In January, RabbitHole launched v0 of our metagovernance pod (the MGP), to empower our community members to actively participate in the governance of our partner protocols. Over the past 12 weeks, our contributors have absolutely blown us away with their work. We’ve executed over 75 votes, voting in a way that represents RabbitHole’s values, amplifies the voice of everyday users, and promotes the sustainability of our partners.

Accomplishments and Contributions

v0 was an experiment to test our community’s interest in governance and the ability for critical strategic initiatives to be led by our community. v0 was an MVP in every sense (nobody would argue that Notion + Discord polls are the optimal governance stack) but in spite of these limitations, our contributors were able to provide enormous value to our community and throughout the broader web3 ecosystem.

Here is a brief sample of what our contributors accomplished:

• 89 voting recommendations (for reference, our target was 20 votes executed in v0)
• @rathermercurial created a Gitbook archive to open source our work
• @hzlkmp.eth created a tiering criteria to streamline governance processes for proposals of different importance levels
• @adamjmdawson created this radar chart to visualize the inherent trade-offs in governance proposals
• @0xCadena and @plaintextbread created The Governance Library to highlight the latest and greatest content covering all things protocol governance, metagovernance, and daos
• We hosted 7 Protocol Spotlights to help our broader community understand how to engage in protocol governance (shout out to she256 who co-hosted Compound with us and will co-host Uniswap in the near future.) Stay tuned for a future Spotlight with The Graph as well!

We also created a supportive and collaborative culture in which to explore protocol governance together (see more here.) We’ve begun to develop a repeatable governance process with documented workflows so we can share and scale our work. As we continue advocating for better governance processes, we hope to push for good governance practices across the industry.

Challenges and Learnings

We are grateful that leaders from Index Coop and Reverie shared their knowledge with us. In the spirit of collectively learning by doing, we’ve decided to share some of the things we learned in v0 with the community.

• The workload is heavy! Engaging in forums, community calls, and keeping track of active proposals requires consistent dedication.
• The variance of proposals/workload is high and required Protocol Specialists to step in and pick up additional workloads during heavy proposal weeks. Variance in the governance activity between protocols is high, making it challenging to standardize responsibilities across contributors.
• Governance proposals require a high degree of context. Explaining that context for the education of the broader community is not easy.
• Some proposals require technical expertise. In v1, we’d love to add a Technical Protocol Specialist to the pod to evaluate on-chain proposals of a technical nature.
• We learned a lot of hard lessons about governance wallet management.
• We now understand the importance of maximum transparency between the core team and contributors and allowing the pod to be involved in any decision making that will impact the pod.
• Since contributors led this initiative from the start, there were no precedents for how RabbitHole should vote and/or how our votes would be interpreted.
• There is a natural tendency towards group think / default voting towards a recommendation/consensus and we had to actively work to resist these instincts.
• The lack of clarity around roles and deliverables can be a roadblock for potential contributors (esp. those of lesser means, non-men, and non-English native speakers). Defining roles, responsibilities, and expectations upfront is a big focus for v1.
• Juggling working ON the pod and working IN the pod is challenging/time consuming and should be split into distinct roles.

Join us for v1!

We’re just getting started and we’re excited about taking it to the next level in v1. Some key areas of focus include launching Policy and Research & Experiments Workstreams, asking for delegation to amplify the impact of our voting activity, and deepening our governance engagement with partner protocols.

Whether you’re just starting out and would like to learn more about protocol governance or are already up to speed and eager to help to shape the future of metagovernance, join us for v1! You can find additional details about the upcoming v1 pod launch in the #rh-metagovernance channel of our Discord!

To be eligible to be a contributor to the Metagovernance Pod, you’ll need to complete our newly released Dao Skill.