Issue Discussion Call# 4: Core Unit and Facilitator Offboarding

--- tags: Issue Discussion Call --- # Issue Discussion Call# 4: Core Unit and Facilitator Offboarding ## Agenda - [00:08](https://youtu.be/Mkbf6xD6BzM?t=8): Introduction with Thomas Flitter - [03:02](https://youtu.be/Mkbf6xD6BzM?t=182): Offboarding - [7:04](https://youtu.be/Mkbf6xD6BzM?t=424): Policies and Concerns - [12:25](https://youtu.be/Mkbf6xD6BzM?t=745): Addressing Offboarding Concerns - [16:22](https://youtu.be/Mkbf6xD6BzM?t=982): Submitting an Offboard Proposal - [21:32](https://youtu.be/Mkbf6xD6BzM?t=1292): Offboarding Qualifications - [31:37](https://youtu.be/Mkbf6xD6BzM?t=1897): Steps for Improvement - [35:03](https://youtu.be/Mkbf6xD6BzM?t=2103): Internal Review Committee - [41:47](https://youtu.be/Mkbf6xD6BzM?t=2507): Core Unit Succession Plans - [1:01:20](https://youtu.be/Mkbf6xD6BzM?t=3680): Open Discussion ## Video <https://youtu.be/Mkbf6xD6BzM> ## Introduction ### Thomas Flitter #### Agenda and Preamble [00:00](https://youtu.be/Mkbf6xD6BzM) - Welcome to the Issue Discussion Call number four. Our topic today is facilitator and Core Unit offboarding. My name is Thomas Flitter, engagement lead for Governance Communications. Welcome, everyone. We want to focus on posing good questions about a very important topic. Our associated call notes are also linked to the Zoom call. I hope everyone can see the slides. ## Offboarding ### Thomas Flitter [01:12](https://youtu.be/Mkbf6xD6BzM?t=72) ![Agenda](https://i.imgur.com/IGG57pb.png) - The Issue Discussion Call is about the facilitator and Core Unit offboarding policy. I want to hone in on some of the policies we have. We will look at some of the recent offboarding events for today's agenda. We will go through and look at what our policies are. Also, what are some of the concerns that have come up in recent times with a few voluntary and involuntary offboarding events? We will go through questions on the slides and want this to be a friendly, open discussion with everyone to chime in. Many folks have experienced these offboarding events, and I want to look at some of the ideas we could generate to help improve the offboarding process. What are your thoughts? What ideas can we bring to the table to improve this process, make a better experience, grow Maker policies and make them stronger? #### Recent Offboarding Events [03:02 - Thomas Flitter](https://youtu.be/Mkbf6xD6BzM?t=182) ![What key offboarding events led to this discussion?](https://i.imgur.com/I7g96oy.png) - Briefly, what are some of the key offboarding events that have led to the discussion today? We have three events that we are looking at in particular. It is important to understand that we have Involuntary and Voluntary Facilitator Offboarding and a Core Unit Offboarding. The Core Unit Offboarding event opened our eyes to opportunities to examine our policies for improvement in the next offboarding event. - The three events that we will highlight briefly: RWF, an Involuntary Facilitator Offboarding, which ended up being a Voluntary Offboarding event because of the discussion between Rune and Seb. We found common ground with bringing on Will as a facilitator, but it started with Rune and Seb. That got worked out, but it was not optimal offboarding. We will talk in more depth during our examples. - The second one was DUX. It was a Voluntary Facilitator Offboarding. Philip wanted to voluntarily offboard, and he had a succession plan. That event went as smoothly as possible. It did not open up a lot of public scrutinies or much back and forth. That process went up well. - The third one is the CU facilitator and budget being removed. There were a lot of public scrutinies on the forum back and forth, and we believe there could be some opportunities where we could do a better job the next time this event happens. - We want to dig into offboarding policies, the current policies are being looked at in the amendment, the offboarding of facilitators, the fallback decision process, adding and modifying a CU budget, and removing the CU. Those are the four sections in the amendment that we are looking at, and proposing some new language in each of those. There are questions about each of those policies. Each of those policies is our opinion; it is not a suggestion. They are thoughts from the community feedback. They are open-ended questions about what qualified for and offboarding and some of the processes we go through. Our goal is to tighten up these policies to make a better experience with Maker. #### Policies and Concerns [7:04](https://youtu.be/Mkbf6xD6BzM?t=424) ![Current offboarding policies](https://i.imgur.com/eYmfaaG.png) - I wanted to list here the many questions raised by the community. What are the concerns? What are we listening to? When we do these Issue Discussion calls, we listen to the forum. We look at the votes, and Artem pulls stuff together to examine. This seems to be a big concern for us. How do we address it? How do we open this up to get input from the community? From our delegates and CUs? - Moreover, here are the questions that we have come up with. One question is: who can offboard? In particular, some examples that we have are from outside CUs, outside delegates, and maybe were someone’s Maker holder. Does that qualify someone to offboard? Is it somebody that is a community member? Is it okay for someone to come in and say: “this person is not doing a good job; here is why." That leads us to the second question: what qualifies for an offboard? The current policies with the facilitator? Why do you think this facilitator should be offboarded? It is open-ended. - Once that happens, what about the handling of the offboard process? Involuntary offboarding is disruptive. It has brought light to some improvement opportunities to make it a better experience. - The budget removal process is not just about the facilitator when we look at the CU being removed. We want to bring the vote offboard or get the budget offline. Those things have to be in combination for a CU. The interesting thing about the CU offboarding was that it was a joint vote. It was a vote for the facilitator and the budget. The review process was not legitimate. Did we do an ample job making sure that there was a succession plan that all these things fit into place? What about the team members? When we asked about the offboarding facilitators, what impacts other CU? [10:06](https://youtu.be/Mkbf6xD6BzM?t=606) - Maybe there is a member on that team that we have not yet vetted. Have we vetted all the team members? Are we looking at a contributor that may be doing a really good job? Is the facilitator not doing a good job when we line that up? What about the other team members and assets that they bring? - How do we talk to them and discuss opportunities within Maker and keep that as a different matter? One of the things that struck me, especially with the most recent event, was that the defiant came to us with an article they wrote. I know David, Paper, delegates, and others chimed in. - Their article asked will there be tougher governance coming? I want to pose this question. I am leading off and thinking about the future; is the media handling its duties? We have good relationships with some folks, but when they ask about our governance policies or policies in general or offboarding, can we better handle the media? - Did we learn from the offboarding? As a suggestion at a forum discussion, what about making it a better process? Do we conduct exit interviews or feedback? Are we placing a talent group in a situation to learn about our onboarding process? The results may vary, but we could talk about making that experience better. How do we make the offboarding experience better by listening? Those are some of the concerns that we listened to and read. #### Addressing Offboarding Concerns [12:25](https://youtu.be/Mkbf6xD6BzM?t=745) ![Offboarding Concerns](https://i.imgur.com/PpJsmJi.png) - Thomas Flitter: Does anybody have anything to add? I hope these seem like concerns that you have read or heard about. I wanted to get folks' thoughts on the current offboarding concerns that we have out there right now. - Prose11: We currently do not have an incentive mechanism for a smooth transition, so we rely on the good nature of the people being involuntary offboarded to continue the work and not lose our investment. Especially a firing, it is hard to know how people will react when their livelihood is threatened. Between the CU, we control a lot of critical infrastructures. For me, one major milestone for a good offboarding process will have something in place that ensures that people are incentivized to cut ties. - That was one of the scenarios I thought about as a team member: how would I feel? I will use an example: what if David was offboarded? What about Artem, myself, and all the contributors? What effects does that CU being offboarded have on others? We had to work on logistics, and we have ironed them out; it was a challenge for our group. We had to consider work internally, and it stretched us a bit from GovComms because certain things had to get cleared up. David had to work diligently to ensure that those things were taken care of. - We had some recent activities to address concerns. The stuff we pulled from David led to a great discussion at our GNR call recently. We have an amendment out, and the link is out there for comment; I believe folks still have made comments about what is needed for the latest CU offboarding and today's Issue Discussion Call. The first question is, should there be limitations on who can submit an offboarding proposal? The nature of our business is not a traditional company, where you have a boss saying: my subordinate is not doing a good job. The question there is, should there be limitations? Should this be limited to the employees of the MakerDAO, and is it external? These involuntary offboarding came from external community members. ##### Should there be limitations on who can submit an offboarding proposal? [16:22](https://youtu.be/Mkbf6xD6BzM?t=982) - David Utrobin: A key aspect of the protocol we should aim to keep is MakerDAO’s openness and permission lessness around its operations and proposal processes. There should be limitations for specific proposal types, for example, a budget. Anybody can propose the complete removal of a budget, but only the facilitator should modify their budget. Not everyone should be able and modify some random team’s budget. If somebody seeks to offboard a CU completely, they could do a proposal removal budget. Little things like that make sense but are they Maker holders? Or are they some other unknown stakeholder group? What is important is the proposal’s substance rather than who is proposing it. Many people in the Maker community share this value. - Prose11: I would second that from a risk of the governance side, the more you gatekeep proposals, the further you get away from debating its merits. If so, there is greater social capital in who is allowed to make proposals and whose proposals generally go through. When anyone can propose, you understand the proposition and its purpose. - Thomas Flitter: There is a catalyst for this. Let us say an individual with no MakerDAO experience becomes a forum member. He then puts the signal request out. This leads to the question of oversight. Does it make sense? Have we researched this person if we do not know them? This allows us to confirm the legitimacy of the request. Maybe he is not a CU or a delegate, but he has been in the forums. I just wanted to pose that to get ideas. - David Utrobin: There are two aspects. Firstly, should we look into who posts? To some degree, there may be value to that. Are they a troll? Ultimately, you cannot go on a witch hunt. If they are a pseudo-anonymous individual, do you want to spend resources and time to figure out who they are? Or do you want to fall back on the original idea of just relying on the proposal’s substance? Then, for the actual substance of the proposal, we have mechanisms in place. We have MIP editors who determine if you are following the template correctly. - Secondly, are you following the component correctly? Although you may have followed the template, you may not have listed all the required components. Thus, a quality check needs to happen on the MIP editor side. I do not know if that is part of the process. The other piece stresses the importance of giving the proposal person a chance to voice their rebuttal. Not everyone is trained in communications, but facilitators handling those rebuttals is a key component. A facilitator should know how to rebuttal these types of proposals. [20:37](https://youtu.be/Mkbf6xD6BzM?t=1237) - LongForWisdom: If we want to ensure quality for proposals, we should create rules around what the proposal should look like, what the template should be, what it needs to include rather than creating rules over who is allowed to create proposals. The idea should be that anyone can do it, but they need to follow guidelines correctly. One outcome of our current process is its lack of explicability and detail. It is not a good idea to make it about the proposal person rather the actual proposition. ##### What qualifies for offboarding? [21:32](https://youtu.be/Mkbf6xD6BzM?t=1292) ![What qualifies for offboarding](https://i.imgur.com/sSyw4RL.png) - Thomas Flitter: That leads to a couple of additional questions. One key question is what qualifies for offboarding. We are doing good with the amendment, but the current policy was an open-ended question. If I am not mistaken, why do you want to do this? We lack guidance on stating its qualifiers. The new amendment does an excellent job asking about deliverables so far in the comments. What are the implicit deliverables? Is there a possible remedy for this? - If we are transitioning from an open-ended to a more concise line of questions, what does that require for the CU if it asks in the explicit deliverables, “in your mandate, you will do X, Y, and Z. Have you held to that?” All the Core Units prepare for the amendment. I just looked at the MIP mandate for RFW. I just went to the forum, and it said Sebastian is still the facilitator. I go into the mandate, and it says, we will do this, we will do that. - Are we prepared to give the explicit deliverables? Explicitly means to list the CU’s specifically declared deliverables and responsibilities mandate. I want your thoughts on this new amendment proposal; what does that call the Core Unit? Are we prepared to say that the following offboarding proposal has been made? Now, we need to look at factors and the review process. What does that look like in requirements? The CU is already prepared and not for nothing - could we ask about the possible remedies for these CUs? [24:11](https://youtu.be/Mkbf6xD6BzM?t=1451) - David Utrobin: How do we objectively judge a CU facilitator by the performance? There are two sides. The first is to set up a mandate, roadmap, or project depending on your transparency about the sands shifting under your feet. How have your deliverables changed in the time between proposal ratification and today? It is tough to set them in stone reliably. If someone states that you are not filling your mandate perfectly as a facilitator, we need a proper response. This response could be “we dropped this project because of X, Y, and Z context” or “we expanded to this new project, that was not on our original mandate.” It would help provide context on your CU’s performance. The issue boils down to answering criticisms of our perceived shortcomings. Objectivity is problematic because it requires context. There is nuance. Things may change depending on the team. - Artem Gordon: How do we identify/quantify a CU or facilitator threshold, such as missing deliverables or mandate incompletion? Different deliverables have different effects. For example, there is a clear difference between incompletion of a small deliverable (like a video) and incompletion of a large deliverable (like a financial report). How do we judge a threshold for what should be included in an offboarding? - David Utrobin: It is not specific to the deliverable. An amendment should focus on patterns of deliverables, regardless of size. You do not want to find single instances of poor performance. However, you should focus more on patterns of consistent underperformance and address those rather than two or three specific deliverables. - Prose11: I am concerned about making it entirely about deliverables as it potentially caps potential reasons for offboarding. Many legitimate reasons may not be related to the mandates themselves, like ethical concerns. If someone does something unethical, you probably want to offboard them as soon as possible. There is a social layer too. What if CU delivers on everything they said, but everyone hates working with them? What if they are unpleasant and terrible to work with? There are many reasons to get rid of someone, so you must be careful when putting in legislation-like requirements. People’s motivation for offboarding may differ from what you had in mind when drafting. - Thomas Flitter: You make an excellent point. That was my third question: should we fatter an emergency offboarding? A facilitator (or anyone) can do something that deems necessary for their dismissal. How do we find emergency offboarding over theft or other high severity issues? Are we prepared for something like that? - I read an article recently from another DAO. Someone identified their treasurer as the thief who stole from their DAO. Resultantly, they did an emergency offboarding. I cannot remember the article, but the treasurer was quickly offboarded. It was a quick vote with a two-day turnaround. We should consider these cases. In traditional companies, you get placed on probation if you do not do well. They try to work with you and correct those work issues. However, there are certain situations where a particular person is a real sore to the company. What if that happens? How do we address an emergency offboarding for severe things? [29:56](https://youtu.be/Mkbf6xD6BzM?t=1795) - David Utrobin: There should be recommendations for what to include in a justification, whether it be underperformance, a lack of deliverables, and unethical action. Having it as a hard requirement would not work. There is a mix between subjective and objective. You could objectively say: "this person did something morally wrong; should the whole Core Unit suffer for it? Or should they be offboarded?" It is challenging because there is no central administrative control over CU. What happens when a CU with a single facilitator has access to an operational wallet and does something unethical? To an extent, that is a risk that the DAO takes. They could cut ties, but of course, it is very situational. - Thomas Flitter: The new amendment points out these explicit and implicit deliberates. We need to continue to marinate and think about the direction and those. ##### What steps would help to avoid involuntary offboarding? [31:37](https://youtu.be/Mkbf6xD6BzM?t=1897) - Thomas Flitter: What steps would help avoid involuntary offboarding? One of the examples we used was voluntary offboarding for DUX. The process was clean. It states: "I have a succession plan, and I believe this person qualifies. He has been around MakerDAO, and we would like to submit this proposal". However, other offboarding faced much public scrutiny and discussion. Could we have avoided that with an administrator that agreed to take us a step back? That was a common theme I read. If different proposals are made, can we take a step back to discuss it internally to seek a more private offboarding? I want to get thoughts on that because the forum discussions showed many grievances about the public offboarding of Content Production. Should it be an option to have administrative oversight pulling this back? - David Utrobin: This will sometimes be utterly unavoidable because anybody can submit a proposal. Somebody could post a proposal, and then it becomes a question for the public. When the proposal comes from an internal stakeholder more ingrained in the community, they should not take this to the extreme. Doing this publicly impacts relations between both the brand and the individuals involved. If you want to address a performance or ethical concern, you should go to the person or team first—the other stakeholders' DAO to get buy-in. If a person wants to post this, they should reach out to the recognized delegates, explain their reasons, and see if they agree or disagree. To an extent, it will be a cultural process (rather than a formal process) in avoiding nasty public involuntary offboarding. ##### Would the offboarding process improve with an internal review committee? [35:03](https://youtu.be/Mkbf6xD6BzM?t=2103) - Thomas Flitter: A vital question leads into the following slide. I want to lead that into how we can improve the offboarding process. We had an internal review committee. Some conversations have come up, and Mariano said on the GNR call: could there be an internal review committee that helps process the offboarding request? Identify interior solutions and avoid unnecessary volunteer actions? That has been something discussed or at least brought up. Does anybody have any thoughts on that? Maybe we should? Or perhaps we do not need a review committee, a little more oversight, or administration on handling these types of events? How would that look? How would that be within a CU? Would that be an individual that wants that offboard and request comes up? Then they took the ball and rolled with it; they tried to work through solutions. - Prose11: There are centralization risks there. Whether one person or a team, you get a whole set of gatekeepers when you require an internal review. However, I think you can still set it up and get valuable feedback from someone; you could have a CU that wants to provide input based on CU performance that does not have special permissions. That could be very valuable. Thanks to Lenka, I attended a conflict resolution speed dating for DAO the other day. It was great to hear that all these conflict mediators are willing and want to work in the Web3 space. There are outside people you can utilize. However, a gatekeeper function (compared to a volunteer function) brings considerable risk to the organization, particularly its decentralization. - David Utrobin: To respond to that, would that be like an assessment and a public report open to scrutiny? Maybe they do not have the authority, but they do an independent assessment. There is the option of are they their CU? In which case, perhaps they are subject to centralized influence? Or can it be a committee of various CUs, like Strategic Finance, SES, and GovComms, evaluate CU issues' different aspects in multiple cases? That would preserve the decentralization and not act as gatekeepers but as independent assessors. - Thomas Flitter: That was the idea: looking at our experiences and saying: "We have an independent person with processes independent from the Core Unit. This person gathers the request, reviews, and information. Now, what steps do we take?" They are someone who tries to avoid involuntary offboarding and find solutions. In some regards, this is like an HR thought. We need someone to process the data. It is not addressed necessarily in the amendment or the current policy, but it popped up in a couple of conversations. [39:50](https://youtu.be/Mkbf6xD6BzM?t=2390) - David Utrobin: For context, this does not happen often. It could be settled if it happens - I do not think it should be a consistent CU. If so, it should be a small part of their mandate. - Thomas Flitter: We have some delegates on the call and other folks who have seen these processes. Is any internal review committee of interest? Just curious. - Kianga: I like this idea very much. To your point, David, maybe committees assembled per incident. If you avoid a conflict of interest, you can pick someone from the delegate or this CU to put together that report in a public fashion. This would be valuable to consider. ##### What is the succession plan for team members and contributors of an offboarded CU? [41:47](https://youtu.be/Mkbf6xD6BzM?t=2507) - Thomas Flitter: It has potential for future discussion. We want to step back and move on to the next question unless there are additional comments. One of the things that struck us is that we have talked about the amendment for succession plans and all the details. If we are going to offboard a facilitator, we will need to identify the methods of a succession plan. Enter a facilitator to help with the budget and a lot of the logistical work needed, but also something to consider. What is the succession plan, not just for the facilitator? What about the team members and contributors of an offboarded CU? For example, if we look at the critical needs of the Content Production CU. When we got a team of people, do they qualify to be offboarded? Is this such a plan for a team member who may be doing an excellent job and now they do not have a choice? - I felt personal about this. I have interacted with many of the Content Production folks who helped our team on certain projects. I remember this quote - one of the comments was: "we think you are valuable to the DAO. Now that your CU is offboarded, you can reapply to maybe a new CU, or we can find a solution for you." What does that look like? How do we attend to positive team members that have done well? This has not been addressed. Sometimes, I fear if our CU is offboarded. What would I do? How would we look at the other team members? Do we feel there should be a succession plan that tends to the contributors? I say that in light of the recent Content Production offboarding. [44:48](https://youtu.be/Mkbf6xD6BzM?t=2688) - David Utrobin: There should be an essential distinction between offboarding a facilitator and a CU. When you are offboarding a facilitator, you recognize the fundamental work of the CU is valid and understand there might be a lot of dependencies. The CU might be tied to a key roadmap item, and maybe 90 percent of the CU is great. It is only the facilitator that has issues. The other case is that we, as stakeholders think the entire CU's work mandate is not valuable enough to keep around, so we are cutting the team. - It is important to retain as many relationships as possible, not burn bridges, and give people second chances. There are many resources put into onboarding a given individual to MakerDAO. There is a huge learning curve. People who are talented and end up sticking around are very valuable. It is important to route them to other opportunities of the DAO at other teams. My whole point is that there should be a strong distinction between those two cases. - One of my old mentors taught me that a good leader always trains somebody to fill their shoes because you never know when you will go. That applies to CUs with very fundamental mandates of work. A great example is GovAlpha. GovAlpha's goal is to have three governance facilitators. The reason for that is redundancy and security for the protocol. They are a fundamental key piece of the operations of MakerDAO. For any CU with that kind of designation, succession is important. So, you need to ensure a prodigy with your dependencies and key things listed somewhere. If you are a key CU, you want to future-proof MakerDAO by not letting it depend on that is all in your head. That is a judgment that each individual must make. - Thomas Flitter: When we are talking about a succession plan for a facilitator, do we give enough time to wind down? If we offboarded, for example, GovAlpha, many things need to be considered. In the amendment, it is suggested two weeks. The period may need to be longer than that. We should consider that the winding down period may take a long time and impact many different CUs. - That is primarily a communications challenge because each CU has different requirements. Some CUs can wind down in two weeks, and others might need three months. As Long mentions in the chat, GovALpha keeps three months of a continuity emergency fund. I think GovComms does the same thing. Transition periods are a function of the competency of communication from facilitators. [50:18](https://youtu.be/Mkbf6xD6BzM?t=3018) - Thomas Flitter: The next question is about media. We held well with the defiant and the comments made. We had several delegates and CUs members making comments. It was fair to a degree and balanced. But this is going to happen again. We have some good relations with the media. Should those media inquiries be more centralized? We could have a true offboarding or official statement for Maker. Part of what we do in GovComms is reaching out and touching base with the media. We did an excellent job with this last one. But it will happen again, and it may be more severe and complicated. Even with some of the comments made in the article, I wanted to get quick thoughts on whether we better reach the media? We may wish to make an official or legal statement. We will always have to communicate with the media. Have we done a good enough job, a satisfactory job in what we did? How do we see that in the future? I want to get quick thoughts on handling the media or any concerns. If we are doing great, then alright, check the box. But it lingers in my mind, especially in our team and maybe in others. [52:30](https://youtu.be/Mkbf6xD6BzM?t=3150) - Kianga: Is there a Press Relations person or function? There is value in someone trained in that. Somebody that we could publicly say. Not that anyone could put forth a statement on behalf of MakerDAO because that is problematic, but someone whose job is to be on top of stories that break and the media know they can go to. And that person can help the media understand what MakerDAO is and who is who, so at least the press is better informed of context if they want to pick a comment from someone on the forum. They may not understand the concept that this is a decentralized community. It is valuable to have a trained person be part of a Core Team that can be a designated go-to but not someone who could put out a statement on behalf of the DAO. - David: Originally, when GovComms was proposed, part of our mandate was media relations support. It was a very reactive model because we had access to managing our stakeholder database. We would provide a point person for any incoming media requests and route them to the subject matter expert or person involved in whatever breaking story. We did not intend to do press releases or anything like that. While we proposed this, Content Production was proposing a more proactive media relations position they were hiring for, right before the offboarding. They would do a lot more proactive stuff, not necessarily on breaking news, but it was a mix of marketing PR rather than reactive real public relations crisis management style PR. - With the departure of marketing, we put up an informal poll as part of one of our previous bi-weekly updates from our team. We have been writing about what we think press releases can do at MakerDAO, whether they are a good idea, in what situations would they be appropriate. We are considering hiring a full-time Press Relations person for the things you mentioned, Kianga. The signal seems to be strong that the DAO would like this. So, we will be building it into our following budget proposal. But for now, we take incoming requests and put them in the forum to a dedicated media inquiry section where only a specified layer and above of community can answer. And we do our best to put them in touch with the people involved in the breaking story and not just answer on their behalf. We think of ourselves more like a router than anything because we are in a decentralized community, a DAO. [56:17](https://youtu.be/Mkbf6xD6BzM?t=3377) - Thomas Flitter: This is the last question in the series. How can we make offboarding a more positive experience? Is this something that we want to look at and implement exit interviews or feedback surveys or something that we can initiate to learn more about how that last process went? Does that lead us into some discussions that might not be favorable? Probably. But it also could be a positive experience where we listen to the folks that have been offboarded and learn from their experiences. - I did not know if anyone had anything else. Maybe they wanted to add to how this could be a more positive experience. I think it is something that Talent will be looking at because when we have the offboarding situations, they will also be very responsible for onboarding new talent. It puts them at a cross here, having to answer to many of these possible negative connotations of the DAO. When you have an offboard, the next person says, we are trying to onboard talent; what happened here? - Posing the question how do we make this a more positive experience, does that include some of these things with feedback surveys or exit interviews. It is a thought I want to bring to the group here as we wrap up. Any thought on the offboarding experience to make that a little more positive? Because it seems right now that the tone is set a little negative to a degree. [58:28](https://youtu.be/Mkbf6xD6BzM?t=3508) - David Utrobin: People should understand that it is cultural. MakerDAO has focused on the issue and not the person in many cases. But when it is the person at fault, trying to go as non-public as you can to prioritize voluntariness is key. Saving faces is very important for people. You do not want to be publicly disgraced because you took on a role that might have been too much for you. Ultimately you are still a smart person with a great work ethic, and you just were not suitable for that role at the time. It is very situational. In general, it should focus more on preventing its publicity as much as possible when it is not necessary. That is the best thing you can do. - Then, people will be willing to do exit interviews and graceful transitions in combination with a severance package, an incentive, or a lead-off period. All these things will make the experience significantly less negative. Our goal should be to extract the lessons we could learn, retain the talent, and make as little controversy as possible. Ultimately, when somebody or a CU is being offboarded, it is a case of the DAO trying to better itself. The DAO identifies a problem deals with it. The organization is seeking to get better is a positive thing. How do we salvage as much value from that as possible? How do we retain the talent? How do we help people save face? - Thomas Flitter: Those are excellent points. Maybe on the outside looking in, they say: Let us highlight that we are trying to better our company and what we have done. We have gone through and provided opportunities, provided severance packages, we have done all the right things. We want you to know that. It is not something we just cut ties with someone and did not do the right thing. ## Open Discussion [1:01:20](https://youtu.be/Mkbf6xD6BzM?t=3680) - Thomas Flitter: We are out of time. We covered a lot today. There were many questions. We will have this information out soon. I wanted to ask for a quick open discussion. Are there any other thoughts? [1:01:55](https://youtu.be/Mkbf6xD6BzM?t=3715) - Prose11: As a DAO, we learn from experience. The first time we do something, it is rarely pretty. Hopefully, after this becomes a little less raw, some Content people might be willing to share what it was like on there and where they think it could be improved. That would be super beneficial to us. But even without that participation, we still have a good handle on many things that could be better. Do not be afraid to iterate. The next version does not have to be perfect; it just has to be better. [1:02:35](https://youtu.be/Mkbf6xD6BzM?t=3755) - Thomas Flitter: I want to remind everyone that in the call notes, we have the links to all of the information here today, the forum conversations, the defiant article, and the amendment. Please go visit it. Go take a look at the amendment and make the comments. This is such a great opportunity for us. - I appreciate everybody's time joining us. I hope you enjoyed today's session. We will look forward to the next session. I believe it is tentatively for March 16th. The issue is to be determined. Again, thank you so much for your time. We appreciate it. Take care. ## Credits - Kunfu-po produced this summary. - Andrea Suarez produced this summary. - Gala produced this summary. - Everyone who spoke and presented on the call, listed in the headers.