[DAO:bc578ee] Process for Establishing Formal Working Groups

Governance
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by 0x76fb13f00cdbdd5eac8e2664cf14be791af87cb0 (Matimio)

Linked Draft Proposal

Process for Establishing Formal Working Groups

Summary

This proposal outlines the purpose and process for establishing formal DAO Working Groups.

Abstract

Working Groups allow engaged members of the DCL community to collaborate and ultimately solve for the problems and opportunities identified in Pre-Proposal Polls. This proposal aims to formalize the process of creating community-led working groups following the passage of a “pre-proposal poll” and leading to the submission of a well-thought-out and socialized governance proposal.

Motivation

The DAO Governance Proposal Stages outlined three distinct stages for identifying community stakeholder interests, socializing solutions, and developing a well-thought-out and implementable governance outcome. In many cases, however, this is not a seamless process, and the building of community consensus and researching impacts and implementation paths require coordination and collaboration across various distributed points of the Decentraland Community.

Governance as voting further has potential to create divisive community and political dynamics. First past the poll voting in particular can promote polarization and zero-sum engagements. Working within the constraints of our established governance process, it is thus extremely important to have a robust and participatory “decision-making process” such that the votes we table are representative to the greatest extent possible.

Working groups - “a group of people who investigate a particular problem and suggest ways of dealing with it (Merriam-Webster, 2022)” - aim to provide opportunities for community members to engage in productive discourse, and complex decision-making. Working groups also provide a forum for the support and engagement of experienced governance facilitators and other community stakeholders to help direct the group toward identifying and articulating a solution or set of potential solutions for broader community consideration.

Formalizing procedures for establishing and conducting working groups will create a transparent, consistent, and efficient model for moving from the identification of an issue toward the best effort at its resolution. This approach will be one way to tackle and escalate different issues toward concrete outcomes, but it will not become the exclusive one, since each community member will still have the possibility to adopt or choose other ways to channel their needs, discussions or concerns.

The proposed Decentraland DAO Working Group process is based on an adaptation of the Delphi Method. The Delphi Method is a research and decision-making methodology used to gather insights and opinions from a variety of experts and stakeholders, and is particularly well suited for distributed and decentralized contexts. The objective of the Delphi method is to generate consensus, and draw from our “collective wisdom” to inform our decision making process.

During active working groups, the DAO Facilitation Squad (or a representative from the working group) will share the status and stages of each active working group as a part of the regular agenda of bi-weekly Town Halls.

Specification

Decentraland DAO Working Groups will be carried out in the following steps:

  1. Successful Pre-Proposal Poll - Proposal passes the initial stage of the governance process, signaling sufficient community support for the allocation of DAO/Community time and resources for active facilitation.

  2. Working Group Formation - Working groups can be formed through the promotion of a Pre-Proposal Poll or a Draft Proposal to a Working Group by the author or a contributor to the poll. If the proposal is not promoted to the next stage or to a Working Group by its author or contributors in the term of 30 days, every community member will be enabled to promote it to a Working Group. A working group, however, is in no way a prerequisite for an initiative to move forward through the governance process, and pre-proposal Polls can be escalated to a Draft Proposal without a Working Group. (See Figure 1 & Figure 2 in Comments below)

  3. Distributed Delphi-Informed Method - The Delphi Method is a structured process for obtaining expert/stakeholder opinions on a particular topic, in order to gather input and reach consensus on a particular topic. It typically involves several rounds of questionnaires or surveys, with each round building on the results of the previous round. The Delphi Method is useful for decision-making in a DAO as it allows for collection of diverse perspectives. Decentraland DAO’s Distributed Delphi Method includes the following steps:

  • (3.1) Facilitator Selection - Proposal author/contributors self-select or appoint a representative to facilitate the working group. See Annex A for the full role and responsibilities of the Working Group Facilitator. Unless specifically requested to abstain, a member of the DAO Facilitation Team will support the Working Group Facilitator(s), and may be selected by proposal authors to serve as the Working Group’s primary facilitator. If the designated Working Group Facilitator quits at any stage, a DAO Facilitator or a DAO Committee Member will fulfill the role and decide with involved community members if the working group should remain active.

  • (3.2) Call for Working Group Participants - A general call for Working Group participants will be issued via Discord, DCL DAO Twitter, and pathways for joining will be established, likely including integration with the Governance dApp from the Pre-Proposal Poll. (See Figure 3 in Comments below)

  • (3.3) Pose question or problem to the Working Group - The Working Group Facilitator will design and distribute the question(s) / problem to the group, for participants to respond to. This can be in the form of a single question, questionnaire, or survey.

  • (3.4) Solutioning - Participants submit their proposed solutions/responses in the form of written comments, open-ended questions, or other form as specified in the questionnaire/survey.

  • (3.5) Analysis and Reporting - The proposed solutions/responses are analyzed, grouped into categories and/or themes, summarized and shared by the working group Facilitator(s).

(Continued in “Impacts” Section Below)

Impacts

(Continued from Above)

  • (3.6) Solutioning (II) - A second round of clarifying questions is posed by the Working Group Facilitator. Members of the Working Group then have the opportunity to revise and tailor their responses, based on the summary of themes and categories, and adapted questions, repeating the process until a consensus is reached or a set of multiple potential pathways forward is developed - as determined by the Working Group Facilitator. In the interest of time, this process should not be repeated more than four times. (See Figure 4 in Comments below)

  1. Working Group Synopsis Report & Round Table Discussion - The DAO Facilitation Team will lead, or support the drafting of a Working Group Synopsis Report, detailing outcomes of the Working Group. The Facilitator of the Working Group, however, is ultimately responsible for ensuring this artifact is delivered. This report will serve as a record of the proceedings, and as a point of reference for future discussions and drafting of proposals around the issue. The report will be publicly shared and discussed in a Round Table format, including Working Group Facilitators and Participants.

  2. Draft Proposal - A proposal that has passed the Pre-Proposal Stage and workshopped via the Working Group, may be published as a Draft Proposal by the original proposals Authors or Contributors. Once again, a working group is not a prerequisite for a Draft Proposal.

  • (5.1) Proposal Feedback & Review - Proposal authors may share the Draft Proposal for review and feedback with the wider community in general, and Working Group Participants in particular, to ensure it is representative of Working Group outputs.

IMPACTS

The most significant impact of the Working Group process is that it will begin to decentralize the process of facilitating DAO decision-making, providing community members with structured tools to engage multiple stakeholders in a group decision-making and solutioning process. The outcome of this should be two fold. First, it will create more opportunities for consensus building, potentially reducing polarization within the DAO. Second, it will support more frequent emergence of well-thought out, socialized and workshopped governance proposals, in which the long term impacts and implementation pathways of the policy decision have been explored in depth.

Implementation Pathways

The DAO Facilitation Squad has been working with the dApps Governance Squad to develop an integration of the working group process into our governance portal. Initial wire frames of the UI/UX are included in the comments section below.

ALL IMAGES AND WIREFRAMES DISPLAYED IN THIS PROPOSAL ARE JUST PROOFS OF CONCEPT AND GENERAL GUIDELINES FOR IMPLEMENTATION IN THE GOVERNANCE PORTAL.

In the interim period between when this pathway becomes live in the governance dApp, the Facilitation Squad will use a notion workspace to support the working group process.

The Working Group Pathway in the governance dApp will serve primarily as a central dashboard for the working group. Collaborative work must be carried out through external platforms, such as notion, google, or others, which will be determined by the working group’s specific facilitator. In the future, a grant or portion of the Facilitation Squad’s operating budget could be allocated to integrate a tool specifically design for this process, that connects to the Working Group Dashboard in our dApp.

Conclusion

All Working Group procedures and outputs are non-binding. Working Groups aim to expand our governance from a process of voting to one of decision-making. The formalization of this process with clear pathways for the collection and synthesis of information will assist us in devising well thought out and implementable governance policies. The Facilitation Squad has worked closely with the dApps team to develop sound implementation pathways, and once activated within our dApp, the working group feature should significantly increase our ability to engage in distributed decision-making, rather than simply voting on distributed decisions.

Vote on this proposal on the Decentraland DAO

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Figure 1 (Working Group Formation)

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Figure 2 (Working Group Creation)

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Figure 3 (Working Group Dashboard)

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Figure 4 (Delphi-Informed Method)

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As a reminder: All wire frames are initial sketches, and the final implementation may differ from those displayed above. They are intended to serve as an example of how the process could be organized.

1 Like
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Hi Mattimio and Fehz, thank you for this proposal, have several questions:

  1. Working groups will be public and open, everyone will be able to see process and results ?

  2. Who is the contributor of proposal who can move pre-proposal to a working group ?

  3. Who can decide if a user is contributor of proposal or not ?

  4. Why by default it is written that primary working groups facilitator can be selected from dao facilitation team and not from authors/contributors of the proposal or their representatives ? Can they also be selected as a primary facilitator ? What is the process for selection primary facilitator ? If authors or contributors abstain from selecting primary facilitator, how he will be selected ?

Unless specifically requested to abstain, a member of the DAO Facilitation Team will support the Working Group Facilitator(s), and may be selected by proposal authors to serve as the Working Group’s primary facilitator. If the designated Working Group Facilitator quits at any stage, a DAO Facilitator or a DAO Committee Member will fulfill the role and decide with involved community members if the working group should remain active.

  1. What will be the criteria for selecting working groups participants ? Everyone will be able to participate ?

A general call for Working Group participants will be issued via Discord, DCL DAO Twitter, and pathways for joining will be established, likely including integration with the Governance dApp from the Pre-Proposal Poll. (See Figure 3 in Comments below)

  1. How many representatives can be appointed by proposal authors/contributors to facilitate in working group?
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Annex A: Role of The Working Group Facilitator

  1. Designing and distributing questionnaires or surveys: The facilitator is responsible for creating the questions or problems that will be posed to the group, and for distributing the questionnaires or surveys to the participants.
  2. Managing the data: The facilitator is responsible for collecting and compiling the responses from the participants, and for creating and sharing the summary statistics of the responses. Ensuring transparency of data is essential, and this will be approached in more detail if advanced to the Binding Governance Proposal stage.
  3. Communicating with the participants: The facilitator is responsible for keeping the participants informed of the progress of the study, and for answering any questions or concerns they may have.
  4. Facilitating the discussion: The facilitator is responsible for leading the group through the process of discussing the responses, and forming a second round of questions for solutioning.
  5. Keeping records: The facilitator should keep records of the process, the results, and the decisions made, so that it can be used for future reference.
  6. Facilitating the decision-making process: The facilitator should help the group to reach a conclusion based on the responses and help the group to draft implementable and well-formed governance proposals.
  7. Additionally, a facilitator should be able to keep the process moving forward and ensure that all voices are heard, and that the process progresses in a timely manner.
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Hey @web3nit! Thanks for your questions. I’ll try to answer them below:

Working groups will be public and open, everyone will be able to see process and results ?

Yes, 100% public and open for everyone to see the whole process and results.

Who is the contributor of proposal who can move pre-proposal to a working group ? Who can decide if a user is contributor of proposal or not ?

Contributors = Co-authors. We’re reserving the first 30 days of the prerogative to promote a working group for the Author and Co-Author(s), in order to prevent this becoming a roadblock.

“Working Group Formation - Working groups can be formed through the promotion of a Pre-Proposal Poll or a Draft Proposal to a Working Group by the author or a contributor to the poll. If the proposal is not promoted to the next stage or to a Working Group by its author or contributors in the term of 30 days, every community member will be enabled to promote it to a Working Group. A working group, however, is in no way a prerequisite for an initiative to move forward through the governance process, and pre-proposal Polls can be escalated to a Draft Proposal without a Working Group.”

Why by default it is written that primary working groups facilitator can be selected from dao facilitation team and not from authors/contributors of the proposal or their representatives ? Can they also be selected as a primary facilitator ? What is the process for selection primary facilitator?

Quite the opposite:

“3.1) Facilitator Selection - Proposal author/contributors self-select or appoint a representative to facilitate the working group.”

“Unless specifically requested to abstain, a member of the DAO Facilitation Team will support the Working Group Facilitator(s), and may be selected by proposal authors to serve as the Working Group’s primary facilitator.”

As a Working Group can only be started by an author or contributor of a Pre Proposal Poll (30 initial days), they’re the ones that will have initial governing functions to assign the working group facilitator with a high grade of discretion. That also means that they will have the prerogative to self-select or appoint a facilitator. The DAO Facilitators will only be a support reference.

If authors or contributors abstain from selecting primary facilitator, how he will be selected ?

Selecting a Facilitator is a requisite for a working group. But considering this exceptional but still possible situation, I would say that this falls into this part of the article 3.1. Meaning that if the working group doesn’t have a Facilitator, a Committee Member or a DAO Facilitator will temporarily fill that role by default, agree on next steps, and lead the process for appointing a new facilitator. That also means that the DAO Facilitator itself could be confirmed as the facilitator if there’s an agreement among all working group participants.

“If the designated Working Group Facilitator quits at any stage, a DAO Facilitator or a DAO Committee Member will fulfill the role and decide with involved community members if the working group should remain active.”

What will be the criteria for selecting working groups participants ? Everyone will be able to participate ?

Everyone will be able to join a working group and actively participate, plus there won’t be a pre-defined criteria for calling participants. However, it is a responsibility of the Author, Contributors and Facilitator(s) to engage community members considered valuable for discussing the specific topic. Besides that, the DAO Facilitation Squad will announce it via Twitter, newsletter and in the following Town Hall.

How many representatives can be appointed by proposal authors/contributors to facilitate in working group?

There’s no formal limit in this iteration. Most reasonable approach would be to appeal to common sense (2-3 facilitators as a maximum).

1 Like
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Appreciate detailed answers. :+1:

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This proposal is a big step in the formation of DAO governance. I see that DAO must have a clear and transparent governance structure that clearly defines how decisions are made, how voting is conducted, and how members can participate in the decision-making process.

Currently, DAO work groups already have significant results ! :clap:

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This process seems well written and thought-out. You have made it clear this it not binding and it isn’t a prerequisite for an initiative to move forward, however, my fear is this is a slippery slope.

Currently you see in U.S. Politics that similar working groups are used for lobbying. Questionnaires in these working groups can also be tainted. Those who believe in honesty who enter a working group that is acting with premeditated intentions for a particular outcome, would essentially feel left out or even pushed away by the people leading who are trying to lead to a particular outcome.

Many will say these working groups are a good thing. Many will say this won’t happen. Many will say they will be objective. However we are humans. The oversight of voters for these working groups are going to do the same things we are seeing in U.S. Politics today with recommendations from these working groups for a particular policy. While they have no binding outcomes or influence as this proposal implies, it actually does. People will source their arguments from the working groups as an authority.

Centralized Control of these working groups, rather than open discussion seems like it would lead to particular outcomes and for those who didn’t participate, would be ignorant to how it was conducted. The idea that voters make intelligent decisions is absurd. Try getting them to read a whole proposal, but now you are also going to get them to try and read a report from a working group? Come on let’s be real here.

Look where we are today. Many people put trust in things they shouldn’t. I personally believe formalization of this is against web3 as it will create an illusion of authority that is not warranted. Open Discussions via Discord Channels without a centralized Working Group Facilitators should be allowed. Censorship on those channels should be forbidden as well. This will allow for those who are active in the community to know what is going on and give them the ability to make their own opinions rather than having a small group of people give their working group recommendations.

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IMO Potential way to prevent risks associated with a centralized working group is to promote community participation. All community members have the right and should be encouraged to participate in the working group, and if they notice any problematic ideas or central authority risks, they can raise concerns and provide feedback through various channels such as Discord, DAO Forum comments, and posts.

Furthermore, if anyone notices that the working group is abusing the DAO or leading in the wrong direction, they are eligible to propose an alternative approach(their own gov proposal and work group) and present evidence to support their argument and solution. This can encourage healthy debate and enable the community to choose the most suitable course of action for the DAO.

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Also:

Working Groups are temporary. They are not permanent. They are in effect decentralized, because anyone who tables a substantive issue, measured by the ability to have it pass as a Pre-Proposal Poll, can facilitate a working group on that issue.

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While I understand the nature and intent of this proposal, I do wonder if this overcomplicates what’s going on here and adds too much overhead to making progress. If the process is too complex, we are going to scare away new people from wanting to participate in the DAO.

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Imo it only at first sight looks complex. Anyone still will be able to escalate proposal or make new one. I think this initiative will speed up processes and will help to prevent proposals from being abandoned.

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@MorrisMustang It looks complex, but it’s closer to what LordLike is pointing out. I see your point, but we wanted to be very specific about the roles, responsibilities and explaining the method in which this process is based on, to be as clear and transparent as possible.

The fundamentals and the reasoning behind this process are that better outcomes will come from a semi-structured process independent from the Core Teams, and that’s only will be possible by assigning roles and responsibilities and with well defined objectives.

Imo, in a decentralized enviornment, the way to do that is with a detailed and maybe over-inclusive procedure to get legitimacy.

“This approach will be one way to tackle and escalate different issues toward concrete outcomes, but it will not become the exclusive one, since each community member will still have the possibility to adopt or choose other ways to channel their needs, discussions or concerns.”

I can’t recall if I posted this in other place, but just to take into account, these are the main objectives of this first “iteration”:

  1. Implementation of a pathway for community members to create working groups from existing proposals within the dApp.
  2. Setting up of a space for working groups to be ordered and presented such as Proposals and Grants pages.
  3. Provide an open space for the working group to serve as an index, to upload files, to assign roles, add and onboard collaborators, share information, and visualize its progression.

Let me know if you have more questions!

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Process for Establishing Formal Working Groups

This proposal is now in status: PASSED.

Voting Results:

  • Yes 93% 7,320,262 VP (147 votes)
  • No 6% 514,222 VP (9 votes)
  • Abstain 1% 7,704 VP (10 votes)
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Process for Establishing Formal Working Groups

This proposal has been ENACTED by a DAO Committee Member (0xbef99f5f55cf7cdb3a70998c57061b7e1386a9b0)