Measuring the capture or risk of capture of the Token House is really important and I’m generally supportive of work towards this end. I wanted to share a few points of feedback on the specifics of this mission request:
There is a Foundation Mission currently underway to develop a metric of concentration of power of the Collective. Two teams of data scientists are currently working on this:
Optimism Ecosystem Contributions 🔴✨ · GitHub
There is considerable overlap in the outcomes of these mission requests - both are seeking a way to measure the signals that the Token House or governance system as a whole are prone to capture. The primary difference is that the Foundation Mission Request specifies a data-driven approach. There are certainly other valuable methodologies for tackling this problem and I don’t think the existence of a similar Foundation mission is necessarily a reason to not incentivise other research in this space.
However, I do think that there are some things that would make this Mission Request stronger. I think that the suggested OP amount is very high (3x that of the existing Mission Request). It may also be helpful to outline some suggested approaches/methodologies and some ideas for how this framework might be used in practice by the Citizen’s House. One risk I see is that the framework developed under this mission is impractical, too abstract or doesn’t lead to meaningful impact because it isn’t used.
Disclaimer: I work for the Optimism Foundation but comments are my own