A proposal to extend treasury with remark and reputation building
This is not a formal treasury proposal. We created this post to show our ideas and collect feedbacks.
If councilors are interested with these ideas, we may split them into relatively small work to apply treasury, and roughly they will be treasury explorer, remark system and reputation system.
1. Problems
Treasury is a great feature compared to other blockchain ecosystem, while it help sustainable development of the whole ecosystem. But we have concern about following issues:
- How to measure the ROI of each expense.
- How councillors measure the result of each proposal, and how can the community know the measurement.
- Currently the councillors' work is great, but how to help them reduce the cost to judge proposals.
- How to make councillors know the opinions from community for the result or output of one specific proposal.
- What if councillors made bad decisions.
- How to measure contributors for their work with the treasury, and in return how this measurement can help the judgement of new treasury applications.
2. Treasury explorer
Yes, we can check the latest status of treasury and tips at subscan, or maybe polkascan. But we need more details, while the key feature is the TIMELINE of each expense, and all history actions should be tracked and listed in the timeline to help us understand the lifecycle of one treasury expense. Generally the time line will include:
- Discussions record(polkassembly post) before the formal proposal.
- Formal proposal on chain: the transaction, the proposer, the beneficiary.
- Related transactions and events, like the spend event for every expense. For bounties, each state transition will be listed.
- Each vote or cancel by councillors. 'Aye' or 'Nay', and by which councillor.
- Treasury beneficiary's report about the proposal.
This specific treasury explorer will include following features:
- Latest treasury status and some statistical information like proposal, bounties, and tips amount, how much money have been spent, how much destroyed, etc.
- Each treasury income record and detail.
- Each output or expense record and detail, especially the timeline of each expense. Treasury proposal, tip and bounty will have customized detail page.
- A token history price tracker will be involved to help decide the real cost of a treasury at the happened time.
- Some admin manual management work will be involved to add discussion and treasury report post info.
This treasury explorer aim to help us to see the whole lifecycle of one treasury expense. It's not just a UI, block and extrinsic scan, database storing, indexing, data query will be involved to help render the whole timeline.
3. Grade, remark, suggestion or feedback system
For each output of the treasury, ecosystem participants should have ways to give their remark, while different roles should have different rights to remark, grade, or feedback. All the remark actions will be done based on the treasury explorer.
3.1 Terminology
Let's make the remark actions clear. There will be 2 kinds of actions:
- Grade: it means a formal grade(score or rating) to the output of a treasury expense. For example, 5 star in total, some roles can give stars to output of a expense.
- Remark: it's not formal, everyone can give it, and show their opinions about the proposal, the council decisions, and the output.
To better remark treasure expense, we can classify councilors into following roles for one specific target expense:
- The ones who voted 'Aye', called AC.
- The ones who voted 'Nay', called NC.
- The ones who didn't vote but in same council session, called SC.
- The other ones, called OC.
3.2 Remark weights
3.2.1 Councilors
All councilors can grade the output, but AC and NC should have the highest weight, while SC with higher weight, and OC with normal weight. We call this grade score as Council Score.
All councilors can give normal text remark of course, while remark from AC and NC maybe ranked first.
3.2.2 Token holders
Token holders can grade the output, and the score is called Holder Score. Some limitations maybe applied to prevent cheating grade, for example, only holders with an judged identity can grade.
In general, remarks from holders with more tokens should have higher rank.
3.2.3 Community members
Before a convictive way to prevent cheating, normal community members can not grade.
Any one can give text remark to the treasury expense, but it will be weaker than that from councilors and token holders.
3.2.4 Anonymous remark
It's sensitive to give negative remark for most of people. Anonymous remark will help us see the real feelings of ecosystem participants. Of course, anonymous remark will have the most weak weight.
For councilors or token holders with an identity who want to make a anonymous grade or remark but with identity proof, currently we have no concrete way to implement this, but we will do more research and consult other teams for a solution.
4. Reputation system
Reputation will be built based on the grade and remark. A main reputation score will be calculated for treasury participants.
4.1 Roles who will get reputation scores
- Treasury expense(proposals, bounties and tips) proposer and beneficiary.
- Councilors who voted.
4.2 Judgement principle
4.2.1 Growth
- Proposer's reputation will grow when the proposal get approved by the council.
- Bounty curator's reputation will grow when they accept the council's assignment.
- Get high grade from councilors, proposal(including bounties) beneficiary's reputation will grow, while proposer(or curator) get a relatively less growth.
- AC's reputation grow when their voted proposal get high grade from other councilors.
- NC's reputation grow when their voted proposal get low grade from other councilors.
4.2.2 Loss
- Proposer's reputation will decrease when the proposal get rejected by the council.
- Get low grade from councilors, proposal beneficiary's reputation will decrease, while proposer get a relatively less decrease.
- For bounties, if get low grade from councilors, curator and beneficiary should suffer same degree of reputation loss.
- AC's reputation grow when their voted proposal get low grade from other councilors.
- NC's reputation grow when their voted proposal get high grade from other councilors.
4.2.3 Grow and lost weights
Generally, the reputation growth and loss will be highly related with the proposal amount. Bigger amount, higher growth or loss. For example, 10,000KSM expense should lose more reputation if failed compared to 100KSM expense.
4.2.4 How to handle grade from token holders
Currently to keep the reputation calculation simple, we don't take Holder Score into the reputation calculation. Maybe we will introduce a assistant reputation score.
5. Summary
To solve the feedback issues of currently treasury mechanism, we propose a specific treasury explorer with which the community can know each income and detailed timeline of each expense.
With the customized, detailed treasury expense page, councilors, token holders and community members can give their grade and remark, which will help the evaluation of the expense.
Reputation will be built based on:
- the objective approvals and rejections
- the subjective but measurable grade
We are OpenSquare team, dedicated to facilitate the collaboration between projects and developers.
Comments (18)
Comments (18)
I think this is interesting, but don't want to add additional layers of complexity/cognitive filters to a process that is already getting opaque.
Every optional reputational element introduced to the network (ie, verified identity, which was originally intended to combat validator impersonization and allow users to research validators prior to nominating them) quickly became informally mandatory (ie, it is strongly recommended to have a verified identity when applying for treasury) - I am afraid that something like this will end up eventually being used to have "mandatory minimum reputation to interact with the treasury" which would be disappointing for me who primarily wants to use the treasury to grow the ecosystem and bring others into our community - every time a new requirement is added to treasury interactions, it becomes more difficult for new entrants to our ecosystem to participate, and therefore they are less likely to do so at all.
I like the idea of the community giving feedback on treasury proposal and governance participants' behavior - I would just like to see certain properties to avoid the scenario I described above, and other bad outcomes:
- Reputation Scores should be normalized - ie, there should be a maximum and a minimum - I completely disagree with the principle behind 4.2.3. Perhaps "age"/"seniority" or "long-term commitment" should be something people should consider part of someone's reputation, but it should not give you a higher score over time. (this also implies new entrants should have a neutral or below-neutral "unknown" score).
- It should be completely clear what exactly this score is measuring. I would like to see "following or exceeding their personal stated goals" as the metric. What you are describing in 4.2.1 and 4.2.2 implies that the metric being measured is "alignment and cohesion to collective goals" which is absolutely unacceptable to me as a goal for any social reputation score.
- Council Participants, Treasury Requestors, Bounty Claimers, Curators, and Donaters, Tippers, Tipees. should all be able to have a reputation for participating in activities normally - and since reputation is normalized, they should be able to have a calculated reputation value without participating in or even being aware of the reputation system, and if they are meeting all of their goals and are a positive participant, they should have as high a reputation score as someone actively participating in the reputation scoring system.
I don't want to sound overly critical, I just want to ensure that any formalized reputation systems that develop at the core level don't end up creating moats, creating "ingroups and outgroups", increase the burden of participation, or otherwise concentrate power or influence in any systematic way.
We've already seen the downsides of seemingly innocuous decisions like having automatic validator nomination being the default in the UI - people don't usually think unless you ask them to, so a goal for any reputation system should be to give people the information they need to come to their own conclusions, not give them a prepackaged high score that does all of the thinking for them.
Thanks, @jam10o .
but don't want to add additional layers of complexity/cognitive filters to a process that is already getting opaque.
Sure, I think at least treasury explorer will help make the expense clearer. For other parts, it depends on our choice and implementation.
Every optional reputational element introduced to the network (ie, verified identity, which was originally intended to combat validator impersonization and allow users to research validators prior to nominating them) quickly became informally mandatory (ie, it is strongly recommended to have a verified identity when applying for treasury) - I am afraid that something like this will end up eventually being used to have "mandatory minimum reputation to interact with the treasury" which would be disappointing for me who primarily wants to use the treasury to grow the ecosystem and bring others into our community - every time a new requirement is added to treasury interactions, it becomes more difficult for new entrants to our ecosystem to participate, and therefore they are less likely to do so at all.
Actually I have same worry with you, but they are some kinds of trade off, and the key problem is how to seek the best balance. Sure the identity bring some burden to applicants, but it indeed help us to know the application better.
We don't want to make the reputation too formally. We aim to bring some reference to councilors to prevent treasury wast.
Reputation Scores should be normalized - ie, there should be a maximum and a minimum
Yes, we will handle this. Please refer to this google doc to see how we calculate general score from behavior score. Reputation score we talked above is behavior score, and it's easy to normalize it to (0, 100) with mathematical way.
I completely disagree with the principle behind 4.2.3.
Maybe I didn't explain it clearly. I mean 10,000KSM expense should be different with 100KSM expense, and the 10,000KSM expense will bring higher growth or loss. If not, how to judge their differences.
It should be completely clear what exactly this score is measuring. I would like to see "following or exceeding their personal stated goals" as the metric. What you are describing in 4.2.1 and 4.2.2 implies that the metric being measured is "alignment and cohesion to collective goals" which is absolutely unacceptable to me as a goal for any social reputation score.
We may apply some classify to reputation scores to make it as clear as possible.
Actually for most proposals, it's very hard to verify the goals in mathematic verifiable way. Currently we think the best way is introducing more different interest group to give their judgement. Currently councilors are the most canonical roles, and they are the approvers, so at first we can believe their judgement. In the future, we may introduce some canonical identities.
Reputation building will be the last work in the proposal, and we will be very cautious to apply each reputation rule.
Don't have to worry too much about the moats. We will try to make it a reference but not a mandatory and too formal one. In first stage, maybe we will do more work about the remark from the community.
I think this is interesting, but don't want to add additional layers of complexity/cognitive filters to a process that is already getting opaque.
Every optional reputational element introduced to the network (ie, verified identity, which was originally intended to combat validator impersonization and allow users to research validators prior to nominating them) quickly became informally mandatory (ie, it is strongly recommended to have a verified identity when applying for treasury) - I am afraid that something like this will end up eventually being used to have "mandatory minimum reputation to interact with the treasury" which would be disappointing for me who primarily wants to use the treasury to grow the ecosystem and bring others into our community - every time a new requirement is added to treasury interactions, it becomes more difficult for new entrants to our ecosystem to participate, and therefore they are less likely to do so at all.
I like the idea of the community giving feedback on treasury proposal and governance participants' behavior - I would just like to see certain properties to avoid the scenario I described above, and other bad outcomes:
I don't want to sound overly critical, I just want to ensure that any formalized reputation systems that develop at the core level don't end up creating moats, creating "ingroups and outgroups", increase the burden of participation, or otherwise concentrate power or influence in any systematic way.
We've already seen the downsides of seemingly innocuous decisions like having automatic validator nomination being the default in the UI - people don't usually think unless you ask them to, so a goal for any reputation system should be to give people the information they need to come to their own conclusions, not give them a prepackaged high score that does all of the thinking for them.
Thanks, @jam10o .
Sure, I think at least treasury explorer will help make the expense clearer. For other parts, it depends on our choice and implementation.
Actually I have same worry with you, but they are some kinds of trade off, and the key problem is how to seek the best balance. Sure the identity bring some burden to applicants, but it indeed help us to know the application better.
We don't want to make the reputation too formally. We aim to bring some reference to councilors to prevent treasury wast.
Yes, we will handle this. Please refer to this google doc to see how we calculate general score from behavior score. Reputation score we talked above is behavior score, and it's easy to normalize it to (0, 100) with mathematical way.
Maybe I didn't explain it clearly. I mean 10,000KSM expense should be different with 100KSM expense, and the 10,000KSM expense will bring higher growth or loss. If not, how to judge their differences.
We may apply some classify to reputation scores to make it as clear as possible.
Actually for most proposals, it's very hard to verify the goals in mathematic verifiable way. Currently we think the best way is introducing more different interest group to give their judgement. Currently councilors are the most canonical roles, and they are the approvers, so at first we can believe their judgement. In the future, we may introduce some canonical identities.
Reputation building will be the last work in the proposal, and we will be very cautious to apply each reputation rule.
Don't have to worry too much about the moats. We will try to make it a reference but not a mandatory and too formal one. In first stage, maybe we will do more work about the remark from the community.