Developer Advisory Board - Season 6 Retrospective

Elected Representatives đź’Ľ Council Communication Threads
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The Developer Advisory Board came into its own this season, maturing from an experiment into a proper board with processes and significant impact on the Collective. It was amazing to see the results over the season, and we have many great ideas to expand that impact in future seasons.

1. What is your assessment of the impact KPIs that were set in your Budget Proposal at the start of the Season?

The KPIs listed at the start of the season were:

  • Did 100% of Protocol Upgrades have a non-technical summary posted within 72 hours and get approval or comments from the DAB? - YES!

  • What NPS score would the Grants Council reviewers provide (answering: “On a scale from 1-10, if it were up to you, how likely would you be to renew the DAB next season?”) - 10/10 (@Gonna.eth)

  • What NPS score would the Citizens give the DAB (answering: “On a scale from 1-10, how much value do you feel the DAB provided the community this season?”) - 6.86/10 (Telegram poll, 15 votes)

  • Did voting participation on Protocol Upgrades increase (including abstains) since the non-technical summaries were implemented? - YES! Average total votes before summaries was 47M, after summaries was 56M, a 19% increase (data)

  • Did the number of milestones missed by grant recipients decrease on DAB-approved grants relative to grants before the DAB? - It’s still too early to tell

  • Did the quality of technical grants chosen increase, as evaluated by members of the OP Labs engineering team? - We were not able to gather this information

2. Impact assessment - how well did your team’s outputs support the Intent they were authorized under?

The DAB charter for this season included: (a) supporting the community in technical decisions like protocol upgrades, (b) supporting the GC in evaluating MR applications and (c) bringing additional technical perspective to the OP ecosystem (and exploring new ways we could support).

On (a): We provided a plain English summary for the protocol upgrade this season. We also met with the OP Labs team to understand their roadmap, and have provided feedback on the Foundation’s Decentralization Roadmap and Product Vision, as well as the implementations of the Custom Gas Token and interop.

On (b): We worked with the GC to provide detailed feedback on 179 Mission Request applications, which has proven to be very helpful in their evaluation process. We have integrated the DAB directly into Charmverse so we can engage directly with teams, and leave comments for the GC to consider. The Grant’s Council has given an NPS score of 10/10 for our help.

On (c): We have hosted community calls to discuss additional ways to support the Collective in future seasons. Some of the big themes will be discussed below in #5. Additionally, many of us served as judges for Retro PGF 5.

All in all, I feel the team was very successful in supporting the Intent.

3. What are the major problems you ran into over the course of the Season?

a) Early in the season, there was some work to hammer out logistics, but since that has all been buttoned up, things have run very smoothly.

b) The big remaining problem is that it seems like there are so many ways the DAB can be helpful to the Collective, and only some of these ideas are being surfaced. Because we can’t see into every area of the organization, it’s hard to identify these opportunities. The community calls have been helpful, but I believe we can do a lot more.

4. What are possible solutions that could be explored next Season?

We’ll continue to work closely with the GC to ensure our workflows fit nicely together, and host community calls to ask for the community’s support in seeing the areas of the Collective where we can provide the most value.

It will also be helpful to integrate more closely with OP Labs, as having a clear vision for the product roadmap and technical details will allow us to serve as a kind of liaison to the community (for example, seeing opportunities for important Mission Requests, advising applicants about how their work fits in with potential future changes, etc.)

5. What improvements to the team’s mandate would you suggest for next Season?

With two seasons under our belts, the clear message seems to be that the DAB has many more ways to be useful, and can take on more responsibility within the Collective. Specifically, we are planning the following for S7:

  • Take over the full program to assess audit requests from the Grants Council.

  • Take full responsibility for selecting the teams that will deliver on Foundation Mission Requests.

  • Take a more active approach to understanding the technical roadmap, and use this understanding to work with the Foundation to craft the rolling Foundation Mission Requests, and with the Grants Council to craft Governance Mission Requests.

  • Experiment with acting as “dev rel for the Collective”, playing a more active role in getting outside developers involved. For example, hosting office hours to help match developers with interesting projects, advising on writing good applications, a link to get in touch at the bottom of all Mission Requests, hosting demo days for completed MRs, etc.

  • Explore an ongoing role for the DAB to help future Retro PGF rounds close the gap between badgeholders and the better results that expert voters achieved in RPGF 5.

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@zachobront It was great to interface with the DAB this season. On this retro, do you find the DAB this season was spread too thin and should only take on 1-2 main focuses to own, or do you feel otherwise? Appears there are many places the DAB can be helpful but think it might be unideal for the DAB to be spread more than it should given the number of members.

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Hey @zachobront !

I haven’t interacted much with the DAB this season, but just wanted to signal my improvements that I would really enjoy seeing further devrel support for applications in grants missions and RPGF.

Speaking as someone who also works in an optimism-deployed project, I feel having a team reaching out and assisting top projects with participation would be great. If it wasn’t for my active participation in the council, I feel my project would’ve not only been unaware of initiatives and their deadlines, but also the progress to go through them.

Regarding the idea of team selection for Foundation Missions, are there any previous missions you can share as examples you feel the DAB could’ve helped with selecting the teams? This is mostly to help non-tech delegates like me understand better!

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Great question. The type of person attracted to this role is very curious, helpful and high agency. There was lots of desire to help in different ways outside of our existing mandate.

But agreed that given the number of members, it would be hard to add more workload.

I think the solution next season will be to add a few members and make roles a bit more specific, so the DAB as a whole can do more, while each member can focus where they are more interested in supporting.

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I totally agree with the need for more devrel for OP deployed projects and have heard this feedback from other teams too. I think a large part of that needs to live in the Foundation / OP Labs, but I also think it’s possible for the DAB to own some pieces where we’re well suited, and leave those teams to focus more on the areas that need them.

In terms of Foundation Mission Requests, this was a request from the Foundation for us to take this piece over as a part of the path to decentralization. That being said, this is a good example of a highly technical MR that had high stakes in selecting the right teams to execute on it, and that the DAB would be well suited to diving deep to evaluate.

I appreciate the questions. Let me know if you have any others!

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Hey all, here to provide feedback on this retro as part of my duties with the Collective Feedback Commission.

First, I personally want to share my emphatic agreemeng with much of what Zach’s said here. The DAB’s been a huge gift to the Grant Council and the Collective, and we’ve got to find more ways to plug them in and get their candid opinions on proposed Missions.

With respect to process, I’ll share a few observations:

This is itself a tell: either there was abysmal engagement from the Citizens (this is approx. 10%? of total Citizens), or the DAB’s work wasn’t fully exposed to them. I think this is a thread for the DAB, the Foundation, and the CFC to pull on.

Need to have a defined process for somebody to eventually report on this; the retrospectives clearly don’t capture it. My suggestion is for Milestones & Metrics (or whatever equivalent exists in future Seasons) to report back here and in a new thread summarizing results in ~3 months.

This is a good question that is evidently difficult to chase OP Labs team down to answer. So do we get OP Labs to answer this, or do we have the DAB themselves assess this? I recognize the desire to have an impartial body evaluate this, but I think it’s probably fair for the DAB to self-report if it means we’ll be able to get immediate feedback.

Would be helpful to get direct links here.

This is probably another one for the CFC to explore a bit more.

Agree with much of this. Something I’d like to hear from the DAB themselves to this end: how do they ultimately view their roles within the Collective? I think part of the brainstorming to be done around their work could follow from their beliefs on what values they bring.

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Thanks so much @jackanorak — this is all really insightful and helpful. Incorporating a lot of it into the plan for next season right now.

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