Council Dissolution Proposal
As outlined in the Operating Manual, a persistent Council is expected to continue into the next Season unless a Dissolution proposal is approved. The Foundation is proposing the dissolution of the Code of Conduct Council.
Name of Council, Board, or Commission: Code of Conduct Council
Current Charter: link
Reason for Dissolution Proposal:
- This proposal for dissolution is not related to the dedication, intentions, or contributions of Season 5 or Season 6 members. These contributors have played a very valuable role in our experimentation with decentralized accountability. We hope all former and current Code of Conduct Council members remain involved in the Collective in high impact roles.
- The need for an enforceable Code of Conduct remains unchanged. The need for a Code of Conduct, as well as our experiments around its enforcement, are well outlined in the posts below:
- In summary, over multiple iterations, we have learned that it works best to decentralize enforcement among multiple parties (the Foundation, the Milestones and Metrics Committee, the supNERDs/govNERDs, etc.). Our experiments have also reaffirmed the need for a governance minimized approach to prevention and enforcement, reflected in voting design (in Retro Funding) that reduces the opportunity for self-dealing rather than trying to police it. The Code of Conduct Council has been critical in informing these learnings.
- However, we believe the Code of Conduct should not be enforced by an elected Code of Conduct Council for two main reasons:
- Council Structure is Political: The Council structure is not well suited to an enforcement mandate. The Council is elected by tokenholders but is also expected to make unbiased enforcement decisions involving those same tokenholders. This function should be fulfilled by civil servants, or non-politically selected participants that fulfill a job for the Collective.
- Community feedback: “Currently, the CoCC relies on the Token House for both budget and renewal, which creates a conflict of interest. There’s inherent pressure to align decisions with Token House preferences rather than ensuring impartiality. This dynamic can undermine the legitimacy of dispute resolution efforts, as it may lead to decisions driven by budget concerns rather than fairness. When parties are dissatisfied with mediation outcomes, they might vote against renewing budgets, regardless of the fairness of the process.”
- What this could mean in practice is that the Foundation contracts a third party to provide mediation and conflict resolution services and/or the current role of Code of Conduct Council members is folded into the govNERDs contribution path.
- Governance Minimization: In minimizing enforcement efforts and spreading enforcement among multiple powers to reduce concentration of power, the scope of the Code of Conduct Council has been reduced to what is essentially platform moderation. As expressed in Season 5, we don’t believe it is governance minimized to elect a group of people to provide platform moderation services, as this is not a necessary model for this type of work.
- There is a lot of governance overhead associated with Councils (running elections, onboarding members, operating budgets, etc.) and, therefore, the Collective can likely only effectively support 4-5 Councils. That means we need to save the Council structure for the few functions that are well suited to this structure and high enough impact to warrant the associated overhead.
- Council Structure is Political: The Council structure is not well suited to an enforcement mandate. The Council is elected by tokenholders but is also expected to make unbiased enforcement decisions involving those same tokenholders. This function should be fulfilled by civil servants, or non-politically selected participants that fulfill a job for the Collective.
- We thank all members of both the Season 5 and Season 6 Councils for your contributions in this ongoing experiment. It’s hard to iterate towards something new and we appreciate your willingness to help the Collective understand how this function should evolve.
If this proposal is approved, it will supersede any approved Operating Budget for the next Season and the Council will not continue operations.
Proposals by the Foundation don’t require delegate approvals. However, in the case of a Dissolution proposal, delegate approvals are required. 4 Top 100 delegate approvals will be required by December 11th at 19:00 GMT for this to move to a vote