Please note that I have no insight greater than any other community member who also has the same public information available to them.
How do you feel about conflicts of interest? Do you feel we need to setup some guidelines and prohibit certain appointed members of the DAO partaking in certain activities? And maybe if there isn’t any guidance on conflicts of interest should there be some monitoring or ‘spot checks’ carried out at least? And if not why?
Presently, there are no appointed members of the DAO aside from the initial Special Council. Even the Cartan Group, as the management team/administrators, was approved by the DAO via AIP-1
Would I prefer that we were a mature DAO with a full governance structure (organization structure and policies) in place? Absolutely. But I am realistic of where we are as a DAO today: presently, there is barely anyone working for the DAO - it is effectively only the Special Council and Cartan who we could even claim are potentially “in-house”. Developing additional guidelines for our DAO would be terrific, but that will need to come from people in our community. That’s not my expertise - likely best to be initially developed by attorneys from the community.
This highlights the issue that we simply do not have people working in the DAO. My Special Council Nomination profile is anchored by our need to build out our operational infrastructure. There are plenty of great ideas in our community, but they get no where when we do not have people around to execute them. When we can accelerate people working within our DAO, then we can have the capacity to tackle more issues.
In the meantime, IMO the present DAO structure is sufficient to address where we are as a DAO. Is it ideal? Likely not, but the fact that anyone can present an AIP to amend/reject any past AIPs is far better than a spot check. We don’t have a centralized authority that can just force decisions down to the DAO to accept; everything is effectively a recommendation which the members need to approve.
ApeComms - Much of your frustration appears to be centered around the ApeComms team, but at the end of the day these people are just members of the community who have worked months for free. Anyone else could be working for free, facilitating election spaces, inviting AIP proposers to speak when they are up for vote, etc. - is it their fault that no one/no other group in the DAO is doing it? I’m glad ApeCoin RTs their efforts particularly for this election because without it, we’d have zero exposure for candidates to reach the broader community. I think the points being missed here are a) the foundation literally has no one working for it to scope these service, and b) no AIP has been approved for a group to work on these communication services.
Furthermore,
ApeComms team - Their first AIP failed; there’s no guarantee that their v2 passes either.
AIP-77 - to set up an APE Coin discord is also being outvoted presently with 94% of the vote against
Just illustrating with the above again that we do inherently have checks and balances in the DAO, and ultimately, the power evidently lies with the broader ApeCoin community.