After listening to and reading so many interesting ideas, I’ve consolidated a few that I find important, in this CIP: our DAO’s voting principles .
Our recent debates on the subject reminded me of Hofstede’s Power Distance Index theory (PDI): "the degree to which the less powerful members of a society accept and expect that power is distributed unequally. The fundamental issue here is how a society handles inequalities among people."
This brings me to my point: voting paradigm .
Personally, I support the notion of 1 person, 1 vote, because I hope that this DAO will keep its core community and initial direction and that the PDI between us will remain manageable.
As Vitalik describes CityDAO in his blog: "…plan is to start with this plot of land, and then add other plots of land in the future, to build cities, governed by a DAO and making heavy use of [radical economic ideas like Harberger taxes to allocate the land, make collective decisions and manage resources. Their DAO is one of the progressive few that is avoiding coin voting governance; instead, the governance is a voting scheme based on “citizen” NFTs, and ideas have been floated to further limit votes to one-per-person by using proof-of-humanity verification. Vitalik’s Blog Article referring to City DAO:
It seems this is one of our USPs in his optics.
Atst, I also, fully agree with the idea that we all vote equally, but we do not all execute equally. I think there are many ways to reward loyalty and community contributors, including asking citizens to vote for creating a yearly payment fund and plan for selected candidates (based on a voted reputation metric) aso.
It doesn’t need to automatically translate into more decision making power. With the passage of time such a difference could lead to an exclusive society, where new people will find it problematic to integrate or feel their voice is heard.
If we go for voting power based on number of NFTs or personal reputation or any other unequally distributed voting power, we might encourage the formation of power groups, which could jeopardize the long-term unity of the DAO.
Also, if we think about implementing this irl at some point and partnering with a community/city - I am not sure people are actually ready to accept their vote is worth less then their neighbors, as this is long ingrained in our structure.
The criticism to POH (not discussing technical issues) is that some votes could be “qualitatively weaker than others”, based on voter’s expertise in the field. Even if this might be the case, it can be counter-argued that it is less prone to corruption for more voters to take part in the process, as opposed to concentrating voting power in the hands of a few. Expertise and corruption are not mutually exclusive.
It is more complex and takes more effort, but it is objectively more preferable to try and win people’s votes, through agreed, transparent processes (town-halls, community calls), than to risk some form of closed doors, consolidated corruption at the top.
It is also true that the POH model generates a paradox: the more liquid , hence successful, our NFT becomes, the more unstable our DAO culture becomes, because of members changing often. I think a CityDAO should maintain a majority core community which ensures consistency in decision making and governance model over a defined time period. (whatever that will be). In the end, irl we also do not see our neighbors and communities rotating every day, in significant numbers.
One could also argue that if citizens have different marginal costs (or a different added value) for the DAO, the quadratic voting would be a better approach. But to solve also this dilemma, we could simply adopt Vitalik’s and Will’s ideas of a Harberger tax model to adjust to such variations.
Maybe two of the most important questions to initially vote on (and test its power), before drafting any detailed road-maps are:
- Is our philosophy short-mid term profit maximization - use the funds from Treasury to invest them ? (real estate, DeFi, IGOs, IDOs, etc.).
- Or is it to create and test irl a City DAO governance model ?
In layman terms: what is our immediate purpose as CityDAO?
And I am not saying that they are imminently MECE. One could do both, but they imply different resources and road-maps and for the latter we actually need to start testing small scale. Otherwise it is simply a white paper. #1 could provide the funds to develop #2.
I think everyone in the DAO world is watching CityDAO and is waiting for that major milestone to happen: a real life DAO community fully on blockchain.
We should think what type of society we would like to emulate, while trying to achieve this: an “equal protection” type or one with a “ranked participation”. And for this we need to vote 
Please comment, criticize, add.
(Sorry for any mistakes, but English is not my native language. )
Thank you,
Sebastian
