Hey all!
Here’s a write-up from the Radicle Governance Working Group debriefing the formal review of the RGP proposal and outlining next steps.
TL:DR; Despite not meeting participation requirements, the Radicle Governance Working Group proposes to continue moving the RGP proposal through governance to an official on-chain vote. In parallel, we’d like to re-evaluate the current participation requirements/thresholds for Formal Reviews & Governance Proposals with the community as we think they are ineffective and ill-fit for Radicle governance.
Overview
Snapshot voting for the formal review of the RGP closed Thursday, November 26th at 17:00 CET. The poll ended with 94.21% (712.75k votes) ‘YES’ votes, 5.78% (43.74k votes) ‘NO’ votes, and 0.01% (100 votes) ‘ABSTAIN’ votes. This Snapshot poll was the second attempt at moving the RGP into the final stage of governance, after the first attempt failed due to low participation and feedback from the community.
Despite passing with a majority vote, it must be mentioned that according to our governance process, this poll technically failed due to it not meeting participation requirements (total votes made ≥ 4% of total RAD supply). This means that for a proposal to pass a formal review (step 3) and an on-chain governance proposal (step 4), it must receive at least 4M votes.
These participation requirements (outlined in the Radicle Governance README) were put in place at deployment of the Radicle governance module. They are forked directly from Compound governance.
While the governance parameters around Compound governance are tried and true, in reality these participation requirements might not be as finely tuned to Radicle governance as we once believed. With 50% of RAD token supply locked in the Radicle Treasury and a large percentage locked in vesting contracts (with early contributors & team members), the actual supply that can be used in governance is much lower than total token supply. Therefore, a participation threshold based on total supply instead of the actual available supply arguably sets too high a bar for measuring consensus, resulting in governance gridlock.
This analysis brings us (the Governance Working Group) to two conclusions:
-
Participation requirements for formal reviews and on-chain governance proposals should be promptly re-evaluated by the community to ensure a proper measurement of consensus is being employed.
-
We should continue to move the RGP proposal through final stages of governance.
The reasoning behind the two conclusions is as follows:
Participation requirements for formal reviews and on-chain governance proposals should be promptly re-evaluated.
With regards to re-evaluating participation requirements, the governance working group will be prioritizing an official discussion on community.radworks.org to evaluate next steps. The goal of the discussion will be to answer the following questions:
- How can we evaluate the actual supply of tokens that are active and available for governance participation?
- What are realistic voting requirements for ensuring effective participation in formal reviews and on-chain proposals?
- Do we need to adjust the proposal threshold (# of RAD needed to submit an on-chain proposal)as well?
This discussion should be prioritized to ensure that future proposals won’t be hindered by unrealistic requirements.
We should continue to move the RGP proposal through final stages of governance.
Despite not meeting participation requirements, we believe the RGP proposal should be moved into the final stage of governance for the following two reasons:
-
The realization that our participation requirements were unfit/insufficient for realistic governance within the current Radicle community was made in parallel to us stewarding the Radicle Grants Program through governance. This formal review was the first since the LBP event and gave us additional perspective on where and how the Radicle governance process can be improved. In an ideal world, we could’ve had the correct requirements from the start, but it’s understandable that we’re still fine-tuning our processes this early in the project (and will continue to do so!)
-
We don’t believe a third Formal Review would improve the RGP proposal further. The two formal reviews of the proposal resulted in:
-
A majority vote and substantial (despite not meeting requirements) participation. Despite limited participation in the first vote, it still passed with a majority. Additionally, throughout the two formal reviews, participation increased by over 1200% (~756k votes from 26 addresses vs. ~54k votes from 16 addresses).
-
Discernible improvements to proposals based on community feedback.
Both formal reviews triggered constructive feedback from multiple community members which resulted in public discussions around how the RGP proposal could be improved. @bordumb addressed all feedback & concerns publicly (see formal review [v1] and formal review [v2]) and made improvements to the proposal accordingly.
-
Next Steps
If the community agrees with the working groups proposal, then the next steps would be as follows:
- @bordumb will work with Radicle Governance Working Group to create an official on-chain proposal for voting (he’ll also address any outstanding comments in the formal review)
- The working group will create a Temperature Check for re-evaluating participation requirements (See [Temperature Check] Re-evaluate Participation Requirements)
The on-chain proposal will take some time to create, so there is still space to discuss details of proposal (process, compensastion etc…) on the forum.
If there are any objections to the proposed next steps from the community, please feel free to share concerns here. We will also plan on discussing the RGP proposal in next week’s monthly meeting.
That’s it for now. Thanks everyone for your patience! Looking forward to using these learnings to improve our governance process.
— Radicle Governance Working Group
For a complete overview of the RGP proposal please refer to the following posts:
Temperature Check:
Discussion:
Formal Review #1:
Formal Review #2:
