Would be awesome to hear more about this, thank you for engaging – the a16z Companies article is super relevant, esp with the JAM/CoreVM/CorePlay product roadmap basically replacing the parachain roadmap. Most of us have have developed pet theories about foundations vs companies (across the top 25) generally and different degrees of understanding for Polkadot’s primary company (Parity) and foundation (W3F) specifically as total outsiders to both. Based on my observation, the leadership would probably just as soon tell me its none of my business and suck a lemon but if you hold more DOT than the same people who work at these places – maybe not! Why can you vote on my OpenGov life when I cannot vote on your Parity life sir?
OpenGov has zero transparency/control into Parity/W3F and its leadership+management, to the point where anyone who just looks at the entire system of how DOT inflation funds not only OpenGov spend but ALSO Parity+W3F has to simply laugh! If xyz decisions are made in a low-transparency company (Parity), its non-profit (W3F) and a Fellowship, and the remaining abc decisions are in a very high transparent way, it leads to a lot of distrust of the people in charge .. especially if they create illusions that the community is in charge when they are most certainly not!
Its a law of nature that humans are REALLY good hypocrisy detectors, and really bad at detecting their own hypocrisy (or really good at ignoring it), and then really focussed at fighting off any and all criticism of hypocrisy. It doesn’t matter how smart or experienced you are – you could be the POTUS, the worlds best Web3 architect, a Parity employee, an OpenGov proponent – the law of nature applies to all.
Why would you think “First thing I want to fix are incentives in open gov.” and not “First thing I want to fix are the incentives of Parity” or “First thing I want to fix are the incentives of myself, my boss and my staff”? You could apply your KPI-driven thoughts of measuring { users, tvl, active addresses} to the Polkadot app announced to be released in Q3 2024 as a totally central test case, or to the Asset Hub + revive execution – both of which need serious metric driven management. This could illustrate the above law of nature extremely quickly but it doesn’t matter – if Parity CEO announced this or that as the plan for Polkadot salvation, his job and yours and the people leading it (and the rewards for executing well, not this) should be on the line just as much as the OpenGov firing squad. Anyone serious about WINNING with a Company-first approach would make sure there is no Ivory Tower for anyone across the whole system including you and your team. Would you agree with this? If not, why not?
As we get older and aware of their own limited time left to make an impact, people recognize the scarcest resource of all is not $$$ but peoples TIME. To make sure people don’t waste their TIME doing the wrong things almost always involves FOLLOW-THROUGH and COORDINATION. Any company that procures anything has a a set of people who make sure that this happens to the enterprises benefit. There is almost no concept of an “account manager” for Polkadot’s customers (parachains => coretime buyers), its suppliers (from OpenGov or elsewhere) and how these even connect – engineers are left doing account management and supplier management pretty much as a random side job. In my experience, when you have people working so close to customers and suppliers, margins go to zero, and when you have people not even working with customers or suppliers at all, sales go to zero. As a result, what I’m unhappy with is how little FOLLOW-THROUGH and COORDINATION was done. Because I know how little this was done for the things I was involved in, I have a very educated guess on the remaining. Meanwhile, all people can point out is “ROI on what was spent”. Its really much much more basic.
The Retuning of the DV programs addresses none of this - did anyone here ever even run a company to get sales and margin. Having a bunch of DAOs voting AYE/NAY is simply inadequate. The present system requires honest people delivering honest work and doing the coordination themselves (poorly, since they are not managed), playing a political game to attack the remaining players as a form of audit in the hopes of renewing their own position. People seem to think its just about money, or KPIs, or some whales, but its even more basic – its people giving a shit about following through.
Things are not being retuned enough when you have this
or that
where you can’t just blame some whale on it – these are things DVs voted for in the last few months.
Even more basic is that many (most?) DVs are mostly basically entities seeking to renew their own position, because of job security. If you want to remove the toxicity, you have to “retune” this. Enormous incentives exist for these entities to put out programmed responses to look like they are the good guys to ensure they maintain their job security.
And not even an OpenGov support to fix it can get FOLLOW-THROUGH and COORDINATION either! It would not take that much imagination to see how this really good idea could be used to solve problems, but it requires a reset rather than a retune.
I am wondering if you have asked your boss this question =) – is that guy part of the problem or part of the solution? I am not as proud of the “There is no Polkadot CEO” story – I prefer to see people executing against a roadmap. The things off the roadmap have to be cut out and the things on the roadmap have to be amplified and coordinated far better so that everyone’s time is spent better. Happy to give the required lip service to KPI with the 101 in place.
Thank you for the “Maybe”, so happy you are in the “we need a plan that starts now” and the push for 10x=>100x even! The new needs new friends =)
How do you want to coordinate a plan on this front? Here there is basically a few insanely great guys and a very nice clean slate – we’re now appear to be off topic, except for the fact that I think its central to the product-centric roadmap and the 10x => 100x roadmap.