Should we have a "Roles Meeting" once a month as part of one of the GOV meetings?

I am pleased to read about this tension and know that these questions are being asked. It seems a natural evolution for Giveth and one I wished we had seen and discussed a lot earlier. Wherever the discussion will take you, I hope you keep in mind the true nature of decentralization and empowerment. In my opinion each circle should have its own governance and come up with its own game plan- which has to be very specific to the circle and can change over time. In other words, each circle should become a DAC. Funding is always an important point and should be addressed separately. Giveth circles should be role models for what we expect to attract as users of the dapp. Mini communities working towards a common goal. Donors should be inspired and wanting to contribute to achieve that goal.

I propose to have a meeting about this in Swiss, July 4th in the evening., I'm happy to organise it.

Imo we need to take Holacracy to a higher level to solve current tensions within Giveth. We started off very well about a year ago, and we've practised a lot, but we've stopped at like half an implementation and I don't feel it's very future proof

A couple of things we should do (imho):

• We talk about progress as in 'what did you do last week', which is really the wrong question to ask in Holacracy! Because Holacracy is not about you or what you did, it's what you did FOR your assigned role(s). This is the essence of Holacracy, it's not about people, it's about very well defined roles, and we totally miss it!

This means that if that role that you perform is not defined and is not accountable within the context of the strategy of a circle or project, then that progress is really an empty statement.

Yes you did a lot, but how did that benefit your role and how did that advance the strategy or goal of your circle? As such we think we're accountable with our transparent milestones, but how much does that accountability actually mean?

(Note that in this context we should also write our milestones differently!)

• Hence we need to separate roles from people, with actual roles descriptions to make roles accountable and provide a rigid structure for individual freedom of performing that role.

This will also reduce a lot of tension with decision power that people have. You are the 'owner' of your role, so you can make the decisions within the boundaries of that role unless it influences other roles, which then you must advice (but that advice you don't necessarily have to follow). Advice process!

Last this enables removing people from roles that don't benefit their role(s), as now the discussion won't be personal, but objective as you can simple observe the difference between role definition and work performed by the owner of the role.

• We need to split tactical meetings from governance meetings. In Holacracy governance meetings are basically only about roles (!). We never talk about roles. Our 'governance' meeting is actually a tactical meeting. Tactical meetings are about operations within circles, like progress of roles (not you!), tensions and accountability of roles. We only talk about operational tensions, and we don't solve these the 'Holacracy' - way.

  • We should think about splitting the role of rep and lead link, as we kind of mess that up. The rep link represents the circle to its super circles, the lead link is responsible for the strategy and operations within a circle.

There's much more to it, but I think the crucial question is:

Do we want to do Holacracy or not? Because our current process can hardly be called Holacracy. If hope YES, but then there's a lot of work to do!

What do you guys think?

I think Holacracy is a good method. It is sort of ready-made and fairly adaptable to our situation, hence we can experiment and no decision is final!
All in! Will the meeting the 4th be online as well as physical?

If we hold one we should definitely do an online one too ofc.

Thanks for launching this Linds, otherwise nothing would have come out of that good transparency call and that would be a pity. All for Satya's real governance meeting proposal. Also reading the reinventing org book right now, and yeah, definitely agree that we can do more holacracy. I read that it's a good thing to have a lot of granular roles (not big roles) with accountabilities. Let's try to find a balance between formalizing this process but at the same time keeping it very flexible, such regular meetings could indeed help for that, and just some sort of template we use and update non-stop.
It's a good idea to keep on experimenting with this (Lanski's great doc will also help indeed - just listened to the fireside call). Right now our community is still small enough to do this in one regular governance meeting (that other kind) and maybe not split all of this up just yet (as grace suggests), let's first try to become very good at this as a team (by actually decentralizing power, as a group), and at the same time document this for future DACs. In the meantime definitely support to work on clearer goals /strategy per circle (grace comment <3), so that we can in the future become fully decentralized and seperate DACs when we scale. (extra motivation for me to continue with manifesto + goals & accountabilities etc per circle.)
And perfect timing, especially now that we'll get inspired by Aragon, would love to help prepare Satya! July 4th evening sounds fine.

Independence Day!
We had this many moons ago but it never caught on, would love to see it have a resurgence:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1AgirCB9VSSSxZ5ElD6-UrmYfO1I35gbgm_QEfrGXHc0/edit?usp=sharing
Had trouble getting it going (most people never filled out Accountabilities and Metrics part) so it pretty much died because of a strong desire for less bureaucracy.
Lessons Learned from first attempt:
1. Some people bit off more then they could chew
2. Need full buy-in from Unicorns, if more than 2 people think its stupid... it wont work IMO.
3. Probably need someone who wants to own this document (or whatever replaces it) and beg everyone to fill it out
4. Probably need to incentivize this documents completion (Maybe attach it to UBI)

I personally think we should pause any big reorganization until we have played with the DApp for a few weeks, we are going to learn a lot about our new toy and it will definitely influence how we organize ourselves :-D