Introducing more accountability to the GnosisDAO

Governance
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Introducing more accountability to the GnosisDAO

Since its formation in late 2020 the GnosisDAO has been growing rapidly. In the past two years more than 70 GIPs had been submitted covering many different topics, teams and stakeholders. Since the xDai merge the number of submitted GIPs per month have increased at an even higher pace. As a result, it is difficult for stakeholders to keep up with the growing coverage and complexity of the Gnosis Forum. Additionally, information is limited regarding what happened after a GIP passed. DAOs are intended to be transparent in its operations and decision-making processes. In a DAO, all proposals and votes are recorded on the blockchain, which allows anyone to view them and track the progress of the DAO. However, this transparency ends in most cases once the snapshot was taken and funds were transferred to the teams that authored the GIP. In the past two years 45 GIPs passed successfully. Yet, what happened afterward and the status of those projects are largely unknown. Moving forward, the GnosisDAO should make sure that transparency is maintained after the funds are transferred by requiring that the community is informed about the progress and results of the GIPs in a formal manner.

What steps are planned to make it easier to navigate through the GnosisForum and keep track of the developments that are happening within the GnosisDAO ecosystem?

The first step will be to give the forum a new and more structured appearance. Categories and topics will be reorganized, governance resources will be updated and added. Lastly, the forum will get a fresh new design.

To improve transparency teams that authored GIPs should provide updates about their work. This applies to previous as well as future proposals. The following template shall be used as a guide to communicate the status of a GIP.

Additionally, the community can ask questions that should be addressed in the updates. In the coming days teams of passed GIPs will be asked to provide updates. Watch out for your favorite GIP to learn what has happened since their snapshot passed.

What other steps are planned to improve the overall experience and transparency within the GnosisDAO?

For a better overview a GIP dashboard will be introduced, summarizing main aspects of the different GIPs and navigation the community through the proposals.

The GIP templates will be updated to tailor better the different kinds of GIPs (e.g. meta, funding, partnership, maintenance etc.). Also those templates will ask to set milestones for bigger projects and funding requests. Bigger funding requests shall be fractionalized according to those milestones and funds will be allocated once the milestones were set.

For some projects streaming funds rather than an upfront payment are more reasonable. Here, we are already looking into different protocols for money streaming.

Furthermore, we would like to invite the GnosisDAO community to give feedback on the planned steps and also ask you to give input on other measures you would like to see in order to track the further developments of the GnosisDAO.

With those new measurements the aim is to inform all GnosisDAO stakeholders about the GIPs from proposal ideation to project finalization.

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Thanks for this initiative! I’ll be happy to learn about many GIPs’ statuses.
How do you plan to assess whether the milestones of large projects are successfully reached to release additional funds?
And what will happen after approved GIPs share their progress? Will any specific community members assess it against the proposal?

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I think those steps are a great way to improve the overall experience and transparency within the GnosisDAO. I also appreciate that the steps include possibilities for engagement and feedback, this will facilitate more stakeholder engagement and community participation. Overall, I think that those steps will help to ensure that stakeholders are well-informed about the GnosisDAO’s activities, including the progress of GIPs, and that there is a clear understanding of how funds are being used. :+1: :muscle:

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In order for funds to be unlocked, teams will have to prove that they’ve reached the milestones that they themselves set out to achieve. It will be a case by case basis in terms of how teams want to prove that they’ve reaching a milestone.

I like the idea of having a working group of community members who are tasked with reviewing the GIP progress report.

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Great initiative! I think this is exactly what GnosisDAO needs to get more community members involved and to see the progress of the projects on GnosisChain :slight_smile:

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This seems like a problem that will only continue to grow in scope.

In my person opinion it seems like maybe the DAO should:

  1. Stream funds to recipients
  2. Move the DAO on-chain for transparency
  3. Link Forum - DAO Actions - Fund Transfers

For the first one, it seems reasonable that the DAO should pay out using streams, rather than lump sum payments. With streams it would be possible to build a single place to see the current “outflows” of the DAO and understand what projects are ongoing or have not met their expectations, also giving the DAO the ability to Cancel streams.

For the second, it seems like moving the DAO fully on-chain would give far greater transparency by allowing multiple front ends to have a decentralized view of the DAO activities. Currently it’s not possible for 3rd parties to build objective decentralized views of DAO activities, thus increasing competition between teams to build tools that provide the most comprehensive view of the DAO’s ecosystem

For the Third, the DAO currently tracks all the projects in a variety of different locations. It would be useful to have tools that structurally link the process by which proposals are created, approved, and paid out. This is sorely missing currently.

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@dennison to build on your comment, there are projects that may have different cost structures or fund requirements and streaming may not always be the best fit. When it is, I think the DAO should consider it an option. As far as I remember, there have been payments done with vesting contracts, though maybe not as often as it could have.

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We at POLY186 are glad at this development and have built a one in all solution to this present issue especially in relation to transparency, fund allocation and progress report. We at POLY186 have created SESAP( Self Exercuting Social Agreement Platform ) which uses Smart Social Contracts as its core technology

Self-Executing Social Agreements Platform (SESAP) and Smart Social Contracts (SSCs) align incentives by allowing parties to create explicit agreements with clear rules of collaboration and by automating the execution of these agreements using blockchain technology, AI and smart contracts. This ensures that all parties have a clear understanding of their roles and responsibilities, as well as the consequences of not fulfilling these obligations.

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That is the best idea I have seen yet! Seriously make the GNOSIS DAO part of the BLOCKCHAIN unless im completely misrepresenting your point dennison in which case i humbly apologize

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Gnosistic Squid here, as someone who has Served in various rolls on the Regional Service Committee here in San Diegos 12STEP Fellowship. Yes i have 30 years Clean. I’d like to suggest that the Gnosis DAO Community consider creating a Secretary position, and if you are using Zoom for your meetings as I think you are you can rexord them to aid you in preparinf the minutes also as a general rule when i was RSC Secretary I had two weeks to get the minutes out to the Areas. 1 region, 10 areas, back then 500 meetings. You get the drift.

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Hello everyone!

First of all, thanks to @Mareen for introducing this topic into the discussion some time ago, we believe that introducing more accountability is essential to ensure order, transparency, and optimization of the disbursement of treasury resources in the DAO, as well as to improve/facilitate voters’ decision-making processes by providing them with more resources to monitor activity in the forum.

To improve transparency teams that authored GIPs should provide updates about their work. This applies to previous as well as future proposals. The following template shall be used as a guide to communicate the status of a GIP.

Additionally, the community can ask questions that should be addressed in the updates. In the coming days teams of passed GIPs will be asked to provide updates. Watch out for your favorite GIP to learn what has happened since their snapshot passed.

This update scheme seems to us useful and easy to implement, however, we note that no progress has been made in the requests to the proponents of each GIP to obtain information on the progress of the proposal and on the use-destination of the funds granted if applicable. It would be ideal to follow up on this initiative, as it seems to be something that has been requested on several occasions by various members of the community.

For a better overview a GIP dashboard will be introduced, summarizing main aspects of the different GIPs and navigation the community through the proposals.

We like the dashboard for GIPs that was published in March. By the way, thanks again @Mareen for the work done.
Comments (links to the updates) could be incorporated as we get status updates from each GIP, especially those with funding.

We also think that a “changelog” like the one Optimism uses for the Grants could be useful for tracking what is going on in the forum.

The GIP templates will be updated to tailor better the different kinds of GIPs (e.g. meta, funding, partnership, maintenance etc.). Also those templates will ask to set milestones for bigger projects and funding requests. Bigger funding requests shall be fractionalized according to those milestones and funds will be allocated once the milestones were set.

For some projects streaming funds rather than an upfront payment are more reasonable. Here, we are already looking into different protocols for money streaming.

We believe that the changes to the GIP template are a step forward in terms of how project funding works. However, as you mentioned, it seems interesting to think about the possibility of introducing payments through streaming or even through vesting, there are viable tools such as Superfluid that is deployed in Mainnet and Gnosis that could give us a simple solution for both options.

Streaming payments fit well with contractual relationships of DAOs that have a certain continuity (e.g. service providers). Alternatively, they could also be applied to projects that do not require a considerable upfront capital upfront.

Therefore, in case of incorporating these options (streaming or vesting), the GIP Template should be modified to distinguish between projects that require capital upfront and those that do not, as well as those that represent a continuous provision of services and those that do not.

Finally, we agree with the community members who have expressed the need to implement the DAO On-chain, perhaps this initiative could be carried out by Tally or the Zodiac Module in the future.

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Great to have you here, @SEEDLatam! Thank you for the insightful feedback. I know that Mareen is taking some of these points on in the new year.

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