Pending Governance Proposals

Governance
1

Summary

There are many proposal pending quorum at the moment. In the Governance Department WorkStream meeting on 6th March, [voice notes: Craig Recording] we brainstormed some ways to move forward. We’d like to invite the community to join us on the CC this Friday to discuss this issue and potential ways to move forward.

Background

In order for proposals to pass the BanklessDAO governance process, they must first reach quorum as defined in the constitution. This quorum threshold was setup at a time when there were many more active contributors in the DAO, and especially active on forum. However, we do not see the same level of activity today, which results in our processes being clogged!

For reference, these are all the proposals missing quorum:

[V2] Establish and fund a Governance Department missing 3 votes
BanklessDAO: Quadratic Matching Round Pilot missing 7 votes
bDIP 04 : Departments missing 33 votes
bDIP - 6 - Code Of Conduct Change missing 19 votes
bDIP-03: Dynamic forum quorum for bDIPs missing 30 votes
[bDIP-N]: Updating the Mandate of Governance Department missing 35 votes

Possible solutions

These are some solutions which we have brainstormed over in the governance meeting:

1. Authors campaign for their own proposals

The group was generally in favor of authors campaigning for their own proposals as opposed to a governance crew being incharge of it. The cons of this approach include additional unpaid work as well as inconsistencies in our governance practices as compared to 2021, when proposals would easily pass quorum without campaigning.

2. Proposal hygiene

Proposals which are well written with a clear summary with bullet points are easier to understand

3. Broader community involvement

There was talk of involving the broader community via translations, education and campaigning. This has been the general approach since the DAO started but has failed to consistently provide results

4. Delegated Governance

Instead of trying to reach out to people who are not interested in governance, we can empower people who are interested in the topic by allowing token holders to delegate their governance power to these interested delegates

5. Other options?

Do you think there are other ways we can address this challange? [Comment below]

CALL TO ACTION

  1. On Friday, the 10th of March during CC, we’ll hold a roundtable on this topic along with a live poll to test sentiment on possible solutions. Join us!

  2. Comment on this post with your thoughts and suggestions

8 Likes
2

POLL

Should BanklessDAO adopt Delegated Voting ?

  • Yes
  • No

0 voters

3

I agree with delegation, as long as the members are informed how their votes are being used. Like a summary, and time lines, and notifications so they can withdraw their voting power when delegator is acting against the member interest, or maybe just withdraw support to specific proposals. Idk about existing tools to do this.

2 Likes
4

@Jengajojo i am confused why this poll is asking about delegates governance but not giving information about it. Also was the round table on delegated governance or on pending governance proposals?

2 Likes
5

Also, @Jengajojo you mentioned proposals that haven’t met quorum. Do you know what the quorum is? I understand all proposals and B dips should have the number of votes that need to meet quorum on the proposal itself, adding this to templates would help.
The problem though is if I don’t know what quorum is, how can I add it to a proposal or bDIP? How does anyone know what the quorum requirements are?

1 Like
6

i agree with vote in this matter

7

Also @Jengajojo bDIP-03 was over 3 months old and only had 10 votes the day that you wrote this post.
As the author of bDIP-03, you should have closed the poll after 2 weeks.
As author of this post, you should not have included it.

8

All valid points. I believe the core problem is that the constitution allows for only two types of proposals, bDIPs and grant requests. Grant Quorums are decided by the GC, bDIP quorums are in the consitution, but there is no clarity on how to proceed with governance proposals which modify things like the DAO multi-sig or withdraw earnings from uniswap pools etc. AFAIK @Icedcool wanted to make a proposal to clarify this or add a new category.

Additionally bDIPs quorums can be pitched by the proposer but their final execution is done by the multi-sig, so the final body which decides what quorum should be for anything going to snapshot is the DAO multi-sig.

This was an experiment conducted in the last CC, this is not a formal governance proposal, but a more of a discussion space. The roundtable pointed to the fact that

a. There are proposals on forum pending quorum for more than 7 days
b. There were over 65 members on that call, enough to clear quorum for all proposal
c. Ice gave a summary for each proposal for those who did not have time/energy to read thru each of them

However, we still did not reach quorum. This was not an issue in 2021 or early 2022 if you check posts and polls from then. For me this is a clear signal that not everyone is interested in governance. How can we solve this problem? There are many solutions which we can iteratively test, my suggestion is to test delegated governance.

In the last governance dept meeting, we followed up on this. One of the points which @Icedcool brings, and I agree, is that we should test new things as opposed to adopting things which are popular in the DAO space. Ofcourse there are other solutions such as Grants stack, Prop House, Home · delvtech/council-kit Wiki · GitHub etc…

9

I would appreciate some more information on the conceptualisation of delegated voting. Of course generally speaking it should be easy to understand. But it can vary in execution, so I was wondering if you could provide more insight on how you envision its execution, how can you protect against sybil attacks and popularity context and how should the whole voting procedure look.