Summary: based on our observations of treasury spends on gov2, we think it makes sense to move away from general spending tracks and create tracks for typical spending categories (such as Media, Events, Hackathons, UI, Infrastructure, Governance, Philanthropy, Business Development, R&D). The reasoning behind this is to allow users to delegate their votes to experts in each spending category. Therefore, creating spending tracks for various categories will harmonize on-chain vote delegations with expert vetting occurring on the “social layer.”
This is much like the formalisation of proposals into pre-agreed templates, a very sensible and common sense approach
It does however omit a few essential insights which should be weighed when considering such a change in strategy that will through basic incentive alignment issues end up working against the collective ability to make sense and to drive distributed intelligence.
- A focus on domains within arbitary categories.
- How do you define events?
- What is an event and what isn’t an event?
- This is even less obvious when we try to do the same for governance, or R&D, or BD… these are buckets for launching a startup, not for scaling a network.
- How do we judge ‘experts’ - is this just a case of people who have run a lot of events?
- The same for media - there has been a huge amount of spending on media as a category and the effectiveness of that huge spend is definitively in question.
By doubling down on ‘domains’ within the design of the system, we work against the ‘OpenGov’ ideals, which is really about dissolving boundaries between expertise and enabling more fluid knowledge sharing where we aim to build collectives who will certainly be better at the sort of lateral or connected thinking that doesn’t emerge from domain specific groups trusted as ‘experts’.
This is why we need to move towards directions over domains, funding collectives with a full-stack capability that can generate novel thinking, not more of the same.
- The experts are wrong
As the data around adoption proves, this ecosystem has precious few ‘experts’ whose opinion we should trust - there is no lack of hard work, passionate endeavour but much of what has been built and is being built has been strategically unsound and short term in its focus. This is a critique of ideas, not of people.
The contrarian view is given the work to date, elevating those who have failed to correctly assess the fundamental value drivers, incentives and have used large amounts of network resources to deliver poor ROI when it comes to network metrics - or bluntly even consider their relevance is a cause to not delegate to their ‘expertise’.
Suggestion
We don’t need new tracks, we need collectives who operate across all tracks and all domains.
The ‘experts’ in this case are the collectives, not the domain experts.
It is within these multidisciplinary groups - fluid, interconnected groups, sharing a common vision and direction that we will develop unique new expertise, and that is the sum of the whole.
Final point
In many ways this really focuses on two binary perspectives - a strategy based on activity or outcomes.
There is an experiment here - a bet on the old, ie the domain based approach and the new, a direction based approach.
In the end everyone is free to express, design and ‘sell in’ their strategy - it will be the outcomes that define objectively which approach is more valuable.
Much as in political systems, we will see two extreme perspectives emerge as the network culture evolves due to external stimulus in the form of on-chain feedback - it will inevitably be the centre ground that ultimately dictates where the majority of spend goes over time.
So in the end, your approach should be encouraged. I am obviously of the opinion that it will fail, but in the end, we need alternatives to show a different path is possible. I wish you the best of luck.