Hello,
Some original answers and others copy/pasted from a different thread, in case new community members stumble upon this one:
In your study of other DAOs, did you come across any pitfalls/mistakes indicating too much centralization took place? – As the article indicates, DAOs are often decentralised too quickly, contributing to their ultimate failure or slow declines.
Could you please provide a few examples of past strategic guidance from the Special Council and to whom the guidance was given? – Some of the topics we’ve discussed lately include: decentralized governance in general, how to attract more voters to the DAO, brainstorms new SIPs, various web3 and ecosystem news etc etc. We are very fortunate to have brilliant SP with a lot of knowledge in the space. These conversations are on top of the SP primary constitutional mandate articulated around SIP review.
What is the relationship between the Special Council and the DAO Admin Team? Is there any position the Special Council does NOT have authority over? – This is a 3-party relationship (more precisely, it’s 4 once you account for the community). No hierarchy between us. In our DAO, there is no Chief “Something” Officer. There is no hierarchy; it’s a rather flat structure. We all have our own respectful mandates, with checks and balances between us. A quick fun example: I have helped to recruit Michael, but he is now the one with authority to approve certain bills, or sign contracts, where I’m not. It’s kind of a chicken and eggs situation, which makes it fascinating to navigate.
Where does the DAO Admin Team publish the feedback it acts upon? The DAO Admin Team has received a significant amount of community feedback, and it would really help to see communication from the DAO Admin Team on what other feedback it implements. – The best example would be the work to implement Staking in the Voting Power calculation. This is mentioned in the operation team weekly updates. This will be live in weeks ahead!
The reason why it was not included in the first place is two-fold:
- while discussing with some community members, it appeared as a sensitive topic as depending on the jurisdiction you live in, the staking may or may not be available to you, to comply with your local regulation.
- the second reason was cost of implementation: it required collaboration between several departments of The Sandbox and the DAO to make it happen, for something that represent 2% of the total voting power out there. When designing a project, you’d always want to deliver feature that are the least expensive with the maximum of impact first.
Much of the community has requested clarification on this. As of now, it is unclear what the criteria is for its use. Seb stated on DAO AMA 4-Jun-2024 [timestamp 41:55] that the Sandbox wallet would refrain from being used after its mistaken use on SIPs 1 to 5. It was then used on 4-Sep-2024 to allow SIP-11 and SIP-12 to pass quorum, but then Sandbox did not vote on the SIPs after. What caused this to happen? – This will be a judgment, from The Sandbox Game on whether the SIP are aligned or not with the DAO’s mission and long term viability.
How does the DAO Admin Team judge when curation has become excessive? – The curation stops when both parties (author and project management team) mutually agree on content, and when the admin team remarks have been taken into account.
What transparent, accountable, and effective functions are applied to the DAO Admin Team? It is not clear who the DAO Administrator answers to, and it isn’t clear what the DAO Administrator’s term length and compensation package is. While the Special Council and Advisory Board is transparently defined in the Constitution, it remains unidentified for the DAO Administrator. – All budget expenses (operation, maintenance, SIPs…), when effectively executed on chain, are transparently shared to the community via the dashboard section of the website.
How did the DAO Admin Team come to the conclusion that DAO-centric SIPs are not substantive to the Sandbox ecosystem? The DAO has a 15,500,000 $SAND budget with 2,200 participating voters and 211,000 token holders eligible to vote. – The goal of The Sandbox DAO is NOT to become a perfect entity, but rather to improve the life of The Sandbox players/creators. We’re also doing all we can to open channels of communication with folks like yourself, so we can simply hear your feedback and make operational improvements as the need may arise. See my comments on the questions below.
Shouldn’t the responsibility for determining what needs to be a SIP fall on the Sandbox community and DAO voters? – Some things like modifying the website, improving the financial and voting reporting, and connecting the DAO to a third-party system, can be requested directly. As these modifications falls under the operation budget, of which the admin team has authority to spend, there is no need to do a SIP. This is for efficiency’s sake, so we don’t need to ask the community when we need to increase our cloud space, or buy some pencils 
But it does not mean that a form of polling cannot be done, to make sure the feature is useful to most.