As many of you are aware, we’ve been in the long and thorough process of hiring a Head of Governance for the (all goes well ) soon-to-be-launched House of Stake.
We’ve narrowed down our candidates to a few extremely qualified individuals and are trying to reach a final selection. We’ve decided as a part of this to ask the candidates to answer a short series of “challenge questions”. These should be tough questions without clear answers, where answers should give us an idea of their personal philosophy, perspective, and problem solving styles.
We hope to have the questions finalized and have candidates post their answers here very soon, but before we finalize these, we’d like to hear from the Community: what questions do you want the HoG candidates to answer? If you don’t have a specific prompt, what things about the candidates and their history would you like to know?
Could you please clarify the purpose of this role, given that five other people are already handling the same responsibilities?
Are you prepared to request that Lane begin publishing weekly progress and budget reports?
On behalf of the HoS core team, are you willing to acknowledge past mistakes (starting with the serious conflicts of interest in appointing endorsed delegates and the censorship in HoS chats) and commit to changing this approach?
Are you prepared to refrain from attending trips funded by the community until HoS is fully launched?
Will you publish the costs of the HoS core team gatherings in Cannes and Lisbon, and ensure that each team member who attended provides an individual report?
From your perspective, what is the real purpose of this role, if major decisions at NF are ultimately made by Illia? Are you ready to suggest that Illia reconsider Lane’s position, given his failure to deliver results?
Finally, will you commit to publishing the Hack Humanity budget and removing from the team any individuals who have been involved in misusing the founder’s funds?
One important point: the HoS Core Team will not be reporting to the Head of Governance, at least not in its present form. The rough plans are that we’ll dissolve the HoS team at the NEAR Foundation once HoS is up and running – tentatively, the plan is to do this by yearend. I’ll be building a new “Product Research” team at NF, which will include some but not all members of the current HoS Core team. Other members of the team will also be moving under HoS oversight, supervision, and compensation (@Dacha this will make you happy, you’re welcome sir). The HoG will need to build their own team, which may or may not include current members of the HoS Core team.
Lots of details still need to be worked out here, including precisely who goes where, when, what the composition of these new teams will be, the mandates of the respective teams, the degree of overlap, how much I personally will still be involved in HoS going forward, etc., and these plans could still change, but in the interest of transparency I’m sharing them here. More info on the plan soon.
Here’s a couple of questions that I would like to hear these candidates address:
The HoS mandate is to be AI-augmented, but the community needs to rebuild trust after previous governance efforts. How do you balance the need for an efficient, AI-powered system with the fundamental requirement of creating a human-centric, transparent, and trusted governance process?
In this role, how would you balance your personal principles with the NEAR Foundation’s value of pragmatism over perfection? Please give a real-world example of how you’ve made a pragmatic concession to achieve a greater goal.
What is your single most important quantitative or qualitative metric for determining whether the HoS governance system is a success? How would you use this metric to prove to the community that HoS is working as intended?
) soon-to-be-launched House of Stake.
How do you describe the Community participating in the NEAR Protocol?