What Would Ideal Community-Led Governance for Octant Look Like?

Governance
1

Envisioning Ideal Community-Led Governance for Octant

As we explore the future of Octant, one of the key ambitions I have is to evolve our governance model to be more community-driven. This post is a conversation starter on what ideal community-led governance would look like for Octant, considering our unique ecosystem, and the current state of where we are in terms of governance.

Current State and Limitations

As many of you know, Octant’s governance is currently fairly centralized, managed primarily by the Golem Foundation (GF). Our focus has been on designing things related to GLM locking mechanisms, rewards for both users and matching pool, and ensuring the security and integrity of the staking operation. As I currently see it, the community’s role is primarily in deciding which projects participate in upcoming rounds and how rewards are distributed.

Our Vision for Community Governance

I can envision a future where the community plays a more significant role. This means not just selecting projects or deciding on reward distribution but having a real impact on the strategic decisions that shape Octant. Here are some key areas that I am currently contemplating for community governance:

  • Mini Rounds: Engaging the community in managing and evolving the concept of mini rounds. Our first pilot program of this idea launches this week with SheFi, so if you aren’t familiar yet, don’t worry. This could include selecting partner projects, determining criteria for participation, and shaping the structure of these rounds.
  • Budget and Funding Decisions: Empowering the community to have a say in how Octant’s funds are allocated. Right now with the currently amount of GLM locked into Octant, the Octant design calls for a decent amount of ETH rewards to be returned and staked to grow rewards for everyone. But theoretically there is more flexibility here. Governance here could involve allocation decisions for additional concepts like marketing campaigns, educational initiatives, research cooperations, and others. Basically, how we manage and utilize unused staking rewards.
  • Governance Participation Incentives: I’m also exploring ways to incentivize governance participation. This might include additional rewards, recognition programs, or other benefits for active involvement in Octant’s governance processes.

Your Participation and Input

To make this vision a reality, we have to start somewhere, and I would truly appreciate your input. What does ideal community-led governance look like to you? Here are some guiding questions to kickstart the discussion:

  1. What areas of Octant’s operations would you like to have a say in?
  2. How can we incentivize meaningful participation in governance?
  3. Are there any specific governance models from other projects that you find inspiring or effective?

Next Steps

Based on feedback, I would aim to draft a roadmap towards more decentralized governance. This will be an iterative process, and I commit to keeping it transparent and inclusive every step of the way.

Really excited about this journey and can’t wait to hear your thoughts and ideas!

11 Likes
2
  1. Strategy, DAO2DAO collabs, marketing & education
  2. don’t know if you already do this but asking for suggestions or comments on the Proposal Draft, so the community have some input around it.
  3. I like pattern #4 & #10; How the devil do I use a Moloch DAO?

I’m part of core team members at Let’s GROW DAO; we’re building a non-financial DAO to grow and unite the Regenerative Movement thru the Public Goods Ecosystem. My work is mainly around Governance, Tokenomics & Ops. We’re using a Moloch DAO with 1 token 1 vote & loot tokens to build a reputational unit of metric that we could use to introduce mechanics and gamification around our values.

One experiment I’m very excited about is “time-bound roles” to prevent zombie members and combine them with eligibility based on the reputational token; as we’re building a volunteer-based DAO, I think the approach could bear a positive outcome on highly aligned communities.

3 Likes
3

Thanks for the input!! When you say strategy… what do you mean here? Features to be added are obviously low hanging fruit, but wondering what else is on your mind.

4

It could be a simple as private thread or doc about “Essential Intents for 2023” that the community can leave suggestions with their input or comments with our honest take on the proposed plan.

When community feedback part of a future roadmap that creates an organic engagement because everyone wants too their ideas to come to fruition

1 Like
5

A few ideas post our call.

  • I do like expanding to outer communities where we are aligned on values and building on that foundation.

  • We - EVMavericks - had Colony on our podcast last week, link, and they were mentioning more tools coming in in January that they have been working on for ages. One useful feature in particular was the weighted voting that is also tied to the current level of participation and I feel like it would be really helpful in the Octant’s case. I’m not sure how it exactly is going to work, especially if there’s already a token involved but this is where collaborating with Colony might be useful too. This might help with your question #3.

3 Likes
6

Yeah I really like this a lot, going to be putting it together today.

1 Like
7

So weighted voting based on participation? We could set something like this up obviously with GLM locked into Octant, but also its possible to create weighted power based on your donations to public goods.

1 Like
8

We’ve got a great opportunity to experiment with the DAO in the months/years until it is fully launched to the community. Let’s try things out, get messy, and figure out what works best for Octant!

We can find creative ways to incorporate the GLM token into the design but our focus should be on empowering active members that donate to public goods. I’m not sure what that would look like but it would be nice to see more voting power issued to the users who actively stake with an emphasis on those who donate their rewards.

For DAO tooling let’s start exploring the projects in the Octant ecosystem. I do want to call out that I have a Bias here. I would love to see DAOHaus tooling to be used by Octant but more importantly, I want Octant to have the best tools for it to be successful. Now that my bias is fully disclosed we should reach out to our community to see how they can help support Octant’s journey to creating a DAO. There is a lot of great tooling out there and I’m sure many projects would love to build something to fit the unique needs of Octant. From my experiences working with Protocol Guild and creating the Membership Registry tool, I could guarantee that other people/projects would benefit from custom-built tooling.

I joined Hats Demo Day today and would love to see us incorporate some on-chain roles for members of the DAO. I will post the video as soon as they upload it for you all to watch.

thedevanshmehta brought up a very interesting point about quadratic funding and the ability to bank/store voting power. I would love to explore this idea more but have some reservations. We should do some thought exercises on how this could be gamed.

This last point might be a little off topic but I wanted to bring it up. We briefly discussed the mini-rounds. I know that members of PublicHAUS & Hypercerts have started to explore opportunities for collaboration. Would collaboration between projects be a good fit for the mini-rounds? Or should such collaborations be submitted as net new projects? I would argue a goal of Octant should be to foster collaboration between the projects.

Thanks for being you!

  • Rowdy
4 Likes
9

When you say essential intents, are you suggesting creating a doc similar to what we have in this discussion? I suppose my confusion comes from me laying out the intention here and where the differences in your idea may be?

1 Like
10

Glad to see Octant taking steps towards meaningful decentralization and I’m in full support of these efforts.

Ideally the whole spectrum over the long term, but near term goals could include researching various domains/areas of public goods → determining the allocation size for each domain → deciding on the allocation mechanism for each domain/allocation usecase. I’d like to point to this post as inspiration of how octant can contribute not only towards distrbuting ETH to public goods buildooors but to allocation mechanism buildooors in order to optimize the allocation strategy for each use case.

  • Generally be backward looking when it comes to selecting the right set of people based on what they have built or their overall contribution to the space.
  • Give specific domains to specific experts based on their contribution to optimize signal
  • retroactively reward folks, since ‘meaningful participation’ is best judged relatively based on the overall contribution set as opposed to a ‘promise to deliver’
  • incentivize veterans to become mentors for newbies by creating a special funding stream for this cause
  • Taking a leaf from DeFi, having a clear set of contract parameters to tune provides an optimial surface area from governance
  • Have the DAO be it’s own entity and let the foundation be a service provider/steward for the DAO as opposed to the DAO being an extension of the foundation
  • Get a trusted set of actors to be on the security council and pre-define veto conditions
  • The general tendency is to identify specific deliverables and delegate these to interest groups. Overtime, there are dozens of interest groups with overlapping delegated responsibilities and further delegation starts becoming confusing, instead define meta level org units and allow interest groups to divide responsibilities under these meta-groups
  • I agree that option 1 is the better way to go
  • As a general rule, focus on building an ‘Internet Native Organization (INO)’ as opposed to a ‘DAO’ which is a specific version of an INO.
4 Likes
11

This thread and specifically this bullet point:

inspired this tweet with this graphic in it (I was also having a related conversation about this concept with someone else)

image
image1920×1080 73.3 KB

I am curious: where does Octant want to participate ??

Personally, I have envisioned Octant providing steady recurring funding to the “short tail”. The short tail includes projects that also play a critical role recirculating funding down the long tail. (Gitcoin is probably the best example of this.)

I think a unique and valuable role for Octant governance would be to focus on “short tail allocators” who enable a flourishing and dynamic long tail.

4 Likes
12

I like this idea, and it was initially what brought me to reaching out to the 10 projects that participated in Epoch Zero. My concern here would be that the short tail then creates a consolidation of contributors with interests primarily around their ecosystem, an idea also related to what you mentioned to me in person at FTC, where Octant is only funding an “exclusive” group rather than being open to all.

Maybe my fears around this would be mitigated when we get out of the bear market, and I’m just “thinking” out loud here.

5 Likes
13

Thanks for nibbling on the line :slight_smile:
If Octant wanted to be a short tail allocator, then the big governance questions might be around how big / diverse / stable is the short tail. It could be 10 projects or 100. A concentration in one or two ecosystems or many. A project set that is stable or rapidly changing.
Regardless, the meta questions are “what kind of distribution curve does Octant want to have” and “where does that fit in with the broader public goods funding landscape”. The answers to those questions will help inform what community-led governance could look like!

1 Like
14

Really appreciate this feedback, and you’re spot on. Part of the reason this discussion is happening in the first place because we’re internally realizing that Octant doesn’t yet have its identity defined. Thanks for sharing on this, its good food for thought.

1 Like
15

In the near term, I think there is a nice way to connect all the strands of thought going on here

Would it be a good idea to let people earn voting power in an epoch for their allocations and then spend that between epochs for the mini-rounds they want to see?

Something I’ve learnt taking part in Arbitrum governance is how much the community detests service providers :rofl:

What people actually want to see are campaigns - individuals taking on the onus for driving something & then seeing it through

As we go about horizontal scaling for these initiatives, we should not fall into the trap of paying for services but instead support the people driving a movement.

I don’t know if you’ve checked out Uniswaps recent proposal to delegate UNI from their treasury to active but under-represented delegates. UNI isn’t given to them but a contract delegates it to them depending on how many votes each applicant gets in the snapshot. Lots to learn from how they have designed & done it!

I already shill Octant on all the podcasts & to people I meet, would love to play a role in the more public facing side of things! Also with creating content pieces on what’s new at Octant.

I second this, we want only GLM that is locked into Octant to be used in governance, not GLM in general

This is something Gitcoin has excelled at - people have found cofounders during rounds and I myself have joined DAOs i came across in gitcoin

Since number of projects are smaller and more curated than Gitcoin, we have an opportunity for intentional matchmaking rather than Gitcoin’s more spontaneous & serendipitous connections

There is a good debate to be had between the right balance of capital allocator and capital utilizer projects applying for funds in Octant.

For example Gitcoin is a regranting mechanism passing on funds received in octant to other projects across the ecosystem, whereas @LefterisJP and Rotki utilize funds to pay their developers for building the end product.

In some respects capital allocator projects can be a side project (since their main allows them to cross subsidize development), whereas those projects utilizing capital should be on the short tail.

2 Likes
16

Efforts to fund projects in this blue range would have a nice symbiotic effect for Octant and those projects.
image

  • These projects are established but haven’t “made it” yet, so a funding round has a real chance to get them what they need to get to that level.
  • These projects have established (albeit small) communities that could help spread the word about Octant. With enough of those projects in a funding round, we catalyze a large number of passionate people from disparate groups to share what Octant is doing in a way that funding the Protocol Guild or Gitcoin doesn’t.

In terms of the DAO, one thing to consider: GLM’s market cap is $236M, so to get a majority of votes you need $118M (ignoring that you can’t fill an order that large and expect that price throughout, but this is just a thought exercise). However the 100,000 ETH potentially at stake is worth $220M, making a governance attack quite appealing. We wouldn’t want the DAO set up in such a way that this is possible.

I like the idea of staked GLM or even the proportional share of staked GLM that was used to fund public goods getting voting power (e.g. if I have 2000 GLM, and I stake 1000 and then donate 75% of my rewards and keep 25% for myself, my voting power is effectively 750 GLM).

On how we can incentivize meaningful participation in governance, there are a lot of more involved mechanisms we could use, but one piece of low hanging fruit is a POAP.

5 Likes
17

This is a really interesting point Mike, and I like your idea of what you highlight in blue, I’ll think about that more.

But in terms of an attack, Octant is uniquely setup to prevent it, because the staking operation is completely separated from Octant as Golem Foundation, not Octant, is responsible for staking. If there was an attack, we can just turn off the faucet of rewards, and that attack would then be very costly to the attacker as I would assume the GLM price would get hit hard when GF turns off staking rewards to Octant.

2 Likes
18

Lots to digest here but I think we are on the same page in many of the things you mentioned. I’m going to chat with leadership about a lot of the ideas that were expressed this week on this conversation and get back ASAP!

2 Likes
19

Really exciting to see Octant going down the decentralization rabbit whole and it’s really great because we have learned some lessons in the last bull market. I personally have been involved/contributed to multiple PG DAOs(Gitcoin, 1Hive, etc) and would love to share some of the insights I’ve gathered.

  1. Governance and grant programs :smiley:
  2. By testing multiple incentivization models (ideally proposed by the community :smiley: ) Ex: Jokerace + A Qf Governance round on Gitcoin + gathering input from the community + making sure enough people participate
  3. I personally love the model that 1Hive uses, it’s conviction voting + streaming proposals to the contributors that are active. People vote using their tokens and the contributors stream grows if more people vote with their tokens. Gardens + streamfluid can help Octant here :smiley: . I would add a kill switch or a review layer to make sure the contributors are actually having impact
3 Likes
20

So Octant V2 has not been discussed much, but a much more flexible and on chain version of Octant is being built behind the scenes. As for governance, this is exactly why we’re here!

Can you expand what you mean here? We are going to be running mini grant rounds on Grant Stack and Jokerace, and I can see the community having much more involvement in the decisions and processes of that. But I think you might be referring to something else?

The problem right now with this idea is that rewards need to accumulate for a specified period so that the matching pool can be leveraged for those who want to donate their rewards. I’m not sure how streaming proposals would work because I believe this would go against the “round” idea and be instead a continuous stream of projects randomly coming to Octant, no?

@thedevanshmehta had mentioned this:

And something like this could be possible but we need to think about how that would work in practice. Because users need to take a decision (donate or claim) with current setup. Maybe we could add a “save” option as well?

Devansh, can I ask how this works in practice? Are individuals compensated retroactively? Wondering what has been an effective motivator for this model given there must be friction towards those taking action if they are unsure if they will be rewarded.

2 Likes