Thanks for voicing your concerns, @nodeE! I’d really like to know what we as the SafeDAO community should do to improve this situation, in your opinion.
Perhaps we’re talking about different ideas and assumptions on how DAO governance is supposed to work. After all, lots of DAOs experiment with lots of different ways to vote.
The concept we know from most nation states – one person, one vote – is rather uncommon amongst DAOs, Proof of Humanity DAO being a notable exception.
AFAIK, most DAOs including SafeDAO fall back on token-weighted voting. This often mirrors a plutocratic structure by default, but I believe that SafeDAO is doing much better than the average DAO because of the fact that we thankfully have Guardians who “have verifiably proven their commitment to [SafeDAO’s] vision”.
When you say “official background”, what do you mean exactly and do you look at that as a bad thing? Personally, I see the Guardian programme as a brilliant innovation and feature of SafeDAO – not a bug – because we’re lucky to have a group of skilled and well intentioned experts who have provably contributed to Safe, and this group received quite a bit of voting power for that reason. Personally, I feel quite relieved to know that this group is a major voice in our community, next to all Safe users, investors and the team.
Long story short, we may want to align more explicitly as a community what kind of decision-making logic we want behind SafeDAO. One person, one vote via KYC? Via DID? Token-weighted voting without any constraints, meaning a pure plutocracy where your voting power is just a matter of how much you pay for it? Or a meritocracy where domain experts are given more voting power?
These are fundamental questions of democracy which humanity has faced for thousands of years, of course.
We don’t need to reinvent the wheel in SafeDAO, but we do have the opportunity to use web3 to question voting mechanisms that became common over the last decades or centuries but should perhaps be questioned. I also see us on a long journey here and will be the first to admit that the current state of our governance is certainly not ideal.
As a starting point, I’d summarise the current situation as follow:
- Phase 0 and 1 proposals are subject to a forum discussion, which approximates one person, one vote in the sense that individuals are free to comment their opinion in the forum and their token holdings do not matter at this point. Of course, Discourse is not sybil-resistant but we could introduce a system (based on POH or Gitcoin passport, for instance) to work towards that.
- Phase 2 proposals are subject to a token vote, whereas SAFE follows a mix of meritocracy (especially allocations to Guardians based on proven positive contributions) and plutocracy (if and once SAFE is transferable)
Where do you suggest we go from here?