As transparent as possible, as private as necessary.
Motto: Building out in the open
The dYdX Operations subDAO’s approach to transparency can best be summarized as:
“As transparent as possible, as private as necessary”
We commit to maintaining transparency by making all information related to the dYdX Operations subDAO, created by contributors, trustees, and enforcers, publicly accessible. However, any information that falls under the category of personal information for individuals or critical business data will be kept confidential. In essence, this can also be understood as the default setting for public availability.
Transparency commitment
To ensure all contributors are aligned with the values and ideas in this document upon starting to work for the dYdX Operations subDAO they will be asked to sign a letter of commitment to the transparency, accountability, and documentation standards of the dYdX Operations subDAO.
Open Documentation
In order to achieve a significant level of transparency, the dYdX Operations subDAO is documenting everything in this public notion. This will serve as a platform to document all the contributions, core contributiors, and trustee activities, ensuring that the information is publicly available and easily accessible to everyone.
The open documentation will be maintained following async work best practices (particularly following gitlabs asynchronous work standards). Next to providing a great basis for transparent information about the dYdX Operations subDAO, this will enable contributors coming in to hit the ground running.
How to document effectively
- Assuming low context
- Writing in simple language
- Concise and precise
- Use less than 30 words per sentence!
- Replace adjectives with data!
- Does your writing pass the so what test?
Thinking about the audience for the documentation and assuming they have little to no context on the topic. This makes clear that all the context necessary to understand the topic at hand needs to be included or referenced in the documentation. Basically enabling someone completely new to the topic to fully understand it on the basis of the documentation.
Using simple language to document removes barriers for people new to the topic, with a lack of knowledge of topic-specific terms additionally it will be easier for people with English as a second or third language to understand the documentation.
The decision process for keeping information private
Certain information cannot be disclosed to the public due to the potential economic harm it may cause to the dYdX Operations subDAO or the individuals involved. To address this concern, the core contributors will adhere to a privacy checklist, which will guide them in determining whether information should be made publicly available or not. If certain information is considered private, this evaluation process will be repeated at regular intervals to ensure that time-sensitive information is not kept confidential indefinitely. The decision-making process and its outcomes are subject to oversight by the trustees and enforcers.
Examples of when information should be kept private
- The information shared could harm the economic interests of the dYdX Operations subDAO
- i.e. the intent of a domain purchase, could, if public enable someone to purchase the domain and then turn around and try to sell it to the dYdX Operations subDAO at a mark-up
- If the personal information of private individuals would otherwise be disclosed
- Full name
- Address
- Banking information
Transparency KPIs
We are currently working on developing meaningful KPI’s for enabling us to track our performance on transparency efficiently.