[PROPOSAL][LAST-CALL 2023/03/08] Validator Commons: improving validator governance and leadership

• [Feb. 8 - updated to focus the proposal on the proposal jury program, shortened it based on feedback] • [Apr. 13 - paused and submitted instead to the ATOM Accelerator RFP] Hi Cosmos, I’m Josh, one of the leaders of the Validator Commons . We’ve been active in Cosmos for a while now, and would love some feedback on this proposal to help get the project funded and staffed! Summary • The Validator Commons is a nonprofit coalition of validators working to improve validator governance and foster validator leadership through experiments like town hall debates, proposal juries, and tooling co-ops • We’re asking for 3000 ATOM to help us continue our validator jury experiments as well as a community organizer and researcher to support additional governance experiments and research (e.g. running a Pol.is conversation for a Hub proposal) related to the Hub About the Validator Commons The Validator Commons began as an effort by representatives from validators and non-profit organizations like Metagov to define technical standards and best-practices in proof-of-stake governance in response to a big list of problems that we felt were holding back validator governance. In…

Excerpt (1195 of 5455 characters). Read the whole post on the forum ↗

this is one is conflicting. it makes sense, but it sounds like voting to fund a cosmos version of ALEC

Interesting comparison, I had to look ALEC up! I was thinking more something like the Federalists or Anti-Federalists (i.e. pre-constitutional “parties”), since so much of the agenda+mission for the Commons is about building up governance infrastructure as opposed to “policy”, per se.

The risk in the cosmos seems to be centered around validator centralization, cartels, and consortiums. my concerns lie with the validator centric fiduciary relationship rather than a delegator centric fiduciary responsibility

The risk in the cosmos seems to be centered around validator centralization, cartels, and consortiums. I think many of the validators who have chosen to get involved in the Commons believe that more coordination and participation among the validator set is necessary to counter de facto centralization of expertise and decision-making within core teams and foundations. I’ve also included a longer answer on whether the Commons encourages centralization or decentralization below. my concerns lie with the validator centric fiduciary relationship rather than a delegator centric fiduciary responsibility Correct me if I’m wrong, but I think you’re saying that the fact that the Commons has a direct responsibility to validators rather than to delegators could be a problem. That’s a good point. However, the Commons is an open membership organized around shared values, and we’re open to non-validators as well—indeed, even today not all members of the Commons are solely validators. But for bootstrapping purposes the Commons is geared toward organizing validators, not delegators. Tackling the latter and getting delegator engagement is a really, really hard problem that the entire…

Excerpt (1196 of 3369 characters). Read the whole post on the forum ↗

im not saying that its a bad proposal or that there is any better way to make the governance/proposal validator coordination process better. but the centralization risk in the cosmos is more so based on validators across numerous app chains that treat the market cap across all chains as the same honey pot. taking advantage of app chains they validate with large treasuries or other preferable parameters to collectively restructure chains through governance to move markets and aggregate liquidity. where treasuries are drained to finance validator “incentive alignment” and bootstrapping LSD LPs on other app chains I dont know how to structure disclosure requirements able to satisfy the level of trust demanded by atom 2.0 or PTMP, but until validators that do vote, vote in a way that benefits the chain and delegators the proposal is native to rather than validators, robust investment seems like a hard sell. I would probably vote for it, i dont ramble on to spread any conspiracy theories or make accusations, just self reporting my perception and concerns with recent governance. its not like you are asking for 10mmATOM to be minted out of thin air to pay off, i mean “incentive…

Excerpt (1197 of 1216 characters). Read the whole post on the forum ↗

Hi Joshua,

I think you’re definitely on to something here. I am familiar with some of your previous blockchain governance research, and would vouch for the quality of that. Some thoughts and questions:

1. I think sharing tools and research is a great idea in general.
2. Would you care to elaborate on how these “proposal juries” would operate in practice?
3. Again, I think leveraging the strengths of collective efforts is a great idea, but how do you see this peer-review system working in more detail? Is the purpose essentially to provide feedback on proposals through an “expert” panel of sorts?
4. More research is most definitely needed, but what would determine the focus of this research? If the Cosmos community is providing the funds, shouldn’t it also have a say in what gets researched (within the strengths of the research group, of course)?

Thanks for your contribution!

Been saying since the first ever public governance call. Would love to see someone commit to creating a committee that actually goes around users and collects feedback, not the other way around. Governance should be from down up and strive to become horizontal. Just saying =)

Thank you! <3 Would you care to elaborate on how these “proposal juries” would operate in practice? Here’s exactly how we plan on running the next versions! Validator Jury Design - Google Docs Again, I think leveraging the strengths of collective efforts is a great idea, but how do you see this peer-review system working in more detail? Is the purpose essentially to provide feedback on proposals through an “expert” panel of sorts? The peer review system is about reviewing a validator’s practices (especially governance practices), not about reviewing proposals! I think this system still needs to go through a few cycles. We trialed it and spun up an easychair instance but in practice it’s too costly to run on every validator (and then to keep updated). I think a peer review system could be more useful on edge-cases (e.g. suspicion of some sort of bad activity), on demand by specific validators or chains, or for other use-cases. More research is most definitely needed, but what would determine the focus of this research? If the Cosmos community is providing the funds, shouldn’t it also have a say in what gets researched (within the strengths of the research…

Excerpt (1193 of 1468 characters). Read the whole post on the forum ↗

Right - Again, I think the general idea of this is great, just needs to be worked out in more detail.

Just thinking out loud here, but could you maybe turn the peer-review system around, in the sense that you instead impose/incentivize/encourage some sort of “downstream deliberation” where validators submit useful/relevant information along the lines of what you’d check through the peer-review system you’re suggesting? As a way to provide transparency (perhaps even coupled with some voting-to-exclude mechanism to promote “good governance”) to the rest of the community (i.e., “the citizens” to use democratic lingo). That way you can kind of keep the balance of letting “the experts” manage governance (which is generally technical and complex) while keeping check on power imbalances/concentration.

Hmm interesting, so in this version, you’d collect “tips” or reviews on a given validator through a wide funnel, which then serves as part of the material for a peer review? That makes a lot of sense.

I pulled together some of the current documentation and proposals for the peer review system here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1fFURLIlOb7EeUSvLt4DggNR7ZCoBQ4PeVuBRFzibB30/edit# please do feel free to edit/suggest, it’s meant to be an open ecosystem initiative!

Another unpopular opinion (I seem to be very good with these)…

Im curious as to why everyone thinks they can fix governance by centralizing certain processes of that governance. The whole idea of DAOs is about collective consensus. Read - wisdom of the crowd. So, unpopular opinion. IMHO, ya wanna fix governance - lets decentralize the process.

Look, here’s roughly how I’m thinking about this: decentralised governance on blockchain is technically complex, part of why it can be difficult for “ordinary” participants to sometimes take part/contribute to governance (including myself). And so, to echo the supposed ethos of crypto re transparency/decentralisation, key governance players have a responsibility to be upfront with what they’re doing and how they arrive at decisions etc. I mean, as a delegate wanting to attract delegation, you’re kind of incentivised to do so, right? Hence why I called it ‘downstream deliberation’: because open deliberation, while necessary at large, also has its limitations, especially if knowledge varies a lot re complex technical topics. So, we want to keep governance non-restrictive/inclusive but at the same time leverage the expertise and specialised knowledge within the community as efficiently as possible. Downstream deliberation would thus involve communicating actions clearly and in plain English, so to speak, hence keeping the non-technical users unable to follow certain complex debates up to speed. And so while certain “expert committees/councils/working groups” etc might form to…

Excerpt (1191 of 2615 characters). Read the whole post on the forum ↗

Regarding the path of true decentralisation; a lot of people actually don’t even care. So we have to ask ourselves if we want to chase a dream which is not shared by the majority of people… We see in current governance nowadays that a lot of people simply do not vote, no matter how important or trivial a proposal is or how difficult or easy the voting process is.

So all in all we have to define what we are aiming for, but also how we should go there. And at this point in time a lot of validators are not even taking the effort to vote. So having some kind of body of engaged validators who are giving some kind of insight on a proposal might be a step in the right direction.

Hi folks, just a heads up that I’ve updated the proposal based on feedback here and on Discord / Telegram, and that we’re planning on posting this on-chain on Feb. 23!

Also sorry for the long delay on this proposal—back in early January, the validators in the Commons decided that funding was not as important as the culture and engagement of the community, and that it would make more sense to let some of the other proposals go through governance first before submitting a proposal in the new year, especially after ATOM 2.0.

Hi @thelastjosh thanks for this. Do you mind changing the proposal tag to [PROPOSAL #][LAST-CALL 02/23/2023]? Feels like this one should make the rounds a bit to get some more coverage and feedback as well.

Also, this may be relevant to the ATOM Accelerator DAO as it provides governance assistance, and so if the funding isn’t urgent (which it doesn’t seem to be), it would be great to have the Accelerator DAO’s thoughts on it (cc: @Youssef ).

Ack, just seeing this—was on vacation last week. I’ve made the change to last call and pushed it back to next week. Would love to get @Youssef 's feedback. The funding is not urgent, but the sooner we get it, the sooner we can commit more resources / get to work.

Thanks for updating the proposal title with proper tagging conventions. I am fully in support of this initiative, and believe that the validator commons can do excellent work. The funding amount is reasonable and the scope is sufficiently clear. There are a couple of points of feedback I have: @thelastjosh – I believe it would be beneficial to you and the commons to start socializing this a bit more. This is generally done via twitter spaces, video interviews, and discussions on twitter so the community that doesn’t read the forum can participate more actively before the proposal goes on-chain. The wider the reach, the better. Additionally, if there are any conflicts of interest, this is an important time to state them. I imagine people will have questions about involvement from folks who are already involved in other community-pool sponsored initiatives. Lastly, there is currently talk about writing a constitution for the Hub (cc: @Ticojohnny ). Would you be able to expand the scope in any capacity to include some thought-leadership or assistance in that domain? I know MetaGov has done meaningful work on the subject . Lastly for those reading this, a disclaimer: I have…

Excerpt (1198 of 1436 characters). Read the whole post on the forum ↗

Thanks for the advice @ala.tusz.am ! Yup, we will have a socialization kick starting soon! From a governance perspective, we’re not the biggest fans of Twitter debates, but understand that that is where a big section of the community lives

Re: CoI: yeah, it’s a bit weird because the people in the Commons tend to be exactly the validators most engaged in other parts of governance! All I can say is that we do not intend to pay validators to do work that they’re already technically paid to do through staking incentives (even though a lot of validators treat governance participation as optional despite those incentives). Participation in the Commons is primarily a volunteer activity; the goal is to fund the juries as well as a community manager who would be employed / contracting with Metagov.

I think we could assist re: a constitution if there is a request from that working group (i.e. it’s not us leading the entire thing, since that would be a big scope expansion). I tend to view constitution-making activities as part of a package of activities toward governance reform / transition, and would encourage people to consider it holistically if you want the transition to succeed.