Governance Geeks Gathering - ETHDenver 2024 
During ETHDenver this year, I organized another Governance Geeks Gathering, where DAO operators involved in designing, facilitating, and coordinating governance came together once more. I ran a “light” version of the Challenge Mapping exercise that we did in Istanbul. I thought it would be interesting to see how the topics that came up would be similar or different considering there were different people in the room for this gathering.
For this exercise, I asked everyone to think of the top 3 governance-related challenges that were top of mind or that they were already tackling in 2024. Below is a collection of key themes and specific challenges that came up during our discussion:
Addressing Info & Context Asymmetries:
- Clarification of roles, responsibilities and expectations of different stakeholders (including different entities/organizations within community, e.g. foundation vs token holders vs working groups vs delegates, etc.)
- How to tackle context asymmetries between different stakeholder groups (e.g. history of project/“lore”, expertise on various topics/decisions, etc.)
- How to better navigate discussing sensitive topics with stakeholders of varying trusts levels while remaining as transparent as possible
- Lack of clear purpose/strategy that everyone is aligned on
- Who has strategy/agenda setting rights? What are the guardrails around those rights and who defines them?
Exploring Delegate Incentives:
- What makes a good delegate (qualities/metrics)? How can we make sure they are aligned with DAO’s purpose?
- How to tackle “stale” delegation, incentivize more active delegates
- How to address apathy and low motivation amongst various stakeholders/delegates?
- How could delegates be compensated? Based on what metrics?
- Should there be consent to delegation?
- How to navigate awkward delegate overlaps with other DAOs?
Decentralizing Concentrated Power:
- How to address “celebrity” delegates and the power struggles there
- The creation of working groups can sometimes feel like a pull towards re-centralization. What checks & balances need to be in place to address and combat this?
- How can we disperse centralization of power held by early members amongst other active participants?
Establishing Better Self-Assessment Practices
- How can we ensure or incentivize better self-assessment practices amongst working groups or other stakeholder groups to make sure they remain aligned and are delivering on their scoped initiatives?
- How can the community help working groups better identify issues/shortcomings? Where are feedback loops missing to collect feedback?
- Which mechanisms could facilitate improved accountability among various working groups and stakeholders to ensure the implementation of these assessment practices? What checks/balances are missing?
I hope that sharing this information can be useful for other folks working on DAO governance and the broader DAO space. Having these challenges documented is a great way to see what governance operators are working on right now, but it also a nice way to document our progress over time and identify places for folks to work together to tackle some of these big challenges. 