Season 8 Council and Board Mandate Guidance

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Timeline for Prospective Leads

:warning: Note: Council terms will now last 12 months. Elected members will serve for Seasons 8 and 9.

  • June 13th - June 23rd: Charter Amendments
    • All Lead candidates can draft and post Charter Amendments for Season 8
    • Deadline to submit: June 23rd at 19:00 GMT
    • Approval deadline: June 25th at 19:00 GMT, see Operating Manual.
    • Voting: The Voting Period for Charters will take place between June 26th and July 2nd. The author of the governance approved Charter will be the Lead for Season 8 and 9.
  • July 9th - July 16th: Operating Budgets
    • All elected Leads can draft and post Operating Budgets.
    • Deadline to submit: July 16th at 19:00 GMT
    • Feedback Period: July 16th - July 23rd will be reserved for community feedback, discussion, and incorporation before these budgets move to a vote.
    • Approval deadline: July 23rd at 19:00 GMT, see Operating Manual.
  • July 3rd - July 14th: Candidate Nominations
    • Candidates can nominate themselves for elections by going to atlas.optimism.io and following the relevant steps. A detailed guide for elections will be posted in early July ahead of nominations opening.
    • Nomination deadline: July 14th at 19:00 GMT in OP Atlas
  • Member Elections and Budget Voting: July 24th - July 30th
  • Season 8 Begins: July 31st :tada:

All Councils and Boards in the Collective should work to achieve our Season 8 Intent.

In determining Season 8 mandates, there are a some required stipulations. Otherwise, it is up to Leads to determine mandates by drafting Charters to be approved by governance.

12 Month Budgets

Starting in Season 8, all Councils and Boards will transition to 12-month terms to promote greater continuity and standardization as well as to lower the governance overhead of running elections more frequently. All Councils and Boards listed below may request a 12 month operating budget from the Governance Fund in Season 8, following the process outlined here.

Councils

Councils are delegated decision making responsibilities which would otherwise be made directly by governance participants.

Councils are elected.

All Councils should work to progressively and programmatically reduce their role over time, as its functionalities are no longer needed or can be effectively and responsibly automated.

Grants Council: Selection (Module I)

  • The Grants Council selects which contributors will complete work supported by the Grants Council Mission.
  • The Grants Council is required to make grants that drive the success metrics outlined in the Grants Council Mission but may follow whatever grants process it choses.
    • The Grants Council may be asked to reserve a portion of their budget to evaluate grants related to the futarchy Mission, if approved.
  • The Grants Council may make grants to applicants deploying across the Superchain, so long as the grants work towards the success metrics. It is suggested that the Grants Council follow the Foundation’s incentive eligibility criteria.
  • The grantNERDs, introduced in Season 7, will become part of the govNERDs program, to streamline Council operations. The Grants Council should only consist of a Lead and Final Reviewers.
  • It is required that the Grants Council make grants in accordance with the Collective Grant Policies and any other compliance requirements.
  • It is recommended that the Grants Council incorporate automation wherever possible to do so in a responsible and compliant manner within the application and review process.

Milestones and Metrics Council: Module H

  • Since the M&M Selection proposal narrowly failed, the Milestone and Metrics Council will be elected following the standard election process.
  • M&M will be required to budget for data analytics on grant performance
  • It is recommended that the Milestones & Metrics Council incorporate automation wherever possible to do so in a responsible and compliant manner within the review process.

Security Council: Modules M-O

  • Members of the Security Council are elected to execute actions on behalf of governance. In the future, we believe members should not be subject to election as these roles should be executed by non-political “civil servants.” However, we need to develop more robust infrastructure in order to identify the most qualified members to fulfill these functions.
  • Re-elections for Cohort A will run during Voting Cycle #43 in October. Details to follow.
  • The mandate of the Security Council is not meant to change in relation to a Season’s Intents as the mandate of the Security Council is primarily determined by our level of technical decentralization.

Boards

Boards advise governance participants on decision making but do not make these decisions themselves (or will be subject to vetos.)

Boards are elected.

All Boards should work to progressively and programmatically reduce their role over time, as its functionalities are no longer needed or can be effectively automated.

Developer Advisory Board: Modules I and K

  • The Developer Advisory Board has advised the Grants Council on selecting applicants, has worked with the Foundation on drafting and selecting applicants for Foundation Mission Requests, and has advised governance participants on Protocol Upgrades.
  • The Developer Advisory Board may continue any of the above mentioned operations (such as making grants from the Gov Fund following the DAB Mission Guidance), but, in Season 8 & 9, will be primarily tasked with voting on Protocol Upgrades on behalf of the Collective.
  • The Developer Advisory Board is required to be made up of at least 7 members, which will vote on Protocol Upgrades. These members may not be affiliated with the core development as their role is to hold the core development process accountable. This means candidates may not be affiliates of OP Chains or organizations that have long-term development grants with the Foundation.
  • All Protocol Upgrades will be voted on by the Developer Advisory Board, requiring a 5/7 approval rating. All other stakeholder groups may override the decision made by the DAB, using the process outlined in the Operating Manual.
  • Since the Developer Advisory Board will vote on Protocol Upgrades, on behalf of all governance participants, DAB members will be elected via a Joint House election in Season 8 & 9, as outlined in the Operating Manual.

Budget Board: Modules I and K

  • The Budget Board exists to bootstrap critical infrastructure and frameworks to enable the Collective to make sound financial and economic decisions (see “Economic Policy” in the System Diagram).
  • The Budget Board Charter has already been established for Season 8 & 9 and members have already been ratified.

Commissions

Commissions are groups of people entrusted by an official body with the authority to do something for a temporary period of time.

Commission membership is determined programmatically via qualification criteria.

Anticapture Commission

  • The Anticapture Commission serves as an institutional structure that defines ethics and expectations around capture resistance in the Collective.
  • The Foundation originally proposed this program to last for two Seasons, the original time frame thought necessary to onboard the first set of OP Chains. In Season 7, the Anticapture Commission put forward a proposal to continue operations. Although renewed through Season 8, the Foundation has recommended that the Anticapture Commission not continue.
  • Please note the Foundation will no longer provide retroactive rewards to the ACC.

Collective Feedback Commission

  • 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.
  • As a result, the Foundation has decided to discontinue the Collective Feedback Commission.
  • The Foundation will continue to solicit, document, and incorporate feedback from a broad range of stakeholders and governance participants to inform the systems continuous evolution, albeit via the informal channels we have used in the past.

The System Diagram has been updated to reflect these changes as well as to incorporate the new Budget Board.

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The Grants Council should not be asked to reserve a portion of their budget to evaluate grants related to the futarchy Mission.

I want to provide feedback based on our experience with the previous futarchy experiment.

In Season 7, the Grants Council was asked to rank a list of projects selected by the Foundation, based on which would produce the most TVL by the end of the season. These rankings were compared to the community (Butter) ranking. However, this setup provided no benefit to the Council or the grants process or its intent.

The experiment made the Council into a predictive, trader-like role without any information on how projects planned to use OP incentives. Evaluating incentive strategies and ecosystem alignment is core to our role. Guessing future market performance based on market data is not, we are not traders.

Further issues with the experiment include:

  • Misleading TVL attribution: Most of the “TVL win” cited by Butter on X came from a single outlier (Balancer & Beets), which actually lost TVL in ETH terms and was 6th on our ranking. The majority of the TVL movement was due to price action, not new bridged TVL from OP incentives.
  • Poor predictive accuracy: The futarchy market predicted ~$250M in TVL gain. Actual gain was ~$30M — an entire order of magnitude off.
  • Flawed comparison: TVL outcomes are not a good proxy for grant effectiveness. Some projects (like Beets) received low GC scores precisely because their OP usage was inefficient. Yet they still show up as a “win” in the futarchy framing.

If we want a serious comparison between futarchy and GC outcomes, the structure must change:

  1. Let users vote/bet on GC approval and compare results based on real metrics.
  2. Require futarchy participants to clearly explain how OP will be used.

Budget-wise, given that I must present a Season 8 Charter and budget before the Foundation releases any report on the Season 7 futarchy experiment, I believe this initiative should not be funded from the Grants Council budget. This is a Foundation-led experiment, unrelated to the core mandate of the Council, and should be covered by the Foundation’s own resources.

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Thanks for sharing your perspective on this experiment as a member of the Grants Council, it’s valuable insight for the community.

It’s important to start by reiterating that one of the main things we were interested in learning with this experiment was the difference in decision making structures (ie. placing predictions via futarchy versus a council that uses a one member, one vote consensus mechanism, as I understand it.) We are attempting to understand the properties of decision making using futarchy vs. a council model, so we can understand what type of decision each would be most effective at making. The goal is not to say that one is better or worse than the other, but rather to understand what the differences, benefits, and limitations are of each.

I believe the Grants Council was instructed to select 5 grant recipients from the full set of projects participating in the futarchy contest, but without specification as to how to select those projects. The Grants Council had full autonomy over the application process for those applicants (ie. request whatever information was determined to be useful) and one of the big differences between futarchy and the council model is that councils have the potential to have access to much richer information, such as what a project plans to do with OP incentives, via a structured application process. All of this is to say that the idea was not that the Grants Council replicate the decision making structure of the futarchy contest, but rather continue to use the decision making structure it has always used.

In terms of the issues you raise with the experiment - it’s important to separate out a few different, relevant components that we can compare:

  • Selection mechanism: This looks at the performance of projects selected by each decision making structure, but does not attribute the performance of that project to that structure. This is often how VC funds are evaluated (based on their ability to select good projects, not based on how much revenue was generated per dollar invested.)
  • Return on Investment: This looks at the TVL (or any other metric) generated per OP granted and does attribute the TVL generated by a project to the grant they received (Season 7 analysis to be posted later today.)
  • Predictive accuracy: This looks at the ability of a decision maker to predict a specific TVL outcome for each project. This was absolutely a weakness that we saw in the futarchy experiment and something we would like to further test in running a v2 (analysis to be posted later today.) I do not believe the Grants Council makes these types of predictions, but I could be wrong.

^ These are all important factors for comparison and separating them out cleanly allows us to understand the strengths and weaknesses of decision making via futarchy vs. a council for each.

The Grants Council does not have to participate in an experiment with the Foundation if they do not want to. However, the goal of the Collective has always been to work together and continuously iterate towards outcomes that benefit the entire Collective. The goal of measuring performance is not to pit parties against each other, but to provide governance with enough information to understand how to improve the entire system, together. The goal of the Foundation running experiments is not to imply that we have all the answers, but to admit that nobody does - hence the need to try new things and learn (and sometimes fail) in public. We’re always open to feedback about how we can do a better job, but we cannot achieve anything as a Collective, if individual components of the system work against each other.

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This seems to reinforce Gonna’s point that this is a Foundation priority, not a governance one, and so should be funded by Foundation, even if governance ends up administering it for some reason.

If the Foundation isn’t willing to spend its own tokens on futarchy, that’s a strong signal the Foundation does not believe it is worth continuing.

Foundation has considerably less constrained spending than governance, so it makes sense that 100% of political science experimentation should be funded from the Foundation going forward.

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The Foundation supported the operational work on the futarchy experiment via a Partner Fund grant. Governance approved 500k OP be used to allocate grants as part of that experiment. The Foundation asked the Grants Council to participate in the experiment by assessing projects that participated in futarchy and selecting their top 5. You could argue that the 500k OP that went towards the 5 projects selected by the Grants Council should have been approved as part of the Futarchy Mission rather than the Grants Council Mission.

The Foundation will continue to support experimentation, with our own tokens, as we have in the past. Governance will continue to have a choice about whether or not to allocate tokens from the Governance Fund to do the same.

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Please note the deadline for Council and Board Operating Budgets to be finalized and receive four delegate approvals is 19:00 GMT on Wednesday the July 23rd.

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