TLDR
This post describes how RadicalxChange Voice might improve the collective decision-making processes in the context of DAOs in general and GitcoinDAO workstreams specifically.
Shared Goal Formation
Groups of people collaborating without a robust set of democratic rules often default back to a hierarchical, top-down decision-making arrangement. In other words, the Schelling point of unorganized collaboration, even in the DAO age, continues to be a traditional boss-employer relationship.
Organizing groups without democratic mechanisms often lead to power concentrations from a few charismatic leaders - the loudest voices in the room dominate. Therefore, formal rules and boundaries are essential to help individuals negotiate the shared resources and vision of the group.
With the help of new DAO-native tools, we are able to construct systems that are more fair, inclusive, and democratic. We should strive for more social dimensions of progress and systems for shared goal formation based on participatory democratic mechanisms.
RadicalxChange Voice: Democracy²
RadicalxChange (RxC) is a global movement for next-generation political economies founded by political economist @GlenWeyl in 2018. RxC is committed to advancing plurality, equality, community, and decentralization through upgrading democracy, markets, the data economy, the commons and identity.
RxC Voice is an open-source web app that allows groups to evolve and leverage collective intelligence to rapidly make decisions together. Using RxC Voice, a cooperative can filter signal from noise and align the group towards shared ideals and outcomes. We believe that RxC Voice can help move DAOs towards more pluralistic governance as it amplifies the whole group’s shared beliefs instead of just the dominant voices.
Using RxC Voice
The RxC Voice process is divided into 3 stages. Each step of the process is anonymous, it’s not possible to gain insight into how individuals vote, nor can individuals prove to other participants how they’ve voted. The stages are as follows;
Stage 1: Delegation - Members of the group are asked to delegate Voice Credits to boost the impact of their peers. The delegated credits are then matched using quadratic funding with a matching pool 100 times the number of delegates.
Stage 2: Deliberation - Members are invited to add and explore statements by the group on Polis. Members may submit any statement or comments that express their ideas, feelings, or principles relevant to the conversation.
Stage 3: Election - Actionable common grounds are identified by quadratically voting on the statements from stage 2 by either agreeing or disagreeing. At the end of this stage a set of the most agreed upon statements are identified and presented.
If you’d like to see how this works in practice - check out the 2-minute introduction of RxC Voice.
Initial Experiments in Gitcoin
Considering how GitcoinDAO operates with contributor-driven workstreams, we see collaborative road-mapping as a natural fit for RxC Voice. With RxC Voice, workstreams can harness the richness of their collective intelligence in order to form better roadmaps, budgets and priorities which align workstream operations with shared contributor goals.
The emerging Builderband, Gitcoin’s alumni network of builders, applied RxC Voice to prioritize its activities for Q1 2022. As the next application within Gitcoin, we propose to implement RxC Voice with the contributors of the MMM Workstream. If the experiment is successful, MMM aims to incorporate the results in the Season 14 budget proposal. The RxC Voice pilot in MMM will take place half way into Season 13 and center around the question:
- What activities should the MMM workstream prioritize in Season 14?
Giving DAOs a Shared Voice
In identifying potential RxC Voice product improvements specific to Gitcoin, we might consider starting a formal collaboration with RxC Foundation to help suit our needs. Similar to how the executive branch of the Colorado government worked with RxC and quadratic voting to address interdisciplinary issues. If proven successful at MMM, RxC Voice could be applied for cross-workstream and DAO-wide cooperation as well for rapid, democratic, decision -making.
We are excited about the use cases of RxC Voice and see an excellent opportunity to apply it within GitcoinDAO’s executive teams. We look forward to experimenting together with RxC Foundation and, hopefully, bringing more plurality and collective intelligence to GitcoinDAO. We invite anyone interested to connect with us as we jump into this experiment!
Special thanks to @alexrandaccio and @anoanoano from the RadicalxChange Foundation for their work on RxC Voice.
