Simona Pop I Lessons Learned on DAO Governance | Pragma Lisbon 2023

foreign [Music] next up I want to invite Simona to talk about how we can learn and do better governance as dowels become more and more prevalent uh she's been part of something so so many dials over the last few years that we've kind of come up with and we kind of know of and the goal is to kind of have an interesting chat about some of the Lessons Learned some of the things that we think we can apply in the future and some things that we know that didn't work and and why so without further zoo let's welcome Simona on stage hello hello good morning good morning until technically morning yes this morning somewhere that's fair yeah well we've known each other for quite some time but this is our first time officially talking on an estate setting where people can also listen to our conversation at least willingly okay so I'm excited to talk to you about a lot of things but uh something interesting happened this morning and and if you follow someone on Twitter you may already know but for those of you who don't um I'd love for you to tell us what did you announce today and the decision that led you to uh to announce this so um again it's it's something that I've kind of been mulling over uh for a while and finally made the decision to um I guess formally announce it is stepping back as a steward and the member of the Stuart Council in git coin um it's kind of been a slow uh process of coming out of um that Dao when it wasn't it definitely wasn't a decision that I took lightly um and I described the reasons in that tweet but in a nutshell it's just been the past few months have just been a real departure from the original ethos and kind of value set of the original Founders I've been somewhat in the git coin sphere since 2018 when they built their bounties offering on the standard bounties protocol that I co-founded and so we kind of were adjacent in some way throughout these past few years and then I got a little bit more involved helping out with governance modeling and strategy in 2021 2022 but since last year just slowly slowly kind of getting less and less involved and I think yeah the decision today is just a clear kind of marker of that process hopefully it's a good thing for for you and uh I know you've been thinking about that for for some time now um could you also go over a little bit more about what you did at get window and sort of what your role was and sort of what sort of changed over time that led you to this announcement yeah so I think one of the main things with with Dows as we know um we we definitely want them to work but we need to put in the work to make them work so one of the things that I did with Git coin was really mapping out and working on the governance flows and the governance process to actually make it a um a smooth and effective and genuinely uh value-add um I guess Dynamic and so when I came in I I restructured and I guess redesigned a lot of the flows um that were in place or rather put in flows that weren't in place to ensure that the resource and the value did indeed flow where he needed to and it was done in a transparent coherent way in a uh you know in a way that allowed the most participation the most engagement and the most I guess positive outcomes for deploying resources and value so I did a lot of that in 2021 2022 I also let up um shelling point which I know a lot of you have attended the shelling points throughout 2022 and this final one in Denver um in 2023 in February which was my last one as a curator and Steward of that particular event so it was a lot of I guess multi-layered contribution and it was you know hopefully all in the service of public goods but you know the trajectory kind of changed at some point and we'll dig into that in a few minutes um yes well part of the reason why I'm excited to have this chat with you is not because just your involved in Bitcoin but there's so many other Taos and organizations you've been part of in kind of shaping what this ecosystem is now that I know all that stuff is in your head but I don't think we've successfully gone that out in the past so we're gonna try that today but um what other dials were you part of and sort of how did you get involved with them and and kind of would love to kind of have you touch on a little bit of what you did for each of those other Nows as well so I guess primarily um I mean it's it's one of the um byproducts of being in this ecosystem for um you know the past five six years is I was part of that I guess big Dao boom that mainly happened in 2020 when we were all stuck indoors and going hey we should like do a bunch of dials and become it became easier and easier to launch a lot of Dao so I think in 2020 um at some point I was part of I don't know 15 or something it was wild because it was just happening and you want hopefully to try things out and to participate and you to try to see what your participation can bring to a new structure to a new way of doing things so that was kind of the boom of the 2020 maybe early 2021 but a lot of enthusiasm happens at the beginning and then as we know enthusiasm kind of Peters out and then you're like what should we do now so you're part of I guess optimism and elements but what are some of the other ones oh no so that was like the the the time of 2020 2021 when there was a lot of starters but not a lot of like you know continuing the process of genuinely setting up dowels that actually function and so what we're seeing now and these are the dials that I'm also part of ens optimism element are those Dao's where we are trying to figure out what these flows and these structures are that evolve us from that yay let's start to uh let's continue and improve and involve so what I'm doing in these others doubts is lending my perspective and my energy and my efforts towards the evolution of let's actually build things that work I mean 15 at any point was a lot I mean having one extra thing outside of your full-time job is is usually something that takes up most people's time doing that it must have been quite interesting um why why are you excited about that I was like what do they mean to you and and what made you actually say yes even though I feel like you but at that time you didn't know what you were getting into but uh what excites you about the house look I think the promise of Dao's is still there um the problem is what we have right now and certainly what's happening in my soul is a balance between the excitement and the sheer weight of the dread of watching them not work and so my excitement for the space and for these structures particularly in the past few days where we've seen so many ridiculous announcements and backtracks and real foibles in what we're trying to do and what is actually occurring is they truly have that promise of diversifying what value means we're so used to in this world the way it is to just equate everything to money cash money and everything is about extraction and we've been bastardized into this way of thinking for the past God knows how many generations the idea with Dallas is that and the reason why I'm saying diversifying value is because it starts becoming also about the value that is community the value that is your individual contribution thank you that definitely deserves um the the value that is your individual contribution and how it interacts with the other individual contributions at a re-local regional World level but also across different verticals that isn't dictated by will it make money will it make profit it becomes something where value is multifaceted because it really is and it allows us to kind of get back to that now as I always say and as we're seeing it's damn hard building a new boat when you're firmly in the current boat and have to play by the current boat's rules so we're over here trying to like you know hammer and nail in this and voila while you know the boat we're on is doing all of this I mean it's an experience so it's also very exhausting which is why I'm saying the excitement comes with some seasickness uh attached but that is what is exciting about them that is what the promise is and that is why it's important to not let them repeat the same crap that we've already done just in a different environment it's like I want to build a new house but I'm gonna literally build the same house just next door I mean why do that why limit why do we limit ourselves Karthik I don't know we'll talk about that uh all right I do have I do have a question on this but I I agree I mean I think when most people think Dallas they think some defy uh protocol has come with the Tao and they're going to use that to incentivize growth of their protocol nothing wrong with that but it's just more than just Financial uh nature um out of curiosity what kind of interesting things you've seen Dao's do that has nothing to do with money or like purely like Finance related but there's so many things right like if we look at uh the recent recent optimism um retroactive funding uh retroactive Brands uh kernel which is a program started by uh one of the old co-founders of Bitcoin in fact which is an educational container that exists to initiate people into this ecosystem and I think it it got a lot of like like doing courses in educational yeah yes and also you know like putting people together and a lot of uh projects came out of that where co-founders met and then they started building and then they got introduced to VC it's a really really valuable and dare I say public good Ford onboarding into this ecosystem um and it got a really good allocation of funds in the optimism round and I was really really happy to see that because it is something that you know we don't want to lose uh East Global is a result of you know this type of a lot of Grants right a lot of Grants so it's incredibly important to you know what they can mobilize scholarships to attend events why you know headed up the scholarship program for East Denver um 2020 we get students from all over the world coming in because they can't afford traveling because these other dials give them scholarships to have them build cool things exactly very important a recent one in the NS small grants uh around was East Brazil were building a digital membership card to essentially solve for the problem that at their last hackathon some people snuck in and stole 30 laptops you know and they got funding to build that wonderful yes that that those types of faiths and they're important things solving communities problems and generally different things that people care about in different parts of the world and you now have a mechanism to help them effectively coordinate correct an outcome very very abstract but we'll take deep into it um coming back to your house analogy that's an interesting one uh I do agree it's a little bit true which is we kind of see that uh something kind of says that we're going to launch it down usually they follow the recipe of the last successful doubt that they can think of which has done the same thing for kind of one before and the recipe is something like we're going to launch a Dell let's kind of set up a page to set up a delegate process and then uh Simona's name is usually on the top of that list because now you see a lot of people um who want to kind of be part of the delegate programs and then they're going to Define these are our values these are our mission statements and so we want to kind of get to all these tools and people sort of delegate their tokens to to some of those people and is that where you lose track well that's usually what gets more traction and then unless you're directly following I feel like you have no idea what's going on yeah um is that a fair statement like what's it is a fair statement and I I think as I said we're definitely improving because I want to make sure that you know I I this is a commitment to myself to not just highlight the problems but also look at where the improvements are being made and recognizing those and celebrating those improvements I think the dedication to once this top layer of soil is there to actually look at what processes need to follow this starter kit right that again to your point everybody uses everybody sets up a notion sets up a Discord does the delicate thing does all of this a lot Twitter announcement thousand likes retweets whatever the idea is that and the work is in creating and mapping out the flow of decision making and resourcing as I say resource isn't necessarily just cash money but mapping those out before we rush to go from the starter kit to just getting some tooling and then that's it we're done so everybody right now is or not everybody there is the pattern that we are breaking that goes starter and then we just put a bunch of tooling and that's it we're done so maybe maybe for my own benefit too yes what what does it mean when you say people just go to tooling like what are they doing what's wrong or what's not right about it and of course when I say tooling is usually there's going to be a voting situation there's going to be a snapshot and Italy put in there's going to be some sort of payment mechanism there's going to be an app that then enables the payment of contributors that then enables the payment of work streams and so on and so forth and but the point is before you get to that you must know where and what at what stage they come in and also who is involved in the decision making process that leads up to a payment that leads up to a vote that actually ensures that the information contained in a proposal is digestible to a level where people do not just rubber stamp votes that they actually process the information in a way that isn't going to take 10 years to do and also be able to make an informed decision and also be able to make a create an opinion for themselves that is based on context that is based on facts and what is presented to them and also be able to compare okay is this funding is this uh whatever the proposal is does it make sense and is it in line with what this Dao is working towards is it in line with the principles of this particular Dao is it in line with my personal beliefs of what the style should be because that is true decision making right now what we what tends to happen is we fall from the transparency and the clarity because at the end of the day transparency is just Clarity it's having a clear picture of something a clear view don't stop me because I'm enrolled um yeah damn it so um a clear picture of what that flow is and what tends to happen when you lose the clarity is you have Shadow what happens in the shadow dodgy we're all unsure or at least a portion of us I hope working on our shadow selves maybe the whole point is avoid that before it comes so solidified or if we fall back into the shadow where crap happens that shouldn't be happening I didn't say anything I mean you didn't because I was saying everything and it was really good anyway I caught it back I agree uh I think as you were just saying this thing one thing just clicked to me was seems like a common thing that people are conflating is that they think transparency is on what the final decision is but not the actual decision-making process because everything we do is on chain I can see who voted for what and who didn't or what their motivations were all the arguments or productive conversations on these forums it's still public but not always around what led to that decision and is that kind of what you meant to sort of say that this is the biggest piece that the tooling doesn't sort of solve yeah because so and I'm gonna quote unquote drop some truth but everybody knows this is that a lot of the decisions made in Dao's are literally done within minutes of vote closing people usually look at what other people they know voted on people usually look at like is this does this look like more of a yes more of a no it's always like this is the other thing it's always binary yes or no what it where's the Nuance where is the oh maybe but like this or maybe but like that and so what I'm trying to say is a clear process and by process I mean Ace almost like a certain standard of what ingredients go into the decision making flow that would stop us or rather curtail this tendency of not digesting anything and just mechanically voting on things at the last minute and chances are you probably don't even know what you voted on also it leads to situations where certain people end up influencing correct that is also an issue because what we're seeing and certainly in a lot of dows what you're saying is literally the top delegators can sway a vote and we've seen this happening I won't name names and all of that because you know but we've seen this in the history of daos where votes were put up for two days over a weekend nobody paid attention and a vote passed because the major delegators like voted on it and it technically matches the process right technically it hit Quorum but how many of those people would or how many people in that Community would have wanted an opinion the ability to vote but again nobody knew the vote was happening or they didn't pay attention that the vote was happening and it just happened yeah in I think the interesting is that people like not be just like even myself included it's it's kind of you can sort of see what this looks like because it's not really a company it's not really it's a new way of thinking about organizing and coordination especially with just anybody can be part of it and at scale um but as we are part of this Century or wherever we live we know that there's a clear hierarchy that companies have there's somebody usually in charge that influences the decisions and this is like an entirely inverted model and you it's natural for you to think about oh I'm just going to trust the person at the top to do this but that doesn't always lead to the right outcomes and it doesn't tonight from discussing symptoms of that too we do and I think really the differentiation um comes from and it's it's slight but I feel it's very powerful we don't work for Dows we don't work for other people we work with other people in Adele and that small yet incredibly important distinction allows for responsibility and accountability of your own actions and your own contributions and the value that you bring to actually be a moving piece of that puzzle when we work for as we do in traditional corporations and again for Generations we've been used to this kind of stupid Dynamic you can hide in the system and also for people who know how to play the system because they've been doing it for God knows how long again you end up in these dodgy power imbalances that just get us right back where we started the idea is working towards working with working together that is the type of pattern and the type of mindset that we need to have when we approach these new systems and dare I say still there's a lot a lot a lot of dows that are just corporations and the same goddamn model that have a facade of a Dao it's almost like you know those like dodgy kind of stands and there's like the sink peeling off and it's like doubt but it's like ink underneath it kind of feels like that and that essentially drives a lot of these faux pads a lot of these things that are happening and we've seen so many even this week or in the past two weeks happen time and time again and until we number one change the intention and number two change that process we're gonna still fall into the same pattern same old same old same old same old again optimistically I think we can do that because I you know and and this is not uh you can do it come on yeah this is a team that requires time and self-reflection which is what we're doing here on stage we're talking about this and recommending what things we know don't work it doesn't mean we know what the right answers are but we know what the wrong answers were for sure I think even us having this conversation is genuinely you know a step towards that so hopefully yeah and uh for the next 15 days you join you get to recommend some better practices that help you stay on on the mission of and make sure that you get to I guess manage when you are off track and in in the value generation or creation piece um what we talked about a lot of problems or rather learnings if somebody were to think about starting fresh what's a good recipe for a successfully managed now in 2023 so again coming back to and a lot of views or some may know this but one of the things that I've been looking at lately again in this kind of attempt to get back to a certain sense of flow and a certain sense of logic when it comes to the processes that need to to exist in a Dao because a Dao is a complex flow Network right there's funding there's decision making there's resource all of that where you also find this is in nature and one of the talks that I've and and what I've been exploring is a lot of biomimicry stuff right like how are complex flow networks in nature mapped out and how do they exist and how do they survive and how they have been surviving for a few billion years which kind of is a good track record particularly when you talk R D um and one of the things that comes up time and time again in the way these ecosystem ecosystems exist naturally is this Clarity of flow and the different nodes that flow touches and the fact that some nodes have weaker connections with each other and others have stronger connections with each other I think right now we're in this place and I will get back to the Practical thing just tiny parenthesis um what we tend to do is it's either too many things and we make decisions on everything or there's too few there's none of that bit in the middle which is where the juicy good functioning stuff is and so what I am suggesting and what I propose and some people don't necessarily like this but I believe that a stand a level of standardization in the Baseline of that flow is necessary the reason I say this all of us here are very different what do we have in common our vein system if it doesn't irrigate the certain organs with blood the organism doesn't function and what we're trying to do normally is add a whole bunch of stuff like a hat and a backpack you know whatever but not pay attention to the flow of the stuff that make keeps the thing alive and so this level of standardization is very very clear proposal format because what we're seeing right now is I have a proposal that's an emoji and one that has a hundred Pages there's so such late X excess of differentiation between these things that make the effort of digesting the effort of understanding what a proposal is what the decision is incredibly laborious which is why most people don't do it so what I'm proposing is this patterning where there is a very clear format for a proposal that does contain certain key ingredients that you just present don't hide it in page 25 maybe have it in a tldr at the beginning so I know what I'm about to digest criteria for the proposals being put forward what are the values of the Dao what is the purpose of the Dow that I'm proposing my thing to is it even in lie if I'm in a proposal educational thing to a doubt that wants to I don't know the organized Porsche trips maybe that's not the best fit but there should be that Criterion that immediately curates the proposals that come in because of alignment I'm not saying gatekeep I'm not saying anything like that I'm seeing curation in the process of helping if anything you're telling the Dow that this is what we don't value so let's not let's eliminate those cases but you can have flexibility in hey maybe this is creative and we'll learn new things absolutely so again none of this is meant to act as a gatekeeping mechanism or uh anything like that it is genuinely what is the most natural flow for something to go through that is relevant for this particular dial then the decision making process who decides and all what do we decide do we decide on every single thing that we're gonna do we're gonna switch from I don't know discourse to something else do we need a vote on that I don't you know that's too much diversity of decision making what we want is the sweet spot in the middle because then you don't have fatigue from voting on 10 000 meaningless things you can focus more energy and attention on the things that do matter the other thing is some sort of cadence we are creatures of habit you humans like habits when you do not and again what I'm trying to introduce here is are habits that help you focus more energy and attention to the things that generally needed imagine waking up every morning and having to tie your shoelaces it would be incredibly laborious and very annoying you'd be like learning learning to tie your shoelaces it's like why do we need to do that every single time we get into a new dog or like okay well what how do they map this how does this work what is this how do so it's this is interesting because I just realized that um this is basically how college applications work like everybody had a different process and then then all these things came in and they created this common form that just standardized all the things that everybody should care about uh and once you fill that form you are ready to send it to any college but not everybody has to look at all the answers or the same ones but they just kind of combine everything to understand and it is a standard in a way you're proposing that at least helps us figure out what to kind of quickly sift through it may not be everything that everybody cares about but and honestly I feel that will enable the interoperability of talent far more and end of personal resource and personal value if you can just go cross down without this huge learning curve that you get to filter for what you care about exactly exactly and I think that is and and again it takes work because we don't know how to do that because we're in this other boat where we do things really weird and whatever but if we can stick to that and keep working at that I think it will get us into a better place and like I say we've seen the evolution from the boom of the Taos in 2020 to where we are now right where there is concerted effort in figuring out how these things work and I see improvements like it's not just we're repeating everything correct and it's like you know one step forward two steps back okay it's how learning happens and it's not going to be overnight because none of this is going to be overnight but that's I feel is a helpful step towards a successful downwind 2023 2024 ball so Dows are not doomed no no even though you might think that but they're not I don't think they are any closing thoughts on how we can make this better for people who are thinking about not just starting Dallas but also joining them because it is effectively each of us that care about different causes and we want to be part of a community that also shares those same values I value here is I would say the big one and value alignment and making sure that whatever you start you join is genuinely aligned with your values and if you see things that aren't in line with those values and if you see things falling into the old patterns I would genuinely urge you to find the other people who also feel like you and figure out how can you you can improve versus I guess keeping with the status quo and just you know it's one of the main reasons why I'm stepping away from Bitcoin because I tried I genuinely tried but at the same time I'm like my energy is better spent elsewhere and I think by helping other dolls or by sharing the experiences that I've had hopefully it does make people feel a lot more empowered and a lot more responsible and a lot more accountable for like hell actually no I don't agree with this or I think this could be better or this could possibly help us get from point A to 8.1 whatever it is it's small incremental steps but I think that the intention of genuinely wanting to change this stuff not because you want money and clout and all of this garbage that legitimately I mean the world as it is I mean okay it's cool and it's fun and we go to parties but honestly like we need to elevate the what the things that we're thinking about if the number of Twitter followers and like all of this crap or if you're first in the governance table or God knows what else it's like your motivation for being in Dallas like it's not not good enough it's not a pure intention it's it's a cliche for me to say this but unlike large organizations you actually have the ability to make that change and still affect a same equal size group of peers or constituents and that's just not a thing that we are commonly aware of in anywhere else except web3 and if you are not happy about something you do get to actually drive for a change you may not be 100 successful but oftentimes change happens it does happen and I think you know one coming back to that boat analogy because we're like you know by the Sea so it makes sense um it's very hard to genuinely switch from an extractive mindset and again I say we've been bastardized into this way of thinking for a very very long time our first instinct is to extract and this is fertile fertile new ground for all of that behavior but the key is unlearning all of that stuff unlearning the patterns that you would have followed in a corporation because again you don't work for you work with there is you are not subservient you represent yourself you represent yourself and the things that you bring are the things that you bring and you have value and you bring value and together with the other people in these new constructs have genuine a genuine shot at making this stuff work but it does say commitment and it does it is soul destroying sometimes and it is exhausting because we are unlearning behaviors the same way as I'm saying let's set up new patterns let's set up new behaviors unlearning something is talking hard and another thing that we all need to get very comfortable with is change any notion of change involves loss this is why people hate it this is why people hate change it's not that they hate the new thing is that they hate losing the old thing like even if it's decrepit and gross and you need to throw like some slippers you need to throw them out because they're like Cesspool of like bacteria but you're like but they're so comforting and like I've had them for a while that's what people fear it's not change it's the sense of loss and depending on who you are and what your relationship with loss is and this is where we are all individuals because we have different relationships with laws it's going to be harder or easier and that's a truth that's uh Sage meta observations about how diverting works and I think a a nice point for us to uh to close us off today so thank you so much for this basic chat and hopefully we get to McDowell's better this year thanks everyone