[Discussion] Addressing immediate gaps in DAO governance

jengajojo · April 17, 2024, 9:33am

Summary

Upgrade governance processes at Gitcoin DAO by fixing governance gaps and creating a DAO constitution.

Motivation

Today, governance in the DAO works as following:

Proposers take guidance from the governance manual
In most cases the manual provides guidance for what the proposer wants to achieve
In some cases (eg 1,2) there the proposal does not clearly fall into a given category so its combined into governance proposals

This creates confusion and a lack of standardization when it comes to following procedure, documenting changes and following an iterative development process for evolving governance.

Specification

As part of DAOplomats engagement with Gitcoin we have analyzed key aspects of the DAO’s governance and here are our suggestions.

1. Differentiate between proposals based on how they are enforced.

Currently there are 4 types of proposals: funding, ratification, governance and reallocation and no difference between regular proposals and community proposals. However there is some overlap between the four categories and some proposals which do not fall in any of the other three categories are posted as governance proposals by default.

In order to provide a clear distinction as well as guidelines for future proposers the following changes are suggested.

Implement two master categories: Onchain and Offchain and two sub categories for each. The proposer can follow this flowchart to identify which type of proposal they are making irrespective of where they lie in the ecosystem orbit

Definations

Offchain	Offchain	Onchain	Onchain
Social	Legal	Admin	Token
Agreements enforceable by peer pressure which do not require changes to any contracts.	Agreements enforced by the legal system and which involve updating the legal setup	Agreements enforced by the blockchain which involves Making changes onchain without changing token balance	Agreements enforced by the blockchain which requires changing token balance

Examples:

Social	Legal	Admin	Token
Establishing/modifying DAO cadence	Electing/removing foundation director	Updating governor contracts	Sending/receiving/depositing/withdrawing/staking/lending/borrowing tokens
Modifying essential intents	Establishing/disbanding legal entities such as Grant Lab	Forming/disbanding multi-sigs
Modifying/electing council members (CSDO/Grants council)	Dissolving the foundation	Adding/removing members to any multi-sig
Modifying program or product policies		Delegating tokens
Adding/removing partners		Adding/removing Hats to a member or a multi-sig
Establishing/modifying constitution
Changing Governance policies, tooling or other mechanics

Based on what a proposal finally aims to achieve, the proposer can decide on a category and subcategory and proceed with the governance flow. The forum categories can be modified to reflect these changes.

2. Create a DAO constitution

In order to solidify the core principles of the DAO, a constitution which captures high level goals of the DAO should be created. This document should be rarely modified and should require significant consensus to be established and modified.

3. Implement a minimum threshold for Steward approval based on proposal type

In order to receive a higher quality signal from token holders and avoid spam, it is suggested that stewards should have a higher skin in the game for each consecutive change. Here is the minimum suggested threshold based on proposal types

Type	Social	Legal	Admin	Token
Minimum Voting Weight	1	10	100	1000

4. Improved proposal labelling

Based on which stage a proposal is in its life cycle, it is primarily the responsibility of the author to label the proposals as follows:

Initiating proposals as drafts for community feedback, marked as [DRAFT].
A “temperature check” phase to gauge community sentiment, indicated as [TEMP CHECK].
Finalising the proposal for voting, labelled as [READY]
After the final vote has concluded, labelled as [PASSED/FAILED]

5. Updating manual

Updating the DAO Structure: The governance manual currently does not include recent changes such as Ecosystem collective and other entities in the DAO orbit such as grants lab, passport, RPP etc… It is suggested that the manual be updated to reflect these changes. This also includes removing older unexisting structure such as Workstreams
Recategorise and organise governance roles from various types to three main types: Multi-sig signer, Pod Member and Governooor. Each of these categories can then include subcatgories to signal specific subroles such as matching pool guardian or CSDO member as MS signer. WS lead, Ecosystem contributor, core contributor as a pod member. Steward, delegator and governance coordinator as governooor.
Delegate the responsibility for updating the manual to the governance coordinator: Since the manual only reflects changes made by gitcoin governance, updating it should not require a DAO vote.

Next Steps:

Collect feedback from the community
Submit a formal proposal

deltajuliet · April 17, 2024, 11:36am

Sweet, thanks for this @jengajojo! Would love some clarification around a couple of things…

we have analyzed key aspects of the DAO’s governance and here are our suggestions.

Does this include community feedback or simply a DAOplomats audit?

Based on what a proposal finally aims to achieve, the proposer can decide on a category and subcategory and proceed with the governance flow. The forum categories can be modified to reflect these changes.

These definitions & examples are great but look less tailored to Gitcoin as an org. Are these standard examples or are you suggesting that we create some of these policies for the org?

Create a DAO constitution

Is this different to our process outlined here by simply a different name? This is also taking into consideration your notes on the DAO manual below (removing/updating the structure) which currently lives in Gitbook.

Recategorise and organise governance roles from various types to three main types

Governooor: Hard pass on this naming.
Also worth noting there is no formal CSDO anymore.
How does this tie into the defining community work that @CoachJonathan is doing?

In general I’m supportive of initiatives that improve our governance, including this one, but what I’m not seeing are the expected outcomes of this work or over-arching goals for these improvements. Would love to see those laid out!

jengajojo · April 17, 2024, 12:39pm

This post is aimed at starting a discussion on the suggested changes and based on community input we will come back with an actual proposal.

The suggestion is to create these policies to replace the existing ones.

The goal of the constitution is to capture high level consensus within the org. Currently these are documented as ‘North Stars’ in the gov manual. Here are some examples [1,2] which may help you understand the desired output

These suggestions are intended to make it easier for

future proposers to identify which domain of governance they want to access
for admins to manage the forum efficiently
make stewards more accountable to their role.

This builds on some of the work which was started here 1 2

CoachJonathan · April 25, 2024, 4:19pm

Thanks @jengajojo for getting the ball rolling on some of these initiatives. Though conversations like these might seem mundane and unnecessary, I truly believe that they are critical aspects of Gitcoin’s legitimacy as a DAO and important pieces on Gitcoin’s path to decentralization.

Additionally, I believe that more thorough documentation & closed loopholes = more robust governance, which starts a network effect that leads to more legitimate governance.

My thoughts on some of the proposals

I am a big fan of this thinking and this is the easiest aspect for me to say “yes” to. In terms of the examples just below, I think there is a bit of finessing we can do to capture real examples of what Gitcoin tokenholders should be voting on.

When I read examples of voting on modifying the cadence, changing governance tooling, foundation director elections, and multisig actions, I tend to agree. When I read other things like product policies and adding/removing partners, I am less in agreement.

I appreciate that these are all just examples to get the ball rolling. @jengajojo where is the best place to capture the full extent of these examples - here in the governance forum or in some sort of working doc? I’d love to tease out these examples and create clear guidelines as to what does/doesn’t need to be voted on + what category it fits into.

When I initially thought of a constitution, I think of examples like Working Constitution of the Optimism Collective and ENS’ constitutions. These focus more on token holder rights and is a foundational document that any governance system would have.

When I think of the Gov v3 post, I see this as part constitution, part incomplete and hard to read governance manual.

I am not overly concerned with the direction we head, though I would like to see us double down on the Governance Manual since this is the most comprehensive and clear document we have relating to governance (and has a decent UI compared to a long, drawn-out document).

This seems fine and safe to try.

Very supportive of creating some standards like this. Whether these are the final words, I don’t have a strong opinion, though the flow seems right.

Sounds good to me.

To @deltajuliet’s point, not aligned to governooor language (let’s use something more clear here). @jengajojo who did you envision were “Pod Members”? I’m not clear on who these people are.

And to @deltajuliet’s point about CSDO - this is another out-of-date aspect of the governance manual since this group no longer exists, and I’m happy to work with you to make sure that this gets accurately updated.

This works for me. To be clear, right now I am responsible for doing these updates, and I would like to see this responsibility moved to or shared with the DAOplomats team.

I am mostly aligned to the suggestions above minus 1 or 2 things. Thanks for getting the ball rolling on these items!

jengajojo · April 26, 2024, 7:23am

Thanks for the feedback and support @CoachJonathan

If there won’t be much contention about this then a reply to this forum post will be sufficient, however if you think this will result in a long discussion, we can move this to a working doc.

Refering to these posts on pods, Introducing Gitcoin’s Ecosystem Collective if we were to adopt the ‘Pod structure’ DAOwide, then we can have separate pods for each group and have 3 master categories for overall roles in the DAO as mentioned earlier and several sub-categories inside the Pod category.

Happy to change the Governoor suggestion to anything else the community feels makes sense.

Viriya · April 30, 2024, 2:58pm

I think reducing friction in governance with these proposed changes make sense and I appreciate the thinking being done by @CoachJonathan and @jengajojo here. Posts like these won’t garner much interest and feedback here, even though they are fundamental to how our DAO ultimately operates.

I’m aligned to the call outs by Jonathan and trust that, as a lead at EC, he is doing the due diligence to help steward this proposal in a way that makes sense for us.

I think overall, if we can update/repurpose docs/tools that currently exist vs. creating net new things, that would be my preference!