Governance Aide & Historian - Prop House Draft

hi all, this is a draft of a proposal I will submit to the Nouns Mandate Prop House - I’d love honest feedback and thoughts before I submit it officially. Thank you!

Governance Aide & Historian Proposal

TL;DR - I will conduct a trial run of a Governance Aide & Historian position, to reduce friction in governance by opening up information about the past and present of Governance, and reduce the amount of work each Nouner needs to put in to stay up to date on the DAO.

Why should I care?

Nouners are people too - they don’t like reading huge chunks of text. They like TL;DRs. And a lot of current information about the DAO, whether it be current proposals, other voters’ opinions, or the history of other proposals is incredibly hard to find, and that’s discouraging. In part because of this, participation even among the biggest delegates is fairly low -

Screen Shot 2022-08-22 at 4.24.40 PM
(Shout out to the Nouncil though)

Some of that can be fixed by software, but a large chunk of this information isn’t available on-chain (i.e. Why did Prop 122 fail? Why did 2 voters abstain? What can we learn from it? Would someone support it if the funding amount changed?) This makes planning for efficient proposal processes harder; for example, just imagine how many amazing proposals we’re missing because someone thinks they won’t have the votes?

As the DAO continues to scale, these issues will only get worse. So I’d like to propose myself as a Governance Aide and Historian.

What will I do?

Governance Aide

  • Conduct interviews with all current voters to create a public pamphlet about them - who are they? What do they love voting for? What are they against? Do they have any requests for proposals?
  • Be a go-to resource for reviewing proposals - based on the above, I will connect proposers with potential sponsors and supporters of their initiative
  • Create weekly write-ups on all ongoing proposals, easily digestible TL;DRs for all Nouners.
  • Be bi-partisan: I will not be explicitly for or against any proposals, but I will have the DAO and its participants’s best interests at heart.

Historian

  • Make sense of previous proposals - why did they pass or fail? What’s the context?
  • Assess ROI of passed proposals wherever possible
  • Conduct interviews about early history of the DAO
  • Keep record of current proposals’ details and intricacies

Who am I?

I’m Martin. I’ve contributed to the Nouns Builder, was a PM at Google & NBA Top Shot before that, and I’m hosting a 24-hour Nouns-themed Crusader Kings live stream this week. I’ve been diving deep into Nouns governance (and tweeting about it a lot), and have been passionate about this ecosystem for a while. I think I’m committed, collaborative, thoughtful, and most importantly, nounish.

Finances

I will create a Sablier to disperse the 20 ETH to myself over the course of 3 months. If we feel the experiment is working well, I will ask for an extension. If it isn’t, I’ll send the ETH back to the DAO.

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I think any experiment in this vein is of interest, so want to start by thanking you for making this proposal.

A couple of thoughts:

  • If you become successful in this role, there is a real centralization risk if information flows predominantly through yourself. How would you combat this risk?
  • I think you should start by doing the work you outline for some time, and then request retro funding for your time/work. If it’s a success, you’ll have a much better chance of getting upfront funding for later “seasons”.

Be bi-partisan: I will not be explicitly for or against any proposals, but I will have the DAO and its participants’s best interests at heart.

Also, this strikes me as somewhat naive. The dao consists of members with a pretty broad range of ideas of what is good for the dao in the long term. What happens when you find yourself agreeing more with some nouners than others?

hi martin, i like that you are taking the initiative here and we definitely do need help organizing and summarizing information. i think 20 ETH might be a little steep for this role (that’s my opinion, you might win prop house), but if you were to just start doing it and it was good and the dao valued your work we would retroactively reward it from NSFW and then figure out a way to scale it up going forward

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