Governance 2.0 Referenda Audits
Dear community,
Based on the recent experience with the increasing number of treasury proposals, I am presenting the following proposal aiming to improve the Governance 2.0 experience through a series of referenda proposal audits.
Governance 2.0 Referenda Audits
1. Problem
Since the launch of Governance 2.0 on Kusama I spent many hours reading, reviewing, and trying to understand many treasury discussions and proposals. I try my best to understand every proposal before forming an opinion and voting. For the majority of the proposals, I try to provide feedback to the proposer explaining the reasons for either supporting or rejecting the proposal. So far I feel like proposals are sort of a wild game at the moment.
Most proposals are not very well structured, lack information, and include budgets that seem very hard to defend. Proposals can also be very diverse with a focus on different areas that not everyone can be familiar with. For all these reasons it is significantly time-consuming for voters to truly understand the proposal and cast an educated vote on it.
With the given time constraints, it is not surprising that proposals are receiving very little or no feedback at all. The feedback is often provided in a free form and is not always clear and precise. Such insufficient information has little use for other voters. It provides low assurance to other community members that the reviewer has objectively formed an objective opinion on the presented proposals.
2. Available solutions
The official Polkadot treasury page, Kusama and Polkadot Wiki provide a good source of information and documentation. Most of this information and guidelines explain the “old” Governance 1.0 system or in other words, it relates to the very specific set of proposal reviewers – Councilors. With the Governance 2.0 introduction, the set of reviewers dramatically increased from a limited set of councilors to a much wider Dotsama community. For this reason, all the documentation needs to be adjusted so it can be better presented to the wider audience where not everyone needs to be an expert in the field to have a good understanding of the proposal content.
3. Proposal Solution
This proposal aims to create a clear and precise framework for creating and presenting the proposals. This framework is not meant to be a strict requirement but more as a set of guidelines for the proposers to successfully present their project and increase their chance to defend the proposal and win community approval.
As the counterpart to the proposal framework, the equally important audit framework will be created as guidance for the reviewers. This audit aims to provide more precise feedback to the proposer and give a sufficient and educated review that can be later used by other voters to form their opinion on the proposal.
In a young system like this, creating these guidelines is simply not enough. To create a better treasury proposal system, a great level of engagement is required. For this reason, I propose a temporary Project manager/auditor role for a period of 3 months. The main task of the PM is to actively follow the governance tracks, objectively check and audit the proposal content according to the proposal guidelines and produce and publish the audit according to the created framework. The task of the PM is to be available to the community and gather feedback and accordingly adjust the framework.
4. Key deliverables:
Proposal template – a document with predefined categories and as many pre-filled and guided data (examples) as possible.
Feedback template – directly related to the proposal template. Possible checklist for each category with additional room for the feedback
Produce a minimum of 30 one-page audits with included feedback on active treasury proposals or proposal discussions
5. Key objectives/ Success criteria
Reduce the time required to write a detailed and comprehensive proposal – measured by the proposal owner's feedback
Higher community involvement in the governance – measured by the number of members involved in discussions, number of provided feedback, and number of interactions with one-page reviews
All these points are taken from the full proposal document.
Comments (15)
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Hi @CoinStudio - Interesting idea and I agree that we need some guidelines so voters can be less annoyed with how some proposals are being done, but why do you need this ? "Produce a minimum of 30 one-page audits with included feedback on active treasury proposals or proposal discussions" Does it have to be 30 ? Also, have you considered a structure depending on the type of proposal ? For example Media funding proposals should be valued differently than a team funding proposal for a technical project. To add to that, what about top-ups for those who already had their referendums passed and have received funding and have delivered on their promise with proof to show for it ? Should they not be treated differently when it comes to requesting that top up so that they don't have to go through everything from scratch ? Thanks in advance and I look forward to your answers before I vote.
Hi Claudio,
thanks for the feedback.
The proposal timelines were created around the current state of the governance where a new proposal is created roughly every 1-2 days. Based on this fact a minimum target criteria of 30 audits is created to match the proposed timeline. These considerations can be found under the section
3.6 Known constraintsin the proposal.All the examples you provided have a solid ground and are worth exploring in the long run. I am sure that during the work on this proposal some other problems and considerations will arise. I am not trying to solve all of the problems at once but I will try to solve the ones identified in this proposal. For the future problem there will be future solutions. At the start I will try to keep proposal focused on the clear and defined goals with the main task to get the things going first.
My intent is to keep discussion on this proposal open and I hope you will stay involved in discussion. Providing this type of feedback will help to catch catch the community sentiment and shape direction and the criteria for the future proposals.
We fully support this initiative to audit the last proposals and formulate possible standards on how to move forward with OpenGov. The standards for a small tip are obviously different compared to a big spender but that was not always reflected recently.
As @kryptoschain mentioned, it would be good to also differentiate between types (bounty, top up, ...) and topic (infrastructure, media, education, software, ...). Maybe you can try to get a virtual round table with representatives of these groups as part of the audit/proposal.
Hi MathCrypto, thanks for the feedback. I agree there are a lot of things that needs to be considered in the long run. As mentioned in the reply to KriptosChain, I want to stay focused on the main tasks first and try to create a set of general guidelines that can be applied for all of the proposals. The first reason is that once we create some baselines, it will be easier to understand how specific type of proposal relates to it and what areas need to be improved. The other reason is to stay focused on delivering the promised scope of work. Trying to solve too many problems at once could easily divert the focus in too many directions and be counterproductive. In previous conversation we touched on some specific metrics that need to be better defined. My intent is to keep discussion on this proposal open and I hope we will revisit these topics when the time is right.