Governance for the ODC: a living document judging the hackathon - OpenDataforWeb3/Resources GitHub Wiki

This document attempts to outline some thoughts on how we can collectively think through and take incremental steps to build towards on-chain governance.

Step 1: Research

Step 2: Summarization of research & potential plan

  • that is this page of the wiki

Step 3: Vote on hackathon winners for contributors to ODC & the hackathon

Step 4: Some sort of fair issuance

  • can include support from grants & other supporters

Context:

The OpenData Community is new, having started in October of 2022, and was founded by the Gitcoin FDD.

One view of the vision of the ODC is expressed in this Loom video by epowell101: https://www.loom.com/share/bd5a722fdd91444b81e525f650f2e857

TL;DR:

  1. Starting life as a non-profit - or a UNA. This does not rule out revenues.
  2. Inspired by the Linux Foundation and the successful Cloud Native Foundation.
  3. Dual house structure - insulate technical evaluators and the community from monetary influences.
  4. Culture and mission are much more important than token go up. We should be thinking about how to build a solid foundation for an organization that should last dozens of years if not longer.

Criteria as important as Research:

There has been considerable research performed on the ODC channels. What became clear from some of those threads is that we were collectively not yet aligned on the purpose of whatever governance we were discussing.

Here are those criteria as I see them - for feedback:

1. Hit the date - use something for the ongoing January hackathon.

  • By early February we need something that enables us to fairly vote on hackathon submissions.

_2. Earned voting power _-

  • voting power cannot be purchased, at least initially until a dual house structure is created for example
  • hackathon participants and community builders receive votes based on their participation

3. Easy to quit the mechanism

  • we need to preserve the opportunity to make different decisions in the future
  • for example, one-way decisions that cannot be easily reversed must always be approached careful and this is even more important when we do not yet have a viable community in terms of size, focus, momentum or treasury
  • all else equal, an approach that allows for experimentation by all of us is far better than one that might be better on some criteria but is less easy to change and to quit

4. Meets our values If at all possible, we want to use technologies that reflect our values including open source, decentralization, and the use of on-chain data

5. Could be built into a more complete solution

  • we would like the solution we use for immediate hackathon voting to be able to serve a role in our future overall governance system

Scoring Alternatives

As a next step, once we roughly align on the criteria for the immediate selection, we can extend this wiki page to give our votes on each of the 5 criteria to each of the 5-6 alternatives.

If someone wanted to post alternatives below that would be fine. However as of 1/12 - I'd prefer we wait a little bit and think FIRST about whether the criteria above are correct. This is intended to somewhat limit inevitable cognitive biases as well as gaming the approach and so on.