Hire Shashwat as the Head of Governance
Authors
DAO core contributors. A full list can be found here
Summary
As the DAO gains momentum and the community becomes more active, the DAO requires a consistent and well-run governance process in order to remain stable and secure as it grows.
The DAO needs someone to write governance reports, moderate and improve the governance forum, network with other DAOs, hold governance meetups and various other activities. These tasks are essential for developing and maintaining a healthy DAO and ensuring constant communication between the DAO and the community. The Core Contributors of the DAO have found a suitable candidate.
Abstract
As the DAO gains momentum and the community becomes more active, the DAO requires a consistent and well-run governance process in order to remain stable and secure as it grows.
The DAO needs someone to write governance reports, moderate and improve the governance forum, network with other DAOs, hold governance meetups and various other activities. These tasks are essential for developing and maintaining a healthy DAO and ensuring constant communication between the DAO and the community.
Introducing a new role
The DAO is proposing a new role, the Head of Governance, which is responsible for maintaining the health of the DAO, and ensuring and scaling governance. The primary duty of the HOG is to ensure the smooth and efficient running of the distributed and open source governance process at Merit Circle.
Responsibilities
- Analyzing the current governance structures and improving wherever necessary
- Moderating and improving the governance forum
- Documenting and educating others on how the governance process works
- Archiving all governance decisions to date for accurate, historic reference
- Connecting governance discussions from Discord, Telegram and the forum, making sure all input around a topic comes in the right thread on the forum
- Actively networking with other DAOs to learn and expand DAO structures in general
- Composing and publishing Merit Circle DAO governance reports
The responsibilities of the Head of Governance should evolve to adapt to the DAO’s needs over time. What is written here is simply what we see as the most useful set of responsibilities right now.
The candidate
After interviewing several candidates that applied for the role, we found Shashwat was the best fit and propose to hire him as the Head of Governance.
Why Shashwat?
- He’s shown exceptional leadership skills in his prior business ventures
- Highly coordinated
- Has incredible tenacity
- Very technically proficient
Most importantly, he’s extremely principled and, we truly believe, fiercely dedicated to the ideals that have attracted the community to this DAO.
Proposal
We propose to ratify:
- A new role, the Head of Governance, which is responsible for maintaining the health of the DAO, and ensuring and scaling governance.
- Shashwat as the Head of Governance
Motivation
As governance is built on ever-shifting sands, the community needs help maintaining high standards of discussion in order to make use of the funds and talent at the DAO’s disposal. This role will ensure that governance remains accessible to anyone who has a good idea and easy to participate in for anyone with a good opinion.
Please see the section above as to why Shashwat would be the suitable candidate for this role.
Budget
The Head of Governance will be directly employed by the DAO and compensated in part $MC tokens and part $USDC. This comes down to a monthly payment of;
- 300 $MC tokens
- 1500 $USDC
Rationale
Won’t this lead to centralization of power?
As the Head of Governance will be empowered by the community as a whole, the role cannot be seen to be partisan. The HOG is not empowered to make ‘governance’ decisions, cannot campaign for any specific governance issue, nor should they express opinions about the merits of one polling or voting option over another. They must remain neutral and objective and focus wholly on policy, procedure and facilitation.
Why fix something that isn’t broken?
A governance model that is capable of managing a rapidly developing ecosystem such as ours needs to be capable of acting just as quickly. The Head of Governance is tasked with nurturing the processes and procedures that will allow the community to rapidly develop in concert with the requirements of governance.
Governance is tricky and will continue to be so as the needs of the community grows and the requirements of the system become increasingly sophisticated. The HOG will be responsible for preparing the community to act quickly and effectively as we move along the long path to eventual decentralization.
Why is this role being compensated by the DAO treasury?
At present, all the DAO core contributors are paid out of the Merit Circle LTD treasury (our seed raise). People who will be paid out of the DAO treasury will be voted on. This is the first official DAO role. Technically, next year (or whenever the LTD runs out of funds) we will need a proposal to hire the core team out of the DAO and, after liquidating the LTD, truly function as a decentralized organization. Hopefully, by that time, we will have multiple independent teams active within the DAO.
Copyright
Copyright and related rights waived via Creative Commons CCO
