Proposal - Delegate Incentive Program (DIP)

[SEEDGov]

Hey, here are some answers to the questions that we received:

@Bob-Rossi

@jojo and @BlockworksResearch , I think something to remember is that proposals are supposed to go on the forums at a minimum 1 week prior to going to Snapshot (and often will go longer). So there should be ample time for an active delegate to participate in discussion prior to a vote. I don’t want to dismiss the concern, but ultimately I think pre-voting discussion can provide a lot of value and if we can incentivize it that is a good thing.

We are in agreement on this matter and trust in the goodwill of proposers to ensure that delegates have a reasonable amount of time to discuss proposals before they advance to Snapshot

@Bob-Rossi

Personally, I think best solution may be starting at 50% with openness to adjust after 3 months of results. This may just end up being a situation that rarely applies in the end. I think even in the stated scenario most votes wouldn’t need more than a few days to get out an opinion. Although I’m speaking thru the lens of a single voter versus some delegates who maybe have teams and may have longer processes to their commentary / voting.

That sounds reasonable. We can proceed with this approach on a trial basis, especially given that in the Continuous Upgrades segment, we have already considered the possibility of adjusting the Scoring methodology throughout the program.

@SEEDGov

Continuous Upgrades

We know that this program still has room for improvement. While this new program version moves away from its experimental nature to become a more developed one, a delegate incentive program must continuously receive feedback from its participants.

The SEEDGov team and Karma are committed to gathering feedback, obtaining more information, and implementing the necessary changes to optimize performance. Considering the new duration of the program, the Program Administrator reserves the right to make changes in the scoring methodology by giving public notice in the forum.

@Blueweb

The threshold of 60% in the last 90 days shall attract more delegates in v1.1 than the previous DIP, but will also have higher chances of Sybil and delegates with less context about what happened in the DAO previously. I am sure we cannot have a Delegate screening. Still, without the context of history, there is less chance of high-value participation and there the Proposal Feedback’s subjectivity will play a crucial role. I suppose SEEDGov’s team efforts in refining those will be way more than currently estimated, and provisions shall be made for that by capping the number of proposals that the current resources mentioned in the proposal can handle.

This was discussed internally, and the proposed changes are primarily focused on reactivating inactive delegates with a significant amount of VP. As mentioned previously, the information gathered over the past few months has enabled us to implement anti-sybil mechanisms—such as the 50k VP requirement—that, for the time being, have been functioning as expected.

@Blueweb

Also, the clarity on the date on which this price shall be considered? The delay between publishing the monthly report and sending the ARB would create a different $ARB sent than what will be in the sheet. So, will the sheet be published after sending the ARB to respective delegates or have a cut-off date as the 15th Feb price will be for January month pay and on 15-16th Feb the ARB will be sent?

That’s a good question. To address this, we propose publishing the initial spreadsheet with the payment amounts (as we currently do) in USD. After the dispute period has concluded, we will submit the payment report to the MSS in ARB, based on the price at that time, and publish the corresponding report in the forum. This approach aims to minimize potential price fluctuations.

@jengajojo

• While I understand where you are coming from when it comes to DIP Bans or Suspensions, the current rationale behind it is rather subjective and lacks objective clarity. I suggest points based rubric for evaluation which would necessitate such drastic actions as well as a forum post explaining exactly why and how any delegate is banned.

• There is a hard limit on the VP required to post on snapshot, hence a delegate without sufficient VP may not even be able to put their appeal up. I suggest the program admin takes up the responsibility to put up appeals if requested on the forum by the appealing delegate.

These are valid and understandable concerns. For the time being, we aim to keep this section as simple as possible until the DAO develops more sophisticated anti-fraud mechanisms (as we believe this is a general issue within the DAO and not unique to the program). However, we can assure you that SEEDGov will maintain the necessary transparency and openness to address situations like this. Any decisions will, of course, be communicated through prior publication in the forum, and it seems reasonable to us that any appeal be posted by the Program Administrator.

Looking ahead, we would like to implement anti-fraud policies to guide program administrators in DAOs on how to proceed and what guidelines to follow. In that sense, we agree with @DisruptionJoe comment.

@DisruptionJoe

Issue 2 - Every grant program should have someone responsible for identifying and communicating about (potential) fraud.

Entropy received the accusation message and decided it would be best to default to full transparency. This seems reasonable.

Ramses would have liked a dm prior to posting because a message like this could severely hurt their business - even if just an accusation.

There is no policy for how we handle accusations of fraud. There isn’t an official community flagging function or dropbox with a standard process. Entropy received this information because there was a vaccuum where a responsible party should be. They defaulted to the option most well-meaning DAO contributors would - they opted to post for transparency.

We should have a consistent policy on how these accusations are approached. Just because you’re a delegate and he could dm doesn’t mean that it is the fair and equal approach (it likely is tho).

I’ve offered to facilitate a workshop to design a policy for community detection, reporting, and transparency with the parties involved. So far we have not set a time - update hopefully coming soon. Comment if you would like to join.

In the future, the policy should be what we argue about - NOT the decisions of well meaning actors.

@jengajojo

• I also recommend investigating the implementation of ‘Expert Coalitions’ ie coalition of delegates who are experts in one or more particular area such as treasury or tokenomics etc. It would be great to have a pool of delegates in each of these Expert Coalitions that the DAO requires to grow as opposed to a large cohort being incentivised for writing the same set of comments in different words. This way we can identify a more streamlined budget for this program with a max. number of delegate set for each ‘Area of Expertise’

Thank you for the recommendation. We are aware of the issue and believe this is where the DAO should evolve in the future. However, this should also be addressed at the governance level, particularly with different types of proposals and voting methods. Agora has been working on this for some time in Optimism, although we are unsure if there are similar plans in Arbitrum. Having different types of voting, where each delegate registers as an ‘expert’ in a specific voting category, would make it easier for us to track activity and adjust incentives accordingly.

To implement this, we also need to define, as a DAO, the most important verticals for ArbitrumDAO so that delegates are aligned. Fortunately, @Entropy has already initiated the first discussions in this area.