Improving Governance

[RagnarLifthrasir]

I will share my thoughts on ways to help the Foundation improve its governance and invite the Stacks community to give feedback.

The denial of @ceramicwhite 's grant residency application illustrates the challenges for non-profit crypto foundations to connect with and translate community feedback into action. Before sharing my suggestions, I want to say three things. 1) I think the Foundation has done an excellent job since its inception. 2) The cause of issues, as I see them, stems from imperfect systems and processes, not individuals. 3) I've received two grants instrumental in building my Stacks app, Trajan. So, thank you to the Foundation's Grant team!

Before continuing, please read ceramicwhite's residency application. It has Ceramicwhite's residency application, community feedback, the explanation of why the foundation denied the application, ceramicwhite's, and other responses. My summary is that ceramicwhite followed the foundation's instructions and received significant support for his application, but the foundation denied it anyways. Community disappointment with the Foundation's decision was expressed by a few publicly on Twitter, in private DMs, and in various chat groups. In private conversations, many felt there was a disconnect between what grant participants wanted and what the foundation did. Again, I want to say that I don't bring this up as a criticism of any individuals but rather to discuss how governance can be improved.

Below are seven suggestions to improve governance.

1) Review the existing eleven Stacks governance proposals and integrate them into one focused, permanent initiative to measure and evaluate the effectiveness of the Foundation. To kick it off, consider doing community discussions in one channel, for example, Discord, Zoom, Twitter Spaces, live stream, etc.

2) Have existing and future employees of the Stacks Foundation go through a similar GitHub-based application process that the Grants Residents go through. They will propose what they will accomplish in their role, list relevant experience and accomplishments, and then allow community feedback.

3) Publish the Foundation's treasury and update it once a quarter.

4) Set the goal to have the Foundation spend all its funds within ten years. Set spending goals in two-year increments.

5) Add four new positions to the Stacks Foundation Board to represent the main categories of Stacks users: developers, entrepreneurs, investors in startups, and educators/community support. These individuals would go through the process from point 2 above and serve for one year.

6) On the Foundation's About page, the bio of every Foundation member should include any companies or projects that member is involved with, such as as an investor, advisor, founder, employee, etc.

7) Publish the financial compensation of all Foundation team members.

Developing on Stacks and joining its community has been a breath of fresh air. I'm excited to play a small part in Stacks' mission to build the user-owned internet by building on Bitcoin.

[whoabuddy]

Hi @RagnarLifthrasir!

Thank you for reaching out and sharing your thoughts - I think it's important to have clear avenues to do so and appreciate the suggestions here.

To explain a little bit of the history of this GitHub repo / org, it started with the Governance Working Group in March of 2020, and during that time @lrettig was guiding us through what governance is, what it could look like, and we started forging the path together as a community to establish Stacks governance.

IIRC, the proposals repository contains some initial items suggested by Lane that we worked through on the first set of calls, which led to the research and additional resources in the resources repository (and on this site).

The readme for the resources and project management repository have more information on the full structure, and the sips repository was moved to this organization right before the Stacks 2.0 launch.

There are some great resources to catch up on throughout, and we still use the pm repository to manage the governance working group calls (+ agendas, notes, recordings, etc).

There is some amazing content throughout this organization and I think it'd be great to look at the current state of governance against what we originally proposed/envisioned. If you need help with anything you find here feel free to reach out!

In the meantime I am going to transfer this issue to the pm repository as a discussion item so it can be covered in the next Governance Working Group call. It'd be great if you could attend to discuss more!

[RagnarLifthrasir]

Thanks for the context and update. However, my GitHub issue is suggestions to improve governance of the Stacks Foundation, not the Stacks protocol. So I don't think my issue should be moved to stacksgov/pm. Does the Foundation have a repo for improving itself?

[whoabuddy]

I think this is the right spot to start - we generally have someone on the call from the foundation and can work through next steps from there.

Our agendas include a foundation update, action items, and discussion items in their current form, and our working group is the most familiar with the governance proposals you linked in point 1.

In the past we advocated for the community board seat and if you are available Thursday we can bring this up and discuss next steps with the group.

[RagnarLifthrasir]

I think this is the right spot to start - we generally have someone on the call from the foundation and can work through next steps from there.

Our agendas include a foundation update, action items, and discussion items in their current form, and our working group is the most familiar with the governance proposals you linked in point 1.

In the past we advocated for the community board seat and if you are available Thursday we can bring this up and discuss next steps with the group.

Thanks, will do.

[blocks8]

Thanks for the feedback above and taking the time to learn about our process and find ways we can improve. The goal of this working group is to keep improving the Stacks Foundation and find more ways to keep it accountable to the Ecosystem. I plan to attend the Working Group call tomorrow so I look forward to the discussion.

To jumpstart on some of the included feedback, I'm including my notes, in bold, below.

Below are seven suggestions to improve governance.

1. Review the existing eleven Stacks governance proposals and integrate them into one focused, permanent initiative to measure and evaluate the effectiveness of the Foundation. To kick it off, consider doing community discussions in one channel, for example, Discord, Zoom, Twitter Spaces, live stream, etc. This Governance Working group is related to exactly that. They hold regular calls, and this Issue can help kick off the working group to potentially update the open issues as you mentioned. This is community run so it'd be great to see you take the lead here or help find a leader to collaborate with from the community.

2. Have existing and future employees of the Stacks Foundation go through a similar GitHub-based application process that the Grants Residents go through. They will propose what they will accomplish in their role, list relevant experience and accomplishments, and then allow community feedback. Open hiring process is really interesting. Personally, I think the restraint is no full time HR in house, so we use Lever to consider candidates. It would also require transparency of all candidates who would apply for a job. Is there something here that you think this would consider? Is it wanting to know who's applying to jobs at the Foundation? Or understanding who gets hired or the hiring process? We want to keep fair and open hiring practices, and a fully public application could both benefit and harm that goal in my opinion, but open to ideas. If there is a way to solve for the problem you're trying to solve with this in another way, let's discuss that.

3. Publish the Foundation's treasury and update it once a quarter. We report this to our Board as part of our nonprofit governance. We open that board deck with only very confidential information redacted. Financials are not audited, but are shared quarterly.

4. Set the goal to have the Foundation spend all its funds within ten years. Set spending goals in two-year increments. Funding timeline is something we work closely with our Board on to address different needs. They are fiduciaries and have a large say in spending and maintenance on our Treasury. I think a proposal for how the Treasury could be spent is very valuable exercise. However, what we've learned so far is the shape of the Treasury can be heavily impacted by revenue inflows, potential future nonprofit donations, and large swings in USD value of the token. Perhaps the take-away here is more on the projected plans for the Treasury and updates and changes to that over time.

5. Add four new positions to the Stacks Foundation Board to represent the main categories of Stacks users: developers, entrepreneurs, investors in startups, and educators/community support. These individuals would go through the process from point 2 above and serve for one year. The Community Board seat was set up to serve various interests. Unfortunately, the original execution failed to deliver value to the community, the board, or find a qualified leader to prepare at board meetings. There is a single board seat still open for the community to decide on, but no efforts from anyone in the community to reengage the process or representation. We have in our bylaws to support this community board seat, even with a rotating member, so you could represent different interests. I think it would be great, but it needs the right people. I think an open, public application process for these could be valuable too, as long as it didn't create bias in selection that's not in line with fair hiring and recruiting practices.

6. On the Foundation's About page, the bio of every Foundation member should include any companies or projects that member is involved with, such as as an investor, advisor, founder, employee, etc. Great suggestion, we do have a disclosure policy that we'll make sure is easy to find, including any disclosures for employees. The short answer here is most Foundation employees help within their roles and don't have any further financial incentive or connection.

7. Publish the financial compensation of all Foundation team members. We keep compensation in line with industry and geographic standards. We publish our aggregate number of compensation costs in our board deck reporting. Personally, I'm not sure of the benefit of publishing individual salaries in a public forum. I've watched the public experiments of this in other companies, but don't have enough research on positive and negatives of it. If this is about transparency on headcount spending, that aggregate number is public. Part of the responsibility of our Board is as fiduciaries, and they are privy to all compensation numbers and ensure that it's in line with market standards and in line with our budget.

[whoabuddy]

Linking the grant application here for consistency: https://github.com/stacksgov/Stacks-Grant-Launchpad/issues/665