Retro Funding 5: Bribery Policy

It is expected that Optimists refrain from self-dealing. While opportunities for self-dealing in the Citizens’ House will be reduced via incentive design and voting mechanisms, the Foundation may implement additional measure to discourage self-dealing, to be defined at the beginning of each Round, while these mechanisms are further developed.
The Foundation has defined the below process to address bribery, if needed.

Over time, the consequences for bribery and other forms of self-dealing will be determined by the Citizens’ House and enforced via governance managed Citizenship Criteria.

Round 5 Anti-Bribery Policy

Reporting

  • You may report any verifiable instance of bribery using the form linked here . All discussions and reports should be in accordance with the Rules of Engagement.
  • As onchain evidence of bribery is unlikely, three separate reports against the same briber (or directly affiliated party) will need to be filed for a case to be considered valid. This number is based upon the number of people required for a bribe have a meaningful impact on results and considering the potential disruption of false reports.

Enforcement

  • In the event 3 separate reports are filed, and the briber is another badgeholder, the bribing badgeholder will receive an attestation and be prohibited from participating in Season 6.
  • In the event 3 separate reports are filed, and the briber is a project, the project will receive an attestation and be removed from the Round (ineligible to receive rewards in Round 5).
  • In the event any report is found to be invalid, the badgeholder will receive an attestation and will be ineligible to receive retroactive governance participant rewards for Round 5.

Please note: In the future, governance will decide the set of attestations that permit or prohibit Citizenship.

Subject to Citizens’ House Approval

Before any enforcement action is taken, the Foundation must post a proposal summarizing the reported bribery incident and corresponding enforcement actions. The Citizens’ House will then have one week to veto any enforcement decisions proposed by the Foundation. If an enforcement action suggested by the Foundation is veto’d, no enforcement action will take place. New reports filed about the same instance will not be re-considered.

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This is good to see, but I struggle to imagine a scenario where a badgeholder would get caught as it stands. If I am dishonest and a project reaches out to bribe me, it seems unlikely that a 3rd party would have any way to know.

To make the system more effective, maybe the Foundation or Anticapture committee should reach out to a few projects secretly and pay them to try and bribe us, then see if any badgeholders accept the bait (I optimistically assume none of us would). Turn it into a fun game of deception and entrapment?

As far as dishonest projects it seems much easier to catch, as they would need to be reaching out to badgeholders, the majority of whom would presumably just report them.

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