Voting process
Voting format
In RPGF4, badgeholders were asked to vote on metrics, not applications or projects.
16 possible metrics were available, and each badgeholder was allowed to mix and match these as he liked and give each chosen metric a weight (a percentage, such that all chosen metrics would add up to 100%).
In addition, there was the option of applying an āopen source reward multiplierā which would multiply the effects of applying the chosen metrics across open source projects by up to 3x.
Time spent
Compared to previous rounds, the voting process was extremely āefficientā: It does not take long to add a few metrics to a ballot and submit them.
Including the pre-voting workshop on metrics, a kickoff call, time to read up on each metric and reflecting on their usefulness, some experimenting in the actual voting interface, as well as participating in a bit of discussion on telegram and a few badgeholder calls to exchange notes and ideas - I probably spent less than 10 hours in total on the voting part of RPGF4. For comparison, I spent more time on the review process.
(Writing this takes time too, of course, but hey -)
Discussions
Aside from a couple of dedicated discussion calls with a handful of participants, it is my impression that there was less discussion in the badgeholder group in this round than in the previous round.
Values and ethics
My main critique in this round is that the format rules out āsubjectiveā evaluations - ie. ethics.
Rewarding any and all kinds of onchain activity feels wrong to me. What kind of Phoenix will we be summoning like that?
Debating what actually constitutes a āpublic goodā takes time and energy, and we will likely never agree - but the same is true of āgood objective metricsā. We need the discussions, and we need to find ways to make decisions that donāt just ignore the complex human reality.
Generating gas fees, or initiating transactions, or even having many human users, does not necessarily mean that your impact is good.
And even though we may not be able to collectively define a āpublic goodā in the same concise way that we define āgas feeā, we can certainly create mechanisms that allow human citizens to weigh in on what is or isnāt a public good - in the same way that we, in this round, were allowed to weigh in on what is or isnāt a good metric.
Public voting
Votes will be public this time. I donāt feel good about that.
It is true that choosing metrics rather than applications makes things less āpersonalā. And the risk of voters selling votes or voting under threat would be there in any case, as the online voting happens unsupervised and anyone can take a photo of their own ballot and share it (which means that they can also be pressured into doing so).
Still, with a āsecretā vote - possibly subject to checks performed by appointed scrutineers working in confidentiality - badgeholders would have a fighting chance of remaining relatively anonymous and just doing their work. Or even be public figures who keep their actual voting to themselves.
Different badgeholders may approach these things differently, or even adjust their approach over time according to their life situation.
With a public vote, all badgeholders are being pushed out into the public spotlight and placed in a position where they could have to defend their votes. That may be appropriate for delegates (who are representatives), but imo not for citizens.
RPGF involves allocating large sums of money, and debates on Twitter and Discord do get very heated at times. Badgeholders are humans, and Iām seeing simultaneous moves from various sides towards wanting to know more about us, analyze our onchain activity, require us to use a Farcaster account with verified addresses, pull in our ENS, etc. In the near future, whether we like it or not, many of us will be very easy to track down by a disgruntled applicant, online and offline.
In the past months, between RPGF3 and RPGF4, I have received messages on various platforms from people who reached out to me only because Iām an Optimism badgeholder. That is what it is - I donāt necessarily see anything wrong with reaching out. I have also received an offer of free tickets for a real life event. To be honest, I have no idea when a friendly offer like that crosses the line to something that might be understood as a bribe. My educational background offers no help with this.
In any case, there is certainly a gray area. Some people will go to some lengths to try and ensure support for their projects in the future. I do my best to avoid conflicts of interest. Knowing that my vote in RPGF3 was secret/anonymous has helped me stay neutral at times when I might have otherwise felt under pressure. With public voting an important layer of protection falls away. Psychologically, and in a worst-case scenario also physically.
Metrics under consideration
In line with my view on public voting I will not share my ballot here. If anyone really badly wants to know, they can look it up later when all of the votes are disclosed.
But Iām happy to share my reflections on the metrics. (And I have obviously voted according to the views that I present here).
Gas fees and transactions
Gas fees will feed future retro funding rounds. As such it is a very clean and obvious metric to use. Even if a contract does nothing meaningful or good aside from that, by generating gas fees it does help keep Optimism alive. (I hope we all want Optimism to do more than just grow fat, but it certainly needs to feed itself).
Transactions is a simpler metric than gas fees. Transactions must take place for gas fees to be generated, but gas fees also depend on the size and timing and perceived value of transactions. Many transactions could mean a lot of meaningful activity - or spam, or clumsy coding. I donāt think this metric captures anything important that is not already captured, better, by āgas feesā.
Addresses vs. users
Iām torn here.
On the one hand, I would like to see Optimism as a great habitat for humans. Not just bots. Many human users could mean that a project has the support of - and/or supports - a lot of humans. That would be a potential indicator of a public good.
On the other hand, machines can do great work too. They can certainly contribute to public goods, and in many contexts we absolutely need them. Using machines for good should be rewarded.
Even more importantly: Humans, too, can be used in many ways. Depending on the context, a user can be a customer, an employee, a slave orā¦?
Addictive, bribing and attention-grabbing platforms may have many users.
In the physical world, you would (I hope) never blindly reward someone for having many employees without asking about the companyās product and the working conditions.
Iām very wary about rewarding the use of humans without some kind of holistic human evaluation of the process.
Trusted users, power users and badgeholders
We can think of different ways to recognize a human user, and we can even go a step further and discuss what particular ātypesā of users indicate about a project.
This could be very useful - but only when we have some context.
Applications operated by machines obviously donāt have trusted users.
Users who like their privacy will not be trusted. Applications that offer privacy will not have a lot of trusted users.
Furthermore, by making OP rewards dependent on specific groups of users, we might end up incentivizing platforms to optimize around the use of those specific humans. Being offered free tickets may still be good fun, but do we really want to encourage all of the platforms out there to be constantly grabbing for the attention and action of a few known badgeholders and their friends - by making their funding dependent on it? I donāt.
Daily vs. monthly
I see no reason why a good contract would necessarily require constant activity.
A combined requirement for ādailyā and āhumanā could potentially create some very unhealthy incentives. (Of course, some great projects might also score high on such a metric. But the metric in itself does not tell us if a project is great or dystopian.)
Linear vs. logscale
A logscale has the very nice property that rewards are distributed according to merit; projects that score higher on some metric M will get more than those that score less, but rewards are not only funnelled towards a few giants that dwarf everyone else. Instead, the funds are distributed in a way that incentivizes initiative of all sizes, promoting diversity and competition.
Letās be clear: Impact = profit can not mean that any project which generates $x in gas fees should receive $x in retro funding. That would be both silly, dangerous and very bad business.
Open source multiplier
There has been a lot of discussion around this metric. I recognize that it may not entirely work as intended yet. But that is true for RPGF in general.
I would like to point out that āopen sourceā is defined as a collective value of Optimism. One of the values that badgeholders are currently being asked to promise to uphold.
Given this, we should take our own medicine and create an incentive for us all to help us get better at defining and recognizing open source. So - I endorse the use of this metric. That should make it worthwhile to put some effort into improving the details.
Going forward
Now that we have tried this once, maybe we could experiment with more complex metrics. Maybe something like āmany human users is great, but only if [something]ā?
I could also imagine a setup where some kind of āsubjectiveā human filter is applied first (similar to what we saw in RPGF3, but maybe in more of a binary way similar to the initial review, to collectively decide which projects are indeed public goods) and then we apply objective metrics to decide who gets how much.
What I would really love, though, is to experiment with using objective metrics to inform the decisions of humans, without mistaking the metric for the goal.