We wanted to chime in as the lead of the M&M Council for the past few seasons.
The M&M role has been through a few different iterations over the last few seasons, starting as a role grant reviewers took on as an extra part of the intake process, to a sub-committee inside the Grants Council, to being it’s own independent Council this season. Each time the foundation expressed to us their goals for the next season, we have our concerns and issues, but as a whole, we’ve been open and receptive to trying something new; after all, that’s what we think this should be: A constantly improving experiment. Therefore, when the foundation told us their plans for this model into the future, with the goal of having non-political public servant positions, we were open and receptive to the idea as normal.
Varit, Takeshi, Mahesh, and us, knowing we would be part of the relatively small set of “vetted” members for next season, as well as serving as members this season, decided to abstain on the vote. We are thankful of the thoughtful discussion that is happening around this topic.
There are few main concerns from our end that we want to highlight and give our opinions on:
The inherent randomness of the committee selection: This might be the largest psychological change and introduction to OP elections we’ve seen. It’s always uneasy when your fate lies in complete random choice. As mentioned, we’re always down to try out new things, and suggested maybe having some sort of weighted randomness for selections. The main concern (albeit very biased) here is just that under this model, a new committee could contain all completely new members, something that would likely not be efficient for the DAO, and unlikely to happen under the normal election methods.
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.
We voted against the proposal and wanted to give a clear explanation of why we think this should not pass. Having been a member of the Milestones & Metrics council from February to April, and having resigned from that role, our decision to vote in opposition is based in the lived experience of how the Council is misaligned with its mandate.
The role lacked credible authority, clear tooling for assessment, and systemic support. Contributors were held accountable without being empowered. This proposal is not well suited to resolve the existing misalignment. In our opinion it creates eligibility filters that decrease the community’s influence in the process.
DAOs and civil roles alike are meant to depoliticize execution. If the goal is to depoliticize roles, the mechanism must be minimally trusted, composable, verifiable, and revocable or have other decentralized enforcement mechanisms, like slashing.
Instead of going forward with this proposal, we suggest to:
Disintermediate Distribution - Make grant flows rules-based where possible, reducing reliance on discretionary approvals. This will open the process to automation and methodical development by builders.
Decentralize Assessment - Build a networked, attestation-based system for tracking performance, open at minimum to, and configurable by: badgeholders, grantees, and delegates. As it stands assessment and distribution are within the same group, and we see massive potential for further decentralization.
Redesign Selection - Define clear, open and transparent selection criteria combined with a call for applicants and a commitment to iteration. Sampling is fine but only once the eligibility pool is wide, randomness weighted, and the Council lead given real agency to form a coherent team. The Foundation wants to replace elections with eligibility. That’s not inherently wrong but when eligibility is gated by prior political inclusion, it’s just an anti-pattern in disguise.
Design With a Ripcord - Every appointed role should include a clear revocability mechanism. If performance falters, governance must have a fast, neutral off-ramp for contributors and misaligned stakeholders.
We need to disintermediate both distribution and assessment and that means:
Automating capital flows where possible,
Crowdsourcing performance inputs across diverse credible actors, and
Moving away from manual bottlenecks with asymmetric context.
I appreciate those who supported my exit (@Juanbug_PGov, @v3naru_Curia, @Takeshi, @mmurthy), and see this rationale as a further contribution to improving this process, and more importantly, moving the DAO further towards more meaningful leverage of our shared power.
In our opinion, no selection method can fix a foundational legitimacy problem until we restructure how we grant authority and assess work.
Polynomial is voting FOR this proposal. We support experimentation with non-political council selection methods that prioritize execution over popularity. That said, the eligibility criteria should expand beyond prior governance roles, and also would like to see randomness evolve into something more intentional and transparent. Pure randomness can be counter-intuitive as it is not trying to build the right team at the M&M council, also there can be cases where the whole team doesn’t have anyone who has prior grants council experience.
We see this as a stepping stone toward a more meritocratic and scalable process, and we’re voting FOR with the expectation that future iterations address these open issues.
On the eligibility criteria :
It does look like this experiment is leaning against competent new-comers as well.
Given the M&M Selection proposal has very narrowly failed (50.68% approval vs. the required 51%), we will address the possible delay to the start of Season 8. Members will run for election in Voting Cycle #39b, which is also when S8 onchain budget transfers will occur. We had hoped to add signers to the M&M multisig that receives these transfers before then. If we want to proceed with the launch of Season 8 on schedule, onchain budget transfers will need to be made to a foundation controlled multisig, with M&M signers added after the fact. This is a sub-optimal solution, but something we can move forward with to avoid a delay.
In regards to the proposal, it was exciting to see the contention and conversation within the community! Many of you provided valuable feedback that will be considered for future proposals. Feedback that suggests specific alternatives or tactical ideas to address weaknesses of the proposal is especially useful. 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):
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.
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.