VDP-106 [Governance] Proposal eligibility criteria to enter the VitaDAO deal-flow funnel

@bowtiedshrike @SB23 @timrpeterson @EliMo @proofofsteve, thank you for the comments, questions, and suggestion. This is the healthy exchange of opinions that is needed to finalize the proposal. I could try to address each and every point that has been raised, but I prefer to share my quick take and leave room to whoever wishes to share an opinion. So here are my loose and hopefully short thoughts.

  • Note that all this discussion is about what qualifies as longevity, which is just one of the criteria. Still it’s kind of a defining criterion for a longevity DAO.

  • The longevity biotech debate is not only open within VitaDAO but also within the larger longevity community, which is still young (no pun intended), although some consensus is forming. A paper precisely on this topic has been published just 3 days ago on Nature Biotechnology by 18 longevity scientists, entrepreneurs and investors (none from VitaDAO). According to the paper, a longevity biotech company should be “targeting the pathways underlying aging, developing drugs capable of treating or preventing multiple age-related diseases, and increasing healthspan and lifespan”: this is almost the same as what we proposed here in a totally independent way!

  • In fact there is an important difference: the Nature paper mentions not only treating diseases, like we did, but also preventing them. This is more stringent, because it requires extreme safety, as pointed out by @SB23.

  • More stringent criteria are actually what we are after, because one of the pain points addressed by this proposal is that, indeed, we are seeing a lot of submissions that for one reason or another don’t fit what the community expects. This is a problem for both the DAO, which has to invest lots of time and resources in screening and incubating, and for applicants, who invest lots of time in proposing and interacting with us.

  • Concerning giving examples of what’s in scope or not, I tend to prefer giving loose guidelines and letting reviewers and the community interpret them, the same opinion as @timrpeterson. Giving examples would require to choose and carefully word a large number of them in order to give enough coverage and avoid misunderstanding. In addition, we already have some reasonably good examples of what we like to fund, the proposals that already passed. And the more we assess and fund proposals, the clearer it becomes, and referring to the latest ones can also give a more dynamic view that automatically reflects the evolution of what the community likes, as it changes over time.

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Perfect answer @Paolo. I wholeheartedly agree.

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@timrpeterson @Paolo I agree with ‘let the community decide’. The problem is that loose guidelines in this proposal will prevent the community from doing that.

As I understand it, this VDP concerns a pass/fail initial screening that is not done by the community. This means that a screener with a narrow view of longevity research would fail a proposal that someone with a broader view of longevity would pass. I would prefer guidelines that even the playing field so that it’s not ‘luck of the screener’.

If the guidelines need to be more stringent, as Paolo indicated, in what way do they need to be more stringent? Even the material needed to pass these new criteria will take a fair amount of work for the applicants. If we make expectations clear up front, it will save everyone time and trouble.

That’s why I think that for this initial screening, the criterion needs a more clear aims and scope.

The initial screeners are a democracy. All 3 phases of governance are a democracy. We can give each phase participants guidelines but ultimately it is their choice. To me, the guidelines are clear enough. As in any kind of voting process, it’s the job of the individual applicants to gauge what the community wants - even if the community is highly divided.

@Paolo Yeah this is a common problem. One way to handle spam problems is to require those submitting proposals to place a certain amount of $VITA into escrow in order to submit the proposal. It does not need to be a large amount. The flow is something like as follows:

  1. Applicant who wants to make a proposal places $100 worth of $VITA into Escrow.
  2. Applicant submits their proposal to the initial screening process.
  3. Person from Vita who is in charge of screening looks at proposal.
    3a. If proposal passes screening (is seen as within Vita purview and high quality) applicant gets their escrowed funds back, and proposal passes on to secondary screening stage.
    3b. If proposal does not pass screening (is not within purview or high quality) tokens are burned.
    3c. If it’s maybe on the fence or needs some revisions, that can be handled on a case by case basis.

This kind of system, gated voting, has often been used by other DAOs to prevent spam votes. It has the benefits of providing an additional use case for $VITA, buying pressure, and possible deflation as well.

There’s obviously a lot of room for variation here. You can lower the amount to just 1 $VITA and that will get rid of very low effort spam, simply because most spammers won’t pay any amount of money, but you can also increase it if what you’re seeing is a lot of submissions that are maybe not from ‘spammers’ but are from people who haven’t fully thought things through who you want to encourage to be more diligent before submitting. Could advise further if I better understood that.

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Hello @proofofsteve, thank you for the suggestion, which we will consider as we improve our dealflow process, CC @gweisha.

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Hello, based on the previous conversation and the votes received, I plan to publish the proposal on snapshot edited as follows:

  • Replace “The proposed criteria are split into the following categories” with “The proposed pass/fail criteria are split into the following categories” add that the criteria are pass/fail

  • Replace “treat multiple age-related diseases [8]” with “treat or prevent multiple age-related diseases [8]”

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This seems like this community is soon to be gated.
Does not look well for me at this time since I am still writing my proposal, I do not know how to view this.
I best submit before you close the gates.

This VDP is for considering proposals for funding, not voting on Discourse or community access.

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Yes, I have a proposal pending summation.