what they are suggesting - Kenric
Concerned that Challenge Team members not given authority to audit proposals - Kenric
Challenge Teams were never intended as auditing function. Audit is a heavy responsibility and the compensation is not enough - Vanessa
My understanding Challenge Team is not an audit function. I was hoping Ron Hill or others would submit audit proposals - Phil
What I observe is that every challenge has at least three, maybe as many as five IOG employees who are part of the challenge team. And then maybe one or the most two that are non IOG employees. Even this is like a baby step towards some delegation to the community. But there was never a commitment of a substantial budget. So that you could recruit the right kind of people and they would have the adequate amount of time to do the functions that would truly be leadership of that challenge. - Kenric
This particular Fund 9 has been quite unusual in terms of the challenge settings, and the challenges that have been available to propose in. I would quite like to see CGO do some kind of oversight or information gathering on what effect that has had on Catalyst? I don't quite know what that would look like or what our process would be. But does anybody think that would be useful or valid? - Vanessa
That sounds amazing. But it also sounds like it would take up all our money. That's a whole other thing to understand that. - Phil
Yeah, I was gonna say the same thing. We've got a lot of fantastic ideas and good work here. I think we're, we're not we're not lacking things we could do. It's a question of prioritizing which ones we have the resources to do. - Allison
Fund 8 feedback due from voting survey - Tevo
We could add questions to the Fund 9 IOG survey ? - Phil
Who is working on what ? - Kenric
Resources - George, Phil
4.2 Catalyst Circle Oversight
What is the scope of F8 Catalyst Circle Oversight ?
11:27 - How should we approach Circle Oversight ? - Stephen
Compensation for the circle members
11:35 - I can chime in because I led one of the After Town Hall discussions [on Circle compensation]. And I think it was a very good discussion. - Kenric
I just finished detailed notes of the meeting that I've asked Stephen and Harris to review before I publish it. Joey [Chessner - Circle v3 Representative] had input to that. - Kenric
People have different thoughts but there was kind of consensus that it's important for some reasonable compensation for the circle members. There is support for the Circle, and for being sustainable through appropriate compensation. I also have done some design work on this, and outline some possibilities. - Kenric
There is a student from Oxford, who's also quite interested in this problem. My concern is whether IOG will take [the compensation issue] seriously. - Kenric
13:26 - I think there's a big disparity between how community members are being recruited to fulfill functions within Catalyst. And how proposal teams are compensating people and IOG in terms of how they run their business and how they recruit people to be employees of their business. - Kenric
Ultimately, I think that disparity has to be resolved in order for the community to be more healthy. With the Circle role I've proposed some ideas that would allow for a kind of negotiation. Where candidates can propose the salary. - Kenric
Circle election process
One of the primary functions of this current Circle is to design the election process. - Kenric
Not making decisions
For me personally the parameters side of things is more interesting than Circle oversight. So I'm happy to defer that scope to others. I would only suggest given the point that I kind of hammered in the town hall that we're not making decisions that were clear to separate what's oversight from? - Allison
After Town Hall
The report back here I would have given was that there was an After Town Hall [three of them]. Different discussions happened. Obviously there was no ability to make a decision in those discussions. But we had participation from three members from here, both acting as overseers and as participants. I think that's kind of more the report we're looking for here rather than any particular outcomes of what happened. - Phil
Scope
Surely here in this meeting we should be talking about what we think CGOs approach and scope to Circle oversight should be rather than thrashing out what happened in the After Town Hall ? Can we try to focus on where that leaves us in terms of CGO ? - Vanessa
I think what Phil meant was to say that this event happened and we have a timeline of people who want to see what's happening in this Catalyst space. They have a timeline, events happening here, here and here. Some of them repeat, some of them don't. But you get this scope of people working actively in places. - Tevo
Another thing I wanted to point out, is when Catalyst Circle is looking for feedback, like doing polis or these surveys we leverage our Twitter and [information] to get information to that Circle. So we don't have a situation where Circle is doing something but doesn't find the traction they need to get their own audience. - Tevo
Circle Election Process
19:42 - I see that point but I do think that it's moving away from oversight and more into participating in the process. And I feel really strongly that we should try to avoid doing that. And we keep our oversight function really clear. - Vanessa
I think that one of the things that should be in our scope for Fund 8 is looking at the [Circle] election process. And what is decided about that. Because Circle has tasked itself to focus on the election for Circle v4. And that seems to be a natural focus. - Vanessa
Sometimes Circle tries to communicate what is going on and people don't always hear it. So we can contextualize to an extent. - Vanessa
I think that's good guidance. The design of the upcoming election is front and center right now. What does oversight mean? And what are the boundaries for contributing to that process? There's two functions, one function is documenting what's going on. That's quite important. But then oversight can also involve making recommendations. We're not ultimately the decision makers, but we should feel comfortable making recommendations. - Kenric
Resources : Vanessa, Tevo
4.3 d-Reps
23:49
In progress - the last meeting was F8 - dRep White Paper Working Group Meeting Tuesday, 4th July 2022 - 1700 UTC
The dReps White Paper team is progressing with their first draft. In August, the team will invite community reviewers to comment on the white paper.
3 authors actively working on drafts. 1 author to confirm. Thorsten working as deputy. Thorsten, Stephen W and Kenric working as editors
Published today - https://quality-assurance-dao.gitbook.io/community-governance-oversight/drep-white-paper-working-group/meeting-5th-july-2022
Open to Community reviewers in coming weeks - Kenric
Separate out White paper from oversight of dReps - Kenric
Second function of how dRep process going - Kenric
Participating dRep perspective - Tevo
Resources - Kenric, Thorsten and Stephen
Other dRep Oversight
Regarding the dReps, I'm doing some work already putting comments and thoughts on a Miro board. [...] I thought of doing a 10 minute video to share my work. And how could I improve and maybe feedback from that could be used in oversight ? - Tevo
4.4 Governance parameters
What is the scope of F8 Governance parameters ?
25:41
Somebody asked both last night and just now, are we keeping a comprehensive log somewhere of catalyst parameters. I think that would be really useful activity to log all of the parameters, how they change, who makes the decision and how it's communicated. But I'm conscious that's a pretty large work workload. - Allison
We can take a little bit out of the Fund 7 report where there was a list of the ones that we had noticed and we could use that as a basis. But there is research to do on when things were announced and how they were announced. - Vanessa
I would just say having a problem on the board which lists all the parameters. We try to note when and how it was introduced and by whom? To whom? - Vanessa
Maybe the way to go about that is to chunk it. Define broad categories of parameters? So for instance, there's parameters on the proposal processes. - Kenric
Jeremy has done great work on the decision making tree and some of the parameters could be categorized within that tree. We can look to categorize parameters. Some parameters probably should be discussed urgently and worked out how to change them. - Phil
The most important thing I think is that there's a column there that states the conditions on which the community can take this over. And those will be blank for now. But as we get to more important parameters we to say that the community and IOG need to discuss what it [would take] to steward it towards an executable decision made by greater community. I think that's where this work can have significant value in the community beyond just reporting. But actually reporting and engaging on how to adjust those parameters [in practice]. - Phil
In addition to the parameters themselves what's actually critical is how those parameters are currently being managed. And what's the cost of that management? In terms of transitioning responsibility to the community that's what becomes critical is what's involved in making decisions on these parameters and how much is that going to cost? - Kenric
You could start with identifying who is involved in the decision making and approximation of how much time they spend on that particular issue and some estimation of how much that costs. - Kenric
Catalyst governance parameters could be a good start for us. How much [resources] we give to one subject does not have to be equal. We can do more work on one subject than another. We do seem to be gathering around Thorsten's idea of building a public register. - Thorsten
dRep example
35:53
The [parameter change] that strikes my mind at the moment is the introduction of the dReps. And how that now is wrapped up in [dRep] workshops. The story is quite different. There might be a good rationale for why it changed. But it is important to understand why it cannot be done one way and why we have now to do it differently. The current challenge is that it's not really clear why this has changed. So people were going into something and it is not really clear what they were working with walking into. As the story has totally changed. - Thorsten
I would like to understand how they came to these decisions on their side. Even if they say we don't have a process, because make it up. Fair enough, at least we know how it works. Because as soon as you give it to the community [you have to] bring in mechanisms to derive decisions in a similar way. - Thorsten
Resources - Allison, Phil, Tevo and Vanessa
5 CGO Proposal Reporting
F7 CGO Proposal Reporting
Action - Stephen W to complete for 26th July 2022
F8 CGO Proposal Reporting
Action - Stephen W to complete for 26th July 2022
6 Summary of CGO meeting for Catalyst Weekly Newsletter
No updates this week
7 Updates on CGO F7 Final Report and Slide Presentation
In progress. Contributions added to final report draft
Slides being drafted
8 Executive, Legislative, and Judicial functions (Kenric)
I’m (Kenric) not sure where to put this, but I suggest having a discussion about the Executive, Legislative, and Judicial functions of governance. The voting processes of Catalyst map clearly to a Legislative function. What are the Executive and Judicial functions? Perhaps the approved projects are an executive function. Perhaps the Circle’s identification and discussion of problems is a judicial function. Clarity about this mapping might help define these different roles, and thereby the form and expectations of these roles.
Kenric - we could take this at the end, or - because discussion of it might inform the discussion on item 4, our deliverables - we could take it after item 3. See what people think in the meeting?
Next meeting discussion ? or Async or informal - Kenric
Last updated
