This document is a suggested process for developing and advancing Gitcoin Community Proposals. It is a living document intended to be owned, modified and enforced by stewards and the overall community.
Before we get started, please note that if you have support questions, our Discord here is the place to ask, comments not related to the proposal in this thread will be removed:
Governance Roles
Right now there are two main roles in Gitcoin governance: stewards and delegates.
Becoming a steward: If you want to get involved as a steward, state your intent here to build and govern for the public good. Any community member may pledge their intent to be a Steward, but fellow community members will choose who are worthy of their delegation.
Delegating your voting power: If you just claimed GTC and would prefer to empower a Steward, go here to delegate your voting power. Even this act of delegation goes a long way to ensure your views and thoughts are well represented. You can change it at any time, but choose your delegate wisely!
Governance Process:
Note: All meaningful governance discussion should take place on this forum to ensure the community has full transparency
The Gitcoin governance process is the act of proposing, discussing, and deciding initiatives for Gitcoin Grants. As currently scoped, workstreams define topics, topics lead to proposals, and proposals are voted on by the community (and the stewards!).
Users should submit a forum post and provide at least 5 days for comment before moving to Snapshot as defined below.
We have the following workstreams proposed, and a few topics that have emerged around them:
Public Goods Funding: Helping rally the community to fund public goods, setting criteria for matching rounds, and finding ways to get Gitcoin involved in funding new digital public goods.
Sybil Defenders: Analyzing Gitcoin data and brainstorming long-term identity and mechanism design solutions for Sybil-Resistance.
Progressive Decentralization: Finding ways to modularize and simplify Gitcoin’s architecture for the community to use in perpetuity.
Public Goods Prototyping: Finding ways to use Gitcoin’s new architecture to build novel solutions to ecosystem problems.
If you see something missing, feel free to suggest a workstream, or just dive straight into discussions.
Voting
Proposals
Once the community has decided a workstream discussion is ready to be formalized, they should make a proposal in the Proposal Discussion section of the forum.
Any formal proposal must:
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receive at least 5 thumbs up
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be live for 5 days
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follow this template
Otherwise, it will not be considered a valid proposal and removed.
Using Snapshot
Once that’s been done, formal voting can take place.
Off-chain voting or "soft voting" - This kind of voting will take place on Snapshot, a simple voting interface that allows users to signal sentiment. Votes on snapshot are weighted by the number of GTC delegated to the address used to vote.
IMPORTANT: For now, Snapshot will be used for final decision making
EVENTUAL On-chain voting or “hard voting” - For proposals to move GTC from the DAO or other key changes to DAO structure, Gitcoin will be using Tally. To complicate things a bit, we’re still in the process of setting up Tally to make sure the experience is perfect, so for now Snapshot votes will be final assuming they follow the flow here.
In both cases voting power is directly proportional to the amount of GTC a user holds and the quorum requirements are the same - a minimum of 2.5mm GTC must participate in the vote unless the community ratifies otherwise.
Soft Quorum
In some cases, especially early on in governance, it may be very difficult to reach quorum. To facilitate better governance and avoid burning out participants, the idea of soft quorum was put forward. Soft quorum means that if a proposal would have passed had quorum been reached and support >90% in favor of a given outcome, stewards act as though the proposal has hit quorum.
Example
Suppose a proposal gets 1.5mm votes in favor of Option A and 500 votes in favor of Option B. We add 1mm votes to Option B to hit quorum and find that the vote is still strongly in favor of Option A. Soft quorum is hit and the proposal moves forward.
Conflicting Votes
From time to time there may be conflicting proposals, to avoid issues, the 5 day window above can also serve as time for anyone to list their preferred alternative option on the forum. Each proposal on an associate topic will have a [TOPIC] block placed in its title.
After that time, a vote will be put forward including all options available to move forward with. This will ensure that everyone has the ability to surface their preferences while keeping decision timelines reasonably short.
Remember, this is a living document and is only meant to act as a starting point for governance. If there’s anything you want to add or anything that’s unclear please suggest it below or even as a separate proposal!
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