Proposal: Wearables - Committee of Curators

Governance
1

Proposal: Committee of Curators :art:

Motivation:

As recently revealed on this tweet, there is a dApp being developed that will enable users to submit their own user-generated wearables. This tool will empower the economies of the metaverse and will enable many businesses to flourish on the platform. However, we face a great challenge finding ways to curate the content and preventing common issues that arises from UGC:

  • Quality content needs oversight.

    • User content isn’t created equally, low-quality or glitchy wearables can create the wrong impression of the metaverse and totally ruin the experience.

  • Content must be legally compliant.

  • Duplicate content must be prevented.

  • Adult content must be categorised in a way that ensures a good UX for all users.

Finding a good way to handle these issues and to decentralize the way UGC gets reviewed and approved is a crucial step towards a free and open economy.

At first, I thought that all wearables proposals could go through the DAO for evaluation. Then, I realized that high gas fees and the attention required to do this are not incentive-compatible with the rewards that a creator gets from selling the wearables. One option would be to have this curation implemented by staking, letting both the creator and the challenger align incentives through skin in the game (stake), but this option would require a much more advanced system in place.

Proposed solution: Committee of Curators

Having the wearables tool almost done, and needing a good and decentralized way to ensure these controls, I would love to propose a solution based on a committee of reputable and knowledgeable members that allows/denies wearables from being shown/minted/sold in the platform as a viable and easy-to-implement option.

Without further due, this is my proposed solution to make the wearables approval/denial process as smooth and fair as possible:

  1. Creator creates a new collection with X amount of items throughout the wearables editor tool (soon to be launched). Once finished, the creator submits the collection for review.

  2. The Wearables editor tool will automatically create a post on the forum once the collection is deployed and submitted, allowing everyone to see the details and be able to try out all the wearables of the collection. All communication will be handled via this medium for the sake of transparency.

  3. The submission process is an on-chain process that requires the creator to deploy a collection smart contract on-chain. Once deployed, the collection will be disabled for the next 7 days (grace period), leaving the option for any member of the committee to reject the collection.

  4. Over this period, only the members of the Committee will be able to reject a collection based on some predefined rules defined by the committee and the community. These rules are intended to cover infringements of copyright, duplicated items and prohibited content, as well as to ensure a certain quality of the objects submitted.

  5. If the quality of a submitted collection is not up for the standard quality, the committee will have the right to pause the submission by rejecting it until it gets fixed.

  6. If there are no comments or objections from the committee, the collection will be automatically approved once the grace period is over.

More insights on the process:

  • Members of the committee will be added/removed via a community vote on the DAO at all times. This will be implemented by minting / burning a special “CommitteeToken” that cannot be transferred. As a good way to speed up the process, I would suggest the first member of the committee to be a reputable member of the Decentraland foundation.

  • Wearables won’t be able to be minted before or during the 7-day review period, or if the collection gets rejected.

  • If a submission is rejected, the reviewer will leave feedback (through the forum) so the user can have a chance to fix what’s wrong (if possible) and have a second chance. The message is off-chain; the pause on the submission is on-chain.

  • The committee members could act on their own, given that most of the decisions they’ll take would be reversible and low-risk. The wearable contracts would have to check that the actor trying to use one of the roles delegated to committee members has at least one committee token.

Curator’s incentives

Given this role requires time (for reviewing) and money (to pay for txs fees). I would suggest rewarding the curators with a small incentive for their job. This will need to be defined by the DAO.

Next Steps

It is worth mentioning that even if this way of curating things is a really good and viable option, once we have a better sense of the market, there could be even better options to align incentives. Right now, with a really low time-to-market, this flow can be implemented and allow us creators to start creating and monetising on an open market.

This proposal will be open for vote on the DAO in the next upcoming days.

Happy and eager to learn what other community members think about this.

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Agree 100%. I think the 7 day grace period might be too long, maybe 3 days is enough? If the DAO is paying the committee members they should be ready to respond faster IMO. I think the ‘CommitteeToken’ should be called a more specific ‘ContentCuratorToken’, because “Committee” can mean anything. Maybe even the Committee should be called “Content Advisory Board”, to reuse the “Security Advisory Board” name style and make it easier. The Token can then be “CAB”, similar to the “SAB”. My 2 cents, I love the proposal, you have my vote. :+1:

1 Like