The following reflects the views of L2BEAT’s governance team, composed of @kaereste, @Sinkas, and @Manugotsuka, and it’s based on their combined research, fact-checking, and ideation.
We are voting FOR the proposal.
While we are not fans of randomly selecting council members, especially since the council is expected to work as a team and the members need to have coherency between them, we do not see this as an issue to drive us to vote against.
At the same time, we believe that an open election process is also not the right approach, as it often devolves into a popularity contest, and it still fails to address the issue of coherence.
Having to choose between the two options, however, we’d like to at least experiment with the random selection, as we have already seen what the open election process and results look like. We could maintain the current eligibility criteria, but we could also make them more inclusive, particularly by removing the requirement for prior experience in a similar position.
Lastly, we want to propose a different approach we could experiment with in the future where we select the council’s lead, either through an election process, or by a direct appointment from Optimism Foundation, and they then select and hire the rest of the council members from the ones who meet the eligibility criteria.