[TEMP CHECK] Aave | Flipside Proposal

Governance
12

Some thoughts from my side.

First, personally, I have interacted with @fig in the past both in the context of BGD Labs and as an independent participant in the community, and like everybody else in this thread, I think his/Flipside involvement has been quite notable for a pretty long time.
So I support having some type of contributor-onboarding Aave/Flipside.

That being said, I don’t think multiple points of the proposed scope make sense to the Aave DAO for the following reasons:

  1. I simply don’t think that Flipside (or anybody) should act as a “coordinator” of the DAO or what resembles more like having some “executive” power. First of all, because progressively this coordination is improving organically, second, I don’t think it is desired.

    To go more into the details on the current “problems”:

    • Contributors & delegates wake up to lofty Snapshot quorum requirements as a surprise. Both Contributors and delegates should follow more, especially delegates.
    • Asset additions are written concurrently, creating duplicate work. Currently, teams can contact ACI if looking for guidance on listings, or if more from the technical side, they can do it directly with BGD. It is true that in practice it is not always the case, but other contributors should just redirect to the appropriate places.
    • Risk contributors have to lobby votes to enable changes & reach quorum. This is a problem for vote participants: to be a delegate, obviously following proposal and participating is a must, if not, delegators should immediately remove delegation from the inactive delegates.

    The DAO vision at the moment is whatever the aggregation of its independent parts produce, but it is not the right moment to bureaucratize more, and definitely not for a single party to act like some kind of global product owner. The owner of the Aave ecosystem is the thousands of AAVE holders.

  2. I think “growth” on the expansion of delegates set is an important topic, together with helping to redirect external parties to the proper DAO contributors. So supportive of the high-level points of DAO Operations & Community Resources.

  3. Multiple items (almost all) on Governance and Proposal Development are already tackled by other contributors or should be by external teams. E.g. expansions to other networks (external teams should initiate the process and the rest of the flow depends exclusively on Snapshots + technical evaluations + on-chain governance proposals), governance technical optimization (highly technical topic), and Risk Admins (technical + risk). It is simply not optimal for the DAO to engage an extra entity for the same.

    And again, Enforce contributors’ focus on core competencies vs. extracurriculars, definitely, should not be up to Flipside or anybody to do; it should be up to AAVE governance voters to or 1) signal that a project is not needed or 2) cut a contract with a contributor. If not “efficient”, it is a desired consequence of the decentralized vision of the community.

  4. On the topic of Data Analysis & Research, Aave has invested quite a lot of resources via grants (hundreds of thousands from what I’m aware) or directly engaging contributors (e.g. Llama) on this. It is time to start evaluating which value is all of this bringing to the table, instead of keeping increasing the scope.
    I agree that open source indexing should be a MUST for the DAO to really own their data flows, and maybe it is not the case at the moment, but still, a really broad topic.



So, even without a doubt Flipside and Fig have always been really good contributors to the community, and scope like the current one touches incredibly “deep” aspects of the DAO and sets precedents of oversight by an external party.

So in the current shape, AGAINST, but supportive of Flipside if coming up with a different type of engagement.

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