GIP-101: Should karpatkey and StableLab Establish a Delegate Program v0 for the GnosisDAO?

Governance GIPs
1

GIP-101: Should karpatkey and StableLab Establish a Delegate Program v0 for the GnosisDAO?

  • In Favour
  • Against
0 voters 
GIP: 101
title: Establish GnosisDAO Delegate Program v0
author: @karpatkey, @Kene_StableLab
Drafttype: Funding
created: 2024-05-20
duration: 7 months
funding: 20k

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Executive Summary

This proposal aims to prevent the GnosisDAO from encountering challenges related to reaching a quorum on its proposals, preventing the hindrance of effective decision-making and governance processes. This program is designed to improve quorum participation, increase community engagement and strengthen the governance processes of the GnosisDAO, leading to more effective and inclusive decision-making.

This proposal suggests electing ten delegates through a transparent and democratic election process to increase the DAO’s ability to reach a quorum and enhance the community’s participation in decision-making.

Each selected delegate will receive 5,000 GNO from the DAO Treasury, empowering them to represent the community’s interests and contribute actively to the governance of the GnosisDAO. This delegation will last six months. This proposal distributes temporary voting power only.

Specification

This program will delegate 5,000 GNO from the GnosisDAO treasury to 10 candidates selected through a Snapshot voting process.

Eligibility Criteria

Each applicant must meet the following criteria to be eligible to become a delegate in this program:

  • Active Community Membership. Nominees must be active members of the GnosisDAO Community. To meet this criteria, they will share a link to their forum account or Discord, demonstrating activity for at least six months.
    • If they do not meet this criteria, an active member not already participating in this program may sponsor them. Active members may only sponsor one applicant.
  • History of Governance Experience. Nominees must have governance experience as demonstrated by a history of participation in the GnosisDAO governance process or another active DAO. To meet these criteria, they will share a link to their relevant Snapshot or Tally profile showing a history of governance involvement.
  • Post a Delegate Initiative. Nominees will post a delegate initiative on the GnosisDAO forum that outlines the details of their experience in DAO Governance and their approach to contributing to GnosisDAO Governance.

These criteria are designed to ensure that the selected delegates are experienced and committed members of the GnosisDAO community, capable of effectively representing the community’s interests and contributing to the DAO’s governance.

Delegate Selection Process

Submission

Delegates will nominate themselves by posting interest in the official “Nomination Thread”. The nomination thread will be posted upon passing this proposal. Please provide the instructions, date, and template for application submission.

In addition to meeting the Eligibility Criteria, delegates will be expected to explain (at a minimum) the following in their application:

  • Introduction: Introduce themselves or the organization. The goal is one brief paragraph.
  • Proposed Delegate Initiative: State their reason for wanting to be a GnosisDAO delegate or become further involved in the GnosisDAO.
  • Areas of expertise: Explain any expertise relevant to their involvement in the GnosisDAO.

Voting and Selection

All qualified and complete submissions received during the submission phase will be placed on a ballot. The ballot will be moved to Snapshot, and voting will be conducted using the weighted voting strategy.

Voters are encouraged to select nominations that promote diversity and representation based on their expertise, commitment to the DAO’s principles and dedication to advancing the GnosisDAO’s mission.

The top ten nominations receiving the most votes will be selected to receive a 5,000 GNO delegation for this six-month trial program.

Timeline

A nomination thread will be opened on the forum, and applications will be accepted for three weeks. At the end of three weeks, eligible applications will be assembled and move to a weighted Snapshot vote to determine the selected delegates.

Phase Duration
Phase 1: Application 3 weeks
Phase 2: Voting 1 week
Phase 3: Active Delegation Program 6 Months

Although the duration timeline is specified in this proposal, the official dates will be established once this proposal is passed and posted in the Nomination Thread with instructions for applying.

Program Duration

This delegate trial program will run for six months, after which the community will review it for renewal or deprecation.

Delegation Allocation

Each of the ten delegates selected will receive 5k GNO independently. The distribution is designed to provide equal incentives for participation.

The total amount being allocated (50k GNO) was chosen because it represents a significant amount of quorum while not meaningfully diluting current stakeholders while still providing a boosting governance involvement.

karpatkey will assist the GnosisDAO in creating ten separate SAFEs, configuring them to the same policy as employed in the treasury management SAFEs. This set-up will ensure the DAO retains custody of the GNO and the signer for the delegation actions.

Accountability Mechanisms

To ensure accountability for this program and the delegates receiving active delegations, two sets of performance indicators will be established:

1. Delegate KPI’s

Delegates will be required to maintain minimum standards of participation. These standards are:

  • Maintaining a voting record of at least 70%.
  • Maintaining a voting reasoning communication record of 100%.

2. Program KPI’s

This KPI ensures that program facilitators remain actively involved and promote the success of delegates:

  • Greater than 50% of the nominated and selected delegates meet their Delegate KPIs.

Note: If a delegate is below these indicators at the conclusion of the trial period, this delegate will be ineligible to participate in the next Delegate Program cycle. Elected delegates are entering this program with the expectation of voting on all proposals and promptly communicating their rationale for voting on the forum.

Rationale

Achieving a quorum on proposals is not just a procedural requirement but a crucial factor for the smooth functioning and effectiveness of the GnosisDAO. Quorum ensures that decisions reflect the community’s consensus and that proposals receive adequate scrutiny and deliberation before implementation. However, the DAO needs help to reach quorum levels, leading to delays in decision-making and potentially impacting the progress of important initiatives vital for the DAO’s growth and success.

By selecting up to 10 delegates through an election process, we aim to bolster quorum participation and increase community engagement in governance activities. Delegates entrusted with representing the community’s interests will actively participate in discussions, vote on proposals, and advocate for initiatives that align with the DAO’s objectives. Their involvement will enhance the diversity of perspectives considered in decision-making and foster a more inclusive governance process.

Budget

The total budget for this six-month trial period is $20,000, paid in xDAI. The budget will pay StableLab to function as the “Program Facilitator”. This budget pays for the work involved in assisting with this program design and providing oversight of delegates, including ensuring delegates remain active in meeting their participation KPIs.

Stablelabs will also provide a retrospective analysis of this program’s efficacy to aid the DAO’s decision to continue beyond an initial six-month trial period.

Payment Schedule

Payment Amount
Month 1 One payment of 10,000 xDAI
Month 3 One payment of 10,000 xDAI
Total 20,000 xDAI

These two payments will be made during the months of the active delegation phase following a successful selection of delegates.

Evaluation

This program will be evaluated by successfully completing the KPIs established in this proposal. A DAO vote will be required to continue it beyond the initial six-month trial period.

Team/ Organization

karpatkey and StableLab are jointly presenting this proposal. StableLab will serve the role of “Program Facilitator”, providing oversight and upkeep, while karpatkey will provide support in setting up the SAFEs.

  • karpatkey will support the technical implementation of the Gnosis Delegate Program by initiating the required SAFEs to achieve multiple delegations. karpatkey will also assist in receiving the payment requests from StableLab. As an already established and compensated service provider, karpatkey will provide these services under existing agreements.

  • StableLab (“Program Facilitator”) will facilitate the governance frameworks and non-technical operations required to execute the Gnosis Delegate Program so that all elected delegates maintain their KPIs. This measure ensures that the Delegate Program operates effectively and in the community’s best interests. StableLab has experience establishing, running, and actively participating in delegate programs across DAOs such as Aave, Uniswap, 1inch, Balancer, Safe, etc.

Points of Contact

Conclusion

A final version of this proposal will be posted to the GnosisDAO snapshot following community discussion, successful polling, and implementation of any edits or changes.

11 Likes
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Hey everyone!

As delegates, it is our duty to ensure decentralization, which is a key part of our mission statement. If we are to achieve decentralization and embrace diverse opinions, transparency is essential. However, we believe there is still a lack of clear communication and coordination.

This proposal seems unusually timely, especially following the recent GIP from Gnosis Guild. Have you been in contact with them? They have been actively involved and pushing for Delegation in GnosisDAO for some time now (GIP-77). There is an interesting mix of interests here, considering both Stablelab and Gnosis Guild are part of the investment portfolio.

It’s also strange that Stablelab is the program facilitator despite not having made any significant contributions to the DAO.

We haven’t seen any comments/feedback from StableLab or @Karpatkey regarding GIP-99, which is also interesting.

  • Does each applicant need to meet the 3 criteria items or is it arbitrary?
  • We believe that if you want to increase community engagement and onboard new participants and voices, setting the bar to “at least one year” will exclude 95% of members, including us, the proposed program facilitator, and many other stakeholders.
  • Great first step, although there are many more factors to consider for participation beyond just voting and the rationale. Looking forward to the v1

  • There is a note for delegate underperformance, what about program facilitator?

  • The program’s KPI (50%) is too low to indicate good performance, and it is unclear how you plan to ensure participation without any incentives.

  • Additionally, the budget of 20,000 xDAI, as also mentioned in the Gnosis Guild proposal GIP-99, is questionable. What is the breakdown of the 20,000 xDAI budget for three months, adjusted to the responsibilities of the program facilitator?

  • Why not tie the disbursement to the achievement of the program KPIs, returning the funds to the DAO if the targets are not met to ensure alignment with the initiative?

Having followed the governance of GnosisDAO for the past few months, we’ve come to understand its flaws, know the key players, and learn the scopes and mechanisms involved. As we said in the GIP-99 (with the corresponding feedback and concerns), we believe that this proposal also addresses governance issues and offers a decent solution.

We appreciated when Gnosis Guild initiated the debate with GIP-77/GIP-99, and we celebrate that you are doing the same now.

4 Likes
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We appreciate the reply and suggestions for improvement. We specifically held off on putting the poll up immediately to give room for important feedback such as this.

We value @SEEDLatam’s input and will consider these in a revision. We’ve reached out to and will discuss ways to optimize the evaluation section. Our general responses to a few of your mentions are below:

The criteria is intended so that the three would be required. As they currently stand, and together, they promote providing these incentives to active community GnosisDAO members with important context, those with a history of DAO involvement and require establishing official communication on the forum.

We believe all of these points have merit and are far from arbitrary. If @SEEDLatam feels there is room for improvement, we’re open to suggestions on tightening or relaxing these.

To mitigate this requirement, we provisioned for nominees’ ability to be sponsored and/or vouched for in their application. We do feel it is important to have a record of involvement, especially if this program were to be further established in a v1.

To your point, this requirement can be relaxed. Do you have a suggested requirement for involvement?

For the performance indicators, we intentionally kept them broader in this v0 so they can be tightened as time goes on and this becomes established. These indicators consider that we are starting from a position with very little diversity and attention. Given the current situation, setting them too high could be aggressive here, whereas in other DAOs, we generally agree that these are far too low.

We intentionally set two indicators: one for the delegates and one for the program facilitator. These are both important because we need a mechanism to sort out and recycle poorly performing delegates and ensure the paid role effectively stewards the process.

Considering the state of activity, this program should have a single responsible party. The facilitator’s role is to ensure that delegates are following through with their commitments and understand the program. The facilitator should identify possible underperformance early and help rectify it. We do not want delegates to disappear. Additionally, we want the facilitator to have a high-level perspective with direct involvement in this program to provide an analysis at the end of this v0 program.

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I think this is a fantastic idea. Delegating 50k GNO to the community would be a huge help in moving us towards more democratic decision-making, considering the quorum on snapshot is 75k.

I enthusiastically support this.

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This is an amazing initiative specially for all the value members that have been contributing to Gnosis for years, it´s a good way to encourage the value of governance. :owl:

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AWESOME idea. One suggested edit for the group – I remember some months ago reading Lefteris’s thoughts on the amount of time/effort that went in to regularly understanding and opining on all proposals in a DAO. His point was that, without significant token holdings of your own, the job was at best thankless and at worst, antagonistic. His recommendation was salaries for those with delegated voting power above a certain threshold. I believe we will run into the same problem here – some of the more active and valuable people in this forum may not have been able to purchase significant GNO stakes but may still be passionate and make an excellent delegated voter. I would propose adding a salary here. Say, $2.5k paid in GNO for each delegate at the end of the 6mo period assuming satisfactory performance. In my opinion, thats $25k well spent by the DAO and increases economic alignment of our chosen delegates. Also, should note that I’ll be putting my name in for this program. Given that, I can commit now to donating any salary that is attached to this proposal to a program like Giveth or UBI.

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Is this due to participation apathy of the large holders? This will not change by the program I suppose, at least not, as long as the delegates don’t vote against the interest of these whales.
Just lowering the the quorum could achieve the same but for cheaper :wink:

But

is ofc very much needed. If this can be achieved, the funds are very well spent, so in general I am in support of this experiment. But as a KPI (those mentioned should be easily met) I would like to see some other metrics added, like increase in the number of ppl participating in forum discussion and/or snapshot voting (or delegate their own voting rights).

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For this pilot program, we intentionally kept the metrics simple to focus primarily on increasing voter diversity. We recognize that the forum’s active community is relatively small today, and ideally, we will see a positive second-order effect resulting in increased posts. In subsequent iterations, we support expanding the program’s metrics and goals to be more comprehensive, as you suggest.

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We want to extend our appreciation to @seedLatam for their valuable feedback last week. This feedback led to significant improvements in the eligibility requirements and delegate KPIs.

The changes were:

  • reducing program eligibility to require only six months of community involvement;
  • increasing the voting participation KPI to at least 70%; and
  • increasing the voting communication KPI to 100%.

To clarify the eligibility requirements, a member who meets these criteria may vouch or endorse an applicant if any applicant has yet to have six months of activity on Discord or the forum. This endorsement would fulfil their requirement. To prevent abuse, endorsements can not be made to multiple applicants, and anyone who endorses is ineligible to apply themselves.

If this program passes Snapshot a “Nomination Thread” with the steps to post an application will be created.

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Hey All !

This is a great idea, and we will follow this proposal and apply .

Lou
Stake capital

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I don’t understand how this is measured here. Ofc the delegates will vote, and have more voting power, but otherwise it didn’t change much as I see it.

Can absolutely agree on this and I am missing especially the involvement of the large holders. Imho delegate some voting rights to ppl interested is fine, but still I would favor to see more participation in the discussion and votig process by those, having a larger stake in gnosis (@mkoeppelmann is one of the few exceptions).

And last but not least: Posting and discussing more internals here regarding the shaping of the gc-ecosystem would for sure attract more ppl to join. This regards many topics @Karpatkey (maybe with advice from some internals) is deciding on it’s own right now like 1.) where to put or remove liquidity, 2.) how to use voting rights in other protocols like balancer and curve and 3.) last but not least the buybacks that have been done (see post from @Nay 1 ).

I am very interested if you see a way to become more open about these topics, cause imho its as important as this GIP on the way to become a real DAO that attracts others to join

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This proposal intends to add 2/3 of the quorum to every vote over six months. On average, over the past year, only five delegates have voted with over 1k GNO in each proposal. Our intention with this proposal is that the 50k GNO delegated will diversify the voting power cast to reduce reliance on one or two ecosystem actors.

This proposal is not just about changing the governance structure, but also about creating opportunities for professionals to contribute to the Gnosis ecosystem. The nomination requirements, which include community and governance experience, are designed to accommodate both existing Gnosis delegates who wish to have a louder voice and those outside the ecosystem seeking involvement. We believe that this inclusivity will enrich the ecosystem with diverse perspectives and expertise.

We hope that this proposal will attract active delegates who can help refine and shape the ecosystem and decision-making, as you described.

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This seems easy if 50k additional votes will be provided to interested people, but this don’t address the negligence of large holders. And it’s not only voting of these enteties, that I am missing but also participation in this forum.

This don’t really addresses my comment: Are you willing to discuss the mentioned topics in public or what is holding you back to do so? I don’t see a reason why it’s not already been done and suppose it could have helped us to gain more traction.

Lending out 50k voting rights for six month in an ecosystem that seems still centralized cause major players hold a majority is nothing that will change much, as long as these major players (and I suppose you know who these are) don’t like to participate here and show a sign about their willingness to become really decentralized, at least in the long run (imho this can be done only by involving the interested community in discussion and decision making). Lending out voting rights is fine, but communication is much more important and can hardly be forced.

4 Likes
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I disagree with this proposal. The low voter turnout among token holders has been primarily due to a lack of transparency from Gnosis insiders, a situation that has been improving recently. Personally, I intend to step up as a delegate and prefer to earn genuine votes rather than rely on artificially created ones.

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We agree that participation can and should be improved, which is why we have decided to put this proposal forward. That said, we do not intend for this to be mistaken as a panacea for all issues.

We can’t force communication from existing holders, but we require any program participant to communicate voting rationale. Participants must meet these requirements to be allowed to reapply, which incentivises maintaining these standards. If this passes, existing community members such as yourself will be candidates who qualify. We intend for these selected delegates to set the precedence for active and informed involvement.

Regarding your comment about liquidity, buybacks, and voting rights, this proposal does not address those concerns directly. However, it will increase the number of voices and voting power in those discussions to make them more productive. As you’ve pointed out, these discussions are better when involving interested community members, and in our opinion, those members need voting power to effectively enact meaningful change using the governance mechanisms we’re given.

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Following the successful forum poll and feedback, we have moved this GIP to Phase-3 and posted it to Snapshot for voting.

If this Snapshot is successful, we will facilitate deploying the Safes required for delegation. StableLab will facilitate the three-week nomination process beginning the week of June 17th. StableLab will also post specific nomination instructions at that time.

Additionally, karpatkey and StableLab will coordinate with @john_szczepaniak to attend the June 27th community call to answer any questions about the nomination process or this proposal.

4 Likes
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Another questions I would have is whether the delegate needs to be an individual or could it be an organization / community? I think it would be more interesting to have collectives as delegates rather than singular people. A collective would be able to have a broader program and goals which several people could take part in forming rather than having one person needing to be aware of everything. This isn’t saying there should be no individual delegates but that there should be a diversity of types of delegates perhaps.

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A delegate doesn’t need to be an individual. It can be a collective or an organization/community.

1 Like