A brief intro to yourself: I've been a member in DAOs since The DAO and got stuck in the rabbit hole. I oversaw governance at VitaDAO (2021-2022) and SafeDAO (2022-2023), worked with Colony, advised on blockchain governance in international development for the German gov't, and wrote my master's thesis on DAOs in 2018. Ever since I've been closely following DAO research around Metagov, BlockchainGov, DRC, etc. Currently, I'm independent, observing DeSci and increasingly active as a delegate for Safe and Optimism.

A message to the community and ecosystem: Decentralised governance is hard and a lot of DAOs don't do justice to what their marketing promises. Optimism has been taking governance seriously since its inception, has a fantastic governance team and keeps innovating in the open while open sourcing its know-how. I'll participate where I can meaningfully contribute, with insights from academic research on DAOs, learnings from fields outside crypto (no need to reinvent the wheel) and with a problem-driven, user-centric mindset. I bring my learnings from VitaDAO, Safe and various other DAOs to our community while acknowledging it's a long way of hard work but always staying optimistic.

Discourse username: theobtl