Collective Feedback Commission Pilot Retrospective
Pilot Recap
6 months ago, we piloted a Collective Feedback Commission (CFC) as the first step in outlining a path towards open metagovernance. The primary role of the Collective Feedback Commission during this pilot was to formalize a previously informal process of collecting feedback from engaged community members by
“consulting the Foundation on early design drafts requiring a high degree of context.”
We simultaneously drove efforts to solicit more feedback from the broader community, via polls and open workshops, so that feedback opportunities remain open to anyone and are not restricted to the Commission.
We also experimented with additional engagement opportunities, such as asking the Commission to draft Mission Requests under Intent #1: Progress towards decentralization, governance.
The Commission was divided into two groups:
- Token House: provided feedback on early design drafts related to Season 6, vision, and roadmaps
- Citizens’ House: provided feedback on early design drafts related to Rounds 4-6, vision, and roadmaps
You can see the hub where feedback was provided here [link to be provided shortly], which includes Foundation statements as to how the feedback was incorporated into designs.
The Commission is rewarded, in line with Impact Level 4 of the Collective Rewards Framework, but is also eligible to apply to Round 6: Governance.
Pilot Goals
One of the Foundation’s main goals with this pilot was to improve Season/Round designs relative to what we would have designed without Commission input. We can safely say that was accomplished. More concretely, at the start of the pilot, we identified the following measures of success:
- Number of design parameters we change based on member feedback (goal: > 5)
- This was actually 30
- Number of new ideas proposed and implemented (ideas that we hadn’t previously thought of) (goal: > 3)
- This was actually 8
These are imprecise measures. A better metric would have been the percentage of feedback the Foundation ranked as “high value” or an NPS score of the Foundation governance team rating feedback utility.
Additional Foundation goals were related to decentralization:
- Create transparency around an informal process and create objective criteria for participating in this process
- Begin to create a program to develop best in class governance designers that can become mentors to others
The ultimate goal as the Commission evolves is to reduce dependency on the Foundation as the sole governance designer of the Collective. The measure for success in this state would be the ability to ship Seasons/Rounds without the Foundation’s involvement. This will require us to gradually increase the responsibilities of Commission members over time (multiple years, likely) as well as to increase the number of members the Commission supports. The inspiration for this program is Core Development Programs. We’re excited to continue iterating towards a Core Delegate Program as metagovernance is one of most important responsibilities in the Collective. In this future, the Foundation will become just one of many Core Delegates proposing metagovernance proposals.
What The Foundation Learned During the Pilot
Note: These are observations and learnings from the Foundation. You can see an overview of the Commission’s own retrospective workshop here.
Based on the success of the initial pilot, and engagement of members, we plan to continue the Commission into its next iteration. Below we outline learnings from the pilot, which will inform the next iteration.
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Expectation Setting: We should have done a kickoff call to level set on the expectations/scope of the Commission in the initial pilot. We thought an asynchronous kick-off would be appreciated by busy Commission members but we later realized this was a missed opportunity to clearly define the goals and success metrics of the pilot.
This was also reflected in member survey responses indicating only a moderate level of clarity on Commission goals and responsibilities (see figma.)
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Reducing the context gap: We need to do a better job of sharing all context related to specific governance components in order for members to provide high value feedback. We are working to close the gap between the context the Foundation has and the context the Commission, and broader community, has. To this point, we also believe the Commission can play a better role in helping us optimize and execute processes members have first hand experience with, rather than opining on higher level or more abstract concepts.
During the Retrospective workshop, members indicated they needed more context to understand how the things they were reviewing fit into the larger system and/or roadmap design.
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Closing the loop: The Foundation initially didn’t close the loop on how we used and implemented feedback. The Foundation was incorporating feedback but members didn’t have insight into exactly how or when their suggestions were being implemented. Member feedback allowed us to course correct at the mid-way point of the pilot.
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Timing: The intent was always to ask for feedback earlier enough in the design process that we could alter designs based on member input. However, this requires us to move our internal planning processes forward more than we anticipated. Round 4 and 5 feedback timelines were a bit tight as a result.
During the Retrospective workshop, members suggested regularly scheduled feedback cycles and periodic synchronous calls to establish a regular workflow.
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Trial and error: We learned a little bit about what types of engagement with the Commission are the most effective:
- Feedback from Commission members on early design drafts was extremely useful
- Asking the Commission to author Mission Requests didn’t work well. Citizens’ House Commission members in particular did not feel that writing Missions Requests, which are approved in the Token House, aligned well with their set of responsibilities as expressed by LauNaMu below.
During the retrospective workshop, Commission members expressed an interest in providing feedback on Mission Request drafts, dividing work into areas of focus, and more two-way dialogue with the Foundation team in the next iteration.
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Collaboration: More collaboration between members of both Houses was desired. We initially separated the groups to reduce spam in the telegram but later realized this created siloed conversations about things that pertained to both groups and made coordination on joint efforts (such as Retro Funding applications) more difficult.
These are observations and learnings from the Foundation. You can see an overview of the Commission’s own retrospective workshop here.
Initial Thoughts on the Next Iteration
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The initial pilot was an MVP test. The next iteration will convert the Commission into a persistent structure, complete with a Charter and Lead.
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The Foundation will host a kickoff call to level set expectations, goals, and how success will be measured in Season 7.
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The Commission will be closely consulted on the Foundation’s 2025 planning process as we further transition this to a Collective process.
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The Foundation will dedicate more resources to manage this program with the proper level of care and attention. A Commission Lead will help better support operations.
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We will be postponing the launch of the open contribution path component of the Commission until we have further refined the best approach to accomplish longer term goals of the Commission. It is one full workstream to design how the Commission works and another workstream to create a contribution path that supports it. We are still committed to supporting this path, but need to focus our efforts on the refinement and development of the core workstream first. We will open source the Commission’s pilot workspace shortly, which will allow all community members to have full insights into the work that was done and the feedback that was given.
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The membership criteria will likely change in the next iteration. Current members of the Commission may or may not re-qualify. We are very grateful for pilot member’s contributions, but in an effort to optimize transparent membership criteria, we cannot guarantee that everyone will re-qualify.
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More about how we envision the Commission evolving over time will follow in a post outlining how the next iteration of the Commission will operate. Launch is expected to be in early November.