[Proposal ##][DRAFT] {After the Big Bang: A constitutional process the Cosmos Hub}

[Antoine_Vergne]

After the big bang: A constitutional process for the Cosmos ecosystem

Change log

• 2022-12-14 Created initial post
• 2022-12-21 Changed name of first step, fixed links (previously not possible to enter links), Added summary for budget)

Summary

Cosmos is at a crucial moment in time. Following the discussion launched by the Atom 2.0 paper and the related on-chain propositions (78,80,81,82,83,86) the community has entered a very lively debate on its future. The rejection of prop82 has created a divide that needs to be settled for the Cosmos to move forward strong and united. Many community members are actively discussing a process to facilitate a healthy and constructive discussion.

As a recognized neutral third party, we propose to support that process by designing and facilitating a deliberative constitutional process. We understand “constitutional” as a process to find the rules for organizing a community: it must not end with a proper constitution even if this would be a world’s first and would represent a revolutionary precedent for Cosmos and its ecosystem, the Blockchain world itself, and even further for the future of governance.

Imagine the day of the 14th of March 2023: It’s the 4th birthday of the launch of the Cosmos Hub and Cosmozens, citizens of the cosmos, gather to discuss, get informed, and recommend a path forward.

What is our approach

We combine following approaches:

1. Deliberative democracy and collective intelligence. Deliberative Governance has been invented, piloted, and scaled since roughly 30 years as an answer and complement to the shortcomings of classical representative democracy and direct democracy. It brings collective intelligence (vs collected intelligence from voting, opinion polls, or current crypto governance) to fruition, is epistemically strong (through cognitive diversity and the methods used in the process) and highly legitimate (through random selection of participants also known as Aleatorian Democracy). An overview of the many faces of deliberation can be explored at participedia-dot-net.
2. Human-centered design and research. Human-centered design focuses a team on the goals, tasks, and pains of stakeholders who will use and engage with a product or platform. We then combine this structure with concrete feedback gathered from users and other stakeholders. The end goal is to give people the empathy and insights needed to make the best long-term decisions for all key stakeholders.

Ok, nice but how exactly will it look like

An inclusive, deliberative process needs to be co-designed with the stakeholder while ensuring that the process has a clear start and end and that stakeholders trust the process steward. We propose the following bricks as a spine:

1. (Work package 1) Preparation: focus on two main tasks with the aim of preparing a solid contradictory process [a process in which pros and cons of different options are presented and discussed] and a knowledge flow for the deliberation.
   1.1 Gather shape of the Cosmos mindset: We will survey Cosmos members on their current views, who shares those views, and who has different views through the means of short interviews and analysis of past public discussions and governance channels. → Output: Galactic map of the Cosmos after the big bang.
   1.2 Design a detailed process flow for the deliberative process: Recruitment strategy and channels, program and method of the sessions. → Output: All navigation systems are up and running.

2. (Work package 2) Review: Present the findings to the community for additional commentary, ensuring people on all sides are heard. This review will focus on:
   2.1 What are the key conflicts/challenges, and hence what are the right questions to ask in the deliberative sessions?
   2.2 What are the pieces of information and opinion that are crucial to be presented to participants to have a healthy dialogue? (emphases on the key problems/needs and potential ‘solution spaces’). → Output: Remit and information package for participants.

3. (Work package 3) The Cosmozens’ Convention Part 1: Deploy the deliberative process on the Future of Atom. We will convene a convention of 50 to 150 randomly selected cosmozens, working on a draft of governance architecture through a deliberative process inspired by the very successful model of Citizens’ Assemblies. The process will alternate synchronous and asynchronous moments and may include 5 non-consecutive sessions of 12-14 hours each (exact amounts to be defined after completion of phase 2) To ensure high quality deliberation, the process will be moderated and facilitated by professional facilitators and moderators. → Output: A set of draft recommendations on how Atoms’ Future could look like.

4. (Work package 4) The Feedback: The drafts will be submitted to a structured process of feedback and improvement during a short period of time.

5. (Work package 5) The Cosmozens’ Convention part 2: During one or two last sessions, participants to the convention will integrate the feedback from the community and improve their recommendations to deliver a final set of proposals. Output → Governance proposal or proposals or any other relevant output.

6. (Work package 6) Ratification: The final version of the constitution will be submitted for ratification through onchain voting. → Output: Onchain vote.

7. (Work package 7) Evaluation: We will propose a framework for ex ante / ex post evaluation inspired by our community health tool. → Output: Evaluation report.

8. (Work package 8): Coordination: This work will support the entire process and make sure it runs smoothly.

Money, money, money

Summary AND Options

A full-fledged face-to-face citizens’ Assembly, which is the standard of large deliberative processes, costs between €2.000.000 (example: https deutschlands-rolle.buergerrat .de/en/ ) and €6.000.000 (example: https www.conventioncitoyennepourleclimat .fr/en/). The process we propose is a fraction of this as it will be online and streamlined to be the most effective. Nevertheless, the need for a highly transparent, accurate, inclusive design process, the need to deploy globally, the particular challenges of balancing out innovation and the already existing ecosystem, will demand a high bandwidth and dedicated resources from senior staff and experts.

We ask for a total sum of 31.490 ATOMS. Below is a detailled payment plan based on milestones. For each milestone there is a mix between liquid and staked ATOMS. There are also a couple of specifics due to the incentives for participants and the costs for evaluation.

Another approach could be to simplify and split as following: 50% non vested to cover expenses and 50% vested for a logner time to ensure alignement.

Detailed budget

We propose a milestone-based budget in Atom (See detail here: After the Big Bang - Budget - Google Sheets). For each achieved milestone we ask for 50% of the sum in liquid ATOM to cover part of the running expenses and not have to invest all from our pockets. The remaining 50% can be vested for 6 months. The same rule could apply for the incentives for the participants to the Assembly: 10% liquid after participation to each session and 10% vested (in the scenario of 5 sessions). For the project management we propose to have 25% as kickstarting funds (as soon as possible after vote) and 75% vested for 6 months. Based on that logic, we propose following payment plan:

1. Milestone 1: Preparation (WP1): Delivery of ecosystem mapping and detailed design of the process. 1180 ATOMS liquid. 1180 vested.
2. Milestone 2: Review (WP2): Review process and finalization of method, information package, remit and mandate. 1965 ATOMS liquid. 1965 vested.
3. Milestone 3: Implementation (WP3): Delivery of the deliberative process: Recruitment of participants, incentives for participants, moderation and facilitation of the sessions, reporting, coordination. Each session demands extensive preparation. For the moderation of each session we need two experienced main facilitators, and around 10 subgroups facilitators, we also need intersessional work to summarize the results of each session, and to design and prepare the next one. We may need facilitators in many languages to ensure that inclusivity is ensured. Each session represents a full day of moderation for 10 facilitators plus 2 main moderation plus technical support. Briefing and debriefing require 1 day. Each session represents 28 days of work. 5155 ATOMS liquid. 5155 vested for the team. Plus: 4800 Atoms for the incentives which we would send to participants as per proposal above.
4. Milestone 4: Feedback, Assembly part 2, and onchain proposal (WP4 to WP6). Feedback process with the community and last sessions of the Assembly, then onchain proposal. We propose to have these together as they will deploy quickly in time. 3290 ATOMS liquid. 3290 vested.
5. Evaluation (WP7): We propose to outsource evaluation to a group of academics (maybe Metagov group). Evaluation needs to be onboarded from day 1 and shouldn’t be submitted to the same level of own engagement and risk. At the same time, if the process is interrupted (milestones not met) we shouldn’t engage the full sum from the beginning. This is why we propose to pay 50% of evaluation costs as liquid kickstart funds and 50% as liquid funds when they deliver the evaluation report. 600 ATOMS liquid at the beginning and 600 liquid on presentation of evaluation report.
6. Coordination (WP8): 25% of coordination costs as kickstart funds and 75% vested: 577 ATOMS liquid immediately. 1733 vested.
7. Extra mile(stone): In parallel to the onchain vote of WP6, we will put an extra onchain proposal to reward the team (core team, facilitators, moderators) with a bonus of 3000 ATOMS if the community decides so. For the bonus we propose one payment with 4 different vestings: 5 months, 10 months, 15 months, and 20 months. 3000 ATOMS vested.

What’s the Timeline

We would like to go onchain with this proposal (governance vote on Cosmos) in the first week of January. Then we would start right away and stick to the following timeline:

1. December 2022: Discussion of proposal on the forum and with the community.
2. January 2023: Onchain vote on final proposal. Setting up of project management and team.
3. February 2023: Implementation of WP1 and WP2. Delivery of Milestone 1 and 2.
4. March-April 2023: Cosmozens’ Assembly: Recruitment, Implementation of part 1, Feedback, and implementation of part 2: Delivery of milestones 4. We aim at launching the first session on March 14, the 4th Birthday of the launch of the chain!
5. May 2023: Final report, evaluation report, vote on bonus.

Interested, tell me more about your rationale

The discussion around Atom2 has created a highly divided community with entrenched positions and strong feelings. The discussion has taken place in many channels, but none of them has been really deliberative. Instead, most of them have been agonistic. This is per se not a bad process, but has strong limits when it comes to finding common ground.

Our preliminary research on decision-making in DAOs, shows that organizations resort to the delegation of hard choices because public debate is poisoning the community and breaking important one-to-one relationships. However, fast, centralized decisions are risky because they narrow the chance of spotting critical risks, are not suited to resolving conflicts and aligning bottom-up communities, and are prone to capture. As such, DAOs and broadly speaking the Web3 community aim to be decentralized, but often fail because they lack the skills and process to discuss hard questions in the open.

A long tradition of research and practice has shown that deliberative processes are very strong tools to overcome that kind of “political” (in the sense of decision-making process) blockades and partisanship and find common ground even in highly divided polities. We think that this can be used for the benefit of the Cosmos Ecosystem.

Importantly, the capabilities required to facilitate such a process require a broad set of skills and deep expertise and context on Web3’s unique characteristics. As such, we’ve combined the capabilities of Missions Publiques facilitating deliberative processes for the like of the EU, with RnDAO’s extensive expertise in Web3 (including members having led Governance at Aragon, researched DAOs’s leadership, organization design, etc.). We will bring those skills and processes to Atom as a credibly neutral third party and align our incentives to the success of the process and Cosmos Ecosystem by proposing a milestone-based compensation fee in Atom tokens.

But who are you, I don’t know you

Missions Publiques

Missions Publiques is the world-leading organization in the field of complex deliberative processes involving ordinary citizens and stakeholders. We work on governance for the 21st Century (https://missionspubliques.com / www.wetheinternet.org. We have run 1200+ mini-publics and Citizens’ Assemblies in 120+ countries gathering randomly selected citizens in deliberative processes.

RnDAO

We’re an R&D DAO with a mission to empower humane collaboration. Having already delivered research projects on sub-DAOs, DAO Conceptual Foundations, Decentralised Leadership, DAO Compensation and more: http:// rndao.mirror .xyz

Team leads

Antoine Vergne, Co-director, Missions Publiques

Antoine has 20+ years of experience in designing, implementing, and evaluating processes of citizen participation, deliberative democracy, and stakeholder participation. Antoine is co-founder of Democracy R&D the global network of experts in deliberative democracy spanning 40+ countries and 100+ members. He won the Next Generation Internet European prize in 2019 for his work on ‘We, the Internet’, launched on the conviction that Internet Governance must include ordinary citizens all over the world (https:// youtu .be/uP3a6oMX_V4). Antoine has also been deeply involved in the Crypto/Web 3 ecosystem since 2017. He is part of the Degenscore Citadel and ranked in the top 100. He is active in many governance processes and 5+ DAOs (none of them in the Cosmos ecosystem). He is a validator on 6+ chains (none of them on Cosmos) and part of the Metagov group.

Daniel Ospina, RnDAO

Daniel is an organisation designer and community architect. He’s been a visiting lecturer in Oxford University on topics of Innovation and Social System Design, has consulted for the likes of Google, BCG, Daymler and the UN, and numerous startups and also led a social enterprise. He joined Web3 in 2018, contributing to multiple projects on tokenomics, system design, and governance, and later becoming head of governance at Aragon. Since 2021 he’s been an instigator at RnDAO, experimenting with different DAO governance mechanisms, conflict resolution, organization design and researching community health. Pre-web3, Daniel’s work can be seen in TEDx, Harvard Business Review, and other platforms for organizational thought leadership.

Andrea Gallagher, RnDAO

Andrea is the design researcher for this project. Andrea has worked in web user experience design since the start, wearing many hats (producer, information architect, design manager, UX researcher) but always bringing a user-centered mindset to the process of designing great products. She has an academic background in cognitive psychology and library science. She began her career in early dot .com startups, has worked in consulting, biotech, fintech, and B2B, then moved in-house as a User Experience Researcher and team lead at Intuit, Google, and Asana. Andrea moved to Web3 in 2021 with a passion for group decision-making and governance research, having then led user research at Aragon and more recently at RnDAO, including projects on SubDAO governance and recent research on DAO decision-making.

Non vested-interest disclaimer

We are passionate about governance and scaling human collaboration for a better future: This is our agenda. We have no vested interest in any specific output of the process. As active crypto enthusiasts, we have some atom tokens but are not validating on any cosmos chain.

Governance votes

The following items summarize the voting options and what it means for this proposal:

YES - The community wants to move to step 1 and fund the project until milestone 1
NO - The community wants doesn’t want to move forward with step 1 and fund until milestone 1
NO WITH VETO - A ‘NoWithVeto’ vote indicates a proposal either (1) is deemed to be spam, i.e., irrelevant to Cosmos Hub, (2) disproportionately infringes on minority interests, or (3) violates or encourages violation of the rules of engagement as currently set out by Cosmos Hub governance. If the number of ‘NoWithVeto’ votes is greater than a third of total votes, the proposal is rejected and the deposits are burned.
ABSTAIN - You wish to contribute to quorum but you formally decline to vote either for or against the proposal.

[Trigs]

Since nobody is responding I’ll throw in my feedback. Citizen’s assemblies are interesting and potentially effective in the right context. I’ve participated in them locally to some benefit. That being said, I’m not sure they are right for Cosmos nor that this proposal is beneficial to the ecosystem. My comments might seem harsh, but I’m just laying out my visceral reaction while reading through your post. I’d never heard of your group before, so it was new territory looking into it.

“As a recognized neutral third party”

— are you tho? Recognized by who? I looked into it a bit, but there wasn’t a lot of information about group not published by yourself.

“it must not end with a proper constitution even if this would be a world’s first and would represent a revolutionary precedent for Cosmos and its ecosystem, the Blockchain world itself, and even further for the future of governance”

— really? Not one single blockchain project in history has had a constitution? Not to nitpick, but this just seemed strange thing to say!

“We will survey Cosmos members on their current views, who shares those views, and who has different views through the means of short interviews and analysis of past public discussions and governance channels.”

— Which Cosmos members? The loudest ones on twitter? The most active ones on Commonwealth? Randomly selected ones from this pool of potentials? What about all the voting Cosmos members who don’t fit this criteria, but still currently have a voice in the current system of chaos? How will you survey with transparency so that the results are known to not be manipulated or obfuscated, whether intentionally or unintentionally?

“The Cosmozens’ Convention Part 1: Deploy the deliberative process on the Future of Atom. We will convene a convention of 50 to 150 randomly selected cosmozens, working on a draft of governance architecture through a deliberative process inspired by the very successful model of Citizens’ Assemblies. The process will alternate synchronous and asynchronous moments and may include 5 non-consecutive sessions of 12-14 hours each”

— Wait, what? You’re going to get 150 ‘random’ Cosmosians to all meet up in a physical location and do 12-14 hour jam sessions for 5 days straight? That alone demands that it won’t be random at all, because very few contributors will be able or interested in committing to that. Even if it was remote sessions, that is just not reasonable. Not even remotely!

“Ratification: The final version of the constitution will be submitted for ratification through onchain voting”

— So, after 5 days of bleeding every ounce of life out of these unicorn contributors, and only 2 days of community feedback mind you, you’re gonna push it through on-chain governance. Pretty sure it’ll need more time for ppl to properly review. Everyone isn’t just sitting around waiting for bombshell proposals to drop so they can immediately review and vote.

— I’m not even going to get into the budget for this project as it is pointless with all the other unknowns and questionable suggestions. It seems really high, but if it actually delivered on what it promises then it could be worthwhile I guess!

I agree with many of your statements about the disorderly nature of the community and governance in general. Delegative solutions aren’t always the best. But my analysis of this proposal seems to me that essentially we would just be trading those downsides for the centralization risk of letting you, an unknown third party with absolutely no transparency (other than just your word) to control the future of the Cosmos. That’s as anti-cosmos as it gets, IMO. It seems you’ve had some success with previous projects, but I didn’t do a full-dive of anything yet. I wonder how those experiences translate to something like the Cosmos, however.

I think there are better solutions to address the issue of Cosmos Governance than just paying some unknown third party to arbitrate solutions for us. I’m intrigued to hear more about your proposal and why you think you provide the right kind of solution to meet the needs of the Cosmos.

[Antoine_Vergne]

Hello, @Trigs thanks a lot for your comments. Let me try to address them.

Recognized third party: I see that it seems strange when posed like that and indeed it seems performative when not in context. I wuold say taht the recognition comes from all the partners we ahve worked with since over 20 years of running such deliberative processes and as many of our parnters worked again and agina with us, we can derivate from this that we are indeed recognized as neutral: same goes for the coalition we have built. If you look at we the internet for example, we had a very broad coalition of actors from gov, civil society, international institutions but also private esectortrusting us.

Apart from that I think you are right in the need there is to get recognition within the Cosmos ecosystem. For this my proposal is to gather supports of recognized members of the community? At the same time this would open another biais: if some people in the community trust us but not other, we risk to be seen as not neutral. What do you think?

On the ocnstitution: Ok I can rephrase but indeed there is no blockchain I know that had produced a constitution through a deliberative process. And even in the traditional politics this would be almost a first.

The cosmos members survey: This is the iterative process: I can’t say for now completely as we will progress. But of course it not only about the louder voices: And there is a proper cut between step 1 of the survey and the step of the Assembly with random selection. I detil a bit below because this connects to one of your other comments.

On manipulation: Good point, I have no solution to ensure this now. Happy to hear if there are experiences on this. We normally publish the form we use and the results. But we also need to ensure some level of privacy. One thing though: We ask people to map with us the positions they have identified which are different from their own. So we also force them to extend the scope.

So on random selection: This will be a real innovation and to be honest I have still not a perfect plan for this. This is why we ask fro soem money to desing this properly. At the moment my intution would be to airdrop and NFT or token to random Cosmos Addresses (10K for example). This would allow people to register and we would monitor key demographics for example age, geography, language, may be gende. We would need to see.

The sessions would be remote and cut in pieces of 2 to 4 hours. We actually have very good experience with this since 2020 and have run quite a few citizens Aseembly like this. On the proper design of the assemblies and their program, we still need to discuss a bit. And of course if the general resutl of stage 1 is that it doesnt’ work, we would adapt the format. But as said: Here we have very good experience, even with people who previoulsy not even had internet.

The feedback moment is planned to last two to four weeks. I realize It is not clear in the plan and I will adapt this.

This long feedbac is before the two last sessions of the Assemby.

What I hear is that even after this we should extend the time for a “second feedback” moment of two weeks before going online. That could be good!

Budget: It is indeed not expensive for comparable process. The question is: Is it worth it? It’s up to me to convince the community that it is worth it. But up to the community to decide! Which if you think about it is pretty exciting, democratic, legitimate (and risky for the proponents). But as I said somewhere else: Cosmos is the place wehre people decide to higher their taxes 8% through referendum.

On the centralization: I think here lies the most interesting debate: I do not aim to control the future of the Cosmos. I am incapable of this, as no one is because of the resilience and strength of the community. What we offer is kind of the brdige to cross the river towards atom 2 or 3 or whatever the name. We offer an infrsstructure. The community and the randomly cosmoszens drive the car over the bridge where ever they want. Any attempt at steering the process from our side would be immedialty picked up by the active members. And I already know that it will happen which is good. I also know it may be one of the hardest project for me in terms of governance of the process itself. But I want to try it.

The core idea is to offer an infrastructure for the community to progress, not to steer it.

[Trigs]

Most of what you said makes sense, thanks. I think you have an interesting dilemma transitioning your process to a web3 environment, however.

@Antoine_Vergne

This would allow people to register and we would monitor key demographics for example age, geography, language, may be gende.

This right here is going to be a big issue, as it inherently limits your pool of willing participants. Forcing KYC is a hot topic in crypto!

@Antoine_Vergne

On manipulation: Good point, I have no solution to ensure this now. Happy to hear if there are experiences on this. We normally publish the form we use and the results. But we also need to ensure some level of privacy.

This issue speaks to the ethos components of most web3 communities around transparent, anonymous, and immutable data. Essentially you are providing a web2 solution to build a better web3 community. While I’m sure you get excellent results and are trustworthy enough to accomplish this task… Cosmos is one of the last blockchains to go that direction, in my experience.

I would suggest addressing this first and foremost. I think there are web3 solutions to your unanswered questions, as well as web3 improvements to your existing solutions that could tip the scales to getting a response from a mostly pseudonymous community of enthusiastic web3 DIY’rs.

In order to accomplish a task such as you are suggesting, but following web3 ethos, you will need a few things, imo:

1. On-chain reputation. In a pseudonymous environment on-chain reputation is your KYC, demographic data, and sybil protection.

Unfortunately you are too early yet for this to be effectively available to you without effort. Fortunately, it can be done if you form partnerships with the leading projects already working in this area to build out a custom solution for your needs.

2. Decentralized tools. In order to ensure integrity of your process it needs to occur on a blockchain itself, not using web2 tools. You could even spin up an appchain on cosmos to perform this function.
   That, combined with on-chain reputation, would provide you with the ability to issue a transparent result. Assuming you’ve accomplished the task of getting the community to trust your team as a neutral third party (your credentials seem impressive at first glance)

(optional) If you really wanted to clinch the full Cosmos demographic, you would build the web3 infrastructure as a public good utilizing the resources available on Cosmos to ensure that every community wishing to utilize citizen assemblies would have access to a web3 capable tool to serve their needs. You, of course, would have even greater access to sell your services using this tool as well, but it follows the web3 ethos of open, permissionless, and transparent.

These are just my thoughts and experiences working in web3 around governance specifically. I’m personally on the same path of doing exactly what I suggest to you: making partnerships and building tools in web3 for web3, which is why I wanted to respond. I think what you’re suggesting is close to exactly what we need, but I think your approach needs to be brought under the full umbrella of web3. Not standing on the outside trying to puppeteer solutions into place.

I’m happy to help more if you want specific recommendations!

[common_spelling]

why not just reduce validator’s overweight voting power by making it √delegations + self-stake and have everyone vote? the skin in the game required to vote in governance would incentivize all voters to vote in the chain’s best interest. use a 6month average to assign default abstain votes for quorum.

[andreas_k]

So many saviors for our ecosystem…!
So many researches that could save us…!

We are tired of reading from all of you, proposals with many benefits for you and few or nothing for our community and our ecosystem. I’m sorry but, nobody knows you, you weren’t here during our tough times, and it’s insulting to think we need your help now, in exchange for a few thousand ATOMs of course!!

After the rejection of prop 82 our community did the one and only right thing to do, increase the pool tax to empower our developer teams to expand the ecosystem even further.
We, as a community, have survived much worse… and come out stronger each time…
You -and all like you- as “self-invited saviors”… please, take your copy - paste proposals and keep searching…

[Antoine_Vergne]

Hello and thanks a lot for all the comments,

I try to answer all.

1. Onchain reputation: This is a very good point. I follow this closely because I agree with you that this will be the long term version of KYC. I am in the top 100 of the Degenscore on EVM and this is a fantastic CV and identity card. It’s pseudonimous and at the same time does reflect my identity. I think developing such tools is indeed both an important and useful tools.

2. Decentralized tools: I love that you address the infrastructure question: It’s something I am trying to push for “traditional” deliberation. There is no good public infrastructure for random selection in any country of the world. There is no real infrastructure for capacity building of civil servant, and politicians on the topic. And this is one of the reason why I find the Blockchain space as a perfect place to push forward: There we could build that infra as public good and let everyone use it. I am not a developper so I would no be able to do it. But I think it’s key. My experience from “traditional” spaces is that the best way to start building this infra is to “do stuff” and show it works and then scale. This is why I think it’s better to pilot and improve now and then learn how we could build that infra.

3. On the puppeeting: I think that is were the debate is: I think that we are all Human beings and as such need deliberative psaces (It’s in our deep biology . On this see the very impressive book by Rutger Bregman - Humankind). Pure decentralized, algoritmic governances negates this. If we try to ignore this it comes back in the form of leadership of persons, benevolent dictators, or polarizations of communities and death of those communities. The support we offer is to give the space. I personnally love Cosmos and its dynamic. I do not see myself as any kind of savior. But I have the strong intuition that such a process would help the community. I think Code is law and the best argument is law should be combined-

And finally: Happy to connect to explore collaboration on Governance for Web3.

[Antoine_Vergne]

Hello,

thanks for the message.

I try to respond to a couple of things:

1. Nobody knows you: I’m ok with that if it were the case. I think it’s not completely true. I have been exchanging with as much people as possible since June or so. I am happy to exchange on this bilaterally as I am not sure it’s good to dox here without asking those people. But I could to the list and ask and publish. I have been there since 2017, read the initial paper, felt in love with the Internet of Chains, staked my first Atoms as soon as it became possible through Cosmosstation. I voted on most of the 90 proposals. But I sure am not a whale.

2. On prop 82 and the following: I also think it has been a really interesting process. I am not sure the “stronger each time” holds for everyone in the community. There also has been a lot of exit. On empowering the developpers I think it’s important but it does negates the fact that developpers are only one part of a project which if - I get it right - aims at also involving non technical people. How do you create ownership of the Cosmos for those people and how do you create trust in it. The strength of Web3 is that fork and exit are easier than in the physical Web3 world. But this comes with a huge consequence: If the community is not able to have an inclusive, constructive discussion, people leave.

3. The community tax is fantastic (see my other comment on it) but does not solve the question of governance. This is our bet: Propose a way to address this question of governance frontally. Let’s see if this seems useful to the community.

4. On the copy paste I honestly don’t think it holds: This proposal is for a deliberative process for the Cosmos specifically. What makes you feel it’s copy paste?

5. On the benefit for the community VS for me: Let’s imagine a scenario in which I ask no money for it: Does it change your view on the benefit for the community? I would be interested in the reasons why you find no value in the process or why it seems to you less valuable than the current one.

Greetings,

[Antoine_Vergne]

Hello,

On this I think there are 2 levels:

Algo for voting: Which is a good way to do it. There are hundreds of possibilities to aggregate votes, and the tendency to fall back to simple majority is sometimes depressing. Cosmos is already ahead with the 4 options. But What you propose is also very interesting. The real discussion is the one on power and power balance. In the proposal we make, this could be addressed in session 2 or 3 of the Assembly.

Voting VS other ways of aggregation of preferences: Voting is only one of many ways of taking collective decisions. On this: Our approach is to connect this way with a deliberative process based on sorition.

[common_spelling]

algo for voting doesnt solve for incentive alignment. risk of loosing your money if you vote contrary to what is best for the chain aligns all voters (assuming skin in the game=voting power)

to some extent, it is understandable that validators had so much voting power in the beginning, but as chains mature the voting power must be given back to investors. if not, it makes the chain too risky for larger investors. they risk having their liquidity seized by validators voting in their own self interests and at the expense of delegators (which i would argue is currently being attempted with the original 2.0 proposal)

perhaps an assembly of some sort, as a backstop, would be useful to veto implementation in the case a malicious proposal passes with articulated dangers not recognized during the vote, but more power in fewer hands is moving backwards. the power is already concentrated in the hands of less than 50 validators and is proving problematic.

DAOs and subdaos will be used to streamline funding within narrow scopes assigned by governance, but major changes to the framework and function of the chain should be quite difficult to pass. protracted discussion related to changes to the chain architecture acts to sieve out bad ideas and harmful eventualities. a measure twice, cut once type approach.

[LeonoorsCryptoman]

An interesting step in between is to see how we can mitigate the voting power per validator.

A part of the issue is caused by the huge difference in voting power and centralisation of voting power, making governance proposals sensitive to being dominated by a few validators. If we would have perfect decentralisation the story would be completely different already.

[common_spelling]

you can do that pretty easily by forcing the top 10 or even top 25 validators to vote abstain by default, or significant portion. this accomplishes much of the same thing but maintains the validator control that makes the ecosystem unattractive.

[LeonoorsCryptoman]

Not so sure if auto-forcing to Abstain is really a good move…

It makes reaching quorum easy and it gives smaller validators are better voice in governance.
However, if you have a big validator which cares about governance you immediately sideline these… The cure might be worse of than the reason for doing this on the long run imo…

It also only masks the fact that some validators don’t care about governance and that voting power is not decentralized enough

[common_spelling]

If you are a large validator and care about governance you should increase your stake in the chain. I dont understand what a centralized stake under a validators control has to do with validators concern over governance. I do understand that it reduces centralized control over the chain, however, there are workarounds like penumbra that will make it so DAOs can use other people’s votes controlled by validators.

@LeonoorsCryptoman

However, if you have a big validator which cares about governance you immediately sideline these… The cure might be worse of than the reason for doing this on the long run imo…

It also only masks the fact that some validators don’t care about governance and that voting power is not decentralized enough

I actually find it confusing as to why it matters if validators care about governance. validators tend to care about governance because they can rig the game to their benefit. when you say validators who care about governance do you mean validators actively changing the rules to benefit themselves? I dont view sifchain as an outlier within the cosmos, but more of a sacrifice for validators to plunder.

Validator cohorts controlling large stakes in many chains are arbitrarily able to control governance across the cosmos and choose a sacrifice to pillage.

2.0 looked to be their attempt at making ATOM the next sacrifice. identifiable by many parallels in governance like changing the entire monetary framework (PTMP) of the chain and removing control from validators to paid councils. it didnt turn out great.

[LeonoorsCryptoman]

I am a bit afraid that with these comments you make all the validators look-alike, while some of the validators in the ecosystem really care about governance (including me).

I seriously don’t care if a proposal is in my own benefit, as long as I believe that the chain which I validate and vote for benefits from it. Because that is on the long run better for my own interest than short term gains imo. And with me there are other validators who do exactly the same thing…

Are there also bad examples? Yes, ofcourse! But then to say that all validators are bad, that is a bridge too far imo.