I’d like to share a brief section sharing my point of view on this topic from the document where I discuss the report and my experience raising a project with the support of OpenGov, as it directly relates to this issue.
OpenGov Vibes
Since the beginning of OpenGov and, especially since the appearance of new players in governance, specifically Giotto (among many others, but this has been the one that has had the greatest impact and accelerated the process in certain moments), indirectly (and directly), they have speed up the polarization of the ecosystem in social networks, which, although the original intentions are good, a conflictive environment to external eyes is not attractive to attract talent organically, that is, without having to resort to agencies in the middle. The same for maintaining talent, it is not pleasant to build openly in a conflictive and polarized environment.
If from the beginning the integrity of the agents with proposals already approved by the treasury is doubted without worrying about doing a minimum of follow-up or asking the author/person in charge, in the end no productive agent (!=political) will have interest in continuing an extended professional career in the ecosystem if they do not even know how to correctly value their work or its potential impact by the responsible entities (in this specific case and the current state of OpenGov, the DVs and major stakeholders participating in governance).
This is why all DVs and other agents of the ecosystem (politicians) active on social networks, if they are really agents and not internet trolls, should help and support the initiatives of the ecosystem, not continually hesitate with publications calling grifters to the whole world, when really hardly any “thieves” have been seen in the treasury, what has been seen are inefficiencies, incompetence and fictitious economies derived from the social bubbles that are formed in the web3 industry in general, which they do not reflect in any way a real and efficient economy in most cases (which is not something alarming, since from what I am seeing, possible cost overruns are normal in all cutting-edge industries and compared to the most other blockchain ecosystems, Polkadot is clearly the most transparent and the one that iterates the fastest on the results that are obtained).
Every new proposal to the treasury should be celebrated by stakeholders! Just as treasury applicants should be excited and grateful to participate in the ecosystem, not be worried and afraid that “agents” or trolls on Twitter/X or closed groups of “experts” will try to misjudge and put obstacles in the way and activity of the managed initiatives.
To help solve this, it is important that all of us and gov related initiatives such as the OG Tracker or Opengov.Watch help make the ecosystem and opengov an efficient place, but above all pleasant, attractive and easy to access for current and future productive agents of the web3 industry.
As for the “ecosystem political players” who like to be proactive in governance forums almost full-time, it’s great that they also help track proposals made to the OpenGov, of course, but not with the premise of carrying out “a witch hunt” to easy farm engagement on social networks, but with the premise of helping the proposals to communicate with the ecosystem, communicate possible complications, additional achievements… Improve communication between entities and monitor the different events, do not farm engagement. Twitter/X != Governance forum.
If the initiatives and “political agents” that monitor the proposals made to opengov and their impact are based only on identifying who is “good” or who is “bad”, then we would only continue promoting the polarization of the ecosystem, which will not go anywhere if it is continually encouraged. OpenGov must be a collaborative model. PVE. Not a Battle Royale.
Opengov != inefficiency
Another additional fact, when it comes to criticizing the performance of the proposals that have been approved in governance or are being approved, until now it is more than evident that the proposals executed during the management of the gov1 council are much less transparent and in more of a case pointed out as aberrantly more expensive and inefficient in terms of investment/impact. Therefore, try to encourage self-criticism and value how incredible the OpenGov model is and the opportunities it offers in the eyes of true productive agents of the industry who want to build openly, not in the eyes of “agents”/trolls of twitter.
– In any case, yes, it is also true that since the OpenGov fever began, the pace of spending has accelerated. But I have nothing to say about that because finance is not my field. In any case, there are several interesting topics in the forum on the subject right now analyzing the different budgets managed during the last semester by the Polkadot DAO.
OpenGov should only hope for more good agents opting for it with an idea to develop and a commitment to the ecosystem. What is not needed is more bureaucracy, nor another hundred directors/curators watching a dozen individuals work. We do not need everyone to have an opinion on all issues, nor for all initiatives to be directly related or conditioned to each other. An environment of collaboration and experimentation where different small projects are worked on that try to build a long-term future in the Polkadot ecosystem and Web3 industry in general.
From my point of view, the future Internet and Polkadot should not even need the role of politicians to approve and manage proposals, a large part of the process should be carried out semi-automatically with on-chain reputation systems, several different sources of data and AI tools that facilitate the decision-making in governance based on the data input provided by the entities that make the proposals and a series of dynamic guidelines that the community establishes based on the output of the joint results of all the initiatives (something like right now the “OpenGov strategy” on which the OpenGov.Watch initiative works, and also directly related to the mission of initiatives like the OG Tracker, by being the first of one of those possible sources of data, and by helping to define and simplify the guidelines and standards for improve the experience of the initiatives that apply to the Polkadot DAO support).
In short, there are many approaches that could be discussed to try to optimize the performance of the governance model and, above all, improve the experience of the entities that opt for it to finance their activity. We will see in the coming years how it evolves. In any case, I am convinced that the future of this lies in one or several on-chain reputation systems, specialized sub-treasuries, a more gamification and automation of a large part of management/monitoring tasks and optimistic financing models in a similar way to what was proposed recently in the Wish for Change track or the PoC raised a few years ago by Shokunin Network.