Parts of the following text and proposal was taken from CIP-135
Problem statement: We have a Charter and Operating Agreement (”OA”) that is cumbersome and presents governance challenges. We also have a disparity of opinion within the community on CityDAO’s mission and how treasury funds should be spent.
Examples of the Problem:
There is no full time leader to get a CIP from Draft through Vote, so it is left to the project teams and “politicking”; CIP practices are disparate and inconsistent
The Charter was aspirational - the Mission Guild functions have not been fully executed, and the Court system was never implemented, leaving citizens with no meaningful dispute resolution process. The Charter and OA may be in conflict.
CityDAO’s mission is still not defined and aligned with internal priorities/practices, creating a lot of disputes, internal arguing, and inconsistent CIPs
The results of CIP votes do not reflect a high degree of conviction on the part of the community at large.
Solution:
An IRL and Virtual Convention at the DAOLabs space (or similar if DAOLabs is unable to timely secure a space) and virtually leading up to ETH Denver for a DAO Convention to present amendments and restate our governing documents.
Pause all new CIPs until ETHDenver has passed.
Allow funding for the multisig to be able to operate key costs for CityDAO until ETHDenver. - Multisig signers will have a budget of 30k authorized for running of CityDAO until ETHDenver.
All operations of the DAO, media, community etc. is overseen by the multisig.
Formally banning Airdrops - to avoid voter turnout from individuals who only are showing up for a possible future airdrop (cited by international community as major issue)
Would the multisig signers be compensated for running media and community tasks? If so, why not simply compensate those who have been doing it successfully for the past year?
If this CIP (136) pauses all new CIPs, and then the next CIP - let’s call it 137 - for something else passes, wouldn’t it simply countermand this one? Given the current Charter and OA, there isn’t a way to make a “this one counts and the next one doesn’t” kind of CIP.
It certainly seems reasonable to make sure that CityDAO is funded to keep the lights on. I’d nominate @alexthims for this oversight role. It might be more transparent to have a spreadsheet of costs than just allocating $30K, though.
Multi-sig signers would not be compensated for the running of these tasks until the governance changes.
The opportunity for such compensation to be set in place once changes have been made would be possible based on work completed but I am of the opinion that the multi-sig could run these operations in a lesser capacity while achieving a similar output.
This would be a CIP to pause current CIPs and further CIPs until ETHDenver. This would mean that if passed, no CIPs would be able to even be put up to snapshot which would prevent the scenario that you are referencing. This would be the case until the set date passes.
For the funding to ensure the operations of CityDAO are kept running in a similar means to that currently, I of course agree that a more transparent spreadsheet of costing involved is necessary and I had used the 30k figure to be interpreted as a maximum budget.
If this proposal is to go to snapshot, I would be including a fixed expense budget, with any unplanned expenses to be possible under the cap of the set 30k budget.
The Charter pretty clearly lays out what allows a CIP to move to Snapshot. If a CIP gets 20 likes and it doesn’t move to Snapshot because a few people won’t use their admin authority to do so, wouldn’t that violate the Charter?
What you’re describing sounds like a change to the Charter, saying that after CIP-136 passes, no more CIPs are allowed to move to Snapshot, regardless of how popular they are with citizens, until a predetermined time (the end of ETHDenver).
I think that theres a number of ways of interpreting the process. If it is a case that people believe that this is a charter change then that is fair enough. However, I think that as per the OA, the ability to do this exists, and the information directly conflicts with that in the charter.
Charter Sec. 4.3.4 (b) Step 1 - Going from Discord to Forum: Any individual with a citizenship NFT can put a CIP on the Forum.
Charter Sec. 4.3.4 (c) Step 2 - Going from Forum to Snapshot Vote: In order to move from the Forum to the Snapshot vote, the CIP on the Forum must receive 20 likes within three weeks.
Charter Sec. 4.3.4 (d) Step 3 - Snapshot Vote: The actual vote will occur on Snapshot. The DAO vote will last for one week.
I’d be curious which OA section you’re referring to that allows one CIP to stop future CIPs from going to Snapshot.
Agree with Solution 1. What do you suggest for rules at the conference?
Agree with Solution 2, but may need more votes?
Agree with Solution 3 as well, but yes, would like public budget. On a related note? Most of the toppling links on the website are broken? And there are not direct links to as passed Charter and OA? Can you or @Da3vid please post public links to the current Charter and OA?
Re Solution 4 - if y’all want that risk.
Re Solution 5 - Can you link to further discussion/debate on the airdrops? I want to propose member rewards, that include NFT’s, like coupons that can be redeemed for CityDAO services (like time at our spaces). I suppose one could call the member rewards airdrops, but they are earned. They do encourage participation. But we should be pro-participation of members, to avoid SEC wrath. So I am probably pro earned air-drop.
The milti sig is the method funds can be removed from the treasury, which is on Gnosis (or called Safe now). If someone creates a transaction Gnosis requires 5 people to sign with their private keys for the transaction to be executed. I am not sure who is on it, though I probably could name most of them. A list would be nice.
So much going on here and in CIP 135. A few points
The budget for this is insane. We could justify 10k or maybe 20k. But hundreds of thousands???
No guarantee at all that this process will result in a solution, or more importantly, a solution that is an improvement. Other DAOs have better governance. The money would be better spent researching their policies and reaching out to them.
Projects already approved and running should not be paused
The Fixed price is $35,000 (Space in Denver, Spaces Elsewhere, Parliamentarian, and Outside Counsel).
Variable expenses/rewards are remainder, decided at Convention.
Most Variables are money directly into citizens’ pockets.
ROI is infinite.
Disagree wholeheartedly. Sure, some DAO’s have decent governance. Other Co-Ops have better governance. But none have great governance that could lead to a Network State.
From Vitalik’s comments on Balaji’s vision:
“Many founders want to eventually retire or start something new (see: basically half of every crypto project), and we need to prevent network states from collapsing or sliding into mediocrity when that happens. Part of this process is some kind of constitutional exit-to-community guarantee: as the network state enters higher tiers of maturity and scale, more input from community members is taken into account automatically.” Source: What do I think about network states?
CityDAO is heartily in mediocrity, and governed by the few. We need more engaged input from community members. Co-Op’s have figured out how to do this. I am building on that model.
I have done the research. We need action. Good governance will come from an incentivized IRL and Virtual sprint to make bonds/morals/rules.
I have no strong feelings here. My aim is to pause new projects pending the convention.
I will have to read the Vitalik post. I just finished his book, so I am more than happy to add Vitalik to my reading list.
Honest question - who has great governance? You can list DAOs, Co-Ops, countries. I am just not sure if that exists lol. Governance exists such that every lever you pull has a cost and unintended consequences. Very complicated to plan out. Experimentation is the key. There are thousands of DAOs all running a governance experiment, I suggest looking at the results.
Some DAOs have raised hundreds of millions of dollars in this bear market. I feel they are doing something right and would love to find out.
I am 100% not against an IRL meetup. But I fail to see how it would solve age-old problems related to governance with anything close to 100% certainty, and I don’t want to see that much money go to it.
Cool, well we are on the same page here!
Going to give that Vitalik a read! thanks for the link!
ps. So I agree for the most part. But the reality is very few will make this IRL meetup, so I am not sure how that solves the problem. From the outside looking in, I would tend to think this would make the problem worse.
I believe many American small towns and counties, and yes, some rural electric cooperatives, do a very good, and sometimes great job at governance. I participate with all of mine frequently. I have my disagreements, but largely, it works. The lights do stay on. The engineers have mostly good intentions. The politicians keep each other in check.
I disagree that good governance is zero sum. I agree that at the global level, presently, the game theory is different. And I agree that establishment America has many shortcomings. Notably, Balaji’s Network State is an argument that Bitcoin’s blockchain changes the game theory of even the global and American game. With truth publicly auditable, the game has changed.
I am proposing an experiment to make DAO governance more like governance that goes on in small towns across America every day - but we must condense and focus because everyone in the Web3 community is working on 4 different things. AND DO IT ALSO ONLINE.
To reiterate. Today, at the hyper local level, there are already lots of good incentives, smart people, and medium transparency and citizen oversight. It already works, I am just replicating and bringing the conference ONLINE AND IRL, and in condensed format. The price proposed is a maximum. And again. The ROI is infinite. Good governance is the flywheel. Without it, the treasury will merely be slowly siphoned off to zero. See eg., SBF.
A little more about me. I am an 35 year old attorney in my local community of ~3,000, Red Lodge, Montana. This past June, we had a 500 year flood that took out several bridges, and many private homes (including one of my family’s). At the time, I was sick with a fever out of state, unable to fly home. The outpouring of volunteerism in the time of crisis was breathtaking. Tears in my eyes seeing people step up to the plate. Our government officials worked around the clock. CityDAO could soon provide a similar level of digital crisis response to its citizens, if it could get its shit together. As I was recently hacked, I can tell you that the first DAO to offer cyber assistance to its members, will grow…
The year before the flood, we had a fire, to which our collective branches of fire fighting government responded to amazingly well. I helped evacuate hundreds of homes, as I and others had trained to do. I am also a member of our local Fire Department and Sheriff Department’s joint Search and Rescue Team. Our training and technology is some the worlds best. But we have much we could do better.
I believe with a Web 3 backbone of energy, data, and dispute resolution management, we can make transparent governance and crisis management an evolutionary step closer to perfect. What I imagine does not presently exist in other DAOs, that I am aware of.
Raising money is not the bar to good governance.
At Permissionless, the consensus was that the only successful DAOs to date had started centralized to raise money, and were moving to decentralization, but most had not figured it out. We are in the same boat. Figuring it out costs money.
The age old problem of governance has been theoretically solved, by the blockchain. Now it merely needs to be overlayed on historical successes of IRL gatherings, and covid created hybrid life.
What you are saying here is paradoxical. On the one hand, if no one can come IRL, the bill will be small. But in the above posts you are worried about money. So which is it that you are worried about? The money? Or that people won’t show up?
What budget do you propose to incentivize participation?
Would you agree we should also probably reallocate some of the budget to marketing to increase internal participation? How about you @MemeBrains?
Build it and they will come. Online AND then IRL. -Balaji
That is an inspiring story. Amazing to hear the outpouring of support.
I agree with you on the importance of governance and that an IRL meetup could facilitate that. Just a matter of doing it with a practical budget.
A lot of this comes down to size. Good governance is easy in small groups. But to scale it to large global communities isn’t that easy. CityDAO is a global web3 organization.
This is an interesting post via Greg (CityDAO citizen). It gets a lot, and I agree with him.
I definitely support an IRL meeting, but we should be realistic that the only ones that will show up are those who have enough money and free time to attend. The group will probably be primarily privileged white men. Just being honest.
So I think it would be valuable to empower both international channels and subaltern communities within CityDAO to have a voice. Therefore, I think that the IRL meeting should have preparatory logistics and not just begin entirely when we meet IRL.
For money, I think it really depends on what people believe CityDAO should cover - partial vs. full transportation, lodgings and food, or some subset of these. I think there could be a few thousand in a coordinape circle to reward those who go above and beyond, and maybe a few thousand for an organizer. I’m not sure why it would require two organizers.
In an ideal world there would be maximal chance for participation, which includes setting the meeting far enough in advance to provide notice, and having enough bandwidth to bring together all virtual participants.
For money, good call, maybe there should be a vote where the community decides what to spend on this and which items to cover (reasonably). There would need to be “proof of travel” and other basic safeguards but otherwise why not open it up to the community to decide its appetite for participation, instead of jesting comments about “privileged white men”. We are all here to help and that comment/narrative does not really help other than as a political sidetrack. (Pointing out of course you are also a privileged white man insofar as anyone else you’d be referring to with that )
On a serious note, I think the community and group can decide if it wants to fund this/participate, and if so, to what degree. Everything else we think without asking the community is just speculation. Right now most people at CityDAO probably do not know this proposal is up, because it doesnt have any soft support like from Media, Community, or Twitter. Really, this all should change as part of the CIP standardization process that we all know is overdue, ranging from a template to standard announcements. So, perhaps this should be more publicized so that people can see there is an effort to try to help fix some key governance considerations!
I’m not trying to be political, or to jest. I’m trying to make a point that getting together IRL, while nice and valuable, won’t actually represent a real cross section of CityDAO unless this is planned soon, voted on, and has some way for those who can’t afford the time or expense to still take part. Otherwise, our perspectives are likely influenced by our inherent biases.
I think a starting point might be to choose the dates and times, set them in advance for both IRL and hybrid participation, start to set agendas for discussions and get this up on our discord so that people can “sign up” for which discussions they’ll take part in.
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