Governance is one of the most challenging and exciting components of web3. LOA Labs believes now is a great time in the history of Regen Network to reflect on what has worked and what hasn’t in this community’s governance environment. More important, it is time to explore as a community how to upgrade and codify best governance practices within the Regen Network ecosystem.
The Regen Network community is dedicated to cultivating an effective and transparent decision-making process. Decentralized governance plays a critical role in fostering a sustainable and inclusive ecosystem, empowering stakeholders to participate, collaborate, and innovate.
With this in mind, we invite all members to share their thoughts on the following key aspects of our governance and funding process:
PROPOSAL FUNNEL/STAGES
What stages should a proposal undergo before reaching the on-chain voting stage, and how can we effectively integrate idea submission, evaluation, and community feedback phases for well-informed decisions? What would you suggest? What improvements can be made to the current process?
ACCOUNTABILITY
How can we establish accountability processes that ensure Community Funding Pool awards align with their on-chain proposals? What mechanisms can be introduced to track progress, measure success, and hold recipients accountable?
PRIORITIZING
What priority categories should be considered for Community Funding Pool awards during this stage of Regen Network’s development? How can we align these categories with our long-term goals and support projects that best serve the ecosystem’s needs?
WHAT ELSE?
Your input is invaluable! Could you lean in a little on this? Share your opinion, help contribute to the outcome?
Let’s work together to create a robust, decentralized governance model that reflects the values of the Regen Network community. We want to eventually work this into a document that can be easily referenced.
Yes! Thank you, @αlphaβiota | LOA Labs for bringing this discussion to the forum. I concur entirely with your thoughts on web3 governance. In many ways codifying best governance practices helps to address some of the challenges inherent to the subject. Below are my thoughts!
Proposal Funnel/Stages
Currently Regen Network recommends community proposals begin as a discussion in Commonwealth for at least one week before being submitted as an on-chain proposal. The discussion needs to contain all the relevant details and links for the project and should be shared to Discord and Telegram. https://guides.regen.network/guides/network-governance/governance-basics/about
Evmos Protocol has done really excellent work in this area that I think we should consider when establishing our own criteria. By Evmos guidelines, a proposal should go through four stages: discussion, formalization, signal, vote. https://docs.evmos.community/governance/proposals/lifecycle
Discussion refers to a Commonwealth discussion, similar to the one which starts our own current procedure.
Formalization refers to an additional discussion period following an update from the original authors. They must reformat their discussion to fit their formal guidelines, which include a summary, authors, abstract, motivation, and then specific content.
The Signal stage is the final temperature check. Here the proposer must switch their discussion topic to proposal, and add a poll to gauge community sentiment. Then, the proposal is ready to go for a vote.
I think the signal stage, especially, would be useful to implement. With Commonwealth’s polling feature, this is easy to do as a final check before a deposit is met and a voting period begins.
Accountability
Regen Network has had very few community spend proposals and no real guideli
A few more questions that could be explored, include:
What required elements should every Community Funding Pool proposal include? Should we establish a proposal template?
What are examples of other Community Funding Pool or DAO funding approaches we can learn from? Can we source community funding processes from outside of web3?
Should we establish milestone-based approaches to funding distribution from the Community Pool? If so, how should it be administered?
What should the role of the group module be in administering the Community Funding Pool?
What processes should we establish for altering community funding proposals post-onchain vote?
What accountability processes should be established for mitigating mis-use of Community Funding Pool awards?
RND had a grants program, The Community Fund Program, in 2022. In our internal retrospective, we identified recommendations for granting in the ecosystem. I think these learnings from grant managers are relevant to this discussion.
**Grant program learnings: **
Projects produced less results than they promised in their initial proposals. Therefore, we would recommend funding projects phase by phase, with timelines, budgets, and deliverables. We recommend releasing small amounts of funding, and when deliverables are met, a grant can be evaluated for support of the next project phase. Projects need to showcase that they can fulfill on their promises before they receive large volumes of funding.
We would fund projects who have a direct relationship to the ecosystem, where the project’s use by the community is not abstract. Examples include methodology development, events the team is attending, bridges for credits to reach other ecosystems, etc.
We would recommend that succesful projects consider the Community Pool for further funding, as well as outside sources.
There needs to be an accountability process to ensure that tokens granted are staked, per grant agreements.
There should be financial transparency with grants, ie. grants should be asked to share a spreadsheet of their expenditures transparently with the community.
Grantees need to provide documentation of individual or organizational proof of existence. For example, if a grantee is a 501(c)3 organization, it should provide a copy of its IRS approval letter and contact information for its Board of Directors. This is important to ensure that grantee’s receive the appropriate accounting information for this income.
Grantees need some sort of direct support, so they have access to the community, resources, education. Having a representative or community manager that works with them regularly, is very helpful to ensuring their success and integration into the community.