@dfisher I definitely sympathize with your decentralization motives here. However, creating more DFinity organizations will not solve the more fundamental problem of how to implement collective prioritization. If there were 10 Definity organizations deciding upon the future of the IC, it would create almost as much unresolvable conflict as making all neurons collectively responsible for the significant number of prioritizations and resource allocation tradeoffs to make during this journey. As I emphasized before, the NNS currently can’t handle prioritizations such as timing and resource allocation conflicts, which form the bulk of the most important decisions in all organizations. Approval voting simply isn’t fit for the purpose of prioritization, nor will it ever be.
The only solution that I see is implementing some sort of collective prioritization process within DFinity, just like I have suggested for the NNS itself. The general public will eventually need some assurance that DFinity is operated as a resilient, permissionless DAO. That means developing and implementing a collective prioritization processes to ensure that all power has been sufficiently decentralized on all major prioritization decisions (i.e., excluding low level task decisions that have no significant budgetary or timing impact). Reaching this point could be a few years away even if we start right now, so I strongly suggest that we start soon.
The Internet Computer won’t be perceived as a beta project for much longer. As the stakes become higher and more real, the cracks in the decentralization narrative will become exponentially more obvious and repugnant to those who depend on the IC to sustain their livelihoods and ecosystems.
In the meantime, we just have to accept the following: 1) DFinity is a single point of failure in this visionary project, which (if unchanged) will increasingly endanger its fundamental mission to oppose both centralized power and censorship; and 2) DFinity is essentially run under a traditional dictatorship model, like every organization on the planet today that is too large for deliberative democracy and other consensus reaching processes.
From my perspective, I am quite OK with this concentrated risk and dictatorial power during the startup phase. It could even add to both innovation agility and the prospects of success given the trust that I currently have for the DFinity team and its vision. However, in the longer term, I think we all agree that we should never have to rely on trust, and we most certainly can’t rely on any dictatorship remaining benevolent or censorship-free when the economic and societal stakes for the IC grow exponentially higher. That is why I have been so emphatic about initiating some sort of collective effort to cross the “prioritization chasm”. This is the only way the decentralization vision can become a genuine reality – in bulletproof fashion – instead of just being an illusion of decentralized power that we have today.
As for the treasury fund, there really is no point in even voting on this, let alone on an actual implementation proposal, until we have a collective prioritization process in place that could fairly allocate these scarce resources in the most optimal fashion.