[Temp Check] Introducing Voting Cycles

Shutter DAO DAO Proposals
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Summary

Introduce standardised voting cycles to streamline governance and strategically focus voter attention to increase voter participation.

Motivation

ShutterDAO is currently evolving its governance structure to be more adaptable and community-driven. Adopting a standardised proposal-making model will provide a structured, predictable process that balances ecosystem growth with governance improvements. By separating the various facets of proposal creation, feedback and consensus-making, the DAO can avoid distractions and maintain momentum in building the Shutter ecosystem.

The adoption of this model aims to:

  • Foster a dynamic but structured decision-making environment.
  • Create focused periods for governance review, allowing thoughtful governance evolution.
  • Encourage experimentation while maintaining a clear process.

Specification

This proposal pertains to governance guidelines and does not require any on-chain action or protocol changes. The proposed changes can only be implemented socially.

Seasons and Sprint Structure

Governance in the DAO shall be divided by decision-making cycles into distinct seasons, each containing three sprints. Each season will be approximately 3 weekslong, and each sprint will be one week long.

Sprint 1: Draft Creation and Feedback Phase

Create draft proposals titled ā€˜[RFC] Proposal Nameā€™ and seek feedback from the community and other delegates

Sprint 2: RFC Formalization

Create a final proposal incorporating the feedback received titled ā€˜[Temp Check] Proposal Name.ā€™

Sprint 3: On/Offchain Proposal

Proposals which have gathered sufficient consensus can be uploaded to the main snapshot space titled ā€˜[SIP-XX] Proposal Nameā€™ for onchain vote along with increasing the voting period to 7 days.

To facilitate this structured governance timeline, we propose creating a temp check subspace in the snapshot of shutterDAO with the same parameters as the main space.

Disclaimer

No Guarantee of Results; and Limitation of Liability: Given the evolving nature of DAOs, thereā€™s no assurance that the proposed changes will yield the intended results.

Next Steps

  • Gather feedback from the DAO about next steps.

Copyright

Copyright and related rights waived via CC0.

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hi jigglyjams from the https://nance.app team

weā€™ve been using governance cycles for the past 2 years at JuiceboxDAO and theyā€™ve worked really well!

it would be great tom join the conversation around this topic at the next meeting. please let me know when it will be! thanks!

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Thanks @jengajojo for raising this topic.

Comments

I agree that increasing voter participation is important.

I am supportive of experimenting. So I am in favor of trying this or an alternative.

One alternative would be: 1) require all proposals on Snapshot and Decent to start the voting period on the same day of the week (e.g. on Mondays), and 2) increase the voting period to 7 days. This would allow voters and delegates to schedule a time each week (on the day of their choice) to check the voting platforms and cast their votes.

Disclaimer

I am sharing this comment in my personal capacity as an individual member of the Shutter community, and not in my official capacity as an employee of brainbot gmbh.

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Thanks for the feedback @Loring and @jigglyjams

I like the idea, however, it is not possible to implement without severely increasing admin overhead. Unless there are specific updates to snapshot which allow this implementation to be operated smoothly, I do not suggest going forward with this for now.

I agree. The proposal has been modified to include this amendment.

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Nance lets you do this! We give you a schedule and cron system to upload Snapshot proposals at scheduled times

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How does it look like in practice? Should we use nance, or is it a module added to snapshot?

I donā€™t want have a. System where have people to go to an entirely different platform to put proposals

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Is the compliance mechanism simply social pressure?

Under this paradigm, how would we address a proposal that doesnā€™t comply, and would we be in danger of a proposal going up during the wrong week and only being seen by a subset of voters?
Could someone strategically put up a decent proposal outside the window so that it receives less attention?

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This will be purely social for now, letā€™s wait for @jigglyjams to see if it can directly enforced on snapshot.

An attacker needs to get 30M, the quorum to push a vote off season as, no one would be voting on it. We could also remove off-cycle proposal on snapshot, but for Decent the delegates have to collectively vote against it

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Nance has its own WYSIWYG/markdown editor (you can preview it in our test space here: https://nance.app/s/waterbox/edit

Weā€™ve seen a lot of information sprawl that leads to confusion around proposals and discussions. Using our built in editor ensures that we have the main source of (pure markdown) truth for the proposal and can upload it to Snapshot knowing there havenā€™t been any edits in another place. It also has IPFS ctrl-v image hosting, local caching for Drafts, drag& drop PDF upload to IPFS, and a pretty darn good table editor!

Its not a strict requirement to use it if you would rather continue using your current system

From what Iā€™ve gathered, all proposals start in Discourse and then either go to Snapshot or Decent. Is this correct?

I could see the Nance editor being a great unifier of these two platforms! Here is the rough flow I am imagining, (I am not trying to change the core of your process just riffing on some automations here, please correct what you donā€™t like):

  1. A DAO member goes to nance.app/s/shutter (or we can embed the editor into your own homepage as we did for https://moondao.com/propose) and creates a proposal
  2. Proposals that require on-chain voting can be marked as such (and automatically load the correct template), off-chain proposals can use that specific template
  3. Nance bot creates a topic here in Discourse, linking to the proposal (or showing the complete text of the proposal) and displaying metadata for it
  4. The proposal ID number is automatically added so members do not need to manage that
  5. Fellow DAO members provide feedback in the topic
  6. The proposal author(s) can make edits
  7. At the scheduled time, a simple :+1:/:-1: Temperature Check poll here in Discourse takes place
  8. At the end of that polling period, approved proposals get sent to the next phase for formal voting
  9. Voting in each respective place takes place and Nance bot accumulates the results for viewing

Again, all these things are flexible! If using a new editor is not desirable, then we could implement a system to fetch the proposal here through the Discourse API. I am talking to the Decent folks sometime soon as well.

Think of Nance as a real tight Zapier for gov ops. We can do what you need!

Let me know your thoughts. Thanks!

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Iā€™m biased, having been a member of the Nance team previously, but I have also used it in JuiceboxDAO for years now, and itā€™s by far the governance where I have voted the most.

I would like to see something like the schedule we use at JBDAO on Discord for Discourse + Telegram. Knowing what happens when allows for members to plan sometime on their weeks to focus on the DAO governance, instead of being surprised by proposals where they have little context and must then find time to understand and vote properly.

Screenshot 2024-10-17 at 12.11.00
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@jigglyjams Iā€™d be curious how you would measure the effort of having ShutterDAO set with a Nance space improved to accommodate the DAO needs:

  • Decent and Snapshot integration
  • Discourse forum post-integration
  • Telegram alerts bot

Maybe the best way to try this would be to start a Space with the Snapshot - for non-executable proposals - and then adapt the multisig queue features Nance already has to call the execute function in case a Decent DAO is connected instead of a Safe directly.

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Thanks Zeugh!

We can certainly slowly integrate a piece meal version of Nance into Shutter if that is desired.

We could start with Telegram bot + Governance Cycles kept track of by the Nance API, sending alerts and reminders at each phase transition. Integrating Nance with Discourse is just kicking off internally so this would be a great place to start linking Discourse to Snapshot and Decent :smile:

Would be great to hear more from @Loring and @jengajojo. Does this seem like a palatable integration path?

Side note:

Weā€™re familiar with Shutter Shielded Voting itself and have integrated it into both MoonDAO.app and nance.app. Works great!

image
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gmgm! any updates here?

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Context

I see the ā€œtemp checkā€ on Snapshot passed: Snapshot

Enforcement

Snapshot and Decent do not support the enforcement of seasons/sprints. So the use of seasons/sprints will need to be a norm rather than a hard rule. As @5pence notes: large token holders and delegates will need to be aware of and be ready to cast votes on proposals posted outside the seasons/sprints schedule.

Nance

AFAIK the introduction of voting cycles and the use of the Nance platform are separate topics - i.e. we can adopt voting cycles without adopting Nance, and vice versa. ( @jigglyjams please correct me if this is wrong.) If so, they should be discussed and decided on separately.

Next Steps

@Baer_DAOplomats - Do we start using the season/sprint plan now? If yes, when is the start of the first season? If not, what are the next steps?

Disclaimer

I am sharing this comment in my personal capacity as an individual member of the Shutter community, and not in my official capacity as an employee of brainbot gmbh.

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gmgm @Loring , @jigglyjams and everyone. We are kicking off the Shutter Governance cycle from 04.11. @jengajojo will coordinate delegates and announce the forum soon.

About Nance

As it is a separate platform built on top of Snapshot, I think we need to follow the standard proposal lifecycle from Governance V0.

In the meantime, we aim to smooth the process by coordinating with the current delegates and proposal authors.

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@Baer_DAOplomats @Loring agreed!

I will create a new proposal to discuss Nance

Thanks

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