[ARCHIVED] Allocate partner voting rights to community delegates

General Archive
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Proposal Title: Require Partners to Delegate an adequate number of votes to community members.

Authors: Deefs

Date: October 26th, 2021

My proposal will benefit the community by distributing a portion of BitDAO’s voting rights back to community members. This will enable the community to engage in Governance without an implied requirement for support from large partners (who currently hold a share of voting rights that far outweighs the general community). The stagnation of soft-proposals that find popular-support, and the speed at which votes are put forth when they implicate large partners, is a clear problem that must be rectified.

The current distribution of voting rights disempowers the community, facilitates bias, potentially enables censorship, and effectively limits our capacity as a community to demand accountability and transparency from our partners.

As an example, the speed at which BIP-4 was put forth, and the lack of engagement (or even acknowledgement) with respect to community concerns / thoughts / questions suggests an extremely real problem forming around the centralization of voting rights within the DAO.

Best practice would also see the implementation of a way for the community themselves to direct these voting rights. Perhaps a share of the voting rights that the partners hold could somehow be allocated to all BitDAO holders.

What are the projected outcomes?

A distribution of delegated voting rights away from partners, and towards community members assigned by the community itself.

How long will it take to complete your proposed changes?

The partners would be provided a specific time-line in which they would be required to delegate these votes. We would initially require a period of consideration and selection with respect to the community’s choice of delegates.

Who is involved?

Our major partners and the community of BitDAO holders as a whole.

What are the milestones?

Voting. Delegate selection / voting. Delegating relevant votes.

Timeline

ASAP- the community is absolutely in need of community representatives who are able to put forth proposals.

Add technical details and/or links to source documentation

Someone else will have to chime in here.

Include any other relevant details on how this proposal will be accomplished:

Herein lies the problem. As it stands, this will require one of the aforementioned partners (or mystery delegates) to put this proposal to a vote- yet, it diretly challenges the ratio of power that they hold. This disentivizes them from putting forth this proposal. Solving this problem is essential to ensuring equity within the DAO.

Next Steps?

If this proposal is accepted, what are the immediate action items? The delegation of a specific amount of votes to members of the community chosen by the community.

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Cross-posted to the #soft-proposals channel in the BitDAO Discord.

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Although I agree that wider distribution of delegated BIT is needed, requiring delegation to anon or pseudo-anon addresses that may or may not be associated with long term BIT holders wouldn’t solve the problem. It’s also a slippery slope. I’m no BIT whale, but i’m uncomfortable with the idea of anyone requiring me to delegate. To delegate or not should always be my choice. When I do decide to delegate to another community member it will be to someone that I know is aligned with my values and has a long track record of contributing to the community or the wider DAO/DeFi ecosystem. So maybe what’s needed is a way to track participation in the BIT community.

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There should certainly be no requirement for common holders to delegate. My point was that I don’t see it as unreasonable to expect partners to allocate a certain amount of votes, once they’ve reached above a threshold of the total share. This is simply redistributing heavily aggregated influence.

I’m not sure where you got the idea of anonymous addresses from… certainly if there was a requirement to delegate by an entity who holds a disproportionate share of the votes they would be incentivized to choose their delegate carefully. There’s no sense in randomly delegating. It would be done by way of a mechanism- maybe community and partner derived nominations, with a vote to follow.

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This is why I don’t think requiring partners to delegate solves the problem. Its more like a distribution of influence to two addresses instead of one.

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Is that truly the case if nominations are made by, and voted for, by the community?

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But every BIT holder is a member of the community. What’s to prevent those with a disproportionate amount of delegated BIT from nominating and voting for a surrogate or themselves? Maybe I’m missing something on the mechanics of what you’re proposing

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I think the medium post below was on the right track:

https://medium.com/bitdao/proposals-voting-and-delegated-voters-f705599716e1

… [current] delegates are expected to:

  • Propose partnerships (swaps, grants, yield, BIT use-cases)
  • Propose creation of Autonomous Entities (including linked-DAOs or sub-DAOs)
  • Propose cooperation with existing DAOs
  • Build and propose new tooling and products for BitDAO
  • Maintain high standards for proposals (must have clear benefits for BitDAO and partner projects, and be executable with terms thoroughly negotiated and defined)
  • Inspire others to join the BitDAO mission
  • Have skin in the game

Delegations may be added, removed, or adjusted based on activity and community feedback.

Some additional thoughts:

  1. Anyone who holds BIT tokens can already delegate to themselves. The proposed Community Delegation program can be used to enhance voting power.

  2. Delegation is permissionless. Any person or team can make a public post such as “these are the products / items / ideas that I am planning to work on and propose to BitDAO, if you want to support please delegate your voting power to X address”.

  3. The BitDAO governance process cannot compel third parties (partners/large token holders) to take actions with their BIT token holdings, which they may have spent significant resources to acquire. Token holders need to be convinced to delegate their votes to another party, due to shared values and the quality of proposed ideas. I think existing token holders are open minded, and looking to support good ideas and contributors.

  4. A technical solution could be created in the future where a portion of BIT tokens from the BitDAO Treasury are used for delegation.

Crafting detailed proposals, negotiating deals, and creating products for BitDAO is hard work. We know of several teams working on items which will eventually be proposed to BitDAO. One of the teams is Windranger.

At Windranger we are open to experimental ideas and help take them to the next stage. Our approach is to co-develop where possible, and provide private investments or grants to individuals or teams. We are also looking to hire.

If anyone would like to get seriously involved, and jam on this idea or other ideas with Windranger please reach out here: https://discord.gg/zNAxVCUcqN or email:
hello@windranger.io

Thanks
~cateatpeanut, partner at Windranger Labs, all the above opinions are my own.

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It is not correct to force whale to delegate rights to others. If this proposal succeeds, the meaning of bit will disappear. Since you can take the voting power from whale by saying a few words on the Internet without paying any price.

I think the current organizers of bitdao forum and discord, or in other words, community members who know more information, should communicate more in the community to let us know where bitdao is now and where it is heading. Otherwise, we can’t blame others for thinking that whales didn’t do anything with the voting power and made some weird decisions.

It is not a good thing that a divided community leads to confrontation.

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Louis, I wonder how that can be fixed.
A sort of dashboard showing the delegates activity in terms of participation on the proposals is something you believe could help?

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I think what’s being missed here is the idea of a threshold- coming up with a solution that encourages partners who are large holders to engage with the community would benefit the community as a whole. A certain amount of interaction and engagement with the community should be expected. This is in no way unreasonable. If partners are only incentivized to interact with the community when a proposal implicates them, I’m sure you can see why this would be a problem. A DAO should empower the community- not a centralized group of interested parties.

As it stands, this thread is a very good example of the concerns I’ve brought forward. I’ll explain.

Respectfully, cateatpeanuts, Windranger has been absent in the other soft-proposal threads. This is the first spot where community members go to make suggestions and to seek support… to test the waters, so to speak. Yet, without engagement on these threads from any entities that have the capacity to put proposals forth to a vote, the entire pursuit feels meaningless.

Community members can delegate to themselves, yes; but no community members who engage via the forums or Discord currently have the required 200k to put forth proposals.

Perhaps the partners should be expected to have representatives accessible to the community? I’m honestly not sure what the right move is here, and I’m certainly up for suggestions. Though I feel that the problem is clear; the community has a disproportionate amount of influence aggregated into circles that are only incentivized to consider proposals that directly implicate them. This has been clearly demonstrated- look at where partners have chosen to engage on the forums.

Without community empowerment, this is just going to have the appearance of a treasury intended to promote the interests of our partners, rather than the community as a whole.

Case in point- I posted a popular proposal over a week ago. One that could be argued to benefit the community, and potentially have a lasting positive impact on the entire industry. I’m speaking of the proposal to return-and-burn tokens sent to the contract address. No engagement from community partners. I can understand that Windranger doesn’t have much incentive in considering this issue- but it does directly implicate the community, and has found popular support. When the community themselves aren’t empowered to do something, the spirit of a DAO has been figuratively de-clawed.

EDIT: I’d like to ammend this by expressing my appreciation for Windranger’s interest in co-development. This mentality is imperative, and I do not mean to ‘take a shot’ at you with this post; the steps you’re taking here to engage are exactly what I was hoping to see.

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Apologies, I had missed your question- this is really less about the mechanisms, and more about the problem. The only thing I can really think of with respect to avoiding voting for surrogates would be preference towards forward-facing candidates who aren’t hiding their identities. Not ideal, however.

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I agree with you bro.

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Thanks Norton.

I’ve since learned that an individual who has been doing a good majority of the outreach is, in fact, a member of the Windranger team. They touched base with me to discuss a solution to this. Really a classy move, and when I found out that I’d been speaking to someone affiliated with them (who was always helpful) I slowly put my foot in my mouth… where it belongs, for now. :wink:

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As @deefs mentioned, we’re working on some ideas. Join us in the Discord!

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