First Steps for xGovs:
Proposing & Upvoting Measures
The Algorand Foundation is committed to a fully decentralized Algorand ecosystem. We believe that a governance structure that allows the Algorand community to impact the most important economic, technical, and policy decisions is fundamental to the long-term stability and continued growth of the Algorand ecosystem.
In the first round of voting earlier this year, a large majority of our governors voted in favor of the creation of a new tier of Expert Governors (xGovs). These governors, via DAO decentralized aggregation, will have the responsibility to put forward measures for our quarterly governance votes.
Here we share a proposal to translate the principles behind the xGov tier into operative rules: although we outline the practical steps for the applications of the main principles, we view this proposal as a starting point for a broader discussion with the community.
Governors should decide between the following two options:
- Option A: Approve the mechanism as described below, establishing a process for bringing community measures to governance votes: the community at large can propose measures, the expert-governors (xGovs) vote to promote them to governance, subject to final editing.
- Option B: Keeping for now the status quo. The foundation is tasked with proposing a different mechanism for bringing community proposals to governance votes.
The Foundation supports the more inclusive option: Option A. We remind the community that the Foundation does not vote in Governance.
Universal access to proposing measures
An important aspect of this proposal is that anyone in the community can make proposals. Some of the best ideas in world history came from individual ingenuity. For this purpose, the Foundation will set up an App for community Measure proposals, so that every Algo holder can create a proposal there (including some mechanism to reduce spam). Once a proposal is created, it will have a unique identifier, obtained by hashing, and will be listed in the App.
Building Momentum
We encourage proposal authors to also post their proposal in the Governance Forum and/or in the Reddit channel, linking to the hash of the proposal and explaining the rationale behind it, in order to obtain feedback and drive support for their idea. The Foundation will implement a mechanism that allows Algorand community members to use their wallet to support proposals that they like. We expect the community-support to allow better proposals to bubble up to the top, thus participating in a virtuous feedback with further support. This mechanism does not in any way replace the next phase of xGov voting, its sole purpose is to highlight the proposals of larger interest, ordering them for xGovs’ consideration.
Meet the xGovs
The set of proposals is now passed to the xGovs, who earned by commitment their right to promote community proposals to the general Governance vote. In particular, their past and current commitment will be reflected in XGOV tokens that they own, which they will use to upvote proposals. The xGov upvote will be limited in time and in the number of proposals that can be supported. The few proposals that received the highest support from the xGovs will be promoted to the ballot, subject to an editing phase as described below.
Notice that xGovs will interact with the App via their respective DAOs. Each xGov DAO will be able to support measures using the xGov tokens in the DAO, based on its own internal decentralized governance system. For example, one DAO might let individual xGovs upvote proposals, while another might call for a DAO-internal vote and then use all the xGov tokens of all its members to support just one proposal.
Before being placed on the ballot, the winning proposals will undergo an editing process by the Foundation, to ensure accurate language and compatibility with the Algorand Foundation bylaws and mission statement.
The final stage: measure for the General Vote
After the editing process, the proposals that were upvoted by the xGovs will be put on the ballot in the next Algorand Governance voting session. In this way we obtain the proper contribution of all the different actors, everyone with their own peculiarities, to the Governance Framework while at the same time enabling a final inclusive vote with the participation of the whole Algorand Community.
In order to ensure a smooth transition from the existing Framework to the xGov Framework, during the first few periods after the implementation of the xGovs system, the Community Measures proposed and approved through the above process will coexist alongside with the measures proposed and put to vote directly by the Foundation.