by 0x7bbea9c18cd0541acab8c19da2b11d0c03faef1c (Mxyzptlk)
Linked Draft Proposal
Should the DAO Mandate an Annual Review and Update of All Governance Documents?
Summary
Makes Governance Documents Annual Review permanent policy: DAO Council reviews and updates core governance docs yearly, with a 30-day trigger for structural changes, a fixed minimum-scope list, and a public accountability report each cycle.
Abstract
This proposal makes the Governance Documents Annual Review permanent DAO policy. It follows two passed community votes: the pre-proposal poll (1,008,422 VP, 100% Yes) and the Draft Proposal, both confirming community support for a standing, structured review of governance documentation.
It establishes:
- An annual review cycle for all core governance documents.
- A 30-day trigger clause requiring documentation updates within 30 days of any structural governance change.
- A defined minimum scope of documents that must be kept current
- An accountability framework making the DAO Council directly responsible for execution, with authority to commission outside help.
This proposal does not create new governance bodies or shift budget authority. It assigns an existing responsibility, keeping core documentation accurate, to an existing body, the DAO Council, on a fixed schedule with a public compliance report.
Motivation
Every functioning organization, public or private, traditional or decentralized, maintains its governing documents as living records. Corporations update their bylaws when their structure changes. Nonprofits review their charters annually. Government agencies publish updated procedures when policies change. This is not bureaucratic overhead. It is the minimum standard for any organization that expects its participants to follow rules and processes that are written down and accurate.
The Decentraland DAO currently has no such requirement. Documents may be created when a proposal passes and never touched again. Two specific examples are already confirmed on the public record: the DAO Council’s roles and responsibilities are not documented in any single official maintained source, and the DAO’s community-approved mission and vision statements, voted on through governance in 2024, have never been published in an official maintained DAO document. They passed through governance and were never formally recorded anywhere the community is expected to look.
(The only place you find these is by attempting to search for them in completed proposals
That is the problem this proposal is designed to fix. Not just discoverability, but the absence of any process to ensure governance decisions are documented, kept current, and maintained by someone accountable for doing so.
This is not a hypothetical risk. On July 7, 2026, a Foundation representative stated in Discord that DAO references were removed from the main Decentraland site to avoid being associated with “web3” publicly, a claim the Foundation has since described as inconsistent with its stated position that it is not distancing from the DAO. Whatever the intent, the DAO’s own governance link disappeared from the main site nav, and the contradiction between the two statements is now part of the public record. Outdated and contradictory documentation is not a cosmetic problem. It is how participants lose track of who is accountable for what, and it is a documented factor in DAO legal exposure (see CFTC v. Ooki DAO, 2023; Samuels v. Lido, ongoing). A DAO whose own published description of itself does not match its operating reality cannot demonstrate representative governance or informed consent from participants.
Discord Conversation
[Attach: DCL Discord Conversation screenshot]
These gaps affect every community member who tries to understand how the DAO works, every new participant who reads the documentation and forms an inaccurate picture of the current governance structure, and every accountability conversation that stalls because the rules are not written down anywhere reliable.
An annual review cycle with a structural change trigger is the minimum standard expected of any organization that takes its own governance seriously. This proposal asks the DAO to meet that standard.
Specification
Responsible Party
DAO Council. The Council may execute the review directly or commission a contributor or vendor to do so, at its discretion, within existing budget authority.
***Review and Approval: ***
Work done by a commissioned contributor or vendor is submitted as a draft, not a final publication. The Council reviews each draft and records a public approval, or requested changes, on the forum within 14 days of submission. Only Council-approved drafts are published as official governance documentation. If the Council does not respond within the 14-day window, the submission is automatically escalated to the next scheduled Council meeting for a vote. This applies regardless of who performs the work; the Council remains the final approver of anything published under this proposal.
Annual Review Cycle:
Once per calendar year, the Council conducts a full review of the minimum-scope document list below, verifies accuracy against current governance structure, and publishes an updated version of each document that has changed. The first review must be completed within 6 months of this proposal passing.
30-day Trigger Clause:
Independent of the annual cycle, any structural governance change (a new role created, an existing process modified, a governance body deprecated, or a new mechanism introduced) triggers a requirement to update all affected documents within 30 days of the change taking effect.
Minimum scope (must be kept current at all times):
- The Governance Legislative Tracker, restored to public accessibility.
- DAO Council roles, responsibilities, and timeline obligations.
- Documentation describing how governance proposals advance through each stage
- A summary of the Regenesis Labs mandate and operational scope as it relates to DAO governance
- Wearable, emote, and creator submission guidelines and fees including where the fees go
- Any documentation describing DAO governance bodies, committees, or squads
- The DAO’s approved mission and vision statements, and where they are published
- A List of who’s who and bests way to contact them.
Document Standard:
Every document in the minimum scope carries a visible last-updated date, a version number, and a status marker (Draft or Official). A single shared changelog records who made each change, what changed, and when the Council approved it, keeping the documents themselves short while the full history stays one click away.
***Accountability Framework: ***Each annual cycle concludes with a short public report to the forum stating which documents were reviewed, which were updated, and which are still pending, with reasons. If the Council commissions the work to a third party, that arrangement and its cost are disclosed in the same report. Failure to complete a review cycle or a 30-day trigger update must be explained publicly within 30 days of the missed deadline, with a revised timeline. No governance document becomes ownerless; ownership transfers must be publicly documented.
Starting Point: the community-drafted materials produced in July 2026 (DCL_DAO_How_It_Works_Updated, DCL_Governance_Entities, DCL_Mission_Vision, DCL_Council_Roles_Responsibilities, DCL_DAO_Legal_Status) are offered as a starting draft the Council may adopt, edit, or discard at its discretion. Their existence is proof this work is achievable without new tooling or budget.
SEE ATTACHED DOCUMENTS*
Impacts
If passed: governance documentation stops drifting further from reality every year. New and existing community members get an accurate, findable description of how decisions get made and who to contact. The 30-day trigger closes the specific failure mode already seen with docs.decentraland.org, where a structural change (deprecating old bodies) happened without a corresponding documentation update, and it has sat wrong for over two years. Public accountability reporting gives the community a way to track whether this is actually happening, instead of relying on informal follow-up.
There is a modest ongoing cost: Council time, or a commissioned contributor’s fee, each year. No new governance body is created and no existing authority is transferred, so Council workload is the main cost, offset by using the July 2026 community draft as a starting point rather than starting from zero.
If it fails, or passes but is not enforced: documentation continues to describe deprecated bodies, the Legislative Tracker stays inaccessible, and the gap between what the DAO says about itself and how it actually operates keeps widening, with no standing mechanism to close it.
Implementation Pathways
- Upon passage, the Council designates an owner (a Council member or commissioned contributor) for the first review cycle within 30 days.
- The owner reviews the minimum-scope list against current governance reality and either adopts, edits, or replaces the July 2026 community drafts, submitting the result to the Council as a draft.
- The Council reviews and approves the draft within 14 days, recording the approval or requested changes publicly on the forum.
- Only after Council approval are updated documents published to the appropriate official channels (docs.decentraland.org, governance portal, forum) within the review cycle.
- The Legislative Tracker is migrated off its current inaccessible format to a publicly reachable page.
- The Council publishes the first accountability report to the forum at the end of the cycle.
- The 30-day trigger clause takes effect immediately upon passage and applies to any structural change going forward, including changes already in progress (e.g., the wearables curator restructuring).
- This proposal, and each year’s completed review, is itself added to the minimum scope list, so the review mechanism documents its own existence.
Conclusion
The Decentraland DAO approved a mission that includes representative governance and efficient management of collective resources. Governance documents that are outdated, inaccessible, or simply wrong undermine both.
This is not a complex ask. It is the minimum that any serious organization maintains: a regular review cycle, a named responsible party, and a requirement that documentation reflects reality. The fact that it needs to be put through governance at all is itself evidence of why it is needed.
A properly maintained Governance Legislative Tracker, updated as required by this proposal, serves as the living directory of all current governance responsibilities, decisions, and accountable parties — making it the single reference point the community has never had.
