Recap - Polis Review Workshops Nov 27-29

Co-Creation Cycle
1

TL;DR

Following the idea generation workshops from earlier this month, the most discussed and highly-voted topics were submitted to Polis for a sentiment check. From November 27 to 29, we hosted a series of 90-minute workshops to review the results and identify potential proposals for the co-design phase starting next week. The full Miro board can be viewed here.

This post includes:

  1. A list of the topics that lead to potential proposals, with links to begin exploring and refining ideas.
  2. An in-depth review of the three workshops, including ideas that didn’t progress into proposals.

Make sure to check out the full Co-Creation Cycle (CCC) Check-In Post which sets the stage for upcoming calls.

Workshop Summary

The three workshops centered on key areas: Governance, Growth, and Community. While each topic was addressed separately, significant overlap emerged, especially between Growth and Community. Discussions were structured by theme, but many insights proved relevant across multiple areas. Below are the topics that people were interested in creating proposals around. If you have any additional ideas you would personally like to explore, please feel free to follow the instructions listed in the proposal template.

Workshop 1: Growth

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Given the close alignment between Growth and Community, the two were combined in Polis, which was also reflected in the Miro board. Despite this integration, the majority of the discussion focused on the topic of Growth.

Topics that led to a proposal include:

The recording of the Growth Workshop can be found here: #10 - Proposal Co-Design - 2024/11/27 07:29 EST - Recording

Workshop 2: Governance

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The recording of the Governance Workshop can be found here: #11 - Proposal Co-Design - Governance - 2024/11/27 12:57 EST - Recording

Workshop 3: Community

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The recording of the Community Workshop can be found here: #12 - Proposal Co-Design - Community - 2024/11/29 10:26 EST - Recording

Further Discussion

Workshop 1: Growth

This first workshop discussed the overall results of the Polis and then dove into Growth related topics, such as as user research and real use cases, achieving sustained usage of the scroll network, balancing regional and protocol growth, treasury diversification, and providing financial and non-financial support.

User Research and Real Use Cases
  • User Research (Proposal Co-Design: User Research Proposal Co-Design):
    • Some use cases are tailored to specific communities, such as MedTech, FinTech, or CollabTech. These do not necessarily require a regional focus but can include one where relevant.
    • Conducting user research is critical for identifying real-world needs and aligning funding with impactful solutions.
    • Start with user research to identify real needs and avoid self-confirming biases or lack of focus in funded initiatives.
    • Engage researchers to conduct the studies and builders to validate the findings.
    • Metrics to track progress:
      • Number of DAOs created.
      • Active delegate participation.
      • Proposals passed and implemented.
    • A pilot program on Arbitrum aimed to teach people how to conduct user research but revealed challenges:
      • Participants often lacked focus or direction.
      • Some approached the research with preconceptions, leading to confirmation bias.
    • To improve outcomes:
      • Engage professional researchers to conduct user research.
      • Have builders validate the findings to ensure practicality and relevance.
    • Consider forming vertically specialized teams or leveraging decentralized ethnography tools to gather deeper insights.
    • Having vertically specialized teams OR using a tool to do decentralized ethnography
Achieving Sustained Usage of the Scroll Network
  • Focus on Foundational Infrastructure (Proposal: Co-Design Foundational Infrastructure Grant Program Proposal Co-Design)
    • Develop key Web3 infrastructure, including:
      • A DEX (decentralized exchange).
      • Borrow/lending markets.
      • Other commodified smart contracts to enable seamless transmission and storage of value (e.g., exchanges, earning yield, borrowing mechanisms).
    • Deploy an AMM (Automated Market Maker) to capture part of the yield into the DAO treasury and enshrine it as part of Scroll’s ecosystem.
    • Treat Web3 infrastructure as utilities, addressing essential needs for seamless network participation.
      • Deploy a v2 AMM (Automated Market Maker).
      • Develop marketplaces for trading and services.
      • Create token launching and NFT minting infrastructure.
  • Effective Grant Programs
    • Design grants that address practical, real-world use cases, avoiding speculative trends like meme coins or pump-and-dump projects.
    • Include regional or local funding initiatives as part of iterative, plural programs audited by neutral entities.
    • Support projects that promote high coherence and community growth, ensuring faster and more effective adoption.
    • Prioritize initiatives that directly benefit the network, such as scalable governance mechanisms, while maintaining transparency and accountability.
    • Explore joint ventures (JVs) with other projects or organizations to enhance resources and expertise.
  • Marketing and Messaging
    • Define responsibilities for marketing initiatives and establish clear timelines for campaigns.
    • Ensure inclusivity in messaging to align with Scroll’s values and reach diverse user segments.
    • Integrate Labs’ growth strategy with Scroll’s initiatives for cohesive and effective communication.
Balancing Regional and Protocol Growth
  • Regional:
    • Prioritizing regional initiatives over broader protocol growth risks losing focus on impactful development. Regional efforts should complement, not detract from, the protocol’s overall objectives.
    • The approach should begin with user research to identify real-world needs rather than rushing into funding projects without a clear understanding of impact.
    • Analyze global crypto adoption trends to stay ahead of emerging opportunities and seed adoption through tangible, meaningful use cases.
    • Regional hubs should aim to create practical, impactful initiatives rather than merely recruiting regional token holders (“bagholders”). These hubs must demonstrate utility and align with Scroll’s mission.
    • Building high-coherence communities—those with clear, unified goals and strong collaboration—leads to faster and more sustainable network growth.
    • Use public government information to guide regional strategies, ensuring alignment with local needs and regulatory environments.
    • Metrics such as the number of DAOs created can track progress and help measure the success of both regional and protocol-level initiatives.
    • The overarching principle is that all efforts must be rooted in real use cases to ensure lasting impact and relevance. Regional focus should enhance, not overshadow, protocol growth.
Treasury Diversification
  • Treasury Diversification (Proposal Co-Design: Treasury Diversification Proposal Co-Design)
    • Minimize Risks of Token Volatility
      • Selling native tokens when their value is low often reduces consensus for treasury spending, as stakeholders may see it as unfavorable.
    • Diversify Treasury Assets
      • Include assets beyond the native token to provide stability and reduce reliance on a single volatile asset.
      • This diversification can help maintain consistent funding capabilities regardless of market conditions.
    • Focus on Sustainable Use Cases
      • Prioritize funding for perennial, non-speculative use cases that provide long-term value to the ecosystem.
      • Avoid speculative or trend-driven initiatives to ensure the treasury supports meaningful, impactful projects.
Providing Financial and Non-Financial Support
  • Incubation Program (Proposal Co-Design Incubator Proposal Co-Design):
    • Financial and non-financial support can be offered through an incubation program.
    • Start with the simplest, most frictionless version to ensure ease of implementation.
  • Education (Proposal Co-Design Education Proposal Co-Design):
    • Knowledge sharing, knowledge base. what edu materials need to exist to onboard more users

Workshop 2: Governance

The conversation covered a wide range of topics including Ideas for experiments

scroll and governance experiment objectives, sensemaking and deliberation, delegate compensation and participation analysis, potential committees, governance tooling.

Ideas for Experiments
  • Reputation Based Voting
  • Prediction Market
  • Anonymous voting
  • Lottery-based voting
  • Liquidity incentives
Scroll and Governance Experiment Objectives

  • Scroll Objectives:

    • Establish clear goals, outcomes, and metrics before funding governance research or experimentation.
    • Balance high-level, visionary goals (“for everyone everywhere”) with specific, measurable objectives.
    • Examples of measurable goals: delegate participation, voter turnout, and broad, sybil-resistant governance distribution.
    • Enable Ethereum and Web3 to scale effectively across different dimensions, creating a foundation for an on-chain future.
    • Consider the transformative potential of Scroll scaling: how it changes governance, community interaction, and protocol impact.
    • Define what aspects of governance are within scope initially, from community-level governance to protocol-level decision-making.
    • Identify governance pain points and experiment with solutions to address them effectively.
    • Mitigate challenges such as clientelism among delegates and incentivize governance participation through meaningful rewards.
    • Align governance experiments with solving real-world problems.
    • Develop specifics around governance initiatives and experiments in the coming weeks.
    • Labs:
      • Advance the protocol through research, development, engineering, and business development.
      • Ensure Scroll is the best at what it does.
    • Foundation:
      • Begin decentralizing responsibilities into the DAO (e.g., spawning committees).
      • Focus on gradually building robust DAO governance structures.

  • Governance Experimentation Objectives

    • Understand what decentralization into the DAO means and determine how to achieve it effectively.
    • Demonstrate the effectiveness of decentralized governance, both within Scroll DAO and as a model for broader adoption.
    • Provide experiments with a launchpad to secure funding beyond Scroll, proving their value for other DAOs and ecosystems.
Sensemaking and Deliberation
  • Exploring Deliberative Tools and Methods (Proposal Co-Design Deliberation & Sensemaking Proposal Co-Design):
    • Conduct experiments with different tools (including AI and deliberation platforms) to identify the most effective approaches for various contexts.
    • Trial deliberative decision-making tools to refine strategic sensemaking processes.
    • Explore alternatives like citizen assemblies to mitigate delegate clientelism.
    • AI in Deliberation:
      • Use LLMs or other AI tools to help participants better understand the context of discussions and deliberations.
      • Employ AI to enhance contributions to the DAO knowledge graph, making insights more accessible and structured.
      • Address risks like hallucinated outputs from LLMs that could distort or derail deliberations.
  • Preference Signaling & Participant Engagement (Proposal Co-Design Preference Signaling Proposal Co-Design):
    • Implement preference signaling to improve clarity and collective sensemaking in decision-making processes.
    • Explore Futarchy and prediction markets as tools to gauge participant knowledge and involvement.
      • Futarchy isnt well explained enough for people to truly understand
      • However, it can help delegates understand the potential impact of a given proposal, which an help the community understand how the delegates are thinking and the types of proposals they are evaluating
      • Helps bring their thought and deliberation to the surface
  • Tool Usability and RFPs
    • Evaluate tools beyond Polis, which can generate misleading or unintuitive data, and explore complementary, user-friendly alternatives.
    • Consider running a Request for Proposals (RFP) for deliberative tooling projects to bring in innovative solutions.
  • Strategic Deliberation (Proposal Co-Design Strategic Deliberation Proposal Co-Design):
    • Explore what a deliberation process to define/refine strategy can look like
Delegate Compensation and Participation Analysis
  • Understanding Delegate Compensation
    • Conduct a benchmark exercise to determine appropriate compensation and responsibilities, referencing successful DAOs with healthy governance processes.
    • Evaluate whether compensation is needed at this stage and how to decide if/when to implement it.
    • Consider streams as a way to provide ongoing support for active delegates, with conditions like voting on a percentage of proposals or participating in committees.
    • Address potential exploitation by implementing sanctions for non-compliance.
    • Determine who sets stream amounts and ensure fairness and transparency.
  • Strategies to Increase Delegate Engagement
    • Identify inactive delegates and explore ways to encourage their participation.
    • Run public campaigns, such as “Calling all SCR Whales,” and host Twitter Spaces to introduce and engage with delegates.
    • Create a strategy for a dedicated redelegation week/month with clear goals and expected outcomes.
  • Incentivizing Desired Behaviors
    • Define the roles and behaviors to incentivize, such as active governance participation, mentoring new delegates, or contributing to committees.
    • Assign experienced mentors to guide new delegates with personalized support.
    • Use mechanisms like a delegation lottery for verified, contributing delegates based on clear eligibility criteria.
    • Address current technical obstacles to redelegation, potentially funding the development of necessary features.
    • Consider future reward mechanisms for past contributions, such as RetroFunding or Quadratic Funding (QF).
    • Map out what other DAOs are doing in terms of delegate compensation and governance.
    • Interview delegates to understand their perceptions and needs.
  • Training for Delegates (Proposal Co-Design: Training for Delegates Proposal Co-Design):
    • Define a specific training program (or series of trainings) that would be helpful for delegates at Scroll DAO
Potential Committees
  • Governance Committee
    • Form a committee from the delegate pool to establish norms for token distribution, voting protocols, transparency, information disclosure, and decision-making tools.
    • Enable the committee to iterate on these norms as part of ongoing governance experimentation.
  • Code of Conduct Committee
    • Create a committee to establish a code of conduct from the start, fostering long-term order and stability within the governance process.
  • Ethics Committee
    • Focus on promoting human-centric technology and ethical considerations in governance and protocol decisions.
  • Technical Committee
    • Oversee protocol updates, ensure proper implementation, and address technical needs.
    • Address Web3 privacy tooling, security tooling, and incident monitoring to prevent governance attacks.
Governance Tooling
  • Open Source Governance Tooling
    • Prioritize funding for open-source governance tools tailored to immediate needs.
    • Align this effort with a broader public goods funding strategy in the future.
  • Exploration and Iteration
    • Balance priorities between committee work and Scroll-specific experiments, considering the budget’s smaller size.
    • Track learnings (“gold”) uncovered during these processes to inform future improvements.
    • Explore long-term sustainability issues, ensuring governance remains adaptable and robust.
  • Collusion Prevention
    • Establish processes to detect and mitigate collusion, safeguarding fair and transparent governance.

Workshop 3: Community

The conversation primarily centered on local meetups and hubs, exploring ways to connect various activities and identifying if we should focus on specific industries within these communities. Secondarily, the topic of potential working groups came up.

On the Ground Presence
  • Proposal Co-Design: Local Nodes (on the ground presence) Proposal Co-Design
  • Defining a Hub
    • A hub doesn’t have to mean physical infrastructure like office space.
    • It could include:
      • Consistent meetups.
      • Connections with local universities and startups.
      • Organizing hackathons.
      • Educational efforts.
    • Invest in people rather than physical spaces.
    • Emphasize consistent community presence over permanent property.
    • Use guerrilla tactics to build community by hiring regional representatives to grow networks locally.
    • Enable people to meet and organize, rather than fully sponsoring physical hubs.
  • Pathways for Onboarding and Growth
    • Establish a structured pathway for onboarding and fostering growth.
    • Clearly define how contributors can get involved through working groups with concrete roles.
    • Build industry-focused communities rather than a generalist Web3 approach.
    • Simply funding hackathons doesn’t guarantee growth.
    • We need clear metrics to measure their impact and reach before committing resources.
    • However, the DAO should still connect with smaller, local communities as part of its strategy.
  • Cultural and Regional Alignment
    • Recognize the challenge of balancing uniform measures (e.g., “X meetups = Y dev activity”) with differing cultural norms across regions.
    • Conduct regional research to align strategies with local cultures (e.g., hackathons may work in one region but not another).
    • Define desired outcomes (e.g., apps deployed) and align these with regions best suited for the task.
  • Localized Frameworks
    • Develop frameworks that account for cultural and regional differences:
      • In Asia, account for language diversity and preferences for leadership (e.g., Solana’s model).
      • Offer a general Scroll handbook that is adjustable for local use cases.
    • Provide guidelines for setting up local initiatives, even in regions with little familiarity (e.g., “take photos, tweet”).
    • Implement a “train the trainer” model to empower local leaders with the skills and resources to represent Scroll.
    • Develop resources like an Ethereum Meetup Support Program tailored to Scroll’s context.
    • Establish a balance between centralized support and decentralized execution.
    • Identify who within the Scroll community is in a region and understand what they want to pursue.
    • Ensure materials and resources are provided in the right (local) language for hackathons, hacker houses, conferences, etc.
    • Study successful projects in specific areas and analyze their strategies.
    • At meetups, focus on showcasing projects built on Scroll, not just Scroll itself.
    • Encourage hands-on engagement with tools rather than abstract discussions.
  • Learning and Experimentation
    • Leverage learnings from other local community experiments to help people access effective practices.
    • Provide open-source documentation for best practices, tailored to specific areas.
    • Use examples like open-sourced meetups (e.g., Base’s model) to guide local initiatives.
  • Key Goals
    • Enable local leaders to contribute back to the DAO while supporting their initiatives.
    • Create scalable, decentralized systems that adapt to regional contexts without sacrificing consistency.
  • Practical Applications
    • Provide resources that are immediately actionable for participants (e.g., Speedrun Ethereum, tailored specifically for lawyers to understand smart-contract escrow).
    • Create customizable, context-specific content to suit different groups and regions.
    • Highlight that deploying on Scroll offers a platform where projects gain visibility and community-driven coverage.
    • Emphasize the ecosystem’s benefits for builders and the “flywheel effect” of project success.
  • Scalability and Feedback
    • Relate sizable investments to ROI by ensuring alignment with Scroll’s goals and realistic infrastructure.
    • Prioritize accountability by focusing on infrastructure that meets both internal objectives and community needs.
    • Create scalable local community clusters or nodes that inform DAO-wide strategy.
    • Enable feedback loops for collaboration between these nodes.
    • Use a matrix approach to assess coaching needs in specific regions and accommodate local adaptations.
    • Document open-source best practices for broader application and determine priority regions for expansion.
  • Industries for Initial Community Development
    • Focusing on specific industries can help tailor and translate Scroll’s base templates into meaningful, region-specific strategies.
    • A shortlist of 4-6 industries could guide initial efforts and enable experiments across different regions to assess impact and scalability.
    • Potential areas for customization include computer science/engineering, legal/regulatory, humanities, and design/UX/UI.
    • While developers are a key talent pool, framing initiatives around industries (e.g., MedTech) keeps efforts more tangible and accessible to diverse participants.
    • Meetups can be used to teach about Scroll, emphasizing Web3 applications beyond DeFi, while contextualizing Web3’s local impact and identifying key messaging strategies by understanding regional priorities and pain points.
    • Scroll should actively identify and engage with local institutions and organizations in specific areas that have an interest in blockchain technology.
Potential Working Groups
  • Working Group Structure and Organization
    • Smaller groups, such as working groups, can be more effective than larger groups, which often face coordination challenges.
    • Clearly defined roles and responsibilities are essential to ensure accountability (e.g., determining who maintains group activity).
    • A shared communication channel and recurring calls foster collaboration and continuity.
    • Adding some form of compensation can make participation more attractive and sustainable.
    • Potential Starting Points
      • Delegate Training Working Group: Focuses on equipping delegates with key skills and understanding.
      • General Culture Committee: Defines and promotes cultural norms across the DAO.
  • Delegate Training and Alignment (Proposal Co-Design Training for Delegates Proposal Co-Design)
    • Delegate training can help by:
      • Avoiding conflicts of interest and promoting collective best interests.
      • Teaching proposal writing, codes of conduct, and outlining consequences for not meeting standards.
      • Introducing foundational elements of governance and DAO principles.
    • Onboarding Programs
      • A delegate/governance onboarding program could:
        • Align delegates with the DAO’s values and expectations.
        • Use an “onboarding buddies” system to help new delegates learn best practices.
        • Integrate on-chain activities to strengthen technical competence.
      • The CCC (Culture and Community Committee) could support onboarding by providing documented resources and clear learning pathways.
      • Address fundamental questions about the roles of delegates.
        • Use the metaphor of delegates as decentralized board members.
        • Establish clear expectations for delegates before starting training.
        • Focus on helping delegates set and track strategic direction effectively.
      • Identify any additional trainings delegates may want or need.
        • Emphasize base-level expectations such as sustainable governance and transparency.
        • Teach skills for giving and receiving constructive criticism.
        • Provide training in conflict resolution.
        • Introduce principles of good decision-making and strategies to avoid bias.
        • Offer classes, calls, or lectures with experts in Web3 governance from other projects.
        • Develop a training program with modules on decentralized governance, proposal analysis, effective communication, and conflict management.
        • Incorporate elements of business strategy into delegate education.

For full details, you can access the Miro board. Additionally, next steps can be found in the Co-Creation Cycle (CCC) Check-In Post. Thanks for being a part of the conversation!

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