On behalf of the HoS Core Team, I want to acknowledge that we’ve been inconsistent in our delivery of certain promised deliverables, including things like sharing documents we said we’d share, sharing a proposal template, suggesting workflows and policies, mission/vision/values, a clearer roadmap, etc. There are various reasons for this, but ultimately as the team lead I take responsibility and ownership of fixing it. I’m grateful for everyone’s patience and understanding - please keep in mind that we’re a brand new team and we’re working largely without a playbook here, attempting to do something that’s never really been done well before. Decentralizing the governance of an ecosystem as large as NEAR is a huge task.
We discussed the situation as a team and we decided to commit to doing the following, immediately:
- we’ve set up a public kanban board where the entire community can see what we’re working on at a high level, and we commit to keeping this updated at least weekly. This will also provide a forum for the community to make suggestions, suggest changes in task sequencing or prioritization, etc. Anyone with a Github account is welcome to comment on the posted tasks, suggest new ones, etc. using the houseofstake/pm repository.
- we’re going to adopt a product-driven sprint methodology, where each team member commits to delivering at least one item per week. (“Item” here is loosely defined, but should be a task that’s small enough to complete in under a week.) We’ll do weekly reviews and share updates when there are delays, explaining what’s going on. (We’re starting with one-week sprints but may need to also experiment with two-week sprints.)
- each team member commits to posting an update to the transparency thread fortnightly, explaining what they’ve been up to over the prior two weeks. (If the kanban board is well managed, this should mostly just be a list of items from that board.)
- additionally, as a team, we commit to hosting an open office hour fortnightly, with at least some team members, and when possible, all team members, to answer questions and share updates. This will be open to all members of the community.
We’re open to other suggestions, of course, but we think this is a good starting point in building trust and establishing accountability.
One final, important point: while we feel that a kanban board is a big step in the direction of transparency and accountability, it’s not intended as a panacea. In particular, it doesn’t lend itself well to every type of task and every form of work. Some members of the team, including me, have a scope of work outside of HoS that naturally won’t appear on this board in the first place. It doesn’t capture last minute, time sensitive tasks that pop up from time to time. It doesn’t capture time spent in planning, meetings, and retrospectives, etc. We’re going to run this experiment for a while, and with your support I believe it’ll be successful, but I can’t guarantee it’ll make sense to do this forever. Let’s give it a shot.