Hey @adam
@JackALaing will respond at some point today with a more comprehensive response to the comments from you and @zaatar - many of which I hope you’ll both be pleased to see have been taken into consideration.
In the meantime, I wanted to respond directly to your points above about changing the governance structure of the DAO and the Foundation. Namely, to establish a “DAO Board”.
Regarding establishing a “DAO Board”, it’s not clear to me what benefits would accrue from creating a centralising force within the DAO, particularly when:
- Such a board would not be subject to any legal fiduciary duties to its stakeholders, ie the DAO members, or be in a contractual relationship to enforce its mandate with any entity within the ecosystem; and
- it’s unclear what distinct value-add such a board would bring to the community, beyond what PNF plans to provide in the short to medium term.
Unpacking the roles of the DAO and the Foundation
The DAO and the Foundation are extremely synergistic institutions. The phrase “highly aligned, loosely coupled” comes to mind as the DAO and the Foundation share a similar vision but focus on distinct missions to get there.
As a result, I believe that each institution would be best placed to lean into its unique attributes to achieve its goals.
The DAO
In the case of the DAO, it is the key vehicle for driving Pocket towards becoming unstoppable, i.e. as resistant as possible to capture. And to eventually become a hyperstructure. The DAO achieves this mission by representing the broadest possible set of interests of the Pocket ecosystem. In doing so, the DAO also maximises the quality of its decision-making in concave environments “where pluralism and even naive forms of compromise are on average likely to outperform the kinds of coherency and focus that come from centralization”. Further, by investing its treasury, the DAO maximises the impact its contributors can make on behalf of the broader community. Becoming more representative while continuing to learn and evolve is what makes the DAO so valuable.
The Foundation
The Foundation is ultimately all about enabling the DAO on its mission. It can represent the DAO in the real world and enter into contracts on its behalf. However, more than that, with its own separate genesis allocation, a credibly natural mandate, and a small but focused group of paid staff, the Foundation can focus on longer-term goals that members of the DAO may not have the time to think about or care about as it doesn’t impact their stakeholder group directly. The more that the Foundation’s autonomy is reduced, the less its impact will become. And while there is undoubtedly a balance to be struck, highly centralised direct control of the Foundation by the DAO is not it. Being as credibly neutral as possible while maintaining sufficient autonomy to represent Pocket’s values and think longer-term makes the Foundation valuable.
The Future roles of the DAO and the Foundation
The DAO is just not ready yet to fulfil the Foundation’s role as well as its own. Putting a “Board” on top of the DAO wouldn’t change anything for the better. I think it’s clear that the Pocket ecosystem has been missing an entity like a more active Foundation in the last year or two, a credibly neutral entity with the mandate, resources and reputation within the community necessary to facilitate better governance, connect Pocket’s community, empower contributors and stand up for the interests of the DAO in front of other ecosystem institutions and players.
As the DAO’s socialware and trustware develop, I hope that the DAO can make PNF redundant. However, we can all agree that we’re at least a couple of years away from that point. And hopefully, most of the community can see the benefit of having paid, highly aligned directors and staff working for the Foundation focused on unlocking the DAO to deliver the most value to the rest of the ecosystem in the meantime.