Open Discussion: Governance Tools and Mechanisms

Governance
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gm Arbitrum DAO contributors and delegates,

During the Expanding Tally Support for the Arbitrum DAO proposal process, a number of delegates including @dk3 @krst @Sinkas @JoJo suggested an open discussion period to collect feedback on how we can improve our governance tools and mechanisms in the Arbitrum DAO.

I created this thread to serve as an open forum for people to share their ideas. I’m also planning to facilitate a live, open brainstorming session on Thursday April 4th at 1pm UTC. Once we’ve collected enough high-quality ideas, we can create a DAO proposal to execute on them.

Everyone should feel free to contribute not only their ideas on how to improve our governance tools and mechanisms, but also ideas on how we should structure the project to execute on them. My proposal Expanding Tally Support for the Arbitrum DAO is one way to structure things, but it doesn’t have to work that way in the future. For example, @krst suggested establishing a governance R&D fund that makes longer-term bets to support key governance initiatives.

Cheers!

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I’ll get the conversation started by sharing a few things that are top of mind for me.

Some key ideas that are included in Expanding Tally Support for the Arbitrum DAO

  • Shielded onchain voting
  • Partial delegation
  • Including security council transaction on the DAO page on Tally
  • Adding proposal execution steps to proposal status on Tally
  • Integrating Karma delegate score on Tally
  • Adding a Snapshot diff checker and Discourse integration to Tally

Some key ideas @krst shared in the Expanding Tally Support for the Arbitrum DAO feedback

  • The ability to ‘subscribe’ to a DAO and receive email notifications for new votes (like Snapshot).
  • Fuzzy search when looking up delegates.
  • Ability to provide feedback on past votes (for example after half a year from the vote it might be a good idea to put some additional thoughts on the vote based on the execution of the proposal).
  • The ability for delegators to provide feedback for delegates based on their votes

Recent feedback from the Security Council election

  • Include security council votes on Tally profiles and voting history
  • Fuzzy search for security council election candidates

Ideas included in the Accelerating Arbitrum DAO GovHack proposal by myself @shawn16400 @hiringdevs.eth @hung-vu @cbxm

  • Redesigning and adding a voter guide to the proposal tempate
  • Integrating temperature check into the onchain voting process so delegates only have to vote once
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Gm, do you know if the foundation self-hosts the forum? If not, that should definitely be on the list to migrate to a self-hosting solution so we can start enabling some discourse integrations. If you don’t know, I can hunt down someone from the foundation who does. Either that or we try to start moving more to a platform like tally, karma, or both.

I like how Agora has voting, discussions, and announcements/news in a snappy interface.

I want to be able to have some organizational integrations (maybe via attestation) so that Plurality Labs can identify everyone on their team. If someone replies to a post from my team, you know it is coming from a Premia team member.

I think upvotes could be helpful so the hot topics find themselves at the top. Also, integrations with things like Common Room or Orbit could be cool to bring more data into the fold so we can make better-informed decisions.

Anyways here is a list of discourse inspo sites of what we could be from back when we deployed an instance, 95% sure these all use discourse as a backend:

https://amcforum.wiki/
https://community.smartthings.com/
https://community.atlassian.com/
https://community.spotify.com/
https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/blizzard/
https://www.localguidesconnect.com/
https://forums.babypips.com/
https://forum.asana.com/
https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/
https://discuss.codecademy.com/
https://forum.newrelic.com/s/
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do you know if the foundation self-hosts the forum?

I’m not sure exactly how the forum is set up. @fred is probably a good person to connect with about this.

I like how Agora has voting, discussions, and announcements/news in a snappy interface.

Agree that getting more of the DAO context into one easy-to-use interface is valuable. We’re adding some features in this direction across Tally, including in the Arbitrum DAO. Would love to get some product feedback from you on what we’re building.

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Hello, there are several points:

  1. Remove buggy voting, where the dates have already been violated, but it lights up that there is something to vote there.
  2. Your DAOs should be sorted by default by DAO active proposals on top (this is how it is done now), and then according to your strength of votes (the number of delegates, or the number of votes)
  3. Again there is a problem with Arbitrum. It doesn’t show it in Your DAOs, but there are some other PoolTogether that I don’t participate in.
  4. You need make the ability to remove DAOs from your list

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One idea that I’ve thought about that might add value is having any delegates comments tied to their Tally votes be easy to view from their profile page. Weather that is a column on their voting history that links to their comments, or an entire tab on their profile. Currently finding what a delegate commented on a proposal takes too many clicks and too much digging (have to click the specific vote, then click comments, then scroll to find their comment [which sorts by size so is even worse for smaller delegates]). I think it would be a lot better for all parties to just have their entire specific comment history in their own profiles.

Voting power overtime chart. This isn’t really that important tbh and is more of a feedback. But I think it would be interesting if this chart could be a little more interactive. Or if it can atleast be more then just the top 5 delegates. I’m not sure if there is a ton of value only for the top 5 as it currently stands for a DAO of our size.

  • The ability for delegators to provide feedback for delegates based on their votes

All the ideas above are great, however I wanted to tag this one specifically. As it’s something I hadn’t thought of but now reading it I think this would be really great to see. Speaking for myself, I have never gotten direct feedback from anyone delegating to me that I haven’t proactively searched for (and even then it’s been maybe a half dozen people). I’d imagine others are in the same boat. I think this may be a little tricky, as you have to then get into moderation when it comes to what type of comments are made (inappropriate, spam, advertising, ect) but if there is a way around that this would be awesome. Especially if it is something that can be posted with an addressed tied to it, so you can verify they are people who have delegated to you (or previously have delegated to you if they are explaining why they left).

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Great idea to spin up this topic @Frisson

Top of my mind, two things can be improved:

  • multiple voting like in case of security council. Main difficulties for me is that interface wasn’t showing me the total amount of votes I had and the amount of votes I already allocated. Plus, it would be interesting to have at least a page in which i can have all choices, and I can allocate in there, with links (to page opening in another tab, or at least overlay when mouse over with TLDR) to the page of the single candidate. This because security council is the most complex voting and requires both single interface for candidates but also an ad-hoc one to sum up all info delegate side and execute
  • (this is more bug reporting) sometimes there are bugs that don’t allow you to vote, or that instead made you vote but it doesn’t show. This is more of a general feedback here, because especially when a delegate comes at the last second, it might be hard to understand if the vote went through. Want to also say that I use a safe to execute which might make stuff more complex. But one of the example is in the recent vote for empowering old contributors, for which I voted through tally, confirmed in my safe, went through in the chain but is not showing up. I assume it went through because if i try to vote again the tx fails, but you know, this is bad UX that we need to solve to remove friction.

I’ll add more ideas when i will have something new or I will remember what i thought using tally. Thanks!

EDIT
Just realized both the last 2 proposal, empowreing old contributors and the very one about tally, have 0 votes.
Again, likely is a UI problem more than anything.
Might make sense to create a secondary interface, that a delegate can query, in which you provide for example the proposal id, and it gives you the current status by just quering the contract (without too many graphical stuff). Also, you might want to query the proposal id + the delegate address, to see if that delegate voted, and how, mostly to double check if your own votes went through.

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Great suggestions for the Security Council Election and the secondary interface @JoJo.

Thanks for reporting the bug with your vote showing up - we’re working on a fix.

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I hosted an Arbitrum DAO call yesterday at 1pm UTC where we had a live discussion about this same topic. It was a very productive conversation with ~12 Arbitrum DAO contributors. We walked through pain points, things we like, then brainstormed solutions.

For a full readout of our discussion, please review this Lucidspark Board (requires you to create a free account) https://lucid.app/lucidspark/71c4e760-8499-43b1-b421-b28d463f969c/edit?viewport_loc=-1211%2C80%2C6502%2C3432%2C0_0&invitationId=inv_6c14dca6-359d-4ca3-a17b-c2713fdb2b2f

As a next step, I will be reviewing all of the feedback on this thread and on the Lucidspark board, and using it to put together a proposed roadmap for Tally in the Arbitrum DAO going forward. Please reach out to me directly if you’d like to contribute to this process.

Cheers,

Frisson

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Noting that a number of delegates have requested an optimistic governance solution for LTIP/STIP like voting programs.

Also noting that a number of delegates have requested onchain elections for council members.

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Thank you again to everyone who contributed to this discussion. I included many items that were surfaced here in our new, comprehensive Tally Arbitrum Roadmap. Please feel free to comment with feedback on the roadmap post. Cheers!

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ARB’s voting and governance is really at the forefront of all DAO governance. It’s leading the way, thanks to the active participation of many partners and the core philosophy of arb.