| Reference YGP | title | status | author | created | type |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
1 |
Yam RePlanted Requirements Document |
Draft |
Ross (@rossgalloway) |
2022-06-02 |
Requirements Document |
This project aims to build a new framework for the YAM DAO to facilitate better transparency, accountability, and permissionless-ness. It does so by developing a new process by which projects can receive funding. It will clarify the governance process, define and limit the roles of core contributors, and provide an example structure for how DAO-funded projects can be run.
The DAO has struggled to find its purpose and to retain mindshare and contributors. We believe that the causes of this are multi-faceted, including a lack of vision around the mission of the DAO, a lack of thought and investment in the core organizational infrastructure of the DAO, an inability to enforce accountability, and confusion around management of projects.
In the past, when token holders wanted something done, they proposed a vote and expected someone on the ‘core team’ to fulfill the task. This lead to situations where certain elements of the community expected things from others without any agreement. Contributors were put into working situations they didn’t expect and hadn’t signed up for. The grants system changes this. Grant recipients can work the way they want with the team they want, as long as it is agreed upon in the grant contract. They are their own boss, but with a contractual responsibility to YAM token holders.
The scope of this project consists generally of the following elements
- design of a new operational and organizational structure for YAM based on a grants model that empowers token holders to make big picture funding decisions and individual actors or groups to apply for funding to do self-directed work for the DAO.
- Full documentation of how a new operating and organizational structure based on a grants model will work and how to use it. This will be via documentation style website.
- Example documents and templates for users of the system to use.
- High level documentation explaining the new system and rationale to token holders who much decide whether they wish to implement it. This will be in the form of a website with blog style posts.
- Design of a "Governance Repository" system to manage and record the decisions and documents produced from running the designed system. This would be a public documents repo where governance and grant proposals are published.
There are a myriad of ways to try and solve these problems and lots of different DAOs are working to do so. We believe that any solution to these problems must allow YAM to continue to operate with the same ethos that it has in the past: A permissionless, decentralized organization that puts fairness and experimentation at the forefront and doesn’t take shortcuts. We are interested in exploring a system that holds true to these ideals and also functions effectively and accountably.
In doing so, we will make the following assumptions about how the DAO must operate:
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Anyone should be able to freely join and leave the DAO at any time.
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The DAO should not be constrained by a limit to the number of token holders or the number of actors who are able to participate in governance.
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No individual actor or actors should be able to exert control over the DAO outside of the accepted mechanisms (token voting).
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Anyone who wishes to contribute to the DAO can do so and their compensation will be be determined by DAO members (token holders).
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All information necessary to participate in the DAO should be publicly available.
Role: They control the Treasury. They decide on the large scale decisions around the direction of the DAO and what projects to fund.
Necessary Skills: A token holder should have a basic understanding of how DAOs and blockchains work in order to make good decisions about their development, but not explicit skills are needed. The better educated the token holder, the higher chance that they will govern well.
How they interact with the project: Token Holders must be able to find information about the workings of the DAO. This includes information about the grants that they need to approve and information about the processes to do so. They interact with the project via discord, discussion forums, github, snapshot votes, and on-chain votes. They should have a web-3 wallet (metamask as the standard) in order to store their tokens and vote on governance actions or delegate voting power.
Role: Build, design, and work on specific parts of Yam or projects to make the DAO or the wider crypto landscape better.
Necessary Skills: This varies based on the work they are applying to do for the DAO. They should be able to communicate effectively in English and able to navigate the approvals process and the review processes for their work. They should be able to post a document to github, or willing to learn how.
How they interact with the project: Grant applicants and Recipients interact with the project via discord and the Discourse discussion forum, as well as via github to submit work and documents.
Role: They make sure that the above 2 parties are able to coordinate and keep the system and DAO working smoothly.
Necessary Skills: They must understand how the YAM governance process works and be able to guide token holders and grant applicants and recipients through it. The system facilitators who write and vet proposal code should be experienced in writing solidity and using github to review proposals. They should be able to communicate why a proposal or process may be lacking in completeness.
How they interact with the project: Facilitators will interact with the Discord and Discourse discussion forums for discussions. Some with use Github to review code and may create snapshot and on-chain votes.
[insert this info]
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When complete Token Holders must be able to understand the new system well enough to vote to implement it. Once implemented, they should be able to use the current communications and voting infrastructure to make decisions about distributing grants to applicants.
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When complete, token holders should know how the first system facilitators (governing council) are elected and be able to elect the facilitators they choose via that mechanism.
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When complete grant recipients must be able to understand how to successfully submit an application for a grant and how to go through the process to receive a grant. They must be able to go through this entire process using the existing DAO infrastructure.
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When complete, the facilitators must be able to successfully guide both token holders and grant recipients through the entire process using existing infrastructure.
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The design should be general enough that it can work if a new on-chain voting mechanism is implemented or governance processes are upgraded.
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The design should require the same level of governance participation that the DAO currently has, even if the aim is to increase that participations
- see the answer to question 3.
Are there other projects or contracts that the project will interact with? How will they do so? What are the security risks from these interactions?
This project will utilize the existing YAM governance contracts and governance infrastructure, including Discord, Discourse, Github, Snapshot, and the YAM website. There are limited changes to the way that the DAO interacts with these pieces of infrastructure. The initial version will not make significant changes to how they are used, but may make suggestions about future improvements and changes.
The security assumptions for this project are equivalent to the current YAM security assumptions. This project makes the assumption that YAM token holders are capable of making important decisions about the future of the DAO and how to spend the treasury. It makes assumptions that YAM token holders are capable of vetting projects that it chooses to fund.
This project does not involve any changes to the way the YAM treasury or YAM token holders interact with the treasury of their own funds. How tokens are stored and used to vote does not change. The authors cannot make any statements about what this project will do for the YAM token price and we consider any gain or loss of value in the YAM token to be out of scope of this proposal.
13. Are there similar examples to the proposal that token holders can use to compare or understand the scope?
There are other projects that utilized similar governance structures and models to what we are proposing, and while those are not directly applicable, they may be helpful to look at to understand what we are trying to achieve.
https://docs.synthetix.io/governance/
https://docs.element.fi/governance-council/council-protocol-overview
14. Time-frame expected to fulfill different parts of the scope, as well as full completion of the project.
Projecting a timeframe for this work is difficult as the design portion is hard to predict. But most of the big design questions seem to be clear and mostly answered, and now simply need more documentation. We believe that the full re-org can be presented in July. It then needs review and approval by YAM stakeholders, and following that, work on building out some of the necessary infrastructure like a "governance repository" website that will need to be built. Work for these later peices and other complementary work like a protocol owned liquidity or Treasury Yield distribution specifications can begin when presentations, community input, and consensus building is happening.
We expect work on this project will be ongoing for the next few months at least to build out and develop everything needed to make the Re-Org work.
Below is the scope of work as laid out in the Authors' last grant request:
Re-Org Docs (YAM RePlanted) and synopsis articles.
- Concise statement of the Yam ReOrg project purpose and main objectives (90% complete)
- Article 1: What makes a good DAO - documentation that serves as a guiding target (80% complete)
- Article 2: Goals for a new Yam DAO - success definition and specific goals (80% complete)
- Article 3: New Yam DAO model - how grants, silos and a gov-ops council will work (50% complete)
- Diagramming and refinement (30% complete)
Milestone 1: Substantial completion of all above to hand off for presentation work by YAM Design Studio Silo on June 27th.
After handoff of Reorg Docs, Develop Templates for:
- Pre-grant application
- Project Requirements document
- Grant Application
- Counter-Bid document
- Grant objection document
Above documents to be worked on as part of milestone 2.
Present new Yam DAO model and communication materials once completed by YAM Design Studio. (early-mid July)
- Coordinate with Chilly to present documents and articles on the new supersite website, twitter, medium, etc.
- Respond to questions, concerns, etc.
- Formally present content for review and feedback to confirm consensus among stakeholders.
Milestone 2: Vote to approve new process and more forward into implementation. Templates to be delivered in this milestone as well. July
- Based on final consensus, begin the specification and implementation process
- Implement enough structure for grants process to begin. Refine and publish templates.
- Specify and begin to implement the Gov-Ops Council.
- Specification and development of “Governance Repo,” the location and process for storing and updating new grants >and governance proposals.
(to be worked on as time permits)
- Treasury Yield Distribution design
- Governance contract upgrades
- Token Issuance strategy and design
- Vision and Values documentation and ratification
- Protocol owned liquidity strategy and design
Because much of the current work is design focused, the work follows an iterative process in which discoveries in later phases may change the design. We expect that the broad strokes of the re-org are complete and ready to be presented at the end of June, and look forward to getting additional feedback. This feedback may impact the final product and require some re-working. The same goes for the design of the complementary initiatives, although the current design for the re-org has been crafted with them in mind.
See Grant Request
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Copyright and related rights waived via CC0.