DISCLAIMER: My opinions are mine, and not of any of the projects I collaborate with.
I come here to disagree with the general approach of a centralised executive branch/person/entity, and highlight some of the points that have been mentioned here that are solutions to some of the problems that we are facing.
But let’s look ourselves into the mirror first.
We celebrated decentralization first - particularly when the treasury was in full swing -, to now ask for a “strong leader/leadership” now that we are facing the challenges of a decentralized approach. Strong leaders and/or leadership have a problem: they tend to stay in power. We have enough concentration of influence on the halls of power, to actually build more.
I think also Polkadot is viewed under a corporate approach as a mental model: being the corporation a centralized, closed, vertical and efficient structure. where power is executed top-down by decision makers. Corporate language, behavior and activities are used and performed. What we have here is an open-ended digital community (how big is the ecosystem? we don’t know, who is in? we don’t know), a fragmented cluster of companies which share a common technical infrastructure, some individuals that they hold some mandate from a DAO or a subDAO to perform some tasks, some support companies and individuals that deliver some services to the wider ecosystem (granted or after voting in one of the DAOs, which makes all more complicated), one big company that delivers code that supports and evolves the technical infrastructure and a foundation that gives support to the whole system.
This is a large sum of different objectives of different actors (business and personal), which differs the unique direction of corporate structure under the leadership of a person or a board - direction which cannot be questioned by the participants of the structure - because they don’t have the authority: in a vertical system, you are aligned or you are out.
As we are building something new, this needs new mental models.
Governing (or decision making) has two sides, the decision making and the enforcement of that decision. And here is where the problem resides, to have decision/policy enforced you need some kind authority over the affected. And here is when I find it problematic, as is contrary to the values of what we are doing here (permissionless/open, resilient, self-sovereign). We like to mention Web3, and we are craving for a central authority. We like to talk about consensus, but are looking for someone to make decisions for everybody. We are proud of our “nakamoto coefficient”, but asking for exactly the opposite.
We need to eat the food on our plate: What we need is alignment.
We need to reach a consensus on the bigger picture ( and assume than some parts they don’t agree and go by their own way, because the only enforcement Polkadot - today- can do, is deny $ proposals on openGov), and have the small parts to align and communicate between each other in their areas of interest/scope. GNU architecture at its best.
We have mentioned Talent Inflow.
Again, looking ourselves into the mirror: It is very very difficult to stay in the Polkadot ecosystem for solo coders, small teams and support functions. It is a hostile ecosystem. And, no, “joining the community” and pointing the people to the DAO, where you can see the spectacle of grown adults fighting over a pile of $, is not the best introduction for a digital community. We need to bring new faces to Polkadot, handhold and educate them.
We have overcome some barriers for builders ( financial - crowdloans - and accessibility - with a bit better documentation - thx Papermoon) but, in general, a lot of the openGov treasury proposals they are funding existing teams, or one-off multimillion this-is-going-to-save-polkadot activities that fund teams external to the ecosystem mainly (and they fail and don’t provide anything relevant ). There is little room for newcomers or new teams to establish themselves in the Polkadot Ecosystem.
What we need is to build the foundations to allow other newer teams in the core of the ecosystem, not ones that interact with us on the border ( for their profit ). I believe that there is room here to massively improve this aspect, in many ways, but I will mention the one that I see more evident.
Again, we mentioned Talent Inflow: we need a transversal DevRel team that connects existing documentation, educational programs, meetups and hackathons. This is a permanent team, should be geographically dislocated ( see Solana’s superteam here), and their function is to handhold, follow-up, give reference, sync and align with the other partners.
This is the team that picks up a promising team out of a hackathon or PBA, and follow-up and handholds them for 6 months, until they are ready to apply for JUST, easyA, W3F Grants…. This is the team who follow-ups in this pre-professional stage: Now after a hackathon or a meetup, there is only the cliff of the solitaire development. And a lot of financial resources and effort thrown by the sink. And this opinion comes from a person that was in the trench of 3 major hackathons last year.
But there is a problem, it is slow to build and you need the right people for that, and we have been used, in many ways, to try to solve problems with money, when not always is the right approach. Also, as it is a service, it doesn’t scale very well. Everything takes time, and the ecosystem should provide guarantees of financial security long term ( basically we need the Distractive of DevRel) to allow this team or teams to be built. And this should be their main task. Many agents in the ecosystem have their hands in too many pots (including their project/company and Polkadot).
Polkadot is a technology that can be very polifacetic, it can outreach business, community, academia and users.
We don’t need more people on the top, we need more people in the trench.
