Retro Funding 5: Announcing Guest Voter Participation

Retro Funding 🔴
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Retroactive Public Goods Funding (Retro Funding) 5 will reward contributions to the OP Stack. As part of Retro Funding 5 a new kind of experiment will be run that aims to increase our collective knowledge around Citizenship selection mechanisms.

In Retro Funding 5, a random sample of ~90 existing Citizens will be asked to participate in voting. Randomly sampling participants is a way to keep the Citizen workload manageable despite an increased number of rounds, and is a well established method of forming a representative sample of a larger population. In addition to these Citizens, ~30 Guest voters will participate in voting.

Guest voters

Guest voters are temporary participants able to vote in a single Retro Round. This new concept allows the Collective to experiment with different selection mechanisms without making any permanent changes to Citizenship.

How to become a guest voter for Retro Funding 5

Applications to become a guest voter are open until updated: new deadline is July 31st! to developers contributing to the Optimism ecosystem. Of all applicants, ~30 will be selected to participate as guest voters using a ‘Proof of Work’ selection mechanism (see below). Part of this mechanism will involve an analysis of public GitHub account activity before June 27th 2024. The algorithm will be shared publicly after the selection process has taken place to avoid influencing the experiment.

If you are a developer and you want to participate in voting for Retro Funding 5, please create your Optimist Profile and submit an application here by July 31th 2024. Any developer can apply, the algorithm will rank and select the top applicants based on their code contributions to relevant repositories. Therefore, please apply even if you are unsure whether your contributions are significant. Please do not apply if you are not a developer.

Proof of Work

The hypothesis behind Proof of Work is that individuals who have contributed work and impact to the Collective will demonstrate relevant competencies and understanding of the Optimism ecosystem. Voting in Retro Funding 5 will benefit from a technical understanding of the OP Stack, which is why this particular opportunity was taken to test a selection mechanism aimed at identifying voters with relevant technical competencies.

In the context of this experiment, the Proof of Work selection mechanism is being tested across only a single dimension - code contributions. However, the concept of Proof of Work can be applied to other areas and is not limited to technical contributions.

What does this mean for future Citizen selection?

The development of Citizenship is reliant on knowledge gathered from experimentation - this is the first in a series of Citizenship selection experiments designed with this end in mind. To read more about experimentation with Citizen selection, see this gov docs post.

Learnings from this series of experiments will help the Collective gather knowledge about a variety of selection methods which is an important step in empowering Citizens to make informed choices about Citizenship criteria in the future.

This experiment should not be taken to imply that future Citizen selection will focus on developers or the Proof of Work mechanism. Future Retro Funding Rounds may experiment with other methods of Citizen selection targeted at different Optimism participants.

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I would like to clarify that these views are my own and do not reflect those of the Grants Council or Govnerds.

I was not part of the decision-making process to define “Profit,” and I disagreed with the outcome during the Citizens’ vote.

In Retro Funding 5, a random sample of ~90 existing Citizens will be asked to participate in voting.

As a committed Citizen, I have participated and voted in every RetroPGF round. I appreciate the process, even when it was time-consuming in RPGF3. RPGF4 was more streamlined, making the voting process quicker and easier. Therefore, I am puzzled by the introduction of a random sampling approach. During the “Profit” experiment, I chose to be silent and observe the sampling process and noted that its ratification did not succeed.

Why not make participation an “opt-in” process or exclude Citizens who did not participate in previous rounds if the current number of participants is too large to manage effectively?

Why aren’t Citizens asked if they want a sampling, opt-in, or full participation?

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force warpcast login blocks me from take part in the Retro Funding(this Voter Participation),I have an early FID registered from other farcaster client,and cannot import to warpcast,guess how long I need to wait to get a fix?
no one wants to add a alternative login,not ethereum login,even just something that can fetch FarcasterID to verify

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This.

Random sampling seems to presuppose that citizens are interchangable - that one is not much different from another.

That is simply not the case. Not only do we all have different backgrounds and skills (that’s a good thing) - some citizens put in a lot of time and effort, while others don’t even show up (this is less ideal).

50 citizens were invited to the recent deliberation, as I understand it. Why did only 25 participate / vote?

Up to 40 citizens regularly participate in the ratification of token house votes. A record 54 showed up for the ratification of the profit definition.

Where are the remaining ~80 citizens?

There seems to be an assumption that if citizens don’t vote, they are lacking confidence, as seen in intent 1 here: “Increase in the percentage of Citizens that feel confident voting on upgrade vetos (to be measured via the voting UI in each veto proposal)”.

But where does that assumption come from? Not one citizen expressed lack of confidence in the most recent veto vote. How do you increase a percentage that is already 100?

If the goal was rather to increase the percentage of citizens who vote, excluding those that don’t would do the trick.

I think it would be better to work at increasing both the raw number and the percentage of active citizens. However, to do so, it would make sense to actively support those who are already active and offer them a sense of community and purpose.

To my mind, treating people as radically interchangable, even with no-shows, does the exact opposite.

Optimism needs active citizens with shared context and diverse views and skills. We should be building on what is already there. Not pretending that a random sample of 50 that turns into 25 (likely less random) is representative.

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Would like to echo this, there are more than 120 badge holders and I can see only 54 votes on our last impact==profit ratification proposal.

We have a couple of highly active and motivated citizens, including you, engaging in discussion and trying to create a positive atmosphere to share and discuss ideas. But if only a few will participate, i am afraid, it could create an information bias. We have a diverse set of badge holders and our failing to include all of them in a discussion is a waste of resources and collective effort.

how do you suggest this could be done? Personally, there are many things i would like to change or changes that I don’t agree with, at the same time, i feel Optimism is providing us with an open platform to express our views and opinions, and new changes are traversing upward from collective feedback rather than OP Foundation forcing on us which gives me a sense of belongingness even though i am not directly or indirectly involved with Optimism.

Holding a badge itself defines a purpose, each badge holder was chosen by someone, and they put their trust in us if this is not enough of a reason to participate i don’t know what will.

My suggestion is put a reminder/warning threshold in place and even if its harsh, exlude non-participating badge holders. Second, ask them what is missing ? what could be done to encourage them to participate, perphaps we are missing something.

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  • I like the experimentation of “guest voters”. Specially great that guest voters will be “experts”/“experienced” within the scope of RF 5.
  • Agreeing with @Gonna.eth about the “forced random sampling”. I propose the following solutions:
    a) Make a Citizens House vote on whether we want to use opt-in, random sampling or other method.
    b) Allow opt-in for any Badgeholder and on top of that do a Random Sampling of another X number of Badgeholders that did not opt-in.
  • On the other hand, being a Citizen is a privilege with responsibilities. I think we should create standards of participation/voting/etc. And Citizens that do not meet/maintain these standards, should not be in the Citizen’s House.
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In this context, I think it would make sense to allow the active participants to participate as much as they want. Let them build all the context they can, and invite them to be a part of discussions and deliberations as much as they want and share their knowledge and experience with everyone else.

My suggestion would be to explicitly make it an invitation - not an expectation or a duty.

I’m not suggesting to only invite the same small group every time!

I think the idea of guest voters is a very interesting one. And it would still be possible to work to include less active citizens. I don’t mean to say that we shouldn’t.

If we need 120 voters in Round 5, we could invite those who have been actively voting these past months to opt-in. Let’s say there are 50 of those, and 40 of them opt in (just as an example). Then we know that we have 40 experienced citizens who are happy to show up and work in this round.

Now, let’s say we want to invite 30 guest voters. We can absolutely do that.

Then we still need 50 more voters. We can randomly sample them from the less active citizens. (We may still want to ask them to say yes or no, and expand the random sample if many say no).

That way, everyone should be happy: Active participation gives access to more participation - if you want it and have the time. We don’t exclude the core voters and risk ending up with a group of guests and only a few active/experienced citizens. And there is still plenty of room for experimentation and inclusion.

I want to say that I very much appreciate the ideal of drawing in people and creating a diverse and dynamic mix!

I just think that this should not get in the way of also allowing a core of experienced citizens to form and build shared context that can be shared with newcomers and those who don’t regularly participate.

If people want to invest their time and energy in Optimism as citizens, it would be good to welcome that. Not tell them: “Come - if or when we call you”.

I know I’m being a bit blunt. I do hope it comes across that it’s because I care about people who care.

I think it was really nice to be able to read the documentation and watch the recordings from the profit deliberation process. And I think even more could be done to ensure that all citizens are being kept in the loop with regards to what is going on in Optimism.

My hunch is that few of the less active citizens read everything in this forum; a regular news letter with the most important updates might go a long way.

And it would be awesome if those who are not chosen (randomly or otherwise) to participate in this or that were directly contacted by email and told so - both to keep them informed about what goes on, to signal that they are still seen and valued as citizens, and to allow them to plan their time.

I’m sure there are more things that can be done to promote community and sense of purpose. We should investigate all of them. :slightly_smiling_face:

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Totally agree with the experiment in retro funding 5 that only about 30 will be selected to participate, can badge holders apply? As a person who has knowledge in IT and skills in it, I would like to participate to vote

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Hello, I received a message asking if I would like to apply to be a guest voter in round 5. Is this something I need to apply for if I’m already a badgeholder?

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Badgeholders should not apply to be guest voters - the purpose of guest voter selection is to source net new participants

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Thanks for raising the questions about random sampling, we could have done a better job of explaining the concept and why we think it’s worth experimenting with earlier. I’ll address the more tactical questions here and we have addressed the higher level principles behind random sampling in: Experimenting with Random Sampling in the Collective. Please use this thread to discuss guest voters in Round 5 and the other thread to discuss random sampling :pray:

50 citizens were invited to the recent deliberation, as I understand it. Why did only 25 participate / vote?

We reached out to 50 Citizens under the assumption that we would have ~50% opt-in rate among those randomly selected, considering participants were required to attend 3 live sessions at set times. Opt-in rates were in line with our expectations and the experiment was designed with ~25 participants in mind. Citizens that are randomly sampled to participated in Retro Funding voting, will be required to participate.

There seems to be an assumption that if citizens don’t vote, they are lacking confidence

Agree that lack of confidence is just one of many reasons Citizens might not vote! It’s important to understand the Token House and Citizens’ House ability to understand technical proposals. Asking voters whether they are confident enough to cast a veto vote is one way to start to measure that. It helps us identify voters that have already made it to the voting platform, and have ostensibly read the proposal, but weren’t confident enough in their ability to evaluate a technical proposal (otherwise this would just show up as a missing vote.) That doesn’t mean lack of confidence is the only reason someone who is already on the voting platform might not cast a vote, and it definitely doesn’t capture those that never even made it to the voting platform for other reasons. Our goal is not currently to measure all the reasons people might not casting votes, but rather to measure whether the Citizens that are already casting votes are confident in the votes they are casting.

But where does that assumption come from? Not one citizen expressed lack of confidence in the most recent veto vote. How do you increase a percentage that is already 100?

That’s what adding this measurement helps us determine! We had never measured confidence before this vote; collecting this information helps us validate/invalidate assumptions.

It would make sense to actively support those who are already active and offer them a sense of community and purpose.

100% agree with you; I don’t think this is mutually exclusive with random sampling though and explain more about that here. There are many things that can be done to better promote community and a sense of purpose and to allow those that want to engage more to do so. However, there are many ways to achieve those things (Establishing clear Citizen expectations, developing robust reward mechanisms, special non-voting roles for high context Citizens such as mentorship, better Collective context sharing, etc.) that are not at odds with random sampling.

Why not make participation an “opt-in” process or exclude Citizens who did not participate in previous rounds if the current number of participants is too large to manage effectively?

In short, requiring an “opt-in” process invalidates the properties of random sampling (see here.) That said, of the participants that are randomly sampled, they must still agree to participate. Participation in Retro Funding votes is currently a requirement of continued citizenship. The reasons we believe random sampling is a scaling mechanism worth experimenting are outlined in detail here.

Why aren’t Citizens asked if they want a sampling, opt-in, or full participation?

In order to run effective experiments, the Foundation needs to be able to manage the conditions and variables of those experiments. We believe this experimental approach will allow the Collective to develop an industry-leading approach to metagovernance, which will transition to the community over time (See the Path to Open Metagovernance.) It is also very important to make sure metagovernance does not allow for the current set of Citizens (at any time), or a small but active subset of them, to be able to limit the rights of other Citizens to participate in the system (which is partially why Citizens are not asked to vote on this.)

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Hey, guys!
I applied, although I don’t have Github, since I’m in favor of working with media and grant applications in my projects. But I hope I can be useful to the collective :wink:

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just a note on farcaster login requirement on https://retrofunding.optimism.io/: Since opening up signing up on farcaster, new accounts need to pay an annual fee to remain active (I believe it’s $5 right now). This should be considered when making farcaster login mandatory.

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support mail on warpcast website still no reply, force warpcast login actually become a blocker to participate in voting(while I already have a farcaster id outside warpcast)

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Hey @blockdev you can read more about the background behind this in the gov docs here: Project and individual identity in the Collective | Optimism Docs

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Sorry to hear that you’re having trouble logging in! I would recommend retrying in a different browser or after resetting cookies. Optimism support is available via Discord if you’re still having trouble with this

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Hi there, hope you are doing well! Following up the conversation and giving my opinion:

Would you mind to expand the definition of “Profit” and “not-for-Profit” in this context?

During past RetroPGF I was not personally involved in the process, but I was reviewing the process and each attribution allowed to specific projects for example. I believe the dispersion of the funds were right, but I also think that the process was quite “Centralized” whereas common participants selected were vetted thorough a dedicated judge panel (in this case there was trusted seeds or trusted OP user, past grants recipients already vetted etc…

True decentralization is, anonymous weight balance voting allocation: In short, each voting participant, should be by “his” own and not be externally or internally influenced by “the magnetic force of socio attraction (lol)”

So including a gamification using anonymity, for me, is the right approach. This does not include advanced Sybil protection or supplementary shielding layer towards funds allocation as this is a work-in-progress and is a different aspect that we should take in consideration.

That said, this design is made to have a distinct, from traditional approach, and use inclusivity, diversification, to discover and experiment with (from times to times), giving us another dimension to measures social capital allocation.

Hope this will help you to understand.

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Thanks for the great opportunity. We have been part of the optimism ecosystem for over two years and look forward to becoming voters during the process in the other rounds. We will not be participating in those rounds as we are just finishing up with round four for the builders.

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