I can speak to the general concept behind having specific metrics by which to evaluate the success of all Mission Requests in Season 6 but will tag in @thbialek to comment on the reasoning behind individual metrics.
Transitioning more governance responsibilities to the community will require governance to be able to make data-driven decisions. For example:
Robust data infrastructure and analysis capabilities must be developed to enable the Collective to set Intents. Ideally, this system would allow the Collective to derive something that looks like a KPI tree stemming from a north star metric (ie. network usage) so that Collective Intent setting looks more like a calculation than a subjective brainstorming session.
Part of the Foundation’s role to bootstrap the governance system is to help establish a standardized data infrastructure that can support this type of decision making. Meaningful analysis of past Governance Fund grants has been limited due to a lack of standardization and pre-defined success metrics. This limits the Grants Council’s ability to further refine their own grant making and it also limits the Collective’s ability to understand how the Governance Fund drives progress towards the Intents relative to other mechanisms, like the Partner Fund or Retro Funding (for example.)
To start to lay to the groundwork for the Collective to be able to do meaningful analysis on allocation mechanisms, and how they drive impact towards the Intents, we’ve suggested a metric that ties back to the target metric for the corresponding Intent for each Mission Request. The goal is to enable standardized evaluation of the contribution of Season 6 Missions towards the Intent metrics.
Mission Request authors were given the opportunity to object to the suggested metrics and/or suggest an alternate metrics (from a menu of metrics provided by the Foundation) for their Mission Request. We recognize the assignment of standardized metrics to each Mission Request should have happened earlier in the process to ensure all Mission Requests are drafted in a way that corresponds to one of the relevant metrics. This is a clear learning for next Season.
I consider it a step forward for the Collective that the conversation can progress from unmeasured assessments of success/failure to a more targeted discussion about the best measurements to use to evaluate success.