Thanks for sharing these thoughts Shane, we’ve learned some good lessons and plan to share more on transparency next week.
We plan to make full use of POPs, with a wallet POP just published and more to come spanning protocol features, maintenance roles (e.g. docs), and other initiatives that support our keystones. The responses to these have been amazing and we plan to continue to leverage as much as we can.
That is indeed how sockets are intended. They are lightly permissioned seed grants to ensure that PNF, and governance, is not a bottleneck on value creation. If you are reading this and you have an idea to contribute to Pocket, just take the time to scope out your contribution, post it to the forum in the sockets category, and you’ll be “plugged in”. The only requirement to get started is that you commit to working in the open. Keep in mind though that if you don’t follow through on your commitment or there is no evidence of your impact you’ll be unplugged in a month. We will work on improving the documentation about this mechanism so that it is clearer to all potential contributors.
We also see the need for a technical perspective to oversee the protocol and related contributions. This is why we posted this referral incentive for anyone who helped us to hire a Protocol PM. I’m happy to say that our new Head of Product began onboarding earlier this week. He joins us after more than 10 years in data and product leadership roles, most recently with 2 years at Chainalysis and then 2 years at Polygon, where he built out their product organization and oversaw PoS mainnet, Supernets, Avail, and Applied Research. He will be filling the role that Jess previously held in helping Olshansky to manage the protocol roadmap but he is part of the PNF team and will advise on all technical/product matters. We’ll be publishing a forum post soon with details on all recent new hires in the protocol team.