On behalf of the governance team, we’d like to suggest the following amendments to the governance cycle structure to give more time for reviewing proposals and their outcomes. Our goals were:
No changes to the total cycle length.
Minimum overall changes.
The changes are summarized below:
Remove “Phase 0” and start at Phase 1 [Draft] at the beginning of the Governance Cycle/Sprint. The proposal cycle officially starts with Phase 1. This would give two weeks for Phase 1 proposal review and discussion. Anyone can start a pre-Phase 1 proposal as a regular forum post under the label “Discussion”.
Introduce a proposal change freeze period: Proposal changes are frozen by the Friday of Week 2. This ensures open questions/comments are completed in a timely manner and avoids any drastic changes for delegates and guardians signaling.
Add a reflection period by shorten Voting Period to Friday / 10 days (from Monday / 12 days), with the following Sat/Sun as reflection. The new cycle would start Monday as usual. This gives time to reflect and allow results to settle before starting the next cycle.
A visual of the changes are under “Changes Visualized”.
Change Log
Original
Change
Reasoning
The beginning of the Governance cycle starts with Phase 0 and Phase 1 starts in Week 2.
Phase 1 starts at the beginning of the Governance Cycle/Sprint. Remove “Phase 0”. Instead, anyone can start a pre-Phase 1 proposal as a regular forum post under the label “Discussion.”
This would give two weeks for Phase 1 review and discussion and reduce confusion about “Phase 0”.
No proposal freeze period.
Proposal changes are not allowed (“frozen” state) after the Friday of Week 2.
This ensures open questions/comments are completed in a timely manner and avoids any drastic changes for delegates and guardians signaling.
Voting period is 12 days and ends Monday/on the same day as the first day of a new Governance cycle.
Add a reflection period by shorting Voting Period to Friday / 10 days, with the following Sat/Sun as the reflection period. The new cycle starts Monday as usual.
This gives time for results to settle before starting the next cycle.
Smaller informal changes:
With this amendment, Guardians can signal as early as the start of the governance cycle (Phase 1) until the Phase 1 signal deadline. Guardians can also withdraw their signal at any time if there are changes beyond their original signal.
Proposers no longer need to create separate forum posts to move into Phase 1.
No matter what phase, changes to the proposal must always be logged and shared as a comment on the proposal thread for visibility.
Proposals with integrations/dependencies on Wallet and Core require explicit sign-off on the forum from a member of the Safe Wallet and Core team.
This amendment introduces new deadlines (such as Freeze Period) as well as changes to deadline times. Introducing a new deadline may also mean 2 more notifications (Freeze Period and Reflection Period) to signal deadlines.
Seeking Feedback
As this change impacts voters, guardians, delegates, and proposers, we’d appreciate feedback on:
Are the amendments clear and easy to understand?
Would this improve your proposal review/ experience?
Are there any part(s) of the suggested amendments that are not helpful?
@amy.sg thank you for putting together this amendment proposal. It seems to accomplish the goal of simplifying while ensuring adequate time for review.
What is the reason you seek a 2 day reflection / settle period? I don’t think I fully understand the need to reduce the voting period.
These governance amendments make a lot of sense — thanks @amy.sg and the governance team for compiling this.
For the integrations/dependencies on Wallet/Core, I would suggest a slightly more formal process to give proposers more transparency and clarity. Perhaps this could be something like:
If a proposal has an integration/dependency on Wallet/Core, those teams have 10 days to respond to the proposal with a Block, Request for Modification, or Sign-Off. The Block would be used only in severe cases where the proposal is unworkable (from legal, technical, or other risks). Request for Modification would provide the proposal with clear requested changes that, once implemented, would allow the teams to sign off.
Apologies for the delay, just coming back from OOO.
@kdowlin - The reflection period is partially operational (gov team has a bit more time to wrap up the cycle), but mostly to reflect outcomes from the last cycle before jumping into a new cycle. (For example, in the case of OBRA, proposers can confirm the remaining budget few days before the start of the new cycle). It is shortening the voting cycle to avoid too many changes to the cycle format. However, we would also have to update the Snapshot strategy. That being said, it’s not a strong case, and would be ok to remove if the change would cause too much disruption.
@espina “Block, Request for Modification, or Sign-Off” is great framing and would fully support that phrasing. Although I can’t speak on behalf of the Wallet/Core teams, 10 days seems like a fair amount of time for review. However, from an operational perspective, time bound becomes challenging due to the timing of the cycle. It would require teams with integrations/dependencies on Wallet/Core to submit by the Friday of the first week. Do you have any other thoughts/ideas around this?
@Georg_Greenfield Yes, it would make the formalized concept of “Phase 0” obsolete. Instead, proposers can just start “discussion” posts and when they’re ready, submit as Phase 1 (start of the proposal cycle).
All very clear and reasonable, thanks for the helpful visualisations.
My only concern would be if the reflection period of two days over on Sat+Sun is too short. The gov team shouldn’t need to work weekends and could reserve the last Friday for such internal operations.
Three other remarks:
Optionally, a reflection routine also seems useful beyond internal operations on a DAO level and could involve a forum thread (or other asynchronous process) to assess the sentiment by thought leaders where the next cycles should focus on in terms of time spent, funds allocated and which resources they’re missing. In aggregate, such information could save the DAO a lot of time if proposal are more aligned with the priorities of the core teams and influential Guardians.
To bring (back) in a related issue: Shielded voting has been suggested before by @0xBaer, but not all concerns have been resolved. It could be worthwhile checking with @Luis from Shutter whether that is now the case. If so, and if shielded voting was to be enabled on Snapshot, strategic voting delays would be disincentivised. If votes are cast much earlier as a consequence, the voting period could even be reduced further.
Great, that’s an underapprechiated objective and worth mentioning. Reminds me of Optimism’s newly released legitimacy framework and the importance of continuity.
