The Standards Head Ambassadors Should Set

Originally written on Subsquare

Lemma 4: Web3 is the norms and principles of the Free World applied to the digital realm.

“And it turns out that we should be…not emotionally driven, not driven by passions, but driven by rational discourse in order to come to an idea about how the world works and what decisions we should take.

We should be open about this discourse, and so forth.”

- Gavin Wood, Polkadot Decoded Asia 2024 presentation on individuality, vid

Friday was a disappointing day to see what happened to the Head Ambassadors. While drama has always been the life of an HA, it was definitely surprising to see that one group of HAs had sectioned themselves off and along with some community members, made a private discussion/judgment of which of the rest of the HAs should stay or go, which resulted in this proposal, which is being put in front of token holders for approval.

Three reasons were given:

• Too many cooks in the kitchen slowed progress
• The primary responsibility of HAs is to be leaders
• The cost structure should be lean at the beginning

Personally, I haven’t been happy with the progress we’ve been making in moving the ambassador program forward, so I agree with the overall sentiment here that more needs to be done (and faster). But I believe this proposal is misguided and sets a poor precedent for the culture of the ambassador program as well as Polkadot, and I hope my colleagues who are putting it forward realize that.

There are a few points I’d like to emphasize:

The 100 day plan was supposed to be prepared by a working group. Instead of coming back to the larger group with the plan, it seems they started to discuss this action. It seems disingenuous to blame “too many cooks in the kitchen” for not getting things done, when actually one group split off from the rest and stopped participating.

In a professional setting, you always have people that you disagree with that you need to work with, and working through differences, while inefficient at first, results in a stronger team moving forward. In this situation, it seemed like there were only a few overall meetings that occurred before the group decided to exit the collaborative process and work to split the group.

Leadership is bringing together people of different backgrounds and persuasions, and working through differences and achieving a result, and true power is not having to use it. There will be similar challenges to grow the ambassador program moving forward, because the team will need to work in a multicultural global environment with complex personalities. If the “leadership team” is starting off by eliminating a people-problem instead of working to solve it, how can the community have trust that something similar won’t happen again?

The culture of the ambassador program should be results focused, not politics focused. How can a decision like this be made without letting the community understand the results generated by ambassadors for the past few months via an open process? Like in the technical fellowship, results should be presented before an evaluation takes place. HAs should lead by example in this way to set healthy standards for the community.

Making an evaluation and decision in a non-transparent political and strategic way by a small group seems to be against the ideals of web3. “Trust me that we chose the right HAs and approve them please.” It seems like there is a consequentialist (the ends justify the means) argument made here to justify progressing faster, but this is a slippery slope. “How” something happens is just as important as “what” happens, and we cannot compromise on the former if we are to really steward web3 into the world and create a resilient DAO.