Why are Cabin contributor chats private?

[Matai]

Why are contributor pod group chats private? And what do you think about them being read-only for verified DAO members, or to anyone in Cabin’s discord?

Background

Cabin Labs currently maintains private discord chat channels for contributors. Most people without the contributor role will only see these channels:

When I was on the Cabin Labs team, I witnessed many conversations in the private chats that would have been very helpful for DAO members and people interested in getting involved to have visibility into.** If these chats were read-only. it would help the community understand what’s happening within the pods, offering opportunities for people to provide assistance, and stay in sync with Cabin Labs’ plans.

Inspiration

Drips for example, is a DAO with all contributor channels in Discord open to the public, except for one private channel for sensitive partnership discussions that need to remain confidential until announced.

As someone who wanted to help work on Drips projects, the fact that their contributor team chats were open made it easy for me to understand their current work and past progress, allowing me to easily identify ways I could add value and contribute.

When i started to work for Cabin Labs, it was a slow process to get up to speed, and I was only provided transparency into what active contributors were focused on after I was hired.

How could this help at Cabin?

I think it would be a huge win for opportunities for Cabin community engagement if the contributor pods open sourced their daily updates and contributor channels to embrace a culture of transparency and trust while building-in-public so that others can see how to effectively get involved.

This could allow interested community members to stay more up to date with what contributors are working on to identify ways they can help.

As a more practical examples:

I am interested in helping to create content with other neighborhood stewards to share within the Cabin ecosystem. Cabin Labs just hired a new content and marketing lead Kaela ()… are there ways neighborhood stewards or content creators in the community can support Kaela with any content?

Others may be interested in helping to work on the new app idea that I’ve heard rumors about. Are there any ways for the community to learn more about these and other roadmap plans?

@Dahveed and team’s Ideation Pod participants would surely benefit from having access to the insight hidden within private contributor chats and calls.

I’m curious if they feel that they are fully up to speed with all things Cabin “behind-the-scenes” to effectively engage and work on new proposals or support existing pods.

As someone interested in getting more involved, with lots of ambiguity around Cabin Labs 2025 roadmap as we await an update, it’s challenging to determine how best to support current efforts and plans.

What do you think?

If you’re someone who’s been involved, or who wants to be involved with Cabin, would more transparency into what contributors are working on help you?

If you are/were a Cabin contributor, would you be comfortable having your day-to-day contribution chats open in a read-only way? Are there discussions you’d prefer not to share publicly, and if so why? Would it be possible to have most conversations read-only, with one private channel for sensitive matters?

I think that doing so would help to significantly reduce the barriers to participation in what Cabin is building.

[Dahveed]

Interesting questions. If the Ideation Pod gets approved, I’ll ask each participating team whether they’d like to give read-only access to their chat.

Personally, I’m against opening up chats to people outside of the team involved because I want them to be safe spaces for contributors to express any idea or opinion without the fear of being judged. As an avid hockey fan, I know what it’s like to have a million TV coaches and general managers scrutinizing every play of every game. It’s fun for us fans but it does bother the actual players and coaches. Now imagine if fans had access to all of the locker room conversations. So I’d rather not make small DAO teams into a spectator sport. Again, IMHO.

[KathiInPorto]

Wondering if just more updates would be sufficient… like a super short weekly check in that is public…
Last week I’ve been working on
This week I’ll work on
This is what I need support with / any blocks?

Also agree that having a safe space is important but also curious if we could change the culture in Cabin so the community is not seen or experienced as judgmental spectators but rather curious, willing and supportive people who want to learn and engage.

What would need to shift? How can the wider cabin community become a safe space? I know it was in the past and building in public was super important.

I would be for more open conversations but not necessarily open for everyone who just hangs out in discord.
Only visible to Token holders could be a good barrier.

[savkruger]

I’m not a fan of making contributor chats open for anyone to observe. It would make me feel like I’m in a fish bowl. Sometimes in our contributor chats we share that we made mistakes, or didn’t get the results we wanted. Sometimes I share that I had a hard day and didn’t get as much done that day that I wanted to.

I have sense of trust with the people on my small team and a lot of shared context. We built that trust because we got to spend focused 1:1 and small group time together. With the state of contention in the discord right now, the last thing I’d want is for more people’s opinions and criticisms to influence my workday. It would feel super invasive.

There’s a tension in DAOs between decentralization and efficiency. I wouldn’t be able to be as efficient at my work if I knew that everyone could now see and comment on my every move (on another channel or in dms). I would now need to consider what many many people would think of everything I wrote. I would overthink everything. I feel uncomfortable in my body just considering this possibility.

I don’t have anything to hide from the DAO. But this shift would mean I wouldn’t be as productive and I’d feel a lot more anxious coming to work each day.

[jon]

Cabin is explicitly designed to have contributor pods that can operate autonomously within the scope of their DAO-approved budgets & proposals. If any contributor pods want to have their contributor chats in public, they are welcome to. But I think it’s a bad idea for all of the same reasons people have shared above. @Dahveed - I particularly like your analogy. One of my mentors used to say “effective execution is not a spectator sport”.

The vast majority of DAOs have failed over the past few years. Cabin is still around because we have taken a different path. Like most effective forms of governance, we have a separation between day-to-day execution and longer-term community alignment through the creation and voting on contributor pods.