VitaDAO needs a more sophisticated governance framework that defines the scope of decisions, improves on our current governance process and ensures that processes in governance represents all stakeholders in the VitaDAO community appropriately.
The ultimate goal is to establish a unique cultural governance structure that embodies VitaDAOs’ core moral values, principle alignments/goals and community.
Purpose
My purpose of leading this core squad is to develop a unique individual governance framework for VitaDAO. The overarching vision for VitaDAO governance is to trail blaze the future of work through decentralised human coordination mechanisms in the DeSci ecosystem. I propose the best time to work on achieving this foundation and ironing out learnings from governance phases (in seasonal governance) would be, during the “down time” of seasons from seasonal governance ie. the execution phases.
Your Concerns
I want to take this topic thread as an opportunity to survey the community’s concerns around our current governance process to direct our attention to particular areas where you see room for improvements.
The output of this thread would be a series of separate proposals that will address the shortcomings of our current governance process. Detailed and individual proposals are more preferable as it keeps each discussion specific and targeted around amending the particular hurdle. Unlike our combined amendment proposals like VDP-59.
List of Hurdles
This is a list of hurdles compiled with feedback from the core contributors. Feel free to add your own pain points in the comments as I will update this first post’s version history based on further responses from the community.
Lack of accountability and transparency
— Time-lock for feedback/review from proposal submission to snapshot (voting process)
— Phasic voting revamp to offer more governance utility to token holders (governance
workflow)
— Vesting smart contract for contributors
— What proposal needs what type of governance
— “Abstain” votes with regards to conflict of interest and meeting quorums
Lack of guidance for newbies
— End-to-end governance wiki
— Improvements on seasonal governance (ops, community outreach, debriefs)
Lack of innovation around making allocation decisions
— Manual execution of funding dissemination eg. Using oSnap for snapshot instead
Our squad is already in the process of drafting proposals addressing these concerns. Your comments/concerns are invaluable during this process, to better inform implementation of relevant solutions.
Summaries often lead to more questions, which leads to more reading. On the other hand, maybe a flash round where proposals are prioritized based on 200 word abstracts would give more time to proposals the DAO is most interested in, with lower priority proposals being considered later. Then again, implementing that sounds like a nuisance.
Maybe different kinds of governance proposals at different times of the year? Would also keep engagement up year round. If the strategic priorities have budgets associated with them, could set priorities, and then proposals answering Priority 1 get a month, then Priority 2 get a month, etc
The other way orgs solve this is via committees and subcommittees.
I have debated with the “round-the-clock” governance framework but I think cool-down periods are important between them. It gives time to iterate on our governance framework and to apply learnings from it, like in this case during the “execution phase” of seasonal governance.
Committees or councils are an interesting idea. @Taliskermalt brought a version of this up too, where the governance squad can assume the position. But, I think it treads a fine line between “gating” proposals and providing support, that’ll need to be clear. Also, I think there’s lots of room to involve delegation in this kind of process. For example, delegatees can assume positions on relevant councils to filter the corresponding type of proposal.
I second @consigli3re on using iterative feedback as a way to improve the governance process. Delegated governance such as a Grants Council, has its pros and cons. In my experience delegating the entire funding process is not an optimal solution, especially considering the fact that, funding experts, such as VCs, have a 10% success rate in the best case!
Building on top of
I would recommend splitting the funding mechanism into different sizes. Small grants could be decided via prop house style auctions, large asks could be decided partially (20% of total ask) via delegated councils and the remaining funded retroactively based on milestones or quadratic funding. This avoid token holder fatigue and having to make binary (yes/no) decisions on things which most of us have no idea if they’d work or not
You guys are so intelligent that you create such complicated systems (maybe it’s needed I never followed a dao before, but I followed a lot of crypto projects). It just hurts my mind to read complicated articles like the seasonal proposal, boy where can I vote and what are you working on currently (that get me excited and that I can at least understand) is all that I care (that’s the newby part I guess, but aren’t you overcomplicating things for yourself sometimes?) Keep it simple :o /newbyrantover edit: maybe I’m just missing the end-user oriented message, I know you have to build structural governance edit2: but I and newbies are out of the loop.
I thought the Longevity WG already filtered and pre-reviewed grants. When the science is interesting, it’s fun to read and think about a given problem.
It’s all the governance/running VitaDAO/marketing/business stuff that added the most to the proposal fatigue.
100%. The simplest things are often the most difficult. This is why I think a governance wiki is in order for VitaDAO, and something I have in the parking lot. Inspiration came from the ENS Governance Documentation on GitBook.
This is perfect insight. I for one, am the complete opposite. Therefore, I want to tailor a governance framework that works (reduces fatigue) for our academics in our community to keep the science fun while also, keeping the DAO enthusiasts engaged and reducing their fatigue for the intricate science conversations.
Fatigue in governance is a huge problem. In VitaDAO’s case, we have specific ranges and extremes due to the diversity of our community. I am at the tip of the iceberg on ideas on how to mitigate this with present DAO/Governance research. However, I see fatigue being a constant struggle - especially when we push delegation.
Usually folks complain about fatigue when work which requires context and toned skillset is being done without comp esp. in DAO Governance. It is pretty difficult for folks to ‘keep up’ with what is happening in any field, including DAO gov, which is when specialists should step in.
As @bowtiedshrike pointed out, the Longevity WG ( a compensated WG consisting of domain experts) is able to do a decent job but the friction arises from DAO governance itself. While VDP-65 was a good start with incentivising specialists to participate in DAO governance, the comp is not even close to the compensation policy approved in VDP-72 for WGs.
True, but I don’t think monetary incentives will work for delegation anyway. Or at least it shouldn’t be the main intrinsic motivation to delegate and the quantifiable benchmarks to disperse incentives to delegates in the space today are loopholed - notably MakerDAO. I’m thinking of better incentive systems for delegation when we roll it out.
I would say it’s the time cost (and concentration of that cost) moreso than the $$$ cost.
Reading interesting things is how we all lose time to social media.
Reading less interesting things is ok once in a while, especially if it helps with the overall objective. But when there’s five marketing proposals all on some variation of ‘for $10k we’ll interview some people and write a report on what we find’, it gets rough. Some of this may be DAO-WG mismatch-- there was some priority from the WG to do consulting, but the necessity of it was not sold in the proposals.
How well did hashing out proposals in discord work? May be that there could be 2 routes to proposals: either via a WG or via Discord first to get community feedback. That may improve some of the requests for funding above what WG make and other major issues. If the discord approach was to get all proposers into the discord over a period of a few days, the competition might help refine some of the proposals, too.
100%. This is also why delegation fatigue still exists in DAOs. $ didn’t solve the issue - in fact, encouraged gaming with a pinch of politics.
I definitely think our phasic approach needs to be revamped. Phase 1 is basically non-existent atm. I already have some ideas to involve the community (token holders) in the procedure and these vital decisions for the DAO.
With my previous comment I tried to throw light on the fact that a (Longevity WG) dedicated group of domain experts if well incentivised can produce favourable results. This can be achieved with or without delegation, the important point is to offer incentives to experts and create an inclusion criteria to unlock those incentives.
great point, quite straightforward ofc to seperate out the science proposals from misc/marketing/other proposals… as well as keeping most governance proposals as concise and relevant as possible