Hey @ThomasR , thanks for this thoughtful and elaborate post - You clearly care.
I’ll share my personal opinion on the marketing & strategy topics, and touch upon the decentralisation.
- We all agree that marketing - and the entire GTM functions - need a strategy.
- Coming up with and executing on a strategy in DAOs is difficult.
However, a strategy also entails saying no (otherwise you end up a) doing everything a little bit, which is no strategy, and b) no following through - a strategy needs time to be implemented, tested, and refined).
Marketing within Parity didn’t work too well either. When Parity’s marketing did more centralised decisions, the ecosystem felt left out and wanted to have a say at the table. When Parity included the ecosystem more, we saw two problems: Firstly, people who complained didn’t show up at the table to actually work on the topic of discussion, and secondly, decision making took forever and we didn’t get anything done. Parity is now engineering-first.
So rather than going back to a “semi-centralised” model based within Parity, we should continue working on creating this strategy within the DAO. It’s not even been a year since the decision, and for work (and strategies) to bear fruit, continuous iterations and improvements work better than big overhauls (at Polkadot, we like the latter though, which is a point I would bring up personally).
I agree that the move to decentralise the GTM functions came a bit quick and the ecosystem wasn’t prepared, but it was the step towards the (decentralised) future that we see for how Polkadot is run, and there are already teams and initiatives working on bringing a strategy into the DAO.
My suggestion would thus be to continue working and iterating on
- the many initiatives that tackle the strategy for the DAO (like like @alice_und_bob’s, @niklabh’s, or @tomi 's GPS - wrote about it in the “Governance” part of this blog from Decoded),
- those projects tackling more topic-based (e.g. marketing, BD) strategies, like Distractive, or the BD Teams
- the “middle management” layers that you have in classic organisations, which could be, in a way, represented by bounties.
By “working and iterating on”, it’s important to
- learn from other DAOs - it’s a new field but we are not the only ones asking ourselves the same questions. Arbitrum is a good ecosystem to look at, as they have a really powerful DAO with their “labs” (Offchain Labs, basically like Parity) and their foundation to be kept to the minimum. Also, SAFE is continuously publishing findings and approaches for DAO strategies, e.g. here,
- participate, as @replghost has written well in this recent forum post: If you see something, do something
- make data- or evidence-based decisions,
- disagree and commit - key for DAOs. We won’t find anything where everyone agrees to, but a strategy is about commitment.
I think we’re on a good path. There are a few gaps to fill, some structures to be implemented, many improvements to make, but I wouldn’t start from scratch and doubt whether or not we want to operate in a decentralised environment or not.