CIP-28: Form CityDAO Council

Proposals (CIPs)
61

Thanks for the revisions Justin. Looks great. I think this will be of huge help moving the DAO forward. :+1:

62

Justin, thanks so much for taking this initiative. I appreciate the leadership as First Citizen. I think this proposal is now a foregone conclusion as per the Snapshot voting, but I hope that I can still bring some ideas to the table.

I tried my best to skim through all the posts (there were a lot) so apologies if something I note below is redundant.

I can make myself available for a call on Discord if you’d like to talk through anything in more detail.

  1. Why are we not electing all 10 of the non-core team council members?

  2. I think there should be a check on how long an elected council member has held their citizenship. I would suggest a minimum of 30 days from the ratification of this proposal.

Why? Negates any chance of someone buying citizenship after hearing about this proposal just to get a councilship. I don’t think that is good for the DAO.

  1. I think that the 30 day limit should be a soft cap with another 30 day extension allowed upon voting by the citizens.

Why? Shit happens. I like target deadlines, but sometimes they just can’t be met and I believe we’re too early in our DAO to have contractual dissolution if the council can’t deliver in 30 days.

  1. Shouldn’t we have the length of the first term decided now? I think that if the Council can successfully develop and ratify the charter, they should automatically be empowered as the first post-charter Council. Perhaps we can set a 3 or 6 month limit for the first council and then allow the charter to establish what it will look like afterwards?

  2. Greg made a great point about 20 council members being too many. I totally agree with this. Many of our citizens may have heard of the “two pizza” rule made famous by Jeff Bezos / Amazon. It basically says that any meeting or forum should have enough members that two pizzas can feed them. Logically, that ends up being about 6- 8 (sorry if you can consume an entire pizza yourself).

What can we do about this? First council can have 20 members since it represents the core team + newly elected / appointed citizens.

Second council could be elected only and have 9 members on it. Why 9? Even numbers lead to splits, which is not healthy for governing bodies, in my opinion. I chose 9 after the US Supreme Court, which, politics aside, I believe to be a fine institution. Also kinda meets the criteria for 2 pizzas.

  1. I think we should have a simple agreement that all council-members sign that has them acknowledge the somewhat legal ambiguity we are still in, as well as getting a firm time commitment per week.
3 Likes
63

Hey, is this still going ahead? What are the next steps?

64

The election process is being formed, but will involve pitching oneself here, on Discourse.

1 Like
65

Dropping this post from the MakerDAO forums about designing a governing system.

In my experience with MakerDAO governance, which is a model for DAOs, governance needs to be improved a lot.

Human nature is to horde power…

That is inevitable in CityDAO’s governance, like all political systems.

2 Likes
66

I’m also waiting to hear the next steps

67

If there is a council There are representatives of citizens. Representatives go to make decisions on behalf of citizens. If so, then it’s a democracy. We should come to decentralization. Representatives have only administrative duties, but all decision-making powers must be largely voted on by citizens.

68

Thank you @Justin for all the work in organizing and summarizing everyone’s valuable suggestions. I also appreciated @asincrypto’s suggestion that there could be a soft 30-day deadline with a possible 30-day extension on ratifying and implementing the Charter and Operating Agreement before dissolving the council. Also, that it might be preemptively beneficial to have an odd number in the council rather than an even number like 20.

@JIUC suggested that there be a Chinese council member, though they wrote it in Chinese, which might have limited understanding. While it hasn’t been specifically discussed, and I think we should ultimately strive for a diverse council, I don’t personally think we should have any linguistic, cultural or ethnic requirements.

Thanks to @MaxRealEstate for that amazing post from Stanford Political Economy Professor, Andy Hall, and his thoughts on DAO governance challenges. I think that, along with MakerDAO, we could help to lead the pack and define best practices for DAOs in the future.

3 Likes