Hi OP Community!
My name is Abbey, and I’m one of the Board Members of the Optimism Foundation. The rest of the board and I wanted to take some time to introduce ourselves to the community and share our own personal Optimistic visions. I’ll go first!
I began my journey into Web3 in venture capital, working at Underscore VC, an early-stage venture firm with a strong open-source investment philosophy and community-driven approach. From there, I spent my bull & bear market hacking (looking back, my Crowdfunding the Commons hack is incredibly relevant now), traveling, and working alongside the Ethereum ecosystem, driven by the community vibes and the New Hope™ of the Web3 vision.
I found my niche in the emerging DAO space, intrigued by the potential of cryptoeconomic primitives to bring about new forms of organizations & incentive models for online communities. This interest brought me to Radicle, a community-owned, free & open source network for decentralized code collaboration — IMO one of the most exciting opportunity spaces for cryptography & cryptoeconomic primitives (I think this talk sums it up well). Working at Radicle has embedded the belief that cryptography & peer-to-peer technologies have the potential to bring about a truly new paradigm for open-source software (and public goods in general!), where digital communities can be self-sustaining and community-owned/operated.
At Radicle, I lead the Community & Governance team and sit on the Council of the Radicle Foundation, the Swiss non-profit entity created to support the continued decentralization of the Radicle network.
At the moment, I am leading our transition to the RadicleDAO. While the Radicle Foundation currently funds and manages core Radicle development, the goal has always been to ultimately fund all project development via the Treasury of the RadicleDAO — aka “transition”. This transition has many dimensions (see the workstreams in the post below) and, similar to the Optimistic Collective, is a governance experiment in itself.
I’d say that my approach to governance is more “off-chain” vs. “on-chain” — I view on-chain governance mechanisms, such as token voting, as important mechanisms for ensuring fair & trustless governance. Governance, however, is an incredibly social concept that requires as much social engineering as it does technical (see quote below). I think my Denver Schelling Point talk sums up my current opinions quite well.
“OSS is best understood neither as primarily a technical development or social process perspective, but instead as an inherent network of interacting sociotechnical processes, where its technical and social processes are intertwined, codependent, coevolving, and thus inseparable in performance”
— Chris Jensen and Walt Scacchi, “Governance in Open Source Software Development Projects: A Comparative MultiLevel Analysis”
Now, taking from the Delegate Commitment template:
My view on the Optimistic Vision:
When it comes to the Optimistic vision, I’m incredibly excited for the journey ahead of us. I truly believe that building on-chain & off-chain governance mechanisms around social primitives like SBTs will enable us to move past the current plutocratic paradigm and empower us to realize our ambitious visions for funding public goods (and open-source software!)
My view on the first three articles of the Working Constitution:
- Experimentation is key. While immutability has its place, adaptability is a necessary aspect of resilience. Governance must be dynamic & flexible, especially at the earliest stages, to ensure a resilient and sustainable system.
- Yes, yes, yes and yes. There is a world beyond token voting.
- From personal experience with Radicle, progressive & intentional decentralization is an effective (some would say necessary) method for instantiating self-sustaining decentralized ecosystems.
That’s it from me. Excited to embark on this journey with you all.
Staying incredibly optimistic 
Abbey
Fantastic leadership!!
