I am proposing to implement standing “Proposal Review Calls” every other Tuesday (alternating with the Standing Delegate Calls). Rather than scheduling a call for each new proposal, this will create a dedicated slot every two weeks where proposal authors can come to present/discuss their proposals.
The Proposal Review Calls will be a time for authors of proposals that are on the forum or onchain to briefly present and discuss their proposals. I think it would be fair to say proposals that are onchain at the time of the call will get priority to be reviewed first on these calls, but also open to other suggestions.
Why this cadence?
To simplify keeping track of when ZKsync Governance-related calls take place, I thought it would be easiest to just alternate with the existing Standing Delegate Calls. The time will remain the same, 1 hour calls starting at 16:30 UTC. We can try this out to start and see if the cadence and allowed time is enough for how many active proposals there will be to review at any given time.
NOTE: Proposal authors are always welcome to schedule their own Proposal Review calls to discuss their proposals. Once you have them coordinated, please let @theshelb know if you want those calls added to the ZKsync Delegate Call calendar. We can also record these and add them to the ZK Nation Youtube channel.
Why a separate call?
The suggestion to hold a separate call for reviewing proposals stems from a desire to preserve the purpose of Standing Delegate Calls. The Standing Delegates Calls serve as a platform for Delegates to engage in discussions on more general topics, share updates on ongoing proposal ideas or other governance initiatives, and to get questions answered from the Gov Team or other stakeholders in the ZK Nation ecosystem. Establishing a dedicated standing call for proposal reviews ensures that each topic receives the time and attention it deserves for meaningful Delegate discussion.
Who will facilitate the Proposal Review Calls?
For now, yours truly. I will collaborate with the authors of active proposals to develop an agenda for the call, based on the number of proposals currently live on-chain or in draft form on the forum at the time. If it is ever the case that there are too many proposals to properly discuss in one call, I might suggest that authors of more complex proposals host their own calls to discuss. Please see call out above for more info.
As always, feedback here is welcome! If there is no strong pushback, I will create an invite starting next week Tuesday for the first standing Proposal Review Call.
Although I like the idea of having a separate call to discuss proposals, whether live, upcoming, or just proposal ideas, I worry it might be too soon for this. If that were the case, we might prematurely shut down a great idea based on the currently low new proposals coming in.
In my view, most proposals will fall into one of three categories: governance, technical, or ecosystem-related. Even technical proposals, in a sense, are a subset of ecosystem-related ones.
So a better route in my view is to have a weekly Ecosystem call where we discuss proposals, among other things such as ZKsync news, highlights, new integrations, partnerships, achievements, TPPs, new products built on ZKsync, new builders presenting their products, etc. Furthermore, we can have a dedicated time slot of 10-20 min for ZK-powered chains to present whenever necessary and maybe have a slot for currently live proposals to be discussed or give their status report on milestones, as would be the case with ZK Ignite.
And let it evolve naturally from there, if necessary.
Thank you for the feedback here everyone! And thanks for your patience in my response. Given there were not going to be any new active proposals to discuss before the end of the year, I didn’t think it was worth trying to schedule one for this week.
@cap this is an interesting idea! While I do want to reserve this spot primarily for proposal review down the road (because I do think we will need it eventually), in the meantime maybe we could even invites some of the ZKsync community mods from Discord or other community/ecosystem folks who could share some highlights.
@TempeTechie.eth thanks for creating the Doodle! Of the 3 folks that responded, everyone said they would rather have this call on Wednesday at the same time (5:30 CET).
To help decide when folks prefer to have this call, please answer the poll below BY FRIDAY, DEC 2oth!
Reminder: This call will take place on the alternating week from the standing Delegate Calls.
Yesss, thank you! That’s precisely what I meant. I would love to run this with a ‘flexible’ agenda for the first year. Or ‘evolving’ agenda rather, where I, or whoever runs this, would engage with the Ecosystem (devs, builders, contributors, mods, community, running program operators, founders, devrels, growth/partnership folks, etc.) and be in charge of creating the topics for discussions. It might be a grind at times to have enough content to fill the hour, and I assume more often than not, it will be gem-packed too. This would however help us identify recurring themes and needs for our entire community and ecosystem. And as time goes by, and we iterate on the agenda, after 6+ months, we’ll have enough data to make an informed decision on how to proceed and steer these calls in the right direction. This would be very fun to do.
Do you know about the weekly ZKsync community calls that happen on Discord @cap ? They also present the latest updates from the ZKsync ecosystem and is a time to ask questions to community mods and other guests. How do you imagine the “ecosystem” content on this call to be different than what is already being discussed there?
Also, the calls don’t always have to be the full hour. If they end up being shorter, they can also be cut short. But I assume as proposals ramp up the hour might actually not be enough time, which is why I suggested in the original post that for authors of more complex proposals to possibly host their own calls to allow for enough time.
I was not aware of weekly ZKsync community calls. Thanks for bringing that up, I will look into it. However, I have to say – I’m not the biggest fan of Discord-confined calls. They feel gated and add one small barrier to entry/participation. And most people have 50+ discord servers they don’t check at all.
In terms of how they differ, I don’t know yet. I need to attend a few of these calls to see how they work and what the discuss.
“…of more complex proposals” - yes. I’m not against this idea, in fact, I like it. If applied to the ZK Ignite program, for example, it makes total sense. But I wonder about smaller ones.
I’ll think more about this and after checking out a few Discord community calls I’ll know more.
Fair point with Discord - also not the biggest fan BUT the calls I attended were quite nice and the community mods are really knowledgable. I think they start up again in the new year so will also attend a few more to get some inspiration.
Re complex proposals - Yes, Ignite is the example I was also thinking of. Squeezing a presentation & discussion of a proposal of that size into a 20min slot on a 1hr call might be tricky. I assume most TPPs will be this way and may require a separate call. ZIPs and GAPs on the other hand will likely be easier to cover in this Proposal Review slot.
I could imagine, for example, a call would have a few 10-15ish min slots for any active proposals at the time of the call (depending on how many there are). If there is a more complex proposal (e.g. TPP) in the mix, this may be a really quick overview but a separate presentation + Q&A call would be hosted to discuss in more detail.
I am spitballing here. We also don’t have to a perfect plan before starting. We can just settle on the intention of the call and try out a few formats as we get started.
I see what you mean. And I agree. I’m just looking at it from my own perspective, as someone who’s an active delegate, contributor, and someone who wants to be/stay engaged. I would either miss going to the ZK Ignite call or wouldn’t want to go because I don’t know what they’ll report or I’m maybe more interested in Ecosystem as a whole or smaller builders or experiments or anything not-Defi. But I wouldn’t mind hearing their progress report every 2 weeks or every month if there was an Ecosystem call where they’d come and present for 15-20 min.
It might be a bit difficult to keep track of everything if we have 3-5 active TPPs, even if we had a public calendar everyone could subscribe to.
I’ll think about this more. I have something in mind to maybe slowly roll this out as part of the proposal we’re working on and see if it catches on. And it will be a convenient place to come and get informed about our program we’re launching as well as the Ecosystem stuff we’re discussing here.
The jury still seems to be out on this one. Since it is so close, let’s revisit the first week of Jan and see if we can get some more voices before setting this one up. We likely won’t have any proposals to review the next two weeks anyways
If there is no strong pushback, I will create an invite starting next week Tuesday for the first standing Proposal Review Call.
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To help decide when folks prefer to have this call, please answer the poll below BY FRIDAY, DEC 2oth!