by 0xaca8fbbdddfce169114f344d8ee739bde665f4f4 (Seanny)
Linked Draft Proposal
Temporarily Pausing the uptake of new Decentraland Grants
Summary
The approval of this governance proposal is the final step necessary in pausing the uptake of new Grant Proposals in the Decentraland Grants System for a 2 Month Period, starting on the 1st of January, up until the 28th of February.
Abstract
The poll and draft setting this governance proposal led to open dialogue where multiple different members of the community brought opinions, information, and added value towards discussing the future of the Decentraland DAO.
In the spirit of agency, this draft proposal aims to add more of a focus on the question at hand:
Should we temporarily pause DCL’s grants programme until Q1 2023?
Through this proposal, we wish to propose the following action points:
- Temporarily pause the uptake of new grant proposals;
- Ensure the pause does not negatively harm the creative community;
- Provide some time to the DAO Governance Squad to implement changes on Decentralised Governance being discussed.
Motivation
Governance is a fundamental part of our DAO, and a two-month pause in our grants system can give the DCL Community a chance to turn its energy toward passing a multitude of upcoming governance decisions.
On the horizon, we have upcoming decisions for:
- Restructuring of the Community Grants Program:
Restructuring the Community Grants Program - Grant Revocation Committee:
Framework for New Committee who decides when to revoke grants -Updated proposal - Implementing a Bidding and Tendering process:
Should the DAO implement a Bidding and Tendering process to allocate resources for voted projects? - Denomination of Names:
Should we denominate the fee to mint a NAME in USD? - Land Concessions:
New Proposal Type: Land Concession
…and that’s just to point out a few.
All debates, discussions, and interests aside; this proposal reaffirms the belief that voting on grants requires constant, arduous contributions from the DAO; at the expense of attention, time, and energy. A pause in voting on grant-focused decisions is an opportunity for delegates and voters to breathe and take stock of all the decisions they have taken over the past months.
As DAO voters, a pause would allow the time and space to look back at the stands we have taken, with the curiosity of knowing how our decisions played out over time.
Remember; within a DAO, you are far more similar to a parliamentarian than you are to a citizen within a state. Decision fatigue is a serious risk that we would be intelligent to avoid.
A pause in our grants system is the perfect opportunity to both reflect on our past decisions, whilst also shifting our collective focus on the most important decisions we have to collectively make.
Specification
Proposed Plan of Action
The Final Governance vote shall approve the pause of the update of new grants, and shall be enacted in practice by Decentraland’s Governance Squad.
Any grants approved before the 31st of December, 2022, will remain entirely unaffected by this pause. Any Grantees wishing to apply for Decentraland-backed funding will have the first opportunity to do so again on the 1st of March, 2023. The pause will remain in effect for a minimum of two months.
The pause aims to cause as little disruption as possible to the creative community, whilst simultaneously aiming to give more prioritization to upcoming governance decisions that can further empower innovators, creators, and problem solvers within our community for years to come.
Impacts
The applications and impacts of this Governance Proposal are quite succinct, yet have the potential to be indirectly far-reaching in the field of consensus-building, best-practice documentation, governance development, and systematic risk mitigation in the field of DAO Asset Management.
Direct Impact
The Decentraland Governance platform is paused for a two-month period, where no new Grant Proposals are taken up for debate by the Community and DAO.
This pause will effectively mean that no community member will be able to apply for Decentraland DAO funding, between the 1st of January and the 28th of February.
Indirect Impacts
Consensus Building
At a crucial point for Governance and consensus-building in our DAO, the pause can prove to be a pivotal moment in rallying the community around debates centered around the future of Decentraland, and the priorities that bind us.
A two-month period dedicated to road-map ideation, governance discussions, and community-focused prioritisations can prove to be a blessing in disguise, especially in the face of recent rifts and disagreements across the DCL Community as of late.
As one can see in our Governance platform; several members of each DAO Core Unit have been discussing how best to implement a distributed visioning and strategic alignment process that is both flexible enough to embody the decentralized ethos of our community and structured enough to serve its unifying purposes. This pause will allow community stakeholders, DAO operators, and others to come together to formalize this process and work together toward not only designing the process itself but to produce some form of deliverable that represents an outcome of this process.
Best-Practice Documentation
As a community-led initiative, this Governance Proposal can shed more light on how to best handle processes and initiatives related to regulating and developing a Decentralised Governance system.
Decentralised Decision-Making is a relatively new concept. In the future, the pause can prove to be a defining moment for the DAO when looking back at how governance decisions can impact the community in the short and long term and can feed into our best-practice documentation from the perspective of governance and decision-making.
Such approaches are already built into traditional governance systems in the form of legislative sessions and electoral cycles; however, in persistent decentralized systems, which have little to no temporal structures to guide our operations, we seriously, face a risk of governmental decoherence without strong best-practice documentation.
Governance Development and Systematic Risk Mitigation
The Pause will set a new precedent for the DAO, highlighting new practices, methods, and responsibilities that both community members and squad members can undertake and represent.
Approving a pause in our grants system is a DAO-first, and undergoing that process will give us new information and governance experience to be able to more efficiently and effectively handle discussions and decisions such as these in the future.
This practical understanding from a process standpoint, coupled with a precedent set in our governance platform, will simply allow us to move swiftly and assuredly in the future should similar discussions be required in the field of systematic risk mitigation and DAO Asset Management.
Implementation Pathways
Should this Governance Proposal pass, the Decentraland Governance Squad would be given the green light to pause the uptake of new Decentraland Grants for a 2-month period.
Pause Timeline:
Last day to submit a grant proposal: 31st December, 2022 23:59PM PST
Uptake of new Grants Paused: 1st January, 2023 00:00AM PST
Last day to vote on a grant proposal: 13th January, 2023 23:59PM PST
Last day of Grant Paused: 28th February, 2023 23:59PM PST
Grants Pause no Longer in Effect: 1st March, 2023, 00:00AM PST
NB: The last day to submit a grant has been amended to the 31st of December, due to Governance Proposals taking longer to vote on that polls and drafts. These extra few days simultaneously act as a buffer-grace period for any creatives in the community that have planned to make use of the Grants Platform this year, to ensure there is ample time for community members to make use of the platform before the temporary pause.
Conclusion
The intended outcome of this entire proposal is to continue building on the great discussions had in the last poll and draft, with the ultimate aim of gathering the community together to focus on governance-based decision-making.
2023 is going to be the year of the DAO, and it starts by coming together and collectively revisiting our foundations.