In Season 8, we’re excited to experiment with alternatives to elections for non-political contributor roles.
Different contributors play different roles within the Collective. Elected members serve as representatives, entrusted with governance responsibilities that would otherwise be held directly by tokenholders. Elected representatives often make decisions on behalf of tokenholders and, in the process, are essentially “writing policies” for the Collective. Representatives should be elected as their work is political in nature (e.g., Grants Council and the Developer Advisory Board).
Other contributors do not act as representatives, but rather take actions necessary for the Collective to achieve its goals. However, these are not actions that tokenholders could or would otherwise do themselves. We refer to these contributors as civil servants: a contributor that executes important functions for the Collective. Civil servants’ work is not political in nature, so we will begin to experiment with non-political methods of selecting members for these roles in Season 8.
The members of the Milestones and Metrics Council act as civil servants. The Milestones and Metrics Council executes (enforces) the grant policies and completes the important actions of measuring grant performance to help the Collective achieve its goals. In Season 8, we will experiment with a non-political process to select members of the Milestones and Metrics Council.
Season 8 and 9 Experiment
For Season 8 and 9, we will conduct an initial experiment with M&M to select contributors via a non-elected model. The goal is to begin to test different models by which the Collective can:
Select members to fulfill non-political roles (those that execute functions) based on competencies (expertise and experience) rather than political means (elections)
In this experiment, the Milestones and Metrics Council will not be elected. Instead, a set of selection criteria, as outlined below, will be ratified by the Token House. That selection criteria will be used to determine a list of individuals / addresses that are eligible to be on the Council in Season 8 & 9, since all Councils will now operate on 12 month terms.
Any eligible member (person meeting the ratified selection criteria) may submit an M&M Charter and run to be Lead during Voting Cycle #39a. The Charter will specify the number of members needed in Season 8 & 9. To determine members from the full list of eligible addresses, the Foundation will randomly sample from the list of eligible addresses. Imagine there are 7 eligible addresses, but there are only 3 members as outlined in the approved Charter. The final 3 members will be randomly sampled from the set of 7 eligible addresses. Eligible addresses must opt-in to participate in the sampling.
This process could be thought of as a stratified sampling approach where in a subset of qualified members are selected from the full list of qualified candidates. Sampling is a temporary mechanism to be used only until we collect enough information on attestations to be able to incorporate a rank order into the selection mechanism itself.
Note on the random sampling - we will use R, a software environment for statistical computing, to compute the randomness. To make sure the random selection is reproducible, we will set the seed which allows the R script to give the same result with this seed each time. To ensure the output isn’t tampered with, we will use the first 3 integers that appear at the Ethereum block hash at height 22575600 as the seed.
Transitioning Councils to non-elected models should have no bearing on the rewards received by members. Leads will continue to submit Council Operating Budget requests as in previous Seasons and the contributions made by civil servants are of equal importance to the Collective as those made by representatives. Importantly, all members will still be accountable to governance via the Representative Removal proposal type outlined in the Operating Manual.
Selection Criteria
To be eligible to be an M&M member in Season 8-9, candidates must meet 2 of the following 3 requirements:
Analytics Skills | Reputation in Collective | Strong Operational Security |
---|---|---|
Previously served on the Milestones and Metrics Council | Community contributor (above wannabe level) | Completed an operational security training provided by Opsek |
Completed a relevant analytical Foundation Mission | Any governance role in Season 6 or 7 | *please note, in the future, other opsec trainings will be eligible |
The first iteration will be imperfect. The initial criteria is intentionally restrictive to ensure qualified candidates are selected that can execute on the M&M’s mandate and maintain the highest level of security practices.
Lead Selection:
- The Lead must satisfy the same criteria as all other members. After the eligibility criteria is ratified by governance, any eligible member may run to be the Lead by putting forward a Charter in Voting Cycle #39a. The author of the Charter selected by governance will become the Lead. Selection of the remaining members, as specified in the Charter, will be completed immediately after Voting Cycle #39 and the final member list will be posted as a comment to this forum post.
If the selection criteria is not approved by the Token House, an election will be run in a subsequent voting cycle, which will delay the launch of Season 8.
What does this mean for delegates?
- This constitutes a Reflection Period proposal type, subject to Token House vote at a 30% quorum and a 51% approval threshold.
- By voting yes on this proposal, you are approving the outlined selection criteria for Season 8 and 9 Milestones and Metric Council members. Only folks who meet this criteria will be eligible to run to be Lead by putting forward a Charter draft in Voting Cycle #39a. You are not voting on whether or not you think we should run this experiment.