[OLD] Collective Intents: Season 4

Collective Intents

Season 4 lays the groundwork to align the entire community around Collective Intents. Intents are directional goals that allow the Collective to align and focus. You can think of an Intent as a near term target. There may be multiple paths towards that target; it is up to the Collective to determine which paths to pursue by proposing Missions.

Most Season 4 Intents will be set by the Foundation. Future Intents will incorporate more and more input from the community, until these Intents are set collectively. On a longer time scale, Intents and RetroPGF Scope will increasingly overlap until they are one and the same.

Each Intent will be equipped with an Intent Budget from the Governance Fund. In Season 4, the Foundation has suggested Intent Budgets, as outlined below. The Token House will vote to approve each Intent Budget. Prospective Council Leads will put forward an Intent Budget Proposal for the Intent overseen by the Grants Council (Intent 2). Over time, budgeting will become increasingly community-led.

Intent 1: Progress Towards Technical Decentralization

The Optimism Collective must continue to make progress on its core value proposition to provide decentralized, scalable compute.

The Bedrock release will enable the use of multiple proof schemes and multiple clients. Multi-client fault proofs are a fundamental component for technical decentralization, and Bedrock’s modular framework will have a big impact on the community’s ability to further decentralize the development of the OP Stack.

Over the next several months, OP Labs will be focused on Permissionless Output Proposals, Bridge Decentralization, and the Cannon Fault Proof Program. You can read more about these efforts in this blog post on technical decentralization.

Full technical decentralization requires a rich ecosystem of clients, provers, and beyond. The Collective welcomes contributions in pursuit of this Intent.

This Intent is the Collective’s highest priority. Why, then, is the Mission budget smaller than other Intents? Many of the projects that support our progress towards technical decentralization require high context and specific expertise. This work will be reflected in Foundation Missions (which follow a separate RFP funding process) and ongoing core development work by community teams like OP Labs.

Intent 2: Innovate on Novel Applications

Optimism believes that crypto has not reached its fullest potential. Low-cost blockchains can change the way humans everywhere interact with the internet, enabling novel coordination games, consumer applications, business models, community structures, and more.

Optimism is already pushing forward the cutting edge of crypto scalability. The Collective must also push forward the frontier of crypto utility to help realize the vision and promise of Ethereum. If you are building something crypto has never seen, something to bring a step-function increase to the status quo, something that takes advantage of the new dynamics afforded by trustless blockchains — this Intent is for you.

Missions are not proposed under Intent #2. Instead, all proposals working towards this Intent will be processed by the Grants Council as grant applications. Grant applications for novel applications of identity, game theory, social, community, gaming, and bridge dynamics are well-aligned with this intent.

The Grants Council will manage this Intent. Grant applications aligned with this Intent will be evaluated by the Grants Council on 5-week cycles.

Intent 3: Spread Awareness of the Optimistic Vision

Optimism is not a blockchain. Optimism is a Collective of builders, companies, chains, and community members working towards the Optimistic Vision.

Users and builders who believe in the Optimistic Vision should be more likely to contribute meaningfully to the ecosystem and remain engaged for the long term, as opposed to solely seeking the highest yield or access to grant funding. However, many value aligned potential Optimists are unaware of the the Optimistic Vision and the important role that public goods and RetroPGF play in our ecosystem.

In order to attract more value aligned users and builders to the ecosystem, we must spread awareness of our Vision. Missions under this intent should work to make the Optimism Collective widely known as an ecosystem that fosters public goods and regenerative finance – an ecosystem ultimately working towards the creation of a new economic model.

Increased awareness should onboard new people, DAOs, builders, and partners who are passionate about our vision and values to the ecosystem, some of which may be outside Web3.

Missions could include targeted educational resources, focused hackathons or conferences, and/or specific marketing efforts aimed at growing a community of value aligned Optimists.

Proposed Budget: 1M OP (for Proposed Missions supported by the Governance Fund)

Note about Intent #3: The Foundation intentionally left this Intent unspecified to give delegates the opportunity to suggest an economically driven Intent. The Foundation has taken suggestions from the community and finalized the above Intent 3 after receiving feedback. Thank you to all delegates for providing extremely high quality suggestions.

Intent 4: Governance Accessibility

Optimism Governance is the ultimate steward of protocol upgrades, the token treasury, and Collective revenue. Optimism’s two-house system is designed to create healthy checks and balances and expand ownership to a diverse set of governance participants.

The Collective must prioritize accessibility in order to create governance structures that welcome a broad range of Optimists to participate. “Accessibility” refers to any work that helps make Optimism governance understandable, open, usable, flexible, and legible to all.

Governance accessibility includes enbaling a diversity of perspectives to participate in governance, facilitating better knowledge sharing to develop more informed voters, and lowering barriers to participation for more culturally diverse involvement in the governance process. Increasing the votable supply and reducing the concentration of voting power should be important bi-products of improved accessibility.

Missions to educate the broader community about Optimism governance and RetroPGF, increase the resiliency of core governance infrastructure, create user friendly interfaces to interact with governance programs, or promote a welcoming governance community are all well-aligned with this Intent.


What Does This Mean for Delegates?

The Token House will vote to approve Intent Budget Proposals in Special Voting Cycle #12a. Each Intent Budget Proposal will be voted individually via a simple approve/reject vote. As always, we look forward to your feedback on this initial proposal draft and welcome active discussion about the appropriate budgets for each Intent. All Intent Budget Proposals will require 30% quorum and a 51% approval threshold.

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You can add your suggestions for Intent #3 here.

Additionally, we will host a 1/2 hour call to facilitate brainstorming and discussion about Intent #3 on 17:30 GMT on April 20th (directly following the Foundation AMA.)

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I copied the following message from the Intent Suggestions Thread

Spitballing here. Governance accessibility kind of touches on it, but I’d like on of the intents to more clearly relate to political decentralization. We can be technically decentralized, but if the controller of the tech, or the direction of the tech, is politically centralized, then we undermine that effort. Not sure if this needs to be its own intent, perhaps the language of governance accessibility can be cleaned up to be more explicit.

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Reposted in thread here which I then saw is titled (suggested by delegates). Can the community also post in that thread or would it be better here?

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Hey @lavande keep in mind a Budget Proposal for Council Intent #2 may be voted on and leave a few ideas outside the council scope that could be covered on Intent #3

Meaning Inten 3 vote should be after the Council budget is voted on and the Council scope it’s clear.

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Good question! In the event that the Grants Council is not renewed, you can assume that Intent #2 will be still be an Intent (along with all the other Intents), but with a budget approved in Special Voting Cycle #12b

Understand there is more information and votes pending so based on the OP Token Allocations shown above I would be interested to understand what percentage of the initial Governance Fund this proposal is looking to allocate in S4 -ballpark %

I have taken a look at the Public Distribution Tracker but as a working document awaiting S3 allocation updates, I can not easily figure this out.

Thanks

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In the public tracker, you can see the total amount of tokens initally allocated to the Governance Fund in “Status Key,” cell A2 is ~232M OP. Adding the Season totals at the bottom of each Season’s corresponding tab shows that ~60M OP have been distributed as grants to date, leaving ~172M OP in the Governance Fund.

Intents #1,#3, and #4 request a total of 5M OP which equates to ~3% of the remaining Governance Fund. Please keep in mind a proposal for Intent #2 may still be put forward by prospective Council Leads, which would increase that %. Last Season, the Council’s budget was 5M OP.

It’s very important to keep in mind that the Governance Fund is meant to be temporary, not necessarily self-sustaining, as we envision a future where the vast majority of work currently supported by the Governance Fund is supported via RetroPGF.

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Thank you this totally helped and as shown in your calculation will apply the “Status Key” and OP Approved value.

Can I clarify what factors into the “OP Allocation” being significantly lower (S2) than the Approved? Or perhaps to ask this another way - What did 6/31 approved proposals do that others could learn from?

Appreciate you’re ongoing patience with all my noob questions @lavande

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No worries, we need noobs :slight_smile: I think you’re referring to the “have received allocation” category, which likely needs to be updated, and I’ve asked our finance team (who manages the distributions) to update the sheet with that information. What it signifies is the number of projects that have claimed their distribution from the Foundation (the Foundation approves a distribution and then grant recipients must claim it.)

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After reading the Collective Intents initiative, we want to provide our first feedback on the four proposed items, and share some first thoughts:

Intent 1

This is one of the most interesting and necessary paths for Optimism to mature as a protocol. It seems to us that it is going in the right direction, we recognize that the path to the completion of the development of Optimism has to take place sooner rather than later and open the option for the community to contribute, honoring the ethos that each one of us promotes for the ecosystem. So it makes sense that OP Labs and the Foundation take the lead in management these intents.
Some questions arise for this Intent, for example a 1M budget is assigned, - what about the audits? Or how Labs and Foundation plan to proceed with spending for a secure implementation?

Intent 2

Currently we are satisfied with the work carried out by the Council in the overall, it should be noted that there were no serious incidents to note or red flags in the process that could be labeled as bad work; but there is always room for improvement, and one of the most critical points is that we believe the Council should be more communicative in its consensus/decision process. We look forward to the council’s proposal to vote for a reasonable budget to the constant growth of the Optimism ecosystem for the coming months.

Intent 3

As active members of the most vibrant communities of the cryptographic ecosystem in Latam (SEED Latam and L2 en Español) we are glad to see the Optimism Collective driving these kinds of initiatives focused on generating genuine users through the communities that are part of the foundation of the Ethereum Ethos and Optimism, that’s why we think that this is an excellent opportunity to put more focus on community-growth-adoption. We believe that this intention is in line with The Optimistic Vision. In any case, we will see how the thoughts of the rest of the delegates and community members align in what role to give to Intent 3.

Intent 4

Participation, active delegations and governance awareness is one of the Optimism community points that is difficult to capture the desired attention. This is not necessarily a lack of governance optiism but more how the incentives are aligned in the whole Web3 community regarding these spaces. This intention should focus on how to bridge the gap between the optimistic user and the governance members and avoid falling into accessibility via more bureaucracy or unnecessary structures. At the end of the day, all the initiatives should lead, together with the continuous improvements of our processes, to achieve a horizontal governance.

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I’m a very very big fan of this intent. Excited to see what comes from it.

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I love Intent 3. Thank you for giving us the opportunity to participate.

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Я делегат оптимизма и готов голосовать

Я делегат оптимизма и голосую за

Я оптимизм хочу голосовать

Я делегат оптимизма мне все нравится буду голосовать

I’m a new Optimism delegatee and I’m ready to vote