Following the progress made towards the Season 7 milestones, we’ve updated both the System Diagram and the Decentralization Milestones for Season 8.
In addition to certain milestones having been accomplished (and marked green), you’ll see milestones in yellow and dependencies in bold. Those are the milestones and dependencies we will work towards in Season 8.
As outlined in Governance in Season 8: The Next Phase, we remain committed to decentralization in so much as it also reduces platform risk. As the Collective continues to decentralize, we must consider that there are ways to decentralize that actually increase platform risk. Accordingly, we’ve updated our thinking on our decentralization milestones to reflect this very important nuance.
-
Metagovernance (Row 26):
- Over the past year, we experimented with the Collective Feedback Commission, as an experiment to cultivate a group of “core governors” that would function similarly to a core development program.
- While the work of the CFC has been valuable, the vision for the CFC doesn’t correspond to the next phase of governance, which is optimized to reduce platform risk. Allowing for governance participants to propose major changes to the governance system introduces a very high degree of platform risk.
- Instead of further developing the CFC, we will continue to reduce the metagovernance surface area to a minimal set of parameters in the Operating Manual. The Foundation currently maintains the Operating Manual, and is therefore responsible for updating these parameters. This is consistent with a governance system designed to maximize accountability, as the Foundation is ultimately accountable to the Token House. Over time, these parameters will be transitioned onchain and a permissioned process to update them will be introduced.
- Full explanation here
-
Citizenship (Row 23):
- In previous Seasons, we’ve experimented with many different Citizenship selection models - ranging from web-of-trust to random sampling - and we did not have a public or set definition of Citizenship.
- Based on the goal of reducing platform risk for the Superchain’s stakeholders and the learnings from all these experiments, we’ve updated our thinking about Citizenship and are taking a significant step forward by publishing objective Citizenship eligibility criteria as part of a coherent vision of Citizenship and governance.
- While the Foundation will continue to maintain this definition, the criteria themselves and the datasets that are used to calculate eligibility, will be public. Voting in the Citizens’ House will happen offchain, with individual ballots stored in a decentralized database as signed messages originating from addresses holding Citizen badges. This creates accountability as it allows third parties to verify the correct application of eligibility criteria and counting of votes.
- Eventually, changes to the parameters within the Citizenship eligibility criteria will be subject to a governance process.
-
A Note On Retro Funding:
- While not explicitly reflected in the Decentralization Milestones, we’ve continued to update our thinking on the level of governance involvement in Retro Funding.
- In previous Seasons, we’ve experimented with different levels of Citizen involvement in the governance of Retro Funding - from Citizens voting on every individual project to merely selecting the algorithm that will reward projects.
- To further optimize this process to reduce platform risk, we need to make the process more reliable and predictable for projects. This shift requires further minimizing the governance surface area, while maintaining accountability for those involved in running the program.
- This means Citizens’ will no longer be asked to vote on Retro Funding algorithms. The Season 7 experiment revealed that voting on algorithms involves abstract technical and philosophical tradeoffs that are difficult for voters to reason about effectively, introducing platform risk.
- Instead, in Season 8, Retro Funding, as a program run by the Foundation, will utilize algorithms maintained by OSO. As always, community members are encouraged to share input and raise concerns via issues on the GitHub repo, ensuring OSO’s process stays transparent and responsive.
- In the short term, the Citizens’ House will continue to hold Retro Funding accountable by voting on Mission budgets and scope. In the medium term, we aim to enable multiple organizations to run Retro Funding programs, creating additional accountability for the Retro Funding program. Our long-term vision is one where the Collective allocates tokens to the most token allocation programs.
Please reference the updated Decentralization Milestones and System Diagram to see the complete set of updates.