Thanks for your questions!
What questions should be used for your platform?
Technically, a conversation on any topic can be organized using DePolis. We can imagine various scenarios of how DePolis could be integrated into governance processes (check “5. Specifications. I. How Polis for DAOs should look” in the proposal), but as a starting point, it’s better to choose the most straighforward and solid use case. To identify this use case and understand what questions DePolis could be used for, it makes sense to explore the following:
1. Polis irl success stories:
Polis case studies can be found here. Polis has been used in numerous cases in Taiwan (and is integrated into the vTaiwan governance processes). Examples include debating technology regulation questions such as “Should Uber be allowed?” or “Should alcohol be available for purchase online?”. Other topics include:
- “What do we have to do today to live in a climate-friendly future tomorrow?” (Austria)
- “Airbnb in Athens and Thessaloniki” (Greece)
- “Improving Bowling Green/Warren County” (Kentucky, USA).
You can find more case studies here.
2. Vitalik’s thoughts on using Polis in decentralized governance:
Vitalik (an active proponent of Polis) describes it as a social technology to help communities identify points of agreement between sub-tribes who might otherwise disagree on many issues (source). In another blog post, he highlights Polis as a tool for large-scale conversations to be used before governance participants solidify their opinions and input them into governance (source).
3. Polis blog and documentation:
Best practices for creating discussion topics are described in the official Polis documentation (source). Key takeaways include:
- open-ended conversations are good;
- Polis is most effective for controversial issues with a diversity of opinions;
- keep it short (long topic descriptions are bad).
Combining these insights, we can identify what types of questions would suit DePolis:
- open-ended questions that encourage participation from a large number of stakeholders with diverse opinions;
- questions that address highly contentious topics, where opinions are polarized, or where there is a significant need to identify common ground;
- questions tied to actionable outcomes, where the results of the discussion can directly inform governance decisions or policies.
Assessing how contentious a topic is requires further exploration, but we can find clues in the Arbitrum governance forum. For example, large grant programs are definitely contentious topics. Discussions related to defining key development directions, policies, or guiding principles for the DAO are also well-suited. Seasoned Arbitrum delegates likely have additional ideas for topics that meet the criteria described above.
Why can’t I use the usual built-in forum poll?
For several reasons:
- most regular Arbitrum users do not visit the forum;
- even if a specific forum poll gains significant attention and many people participate, the voting results will not be representative, as anyone can vote in forum polls (there is no protection against sybil attacks and no way to restrict the list of participants to a specific community or sub-community);
- the forum only supports standard polls where the responses are predefined by the poll creator, whereas DePolis allows participants to express their opinions in their own words;
- unlike standard polls, DePolis enables the identification of key opinion groups among participants and provides deeper insights into the community’s needs and preferences;
- several other advantages of Polis compared to traditional surveys are described in this article: Examining Pol.is as a Survey Methodology.
Thus, DePolis is fundamentally different from built-in forum polls, and the output it produces provides decision-makers with far greater and more profound insights into user perspectives.
Why is Snapshot voting not enough?
For the same reasons as with built-in forum polls. Snapshot provides voters with a predefined list of options, whereas DePolis allows participants to express their opinions in their own words. Additionally, Snapshot is designed to be a decision-making tool, while DePolis is more suited for an earlier step - determining the landscape of opinions, “checking the temperature” of the community, etc. Furthermore, Snapshot is a tool for token holders, which makes it impossible to use Snapshot to gather opinions from, for example, active Arbitrum DeFi users who may not hold tokens.