Introduction: The Gnosis ecosystem has grown rapidly over the past few years, with more and more stakeholders becoming involved in the Gnosis DAO and the Gnosis community. However, as the ecosystem continues to grow, it is becoming increasingly difficult for stakeholders to keep up with the growing coverage and complexity of the Gnosis Forum. @Mareen is already covering some of those topics here. To address this issue on a higher level, I would like to discuss the implementation of a governance structure based on delegates, which could improve the overall transparency and efficiency of the Gnosis ecosystem (similar to MakerDAO).
Background: A governance structure based on delegates would involve the selection of a group of individuals who are elected by the community to represent them in the Gnosis governance process. These delegates would be responsible for reviewing GIPs, participating in discussions and decision-making, and providing updates to the community on the progress of GIPs. They would act as a link between the Gnosis community and the GnosisDAO, helping to ensure that the community’s views and concerns are taken into account when making decisions about the future of the Gnosis ecosystem.
Strengths:
Improves the overall transparency and efficiency of the Gnosis ecosystem by providing a clear link between the community and the Gnosis DAO.
Allows for more effective decision-making by providing a smaller, more focused group of individuals to review and discuss GIPs.
Provides an opportunity for community members to become more involved in the governance of the Gnosis ecosystem.
Weaknesses:
This governance structure could lead to a reduction in community participation, as a smaller group of individuals will be making the decisions.
The process of selecting and electing delegates may be complex and time-consuming.
Some community members may not trust the delegates to accurately represent their views and concerns.
Opportunities:
Will create more efficient and effective governance process.
Better alignment of interests between delegates and the community
Giving more opportunity to community members to become involved in the governance process and have a direct influence on the Gnosis ecosystem.
Threats:
The introduction of a governance structure based on delegates could lead to a decrease in overall community participation, which could undermine the legitimacy and effectiveness of the Gnosis DAO.
Some community members may not trust the delegates, which could lead to a loss of support for the Gnosis ecosystem.
High potential of centralization, if the number of delegates is too low or if the election process is not fair and transparent.
Conclusion: Overall, the implementation of a governance structure based on delegates has the potential to improve the overall transparency and efficiency of the Gnosis ecosystem, while also providing an opportunity for community members to become more involved in the governance process. However, it is important to consider the potential downsides of such a structure, and to carefully design the delegate selection and election process to minimize these risks and to ensure the community support.
Totally agree that transparency is valuable, seeing votes (or absence of votes) from ppl and having no idea why they decide as they do is sometimes frustrating. And also agree @Mareen that follow up of proposals is necessary.
I joined xDAIStake some time ago (before the merger with gnosis), and one of the reasons I joined was my impression that this might become a decentralized entity that I could give some swings in a direction I like to see it to progress. After the merge my share has been reduced to a quarter, and I see also many ppl from the old days have left (maybe because of this).
My wish is still to have a decentralized ecosystem, where the ppl who like to be involved have a say, but also large shareholders need to communicate to the community (and the community needs to be interested in the ongoing stuff).
Having a look at the last votes, I see that it’s easy to just ignore…cause there are not enough ppl regularly involved to cover the 75k quorum. This doesn’t encourage ppl to get involved, cause it just makes it worthless to participate in discussion if it doesn’t have any impact on outcome.
Having a voting system with delegates can make this better…another way to have more participation would be to take the quorum away. And regarding transparency it would even be better to allow just whitelisted addresses (linked to a name in this, or any other, forum) to be allowed to vote.
Actually all these things shouldn’t be necessary if we are decentralized…but as long as there are several entities having 50k GNO or even more I see the necessity to have some other ways to cope with this. Having delegates might make the situation a little better.
Thanks for this post @m3rlin5ky. I think a solution like the one you posted will help with the DAO’s governance health.
Building on top of a few items from your post and @refri’s reply:
Delegation of voting power should aim to increase participation and transparency.
Delegates should explain what they vote for and why.
Any delegates program should incentivize voting, and discussion in the forum as well. At the very least for delegates to communicate their choices.
Community members should be able to select who to delegate their GNO to. If a GNO holder losses trust on the delegate who was picked before, the holder can change his or her delegation.
Delegates activities could be compensated, making incentives have economic value
Incentives could have min and max. Having a cap will help incentivizing more delegates vs concentrating voting power. There could even be penalties for going over a certain value (if within control of the delegate), or have a curve function that grows faster near the min compensation, and slower near the max. Bottom line, there is a space of options to explore once incentives are created.
This needs first and foremost a large crowd interested in the decisions.
not to sure if compensation (in financial terms) attract the ppl we like to have as delegates. At least for me it’s more about making the ecosystem inclusive and this means it shouldn’t be too much about financial gains.
This sounds really good to me, but even better (or at least more in line with my values) would be a voting system not solely depended on number of GNO in linearity but a system giving more decision power to individual persons (e.g. have a voting system where the voting rights are a square root of GNO holdings, but ofc only above a certain number that needs to be at least 1).
Delegates or not, having more ppl involved should be our main focus. And giving decision power and early insight in progress seems the best (and cheapest) incentive to me.
What also might help: getting more ppl that are involved in the Gnosis builders to post here regular updates on what’s going on/is discussed. Having posts here just to get a vote on something that seems to have some history don’t feels right to me.
I think a thoughtful approach to designing a system for delegates would be useful. However, it’s not clear to me that individual delegates result in greater voter participation and overall effectiveness for metagovernance. For example, nearly three quarters of all $COMP delegates have never voted on-chain (Governance Participation: Perils and Promise ).
Some suggestions from other community members recently:
Set a cap on the amount that can be delegated
Set a time period for delegation that ends, like delegation terms
Create a way for delegates to resign (getting everyone to undelegate from you is a disaster and horrible organizational design) — this is covered by the participation agreement time limit for active membership but could be made more explicit
At the end of the day, GNO holders can chose who they delegate to, and when to stop delegating. So if a subset of the individuals looking to become delegates are not aligned with community values, the same community is empowered to cast them aside.
Thanks John for sharing the $COMP experience, I think it is valuable, and you bring up a great point. I think that’s where having a good incentives’ mechanism is key. My suggestion was a financial incentive, and though I still think it is a good idea, I am sure there could be other ways if that doesn’t fit right with the community. For instance, delegated power could get reduced if delegates don’t fulfill a certain definition of success, e.g. a vote participation over a certain percentage threshold. Hence a delegate that wants to continue being one will need to participate just to keep the delegated power.
I also have the feeling that starting with a delegate system is not the real solution to having a higher community participation. I think its better to have some kind of research in order to see how we can increase community participation, to get feedback from people that are already active in the community to people that are not active (like developers from the various projects).
In this we could take CoWSwap as an example: they have been doing a really good job in this with speaking one on one with users of their protocol (zoom meetings or such), ask feedback after each trade and also ask feedback on their twitter/discord etc.
Something important to think about is, why is community participation important. A good place to start might be to understand better the token distribution of GNO currently to understand why the existing token holders might be motivated to participate.
In our experience (I’m CEO of Tally.xyz) the majority of token holders are not interested in taking part in decision making because they are almost always passive holders.
This makes sense, the GnosisDAO Ecosystem is quite large and is coordinated via lengthy text discussion which are time consuming to participate in. It would be unrealistic for most people to participate at a high level.
Delegation is an effective tool to leveraging the voting power, and compensating delegates creates an incentive structure whereby delegates compete for delegations. This competition creates an organic experimentation between delegates to figure out the best way to motivate participation from token holders. It’s not practical IMHO for an organization to run all the various experiments necessary to motivate a community as large as Gnosis.
Back to the original point however, it’s important to try and understand why community participation is important for the DAO. Some DAO’s such as Compound it can be argued has very low community participation by pure numbers, but by pure decisions you could also argue that the folks who do participate are the correct candidates with a strong knowledge of the system and a strong interest in maintaining it.
There is one thing i think people are forgeting about when discussing Delegates and or Delegating Authority to an Individual to serve a specific Community. That Community has to be specifically drawn out in some way, either geographically or cryptographically (in other words grouping by sets of numbers or equations as they relate to each other). As I am a member of a rather large Non Profit International Fellowship involved in its Service Structure on the Regional Level Monitizing the service that a Delegate in the Gnosis GAO BlockChain would be doing is going down a road that is the antithesis of a Community run BlockChain with a GAO which is organized such as Gnosis’s is. Not to mention it also invites a level of corruption that i do not beleive anyone involve would be comfortable with. Just my two bits