Season 8 and 9 Milestone and Metrics Council Selection

[GFXlabs]

@system

In the future, it would be more beneficial to provide these suggestions while proposals are still in draft mode, so changes may be incorporated before final proposals move to a vote.

Suggestions were given when this was first brought up on the last governance call. There wasn’t much of a window to provide commentary, and none of the concerns brought up appear to have been addressed.

Cross-posting here for visibility from our delegate thread (some paragraphs on the historical use of sortition removed for brevity):

@GFXlabs

Recommendation: Vote Against. As we extensively argued during the governance call where this idea was first introduced, sortition has few successful examples in history, and relies upon an unshakeable belief that the process will be fair and transparent.

…

Critically, sortition makes people unaccountable – there is no impact on chances of serving a new term unless a person is so negligent as to be disqualified in the next round – and also is blind to competence. The qualification criteria presented is generally just previous experience in governance, which is confusing because it locks in incumbents from a practical perspective – not a traditional goal of sortition, which is typically trying to remove them.

More broadly, this is part of a long history of experimentation with public choice in Optimism (futarchy, retro funding rounds, bicameralism). In general, these have all been interesting but ultimately wasteful (a large share of retro funding) or not impactful (bicameralism). At this point, we are requesting the Foundation pause conducting political and public choice experiments, so that resources can be focused on value-additive contributions to Optimism and the Superchain.

These are all generally points we raised on the governance call, and have not seen a response that satisfies our questions and criticisms of using random selection to fill a technocratic role.

It is important to clearly state for the record that suggestions and feedback were provided, and that this proposal felt “out of left field” to many delegates.

Given that Optimism is struggling to ship interop despite it generally being signaled as soon for more than a year and has not articulated a clear purpose for Optimism (the chain), let’s pause political science experiments.

• Retro funding still is charitably described as a slowly improving work in progress.
• Futarchy, while interesting, sucked up a lot of governance bandwidth and financial resources and while we will wait for the final report to pass judgement, it appears unlikely to be useful.
• Then sortition (random selection) was floated as a way to select for a technocratic role, much to everyone’s surprise.

Can we please refocus efforts on technical and financial improvements? Optimism governance already struggles to remain relevant without distracting political science theory testing. Let’s avoid side quests and focus on how Optimism and the Superchain can provide value to users and do so in a way that accrues value to the OP token.