Making Decisions in a DAO: Gitcoin Lessons Learned with Annika Lewis

Well, hello everyone. My name is Anakah and I am excited to be here on the DAO and community stage this afternoon to talk about making decisions in a DAO. Uh, I have been with the project Gitcoin for about a year and a half now. Uh, previously served as a workstream lead. I'm now working as a steward with the project.

And so, this kind of comes from the lens of both a full-time contributor and then also an external steward to the project. I was telling my mom about this talk the other day and she asked me to describe it to her. So, I walked her through what I was going to talk about and at the end she played it back to me and she said, "Okay, so it's kind of like making decisions when nobody's in charge." And I was like, "Yeah, thanks, Mom." So, alternate title, making decisions when nobody's in charge.

Here we go. So, everybody who's anywhere around Dows or crypto Twitter knows that Dowo governance and decision-making has become an absolute meme. There is meme after meme. Shout out Eli after meme after meme after meme about Dow governance, how much of a mess it is, and how hard it is to make decisions. Also, I think like 90% of these memes are Kevin Owakis.

So, shout out to Kevin Owak for his great meme game on Dowo governance. Um, so we all know it's really hard. It's a challenging topic. And so, we're going to talk today about Dowo governance specifically in a Gitcoin context. So, there's three parts to this talk.

First, I'll tell you a little bit about Gitcoin, uh, just for anyone who's unfamiliar with Gitcoin. Then, I'll talk about how Gitcoin is governed. So, what the government system is like, how they they make decisions in theory, and then I'll talk about three lessons learned using practical examples from the Gitcoin Dow in the past year. So, Gitcoin, if you are unfamiliar with Gitcoin, uh, is the preeminent funer of public goods within the Ethereum ecosystem. Gitcoin and all of its programs, including the grants program, have distributed over $50 million to early stage projects in the Ethereum ecosystem and beyond.

In addition to the Gitcoin grants program, Gitcoin is the creator of the Aloe protocol and the newly launched Grant Stack, which was just launched yesterday here at ETH Denver. So, if you're a builder building a community, building a grants program, and you want some software to help you do that, definitely check out Gitcoin's grant stack and the Aloe protocol. Uh the Alec protocol is here to help you fund what matters. So if you're trying to fund early stage projects, Gitcoin is the place to be. And finally, if you're interested in learning more about the history of Gitcoin and the Dow and how all of it came together, I definitely recommend you check out Kevin Owak's governance post that runs through a whole brief history of Gitcoin over the last 5 years and how the Dow came to be to be where it is today.

When I talk to people about Gitcoin and people are in the ecosystem generally, they often say like, "Wow, Gitcoin is so at the forefront in terms of Dows and there's so much scale there as well as decision-m process." Um, and so Gitcoin along with ENS optimism, many of our other friends definitely is pretty far along in terms of Dowo governance and decision-m. But how I see it is we are just at like the earliest of early days. So even though Gitcoin has a number of processes, there is still so much for Gitcoin to learn along with all of the other Dows that are leading at the forefront. So we are just really in day one of this space and this is just the very early days of Dowo decision-making.

Now I'll talk for just a few minutes on how Gitcoin is governed. I always wish that there were more talks like this from other projects just so that we could see a flyby of how decisions are made. And so I'll just spend a few minutes talking about how Gitcoin's governance system works, who the important parties are, and how decisions are made at the DAO before diving into some tactical examples. So in a nutshell, Gitcoin has sort of two pillars to its governance. There's the external side of things and then the internal side of things.

And so on the external side of things, Gitcoin has a governance token called GDC, which is a one token, one vote governance decision-making system. And so all of the GTC holders have a say in decisions that are made at the DAO and can vote. So anyone who has GTC in their wallet or has GTC delegated to them can actually make decisions into how the DAO is is being run. A subset of GTC holders have signed on to be stewards for the DAO. So that's folks that have raised their hand and said, "Hey, I actually really want to commit some time to this project.

I want to be involved in a more dedicated capacity and really engage with governance and decision-making uh beyond just being a token holder. So the stewards have a monthly call, they're more active, they spend a lot of time with the project and help provide kind of counsel and oversight. And then even beyond the stewards, a subset of that group is what's called the steward council. So that's a group of 10 to 15 people who are elected by the DAO every six months and who end up acting almost like a board of directors but the very very loose analogy um in terms of providing more dedicated hands-on strategic oversight. So the stewards council has calls every couple weeks uh they spend a lot of time with the leaders in the DAO helping with with governance and decision-m and that's kind of like the most dedicated external body to the DAO.

Moving on to the internal side of things. So, Gitcoin is currently structured in a workstream structure. So, Gitcoin has I think it's currently five work streams uh public goods funding, marketing, fraud, etc. And each of those work streams is a standalone unit within the DAO. So, those work streams every quarter request their budget and then are able to operate on their own.

And each of those work streams has one or two workstream leads who serve as sort of the the main public-f facing leaders of those work streams who end up, you know, delivering the budget requests. uh and basically who represent the workstream to both the DAO and the broader community and then that group of internal folks who are the workstream leads forms a forum called CSDO which stands for crossstream DAO operations and you can kind of think of that very loosely as the executive team of the DAO. So CSDO is where some of the smaller decisions get made that don't necessarily go to the external stewards. Um, and CSTO really kind of drives the DAO week over week and make sure that work gets done collectively across work streams. So that's the brief overview into kind of Gitcoin's governance structure and how it how it is is is structured today.

You can definitely go to the forums and check out more, but that should give you enough context for the rest of the talk. And now we'll move on to a few lessons that I've learned that we've learned. Those of us who've been around Gitcoin for the past year have really experienced hands-on and that I will be taking with me uh into future future Dows and future governance models that I think are really important when we think about decentralized governance and where all of this is going. So the first and foremost lesson that I have learned time and time again is to be really explicit on governance surface area. So what I mean by that is being very very clear about what is governed by a specific process versus what decisions are made through other mechanisms.

And I have one very memorable example of this from this past year where this is an example because I didn't have a good Gitcoin screenshot but you know how on like many websites there will be a sort by feature so you can sort by recommend it sort by price what have you? At Gitcoin, we had a sort by within our grants program that would show you how all of the grants are are ranked and you could see all of the grants in order from the grants program. And this is the user interface. So, basically what happened was we made a small product change that actually slightly tweaked how the grants were showing up on the UI. And one of the very engaged community stewards noticed this and posted on Twitter about the fact that this change had been made.

The product team mentioned that yes, the change had been made and the steward asked, wait, why didn't this go through governance? Shouldn't this have been part of the process where the community makes a decision and it sparked this really interesting debate around what is the governance surface area? What types of small decisions, you know, should be going through governance, which ones shouldn't. Um, and so this to me was a really good learning of how if you aren't totally clear upfront on what the exact surface area is, there can be some tension and lack of clarity on how decisions are made. Of course, it doesn't make sense for everything to go through a long governance process.

And to me, this was just a really interesting illustration of somewhere that we were able to clarify this and make a change in terms of governance and how it's done. To that end, uh this moves quite nicely into the next lesson that I have learned, which is don't let over governance bite you in the ass. And uh this is a a overview of the Gitcoin governance process. Shout out Kyle in the back who who wrote this. Um and I'll use the previous example from that small product change to illustrate how overgovernance might be a challenge in a DAO.

And so in the Gitcoin governance process with the GTC token voting, the proposals need to be on the governance forum for at least 5 days and then on snapshot for a vote also for 5 days. And so if you've got your 5 days on the governance forum and then your 5 days on snapshot, then you're looking at a 10day decision-making cycle in addition to all the time that say these engineers had spent working on that product feature. And so this process is great for big meaty decisions where there needs to be a lot of debate, dialogue, and discussion, but maybe doesn't make sense for smaller decisions where it could be a form of overgovernance. And Chase Chapman, who is the absolute queen of Dows, who I respect very much, had an awesome tweet about this around how we talk about centralization risk, but not about decentralization risk. And when we're making small decisions with way too many people and we're inflexible to respond in a changing environment and especially when you're building software that can really unnecessarily stifle innovation.

And so all of this goes back to the point around governance surface area clarifying that and being really clear about where you delegate decision-m to expert teams versus where you have actually a full-on community process. And the third and final lesson that I'll share for today and this is kind of a feel-good one is iterate, iterate, iterate. So we have learned so much uh from a governance standpoint by testing, changing, testing, changing. And I think that is what we all in web 3 need to be doing as we explore these early days, years uh of of governance. And so I'll share a few successes that I've seen at Gitcoin in terms of how Gitcoin has iterated on governance in the past couple years.

The first is the evolution of stewards governance. So I mentioned earlier the community stewards similar to delegates and other Dows and their role and Gitcoin has done a really good job changing that process at over the last couple years since this has been in effect. So Scott, one of the founders of Gitcoin, launched the steward governance process almost two years ago now. Then the steward council was implemented about a year ago. Now they're on V2 of the steward council.

And there's just a constant desire to iterate and to iterate with the stewards to decide how we should be changing governance. And I just think that's really admirable and leads to to great outcomes in terms of innovating and and experimenting and changing as things need to be changed. The second one I'll call out is the introduction of that CSDO forum that I talked about earlier. So when the DAO was fully fully implemented, there was not really a clear way for workstream leads to collaborate and a consistent cadence for them to really coordinate together. Uh early last year, the team introduced this crossstream DAO operations forum um which was able to get a lot more cohesion to the DAO.

So just another example of iterating on governance and good outcomes coming about. And finally, uh some of you may have seen before, Gitcoin has steward report cards. And so this came from the problem statement of people can delegate and not necessarily know if their steward is actually doing the work in the DAO, posting on the forums and engaging. And so you can go to dowsstewards.xyz and see for any steward that you have delegated to or any steward at large how much they're actually putting their money where their mouth is and engaging within the DAO.

And even these cards which have been around for several months now have been iterated on and iterated on and it's just some really awesome data um in terms of how people are showing up in the DAO. So that's all I have in terms of the lessons for today. I also wanted to share a couple of resources as a governance nerd that I have found really helpful uh for any of you who are navigating this in your own dows. The first is Linda Shei who is a fellow Ditco gitcoin steward uh has an awesome post where she went through several different Dows and talked about their governance models uh and posted it publicly. So definitely recommend checking out that write up.

Um our friends at Metropolis and other internet ran an awesome governance learning forum last year which you can check out and see all of the notes from. I really hope they do it again this year because it was such a great event for operators in the space to come together and talk about decision-making in Dows. And finally, just yesterday, uh, Justine, one of our friends at the Optimism Foundation, launched her new public good, which is the collective DAO archives, where, in her words, she's gone through thousands and thousands of DAO governance posts so that you don't have to uh, and written up kind of timelines of different Dows, new decision-m structures that they have implemented. Uh, and it's just a really good summary and and public good for for those out there who are looking to learn more about DAO governance. So that's all I had for today.

Thank you so much for coming. GM everyone have a great rest of your conference and I'll see you soon. [Music]