DAO Governance Squad Update: Driving DAO Engagement in 2023
By Decentraland DAO, , in Announcements
The Governance Squad, founded in early 2022 after a successful grant petition, is the DAO's first and earliest core unit. It has played a vital role in maintaining and improving the technological ecosystem needed for Decentraland’s community to take ownership of the governance process and make better and informed decisions. Since establishing itself as an essential player in the DAO’s development, the unit initiated the establishment of the DAO’s operational teams using the grant framework. This allowed the DAO to fund groups that maintained and improved the DAO’s platforms, processes, and guidelines while making the groups accountable to the community for their work by providing updates and having transparent and public finances and operations.
In 2022, the DAO provided 107 grants, allocating well over 7 million dollars. Understanding how vital the grant system is for the DAO’s improvement, the Governance Squad has implemented community-approved reforms via binding governance policies that resulted in the complete revamp of the Community Grants Program in early 2023.
Comparing the Voting Power and votes gathered across the grant and governance proposals between H1 2022 and H1 2023. In the uncharted landscape of decentralized governance, Decentraland's DAO Governance Squad has been at the forefront, working towards improving the capabilities of the Governance dApp, the upkeep of the Snapshot environment, and the creation and maintenance of the data layer of the DAO, TransparencyOS.
Background and vision
The core drive of the Governance Squad’s vision lies in empowering users. Their mission is clear and unwavering: Enable users to make better decisions by providing the information and technical infrastructure to do it quickly, easily, and delightfully. Guiding the Governance Squad's endeavors are a set of well-defined objectives:
Building outstanding product experiences that reflect the binding Governance proposals crafted and voted on by the community.
Finding inventive and alternative ways to facilitate community interaction with the governance model.
Boosting the community’s engagement ratio.
Automating and simplifying core DAO operation processes.
Tracking success: key performance indicators
With the above objectives, the Governance Squad defined four crucial success metrics to gauge the impact of their work, all geared towards amplifying community engagement:
Increase the Number of Wallets/Users Participating in the DAO: The team is committed to helping grow the community's active participation in DAO governance. This includes voting, creating new proposals, and commenting on ongoing discussions. To achieve this, the squad has focused on simplifying processes, developing more user-friendly interfaces, and maintaining open lines of communication to ensure that every member feels heard and valued.
It’s worth noting that voter participation was impacted by the 60-day pause of the grant program which resulted in an 18% drop compared to the previous period. Still, the available metrics for this period suggest an upward direction and that a healthier second semester is coming.
Increase the Percentage of In-World Users Participating in the DAO: One of the team's primary goals is to bridge the gap between the Decentraland in-world experience and its DAO governance model. The team is still exploring ways to undertake this task adequately.
Increase the Percentage of Median VP Participating Per Proposal: The team is eager to see an increase in the Median Voting Power (VP) participating in each proposal. This means encouraging active voters and stakeholders to contribute their voices to DAO decision-making, fostering a more diverse and representative governance model.
The Percentage of Median VP Participating Per Proposal has seen an impressive 65% increase between the first half of the grant period (December–February) and the second half (March–May).
Increase the Percentage of Delegated VP in Circulation: Finally, the team is working towards increasing the percentage of delegated VP in circulation. By making the delegation process more straightforward and transparent, they hope to encourage more users to delegate their voting power to active community members, thereby increasing community engagement in DAO governance.
Delegated VP in Circulation increased by 26% from the first half of the grant period (December–February) to the second half (March–May).
Outcome and highlights of 2023 so far
After successfully getting their grant renewed in early 2023, the Governance Squad spent the first half of the year developing important features that supported the growth of their predetermined key performance indicators.
Goals | Percentage of Efforts - Kindly note that this is merely illustrative.
Central to their achievements was implementing the Grant Restructuring Program, designed by members of the DAO Committee and the Grant Support Squad and voted on by the community. The main goal of this reform was to safeguard the DAO treasury and hold grantees even more responsible for the projects and money they requested.
Another significant change in the DAO’s Governance design was the introduction of the Abstention voting option. Even though it was a relatively simple technical implementation, this change allowed community members to abstain, enabling a richer spectrum of voting behaviors and more accurate sentiment analysis.
The Squad is a multidisciplinary team, oriented toward technology and product development with a proven team of engineers, Andy Espagnolo, JP Arnaudo, and Nico Comerci; product designer Juani Ruiz Echazu; and product manager Gino Cingolani.
The Governance Squad also introduced an experimental feature called Community Sentiment. By using this feature, DAO members can express their feelings regarding the specifics of grant proposals by casting metadata to their votes. This initiative will pave the way for an insightful, data-driven understanding of community opinions and views. Looking forward, the team has set its sights on improving vesting contract pages, developing the Bidding and Tendering product, and collaborating with the Facilitation Squad on the Working Groups' final binding governance proposal and product definition. Most of these shipped milestones were demoed and are available on their GitHub Releases page.
The Governance Squad simplified the user experience by implementing Account Linking capabilities. This feature streamlined the identity layer of the DAO by linking the multiple accounts users need to have to interact with all the governance mechanisms. The first version they launched allows the linkage of the Decentraland wallet-based account with the Discourse Forum account used to comment on DAO proposals. This feature aims to close gaps between multiple platforms and build a holistic user-centered view of the DAO profiles.
Most recently, the team shipped the first iteration of a social reputation system based on interoperable and on-chain badges. Badges will be a way to recognize community members who have collaborated significantly with the DAO. These badges are built on top of the Otterspace protocol and are based on the ERC-721 standard, so anyone will be able to consume or verify them, making this a cornerstone of an interoperable identity reputation mechanism for the metaverse.
Next steps in governance
As the grant renewal process for H2 2023 approaches, the team is actively engaging with the community to understand their needs and align their roadmap accordingly. They see decentralized governance as a cross-project endeavor. Their aspirations go beyond their own projects; they are interested in seeing other DAOs potentially utilizing their stack, like Big Green DAO. Moreover, they are excited about bringing new governance strategies and plans to the decentralized community, such as their work-in-progress Multidelegation Strategies on Polygon.
In decentralized governance, decisions are made through a democratic process in which token holders have voting power. Multidelegation allows token holders to delegate their voting power to multiple representatives rather than just one, which can lead to more diverse and representative decision-making.
governance.decentraland.org
Decentraland has an ongoing partnership with Polygon to provide faster and cheaper transactions. As more and more projects and users migrate to Polygon, the need for effective decentralized governance mechanisms becomes increasingly essential.
Implementing Multidelegation Strategies (MDS) on Polygon could potentially provide a more effective way to make governance decisions that better represent the community's diverse perspectives.
Overall, the team is confident they can create a more decentralized and equitable future by working together. They are committed to building a community that is open, inclusive, and welcoming to all.
How you can get involved
As you know, citizens of Decentraland can help the platform become more decentralized by casting their votes. Voter turnout determines how decentralized a platform is, which in turn determines how democratic its administration is. So, to help the Governance Squad keep going, engage! Make your voice heard and try to improve Decentraland for every user. Furthermore, you can join the Squad’s demos, Discord server, and town hall events, keep an eye on the Transparency Dashboard, Grants Panel, or their GitHub, and follow the DAO on Twitter.
The Governance Squad passionately encourages everyone to share their thoughts and feedback on their governance page at canny.io/governance. As they close in on their next grant renewal, it's essential to recognize that the community holds the power to determine the value of their dedicated work. While reaching out for support is undoubtedly beneficial, they wholeheartedly urge individuals to remember that collective opinions and voices have an immense impact on shaping the future of their efforts. Let’s all work together towards a bright future for Decentraland, running on the optimism and enthusiasm of its vibrant community.