Governance and DAO Participation Recommendations
Preamble
Disclaimer: Recommendations are anecdotal and experience-based rather than evidence-based. We can’t promise this will all work, but this is roughly how we think about DAOs, governance, and participation.
Format: We’ve explicitly tried to keep this as short and high-signal as possible. Writing 30 pages on this didn’t sound fun, and paradoxically, we think everyone is less likely to take something like that seriously. Still ended up pretty long, unfortunately.
Subject: This covers both governance participation and DAO participation. The two are very close to the same problem, so in the end it made sense to combine them.
Summary Table
| Item | Area | Cost-Benefit | Risk | Impact | Effort | GovAlpha Pursue? |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Encourage and Reward Mentorship | DAO | High | Low | Medium-High | Low-Medium |  |
| Governance Onboarding Experience | Governance | High | Low-Medium | High | Medium |  (Prefer Advisory Only) |
| Looking For Group Support | DAO | High | Low | Medium | Low | |
| Vote Stickers | Governance | Medium-High | Low | Medium-High | Medium | |
| Expansion of the Bounty System | DAO | Medium-High | Low-Medium | High | High |  (LFW excited about this) |
| Community Led Documentation Revamp | Overlap | Medium-High | Low | Medium-High | Medium-High |  (Coordination only if needed) |
| Decentralise powers over communications venues | DAO | Medium | Low-Medium | Medium | Low-Medium | |
| Create Space for Informal Voice Chat | DAO | Medium | Low | Low-Medium | Low | |
| Hall of Fame | Governance | Medium | Low | Low-Medium | Low | |
| Objective Setting | Overlap | Low-Medium | High | Medium-High | High | (Not sure the DAOs are there yet) |
| Low Friction Quantitative Recognition System | DAO | Low-Medium | Low-Medium | Medium | Medium-High | (Prose excited about this) |
| Semi-Competitive Debates | Overlap | Low-Medium | Medium | Medium | Medium-High | |
| Regular and Predictable Voting Periods | Governance | Low | Low-Medium | Low-Medium | Low-Medium | |
| Narrative Governance Activity / History | Overlap | Low | Medium | Low-Medium | Medium | (Trial Maybe) |
Abstract Considerations
Common Sense and the Funnel
DAO engagement can be modeled as something like the marketing funnel, and participants as customers. (We don’t love how dystopian this is, but it feels correct.)
Governance and DAO engagement take place when you reach the conversion and loyalty stages of the funnel.
To increase raw numbers we have two main options
- Intervention at higher levels. More people at the top of the funnel means more at the bottom.
- Intervention at lower levels. A better conversion rate means more at the bottom.
Motivation And Psychology
Humans are humans. A great deal of study has gone into figuring out why people make the decisions that they do. [McClelland’s model] fits fairly well for DAOs / employment.
Wild simplification ahead!
Each person tends towards one of the following motivators in a work environment.
- Affiliation (McClelland)
- Motivated by connection to others.
- Prefer working in groups
- Avoid the risk of negative social outcomes
- Power (McClelland)
- Motivated by authority and control
- Enjoy competition and debate
- Seek high-risk situations to demonstrate ability
- Achievement (McClelland)
- Motivated by completing tasks
- Seek situations that highlight their skills
- Want to be challenged, but not too much.
Unsubstantiated speculation time!
Two more general (and usually subconscious) motivators could be described as the following:
- Competence
- People are motivated by the perception and reality of success
- Everyone wants to look good!
- Being part of a successful DAO makes you successful by association?
- Activity
- People are motivated by the perception and reality of activity
- Because people want to look good, activity indicates that other people think they look good by doing things here.
- Being part of an active DAO makes you active by association?
Political Science and DAOs
Public Recognition in Civic Participation
Democratic systems frequently use public acknowledgment to celebrate and encourage civic activities. This method shows effectiveness in increasing overall engagement.
Ownership and Civic Engagement
Stakeholding or ownership in democratic systems often correlates with higher rates of participation. Empowerment through some form of ownership fosters a greater sense of involvement.
Structured Governance
Clear rules and governance structures in democratic setups provide a framework that mitigates uncertainty and encourages participation.
Social Dynamics
Community and peer engagement play a crucial role in influencing individual participation levels in democratic systems.
The 25% Rule
Political science research indicates that when an idea garners approximately 25% support within a community, it reaches a tipping point toward mainstream acceptance.
By examining these elements, we can open discussions on how they might apply to various governance models, including DAOs, without diving into specific recommendations at this stage.
PoliSci References
Gerber, A. S., Green, D. P., & Larimer, C. W. (2008). Social Pressure and Voter Turnout: Evidence from a Large-Scale Field Experiment. American Political Science Review, 102(1), 33–48.
Centola, D., Becker, J., Brackbill, D., & Baronchelli, A. (2018). Experimental evidence for tipping points in social convention. Science, 360(6393), 1116–1119.
The Barrier to Exit aka “Eh, fuck this.”
The barrier to exit is so much lower for DAOs than it is for any other organizational unit.
- Available pseudonymity - No sticky reputation hit for bailing.
- Remote - Less instinctive connection and social bonds are slower to form.
- No contracts - No legal impediment to bailing.
- High competition - Lots of other DAOs.
And competition doesn’t end at other DAOs
DAO engagement is competing with everything else someone might spend their spare time.
- Social media
- Video games
- Hobbies
- Family and friends
- etc
DAO Superpowers (lessons from Maker)
DAOs and their participants have advantages traditional organizations do not.
Personal Recognition
The social barrier to communication between different levels of the implicit social hierarchy can be heavily reduced in a DAO. Compare talking to your company’s CEO versus talking to a senior DAO contributor.
The social benefit of communication, support, and recognition down the implicit hierarchy remains hugely impactful.
- In a traditional organization, this is your boss’s job.
- In a DAO this is everyone’s job.
There were many examples at Maker of individuals becoming prolific contributors due to recognition and support of their initial efforts from established contributors.
Extension of Trust
The extension of trust is one of the most powerful tools a DAO possesses to encourage initial and ongoing engagement. Trust gives individuals and groups the power to make a tangible impact on the future of the organization.
In a DAO, the extension of trust comes with huge benefits, and some risks. Trust can be extended much further and faster than seems wise.
LFW’s involvement with Maker essentially boiled down to:
- LFW demonstrates some level of ability, interest, and consistency.
- A specific individual in a position of power sees this and says: “You have done useful thing, here is money, please do more things.”
- There was no direction, requirement, or any obvious oversight.
- At any point LFW was blocked by a trust-gate, the following interaction took place:
- “I need you to make these changes on x software because I don’t have the required permissions.”
- “I’ve given you the permissions, make it happen.”
Conventionally, this is an insane way to run an organization. However, the cost of broken trust in a DAO context is much less than it appears. Traditionally, much of the cost is social and lands on the individual: “You trusted this person, and they fucked it up. This reflects badly on you.”
This does not need to be true in a DAO. Occasional broken trust can be a cost of doing business. It is strongly mitigated by the decentralization of responsibilities that results from wide trust.
The Caveats
- Do not extend trust and resources to those who are not willing to extend it themselves.
- Prefer to trust individuals over organizations.
- Require transparency to the maximum possible extent - the ability to verify often reduces the need to do so.
Expectations Fulfilled
While the DAO should extend trust to individuals. The individual also implicitly extends trust to the DAO, in the form of their expectations.
To a greater or lesser extent, participants in a DAO expect:
- A base level of transparency.
- A real commitment to decentralization.
- The DAO’s processes to be carried out as defined
- Good-faith engagement from the DAOs agents
Fairly or unfairly, DAOs are expected to be better than traditional organizations in these areas. Failing to live up to these expectations will disincentivize meaningful engagement from participants. However, the opposite is also true.
Every expectation met increases the perceived legitimacy of the DAO.
Every expectation met proves to participants that their DAO is better than traditional organizations.
Recommendations In Cost-Benefit Order
Note: We’ve summarised these quite heavily to limit length here.
Encourage and Reward Mentorship
The GMC should signal a willingness to reward the mentorship of newer community members that express interest and desire to interact with DAO processes and procedures. This could be done informally, or explicitly via the bounty system.
Connection to Abstract Considerations
- Personal Recognition - Strongly motivates individuals to stick around, get further involved, and generally contribute to the wider DAO.
- Affiliation - Intrinsically valuable to affiliation-motivated people.
- The Funnel - It contributes strongly to conversion to have a willing party available to answer questions, point you to resources, etc. This strongly mitigates a weakness in resources and documentation if it is widely adopted.
Governance Onboarding Experience
Add guides/tutorials to help NOs onboard to governance as part of the NO onboarding experience. This could range from simple text guides added to existing documentation, to a more interactive onboarding flow built into a custom voting frontend.
Connection to Abstract Considerations
- Competence - The presence of such a flow shows that Rocket Pool takes governance engagement as seriously as it does node operation.
- Reduces Friction - Reduces the friction for NOs to engage with governance if the instructions are provided as part of the onboarding experience.
- Demonstrates Trust - Expresses the trust of the DAO in the node operator (to govern) from an early stage.
Looking For Group Support
Create a space for the creation of informal working groups and encourage its use and adoption into the community culture. Can be achieved via a discord channel, and an effort among the community to adopt the concept.
Connection to Abstract Considerations
- Affiliation - Easy for affiliation-motivated individuals to find people to work with.
- Power - Power-motivated individuals tend to like high-risk high-value leadership positions. The encouragement of groups can provide these positions.
- Reduce Friction - The existence of an explicit venue for this type of interaction can lower activation energy.
- Competence - Allows individuals with a narrow skillset to contribute to composite goals.
Vote Stickers
Add two varieties of discord flair that display when:
- A user has voted personally in all currently active votes.
- A user’s delegate has voted in all currently active votes.
Connection to Abstract Considerations
- Public Recognition - People can see that you’ve engaged with the governance process.
- Affiliation - People can feel a part of the ‘civically engaged group’
- Social Dynamics - Visible community engagement encourages personal engagement.
- Activity - Makes clear that voting activity is taking place.
- Awareness - Non-voters are passively exposed to active voters.
Expansion of the Bounty System
Made up of several sub-recommendations that aim to expand the structure and use of bounties.
Bounty Board
Develop a ‘bounty board’ platform/website that is explicitly designed for bounty hunters rather than governance tracking. This would involve:
- Addition of tags covering the type of work, recommended skills, size of the task, approximate payment level, etc to bounty proposals. Assigned by GMC.
- Display bounties in an abbreviated but useful form on the new platform.
- Implement sorting and filtering of available bounties via tags.
Scale Up Via Incentives
Definition and completion of bounties should be incentivized to aid adoption.
- Bounty proposers receive rewards if their proposed bounty definition is accepted as valid by the GMC
- Bounty proposers receive rewards if their bounty definition is completed by a bounty hunter.
- The rewards for unfilled bounties increase over time according to some formula.
Marketing Effort
The bounty system should be marketed intentionally to both the RP community and the wider crypto community once updated.
Connection to Abstract Considerations
- Achievement Motivation - Bounties serve as a menu of challenges for those motivated by achievement.
- Reduce Friction - Currently, it is hard to find and browse available bounties, this can be greatly improved.
- Meeting Expectations - A DAO consistently creating and paying out bounties is a concrete example of the meeting of expectations.
- Competence - An effective and adopted bounty system should contribute strongly to visible improvements in multiple areas of the Rocket Pool DAOs.
Community-Led Documentation Revamp
The devs publicly encourage and support the community to revamp and update the official Rocket Pool documentation hub. With goals to:
- Remove out-of-date information.
- Restructure the docs to better serve additional user requirements beyond the operation of nodes.
Connection to Abstract Considerations
- Reduce Friction - Makes information more easily accessible for a wider variety of use cases.
- Competence - Out-of-date information sends a poor signal as to the professionalism of the Rocket Pool DAOs.
- Extension of Trust - Explicit extension of trust in the wider community to achieve a major goal without organization via devs.
Decentralise powers over communications venues
Expand power and ownership of the official DAO communication platforms (Discord and Discourse) to committed members of the community.
Connection to Abstract Considerations
- Extension of Trust - Encourages the specific individuals’ given powers, and also signals clearly that the Rocket Pool DAOs are trusted to self-moderate.
- Expectations Fulfilled - Signals real commitment to decentralization to both the Rocket Pool DAO, and the wider crypto community.
- Ownership and Civic Engagement - DAO ownership of these platforms can encourage greater participation, involvement, and improvement on/of those platforms.
Create Space for Informal Voice Chat
Create spaces and culture to support informal voice chat. In practice, this might look like setting up a couple of voice channels and publicizing a handful of times across time zones for informal socializing.
Connection to Abstract Considerations
- Affiliation - Easy to feel part of a group with voice chat in addition to text chat.
- Barrier to Exit - Speeds up connection, and adds costs to exiting the DAO for participants.
- Personal Recognition - Provides a venue for casual encouragement, mentoring, etc.
Hall of Fame
Create a publicly visible ‘hall of fame’ for users that have voted in more than 90% of votes over the last period (likely fixed 3-month windows). Add hall of fame to the voting portal and/or RPIPs portal and make it available to discord bots.
Connection to Abstract Considerations
- Public Recognition - Users can show off that they’ve engaged consistently with the voting process.
- Affiliation - Users can feel a part of the Hall of Fame group.
- Achievement - Users can attempt to be present in all the Hall of Fame groups.
- Activity - Makes clear that voting activity is taking place.
Objective Setting
Adopt periodic objective-setting exercises. These would have approximately the following stages:
- Informal discussion phase - with generation and discussion of ideas.
- Semi-formal consolidation phase - ideas consolidated into a set of actionable objectives.
- A formal voting phase - actionable objectives are ranked via snapshot vote.
Connection to Abstract Considerations
- Competence - The DAOs setting objectives allows the community to align to achieve them.
- Achievement - Provides a clear path for achievement-motivated participants.
- Ownership and Civic Engagement - Each successful cycle of objectives-to-outcome increases the participant’s feeling of stake and ownership in the DAO. Input into objective setting becomes meaningful because objectives have a tangible effect on outcomes.
Low Friction Quantitative Recognition System
Introduce a system in which recognition can be given and recorded via discord, and then rewarded from a pool of funds provided by the pDAO. The grant, bounty, and retro systems are valuable for larger units of work but have a reasonably high barrier to entry that limits their use.
Connection to Abstract Considerations
- Reduce Friction - Individuals in the community can reward value without needing to spend time writing up grants or retro proposals.
- Personal Recognition - Smaller units of value can be recognized and rewarded without adding a large organizational cost.
- Extension of Trust - The pDAO trusts discord community participants to allocate the reward pool effectively.
Semi-Competitive Debates
When there are relevant governance decisions to be made, organize an informal debate on the issues at hand. Debates should be recorded and summarized such that the value generated persists beyond those present.
Connection to Abstract Considerations
- Power - Power-motivated individuals tend to enjoy debate and the opportunity to demonstrate their ability.
- Activity - Semi-regular debates help contribute to the activity going on at the Rocket Pool DAOs.
- Reduce Friction - For some individuals, tuning in to a recorded debate may be a lower-friction way to engage with the issues of governance.
Regular and Predictable Voting Periods
Adopt regular and predictable voting periods (one ‘fast’ and one ‘slow’). All votes are fit into one of these periods (with the exception of emergency response.)
Connection to Abstract Considerations
- Reduces Friction - Reduces effort required for node operators to govern. They can just check the voting portal once a week and know they aren’t missing anything.
- Expectations - Allows the DAO to set and meet expectations around governance.
- Structured Governance - Creating governance structures reduces uncertainty which can increase participation.
- Competence - Allows the DAO to show competence through the adoption of a structure that meets governance requirements.
Narrative Governance Activity / History
Create a serial, fictionalized narrative summary of the governance activity at Rocket Pool. To encourage consistent engagement with the content, you need something that is intrinsically fun, while also being informative.
Connection to Abstract Considerations
- Public Recognition - Can highlight the actions of individuals or small groups in a fun way.
- Competence - Allows DAO to maintain a written record (even if informal and allegorical) of activity.
- Barrier to Exit - No other DAOs do this and it could compete favorably with non-DAO activities.
Feedback
Discussion Points
Hopefully we can get some amount of discussion going on these recommendations. Here are some prompts:
- Are there any recommendations you see as especially valuable?
- Are there any recommendations you don’t believe are worth pursuing?
- Some recommendations involve shifting the community culture to a certain end. Is this possible? Desireable?
- Many recommendations add complexity to the Rocket Pool DAOs, how can we make sure the benefit is worth the cost in complexity?
- How much desire exists in the community for improvements to be made? Is anyone happy with the status-quo?
- Are there other areas that should get focus prior to governance and DAO engagement? (Try not to go too off-topic here, please.)
- Does anyone have strong feelings (pro or con) on any of the abstract considerations?
Specific Feedback
- I’d love to get input from the GMC members on the bounty recommendations.
- I’d love to get feedback from the development team on the trust-extension theme.
- I’d love to hear from anyone that is excited enough about any of these items to want to work on them.
Next Steps
If anyone wants to work on any of these feel free to do so. We’ll look to get some of these implemented ourselves as well, but we’re very happy to hand them off if anyone is passionate about any of them. A number of the higher ranked ones are quite low-effort so we’ll start with those.
For some of the larger recommendations we may submit bounties for their completion. This ties in a bit to the proposed bounty changes, which I’m looking forward to working on, so I may work on some bounty definitions adjacent to that work.
Thanks for reading everyone!
