I propose creating a group of people within the DAO who are responsible for helping steer the overall direction and strategy for the DAO.
Traditionally, within a centralized org, there is a group of C-level roles who help craft this direction. Being a DAO does not mean we should not have a broad direction and strategy. Any group of people, be it Religion, Countries or DAOs, should have core people who set the vision in order to actually move.
What does the group do?
This group is tasked with having a purview of all that is happening within the DAO, and understanding how to best coorperate between Working Groups.
There is a tendency within growing DAOs to silo off into Working Groups - the CSR helps counter that. The group of people within the CSR may change over time, but will generally consist of the group of people in the community who are best able to represent all of the different efforts, happening in all of the Working Groups.
Make no mistake, as we grow, no single person will have a complete picture, but the folks in this group are certainly the ones who can best relay the information, and coordinate with other CSR members to ensure things are moving. There is a high requirement from the people in this group to ensure things get done.
Implementation
The implementation of this is quite easy:
a discord group and reoccurring meetings (Monday’s WG sync are good for this)
the election from each of the working groups on which member is part of that group
a vote in favor of the creation of one of these groups by each working group
What still needs to be decided on?
How much power does this group have power over? For example, if they decide something is not high priority, what happens if people just decide to do it anyways?
Maybe they are just “recommending” a strategy and trying to prioritize major efforts
Note strategy is more than just strategy: it’s developing the strategy, communicating it to the rest of the DAO, evaluating and giving feedback to proposals based on it, etc.
I’m in favor of trying something like this, especially so we have some people who explicitly represent everyone and are paid / asked to help us review incoming proposals. Reviewing incoming proposals with a respectful, critical, goal-oriented eye, and communicating those evaluations publicly is really valuable for encouraging new proposers and establishing the DAO’s goals and reputation.
The big questions here IMO are:
How do we ensure people in this group represent everyone in the DAO? They are entrusted with a lot of implicit power, so I think the process should be more rigorous here. Getting a rep from every WG seems like an okay way to do this, but maybe not ideal, since the overall DAO isn’t directly influencing the decision.
How do we make sure people in this group are devoting the necessary time to do this work? If the people in this group are also members of WG, will they have the time to do both? That’s something I’m a bit concerned about.
Overall, I think this is fine as a starting point, but I’d like to see a switch to a system where the DAO itself elects this group, and they are paid specifically to do this work, rather than having to do this on the side.
I actually don’t think the parent DAO needs to be involved in that process. We are a community (hell, maybe even only one of many communities that forms around the DAO!) - and we should have authority to elect imo.
I think the expectation is that members of this group would be doing less “doing” than workers executing on the work (same thing as executives and managers in a traditional corp). Why does it concern you?
I think we crossed wires here. What do you mean we are a community and should have authority to elect? Who’s the “we” that is a community there? The working groups?
Maybe I can clarify:
For typical working groups so far, I don’t think the DAO has been vetting members that closely, but for a group that’s meant to be sort of “C-level” people for the DAO, I think it probably should vet everyone more, because those people will have a lot of power over the DAO (whereas individual working groups don’t have that much power).
On the other hand, if the main idea here is that this group actually just helps all the existing working groups coordinate more with each other, but isn’t actually endowed with any special authority, maybe “elections” or similar aren’t needed. But that also sounds very similar to the Ops group?
It concerns me because I think there’s actually a decent amount of work to do in shaping overall strategy. As you wrote:
In order for a strategy group to be effective, I think we should be expecting the members to be spending some real amount of time on it (e.g. 1/4 time or 10 hrs / week), and reduce their other responsibilities accordingly. Otherwise, I’d worry the strategy group won’t actually do the “leading” we want them to do, or the strategy members will neglect their working group work, leaving their groups in the lurch.