Fact based decision making in a DAO
An ideal governance model allows for fact and competence based decision making. In other words: competent people make informed decisions, based on objective facts. This is my baseline for the discussion.
Here is my proposal on how such a governance model could be implemented in a smart-contract.
Voting rights
This is a private organisation and hence it can decide who gets to vote and how the votes are counted. In this example each share holds one vote for its owner. And each account (this is blockchain) has a vote too.
The two kinds of votes, the share and the account, are not counted equally, as we’ll see below.
Know your owners
In order to avoid the creation of multiple accounts that would confer additional voting rights to their creators, only identified accounts are counted when it comes to voting.
A share can be owned by an anonymous account but in this case, only the votes for the shares will be counted.
Proposal process
The first step in making a decision is to have something to decide on. In order for a proposal to be submitted to the vote, it must get backing from at least x% of the available votes but no less than y% of the accounts. This ensures that even if someone holds x% of the shares, she can not automatically submit proposals as she has to convince y% of the identified users to upvote her suggestion.
Categorisation
Once a suggestion has passed the first hurdle, it has to be properly categorised. The categorisation is important in order to distribute the votes correctly and is an integral part of the decision making process.
The categorisation will yield a weighted average of all categories proposed. Ending in a distribution like 64% Programming, 21% Organisation, 15% Architecture.
Distributing votes
One of the biggest issues in open organisations is participants apathy. People will just stop bothering to vote at some point.
In an effort to avoid participation rates dropping, the concept of liquid (or delegative) democracy was proposed. I would like to take that one step further and delegate votes based on categories.
The reasoning goes like this: I trust Joe for his ethics but I trust Jane for her technical nous. Hence I want to delegate my vote concerning ethical issues to Joe and on technical issues to Jane. I can also delegate the categorisation task to a librarian because that’s the person who knows what she’s talking about.
And because we don’t live in a manichaean world, decisions are not 100% ethical or technical but 60% technical and 40% ethical. And my 100% vote will be counted as 60% Jane’s opinion and 40% Joe’s.
The delegation does not need to be just one level, I can delegate my vote to someone who delegates it further and so on, on as many levels as needed. My vote might get delegated to a lot of people and that is exactly the point.
For technical reasons (out of gas?) the number of levels might need to be restricted in a smart-contract solution.
Conclusion
This rough description shall serve as a discussion baseline on the usefulness of knowledge (or at least the perception of knowledge) based decision making.
Many rules could be added to the process and the devil always lurks in the details. But as a concept, I find this appealing.
please share you thoughts in the comments
