Temp Check - In an Emergency, who has the authority to Ban Governance Related Malicious Actors?

A Governance Related Matter could pertain to:

A person who has embezzled, stolen from, or attacked the treasury.

A person who creates an attack that could be detrimental to the DAO, to any person, or any group of individuals.

A person who commits violence against another contributor at an in person function.

So, who has the ability to enact an off boarding protocol?

  • Ombuds Office
  • DoG (department of governance)
  • BanklessDAO Treasury Multi Sig
  • I have a question

0 voters

As decentralised as we would love to be.

I still trust a few people in banklessdao to hold this kind of ā€œultimateā€ power.

Most of them are OG.

For example. Ryan Sean Adam / David Hoffman.

Above average joe. NFThinker. Icedcool.

But mainly because of the long track record. And they will only use these powers in ā€œemergencyā€

I would think that a body that is both qualified to mediate and is not directly affected by the offending party would be best to carry out judgement.
In my opinion it needs to be a qualified Arbitration Board; with a clear set af established rules to go by.

If it were up to the Ombuds Office, would the decision be made by committee or and individual arbitrator?

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You forgot some options here homey.

  • infosec

Is an additional group, there may be others.

What would the others be? Listing those is a bonus to this temp check, in my opinion.

This is a good way to add options, and get decisions together as to who could have the ability to make this decision.

I hope that other members would comment with other options as well.

@Junglerush mentions an outside arbitration board. Iā€™m another post, @Humpty had mentioned a service such as Kleros.io.

@BogDrakonov could (and would) be instrumental in this discussion. As would folks like @ernest_of_gaia and @Trewkat (is it weird that I am slowly becoming your biggest fan :face_holding_back_tears:)

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This is such a difficult question - even putting aside the philosophical aspect i.e. which groups or individuals should have what types of authority, the practicalities are not really in our favour.

We have already given InfoSec the authority to ban user identities from the Discord server. Iā€™m not sure that we have written that anywhere but there is an understanding that a user who spams or harasses others will be removed.

Similarly we have presumably given each teamā€™s nominated Notion admin the authority to manage their set of pages as they see fit, and as an org we would expect that access would only be given to those who will use it appropriately.

The reality is though, that re-entering the Discord is as simple as creating a new Discord account. We could ban a wallet address from receiving BANK but unless there was a suspicion, we would not know to check each new personā€™s wallet address for links to the banned one. With a new Discord account and new email, someone can easily come back as part of our community.

In some ways, thatā€™s not a bad thing - some of the rhetoric Iā€™ve read about DAOs is that your past doesnā€™t matter, but certainly it does mean we need to be vigilant. It means that the social layer, the power of our community connections and our engagement with proposals and other governance initiatives, is our most powerful defence against ā€˜malicious actorsā€™.

Your question specifically asks about emergency situations, but you havenā€™t specified where a ban would be applied so I assume you mean Discord or maybe Notion as well. My response to that is that any Level 2 member who recognises a threat and has the necessary permissions is empowered to act first to mitigate the threat and then ask questions later.

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My hope was to bring out the underlying discussion, topics, and factors that could be in play for this discussion. Because I am far from the proper person to answer anything, and there are multiple facets to this conversation that it probably canā€™t be answered in 1 poll.

However, it can be the start of the conversation. Especially by the people who care. Im sure other folks will also give their opinion and perhaps may not be able to votes. However, if it gets the people talking at least (not talking bad, thatā€™s not my intention) then Iā€™m okay with it.

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A in-house arbitration panel can be made up from one(or more) delegate(s) from Ombuds, Infosec, DoG and any other high-level department; with recusal of directly affected parties.
This panel should be invoked for DAO specific instances and not for interpersonal conflicts which is the realm of Ombuds.
Ombuds should be able to invoke the arbitration panel for instances where implications may have spill-over effects beyond the interpersonal.

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This sounds logical. @Junglerush . It seems that there would need to be different body that can be used for simply these factors.

Do you know about kleros? Would this be an instance that kleros would be useful for?

Or an in house fully built arbitration idea?

Good point. I forgot about this at first.

So this could be tricky to answer as well. There are Asana boards, miro, dework, wonderverse, metaforo, and the list goes on for longer than I would like to admit.

It may be just a blanket ban to deal with all aspects of docs that bdao touches however, thatā€™s probably not a valid response.

Id say it would be the main DAO ā€œfunctioningā€ platforms as in discord, Notion, and maybe snapshot?

I would not suggest a permanent panel. I would suggest a panel convened of volunteers once evoked and dissolved once the process has concluded.

I figure that a contributor from each high-level department volunteers to be a part of the arbitration panel once it convenes at the behest of a L2 contributor. In-house arbitration allows for quick action by those that know the inner workings and have authority for change.
I would only prescribe outside arbitration to a DAO-wide division that cannot be arbitrated fairly in-house; say, a rebellion that splits the DOA with a marginal final vote.

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Thatā€™s an idea, I figure. Itā€™s sensible!

Maybe worth taking third party inputs like kleros as someone mentioned, but we must not discount autonomous solutions like https://twitter.com/valoryag/status/1643670672521195523

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Thanks, Iā€™m learning more about these options every day

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wrong answer. we could write this into code. there are tons of tools we could use to achieve this. spinning up a moloch dao comes to mind. if we depend on human actors as the highest authority, what are we doing here anyway? its more of the same.

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Iā€™m with you there; should be written as is the constitution but with a generalization that can incorporate future or unrealized events. Even the Constitution has varying degrees of interpretation of how it is applied. Human actors will more than likely still be intermediaries.

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