DAO Governance Framework

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The DAO Governance Framework (DGF) is a software framework for building DAOs by specifying their governance structure. An essential aspect of any organization is to specify the protocols governing acceptable behavior by its members. In a primary DAO it is especially important that these protocols be formalized and automated with open source smart contracts processed by distributed computing. Governance is the process of specifying and updating these protocols.

DGF gives DAO founders the structure to formally specify the protocols for 1. work flow, 2. review procedures, and 3. the process for updating the protocols, themselves.

System Design

In order to optimize for collaboration and community participation, we will be focusing early on modular, sharable specifications. There are elements of the dynamic framework that are common to a wide variety of specific instantiations of DAOs. This common subset forms what we refer to as Minimum Viable Protocol Requirements (MVPR).

DGF MVPR refers to the specification of an algorithm that implements the governance framework described in [OCG 2018][1] and [BIMR 2018][2].

We conceptualize an MVPR DAO as the Bench of experts who provide some service to the public, together with their Forum. Experts are members of the DAO, determined by ownership of REP tokens. REP tokens are digital representatives of reputation for doing the expert work of the DAO. REP tokens serve as the basis of power in the DAO. The Bench is defined as the list of experts. The public is defined as all nonmembers of the DAO, conceived of as potential customers that the experts intend to serve for fees. The Forum is the evolving history of accepted and rejected actions the experts perform.

In an MVPR DAO, REP tokens confer on each expert the power to do work and governance:

  • Work: Providing official DAO service to the public for fees. Fees are fungible cash money, typically in the denomination of some stable coin.
  • Governance
    • Executive: Automated policing of peer work
    • Legislative: Debating and voting on updates to DAO operating parameters and smart contracts (hard protocols), and cultural norms (soft protocols)
    • Judicial: Reviewing past actions and decisions by revaluing the Forum

Common to all these domains is the power accounting feature of REP ownership. REP is gained by peer validation and staked upon assertions.

DGF work flow

The DGF system is designed as a feedback loop consisting of three major components: 1. the Forum, 2. the collection of members of the DAO, called the Bench of experts, and 3. the public, consisting of non-member users of the system who pay fees to the DAO for work.

DGFsystem.png

The basic DGF workflow is as follows:

  1. A public customer finds the most current Work smart contract (WSC) in the Forum.
  2. Customer encumbers the appropriate fee and selects relevant parameters to engage the WSC.
  3. WSC randomly selects a worker from the DAO from amongst the available experts who have encumbered REP tokens in Availability smart contracts (ASCs).
  4. Selected worker completes job offline, then completes the requirements of the WSC.
  5. WSC publishes evidence of completed job to a post in the Forum, opens an instantiation of the Validation Pool.
    DGF flow.png
    1. WSC sends address of post and public customer's fee to an instantiation of the Validation Pool (VP)
    2. VP mints new REP in proportion to the fee.
    3. 1/2 of new REP is staked in worker's name as an upvote. 1/2 staked as a downvote, unassigned.
    4. VP broadcasts voting is open to REP stakes on betting pool.
    5. VP tallies the vote, decides the winner.
    6. VP publishes the result & distributes REP tokens from losing side to the winners, weighted according to stakes.
  6. Fee distributed to all DAO members in proportion to REP holdings (REP salary).

Smart Contracts

  • Work smart contract (WSC): Evolving official protocol for how the DAO provides service to the public. Enables public users to request work products from the DAO. This WSC accepts certain parameters that will function to specify the proposed agreement, including the standards for fees the public pays, the mechanism for selecting the expert from the active ASCs, the standards for acceptable work, the mechanism for recording evidence of work to the Forum, and the code calling for a Validation Pool to verify successful completion of the WSC.
The Validation Pool is the heart of DGF as it mints all new REP tokens and performs their initial distribution. Finally the Validation Pool distributes the fee from the WSC to all members of the DAO in proportion to the ownership of REP. This is called the REP salary.
  • Forum smart contract (FSC): Records the history of the DAO as a linked list of documented official DAO expert actions. Links are weighted references, positive or negative, that donate or leach REP from the post referred to. Gives the context for discussion on modifications to the DAO.

UI Software

Main article: Front-end software

A DAO must have software that allows the public and its experts to access its capabilities. UIs therefore have two faces. This software provide a view of the Forum that enables its respective audience to interact for their respective purpose. Primarily, experts use their UI to engage their REP holdings to secure work and to govern the DAO. Secondarily, experts use their UI to search the Forum for pressing issues in governance. The public primarily uses their UI to engage experts by encumbering fees in Work Smart Contracts. Secondarily, the public uses their UI to search the Forum to find the WSC and evaluate whether the DAO's reputation is sufficient to warrant their business.

Ideally the UI software would be formally governed by each DAO itself. However, pseudonymity and openness makes this impractical to enforce. Individuals can engage a distributed database with any UI they choose. Thus competing UIs are likely to emerge in most DAO instantiations. DGF simply provides recommended defaults on out-of-the-box UI software, and allows each DAO to choose their minimal canonical UIs.

In its purest, ideal form this system would support stateless client applications, serving all operational data reliably from blockchain storage. However, blockchain storage is currently expensive; so in practice, we can only use it in cases where we require the long-term guarantee, such as the REP ownership list.

This means that we must implement a separate, off-chain stateful layer. There are a variety of options for this off-chain data layer such as IPFS. For now we merely specify that such a layer must exist.

There are both formal and informal processes--hard and soft protocols--associated with each of the above outlined areas of power. Hard protocols are specified by code, and enacted by running systems, whether on or off chain. Soft protocols refer to patterns of participant behaviors.

Key Concepts

Reviews

A goal of the DAO is to deliver quality results to its customers. To achieve this, experts submit work products for review by other experts within the DAO. Each reviewer then submits a review, which itself is subject to review.

Governance

The MVPR parameters are designed to allow customization of the rules that govern the operations of the DAO.

Reputation

??These need to be copied to SGF, and rewritten for DGF

DAO participants shall be awarded with reputation tokens, for contributions which their fellow participants deem valuable. Reputation should be non-fungible among domains, meaning that one kind of reputation is distinct from another. We can begin with the consideration of the following distinct kinds of reputation:

  • AREP - Work product reputation
  • RREP - Review reputation
  • CREP - Comment reputation
  • GREP - Governance reputation

AREP is associated with work product. In a Science Publishing DAO, an example of work product would be a paper, along with associated citations, research data, scripts, and interpretations. The weighted, annotated citations give us the peer validation mechanism. A work product which receives favorable review shall attribute AREP to its authors, as well as to the authors of the works cited, in a recursive manner, up to some (configurable) depth.

RREP is associated with reviews. A reviewer receives RREP for contributing a review that

GREP is associated with proposals to modify the MVPR parameters. This is what we consider governance of the hard protocols in the system. GREP may be staked toward new proposals. Successful proposals shall attribute GREP to their authors and supporters. It is likely that there will be a close relationship between GREP and RREP,

CREP may play an important role in the soft protocols governing the organization. Fundamentally a DAO is a group of individuals. Their behavior will be shaped partly by the communication that occurs among them. Comments will be a central vehicle for this communication. Each organization may develop its own ways of associating meaning with comments. An organization may want its participants to be able to stake their own reputation toward promoting particular comments, and toward suppressing others. Our goal is to enable each community to articulate its own values, in a way that is transparent for the community as well as the public to observe.

Notes about Implementation

These reputation mechanisms will be encoded as smart contracts. Such contracts run on a block chain and thus provide a resilient, distributed ledger where we can store the records of group participant activities.

It will be necessary to build software tooling that is capable of constructing a consensus view of the state of the DAO. This will need to access block-chain data encoded by the smart contract(s) as they ran at the time each block was written. The smart contracts themselves may change over time. Our goal is to encode these changes such that it is possible to reconstruct the entire computational history of the DAO. To maximize the flexibility of our initial contract, we will implement a set of hyper-parameters. In other words, the smart contract will express a dynamic algorithm; by changing the parameters of the algorithm, the behavior of the algorithm can be modified.

Broadly speaking, upgrading the underlying smart contract itself produces a hard fork. The best case for such a scenario is that the new contract is (sufficiently) compatible with the previous, and that all participants are able to upgrade to the new version in a (sufficiently) timely fashion. A design consideration for this project will be to attempt to reduce the probable costs of such a hard fork, by introducing some kind of internal versioning scheme for the blockchain code and data. TODO: Articulate the relative weight of this forward-compatibility consideration versus the competing design goal of avoiding excess complexity.

Applications

The initial DAOs include applications devoted to some of the most relevant requirements for building a decentralized economy, including:

Resources

We are using GitLab Issues to track the concrete steps we are taking in assembling this system. For more information see SD-1.

This wiki is to be maintained as an introduction to the project. See SD-2.

This project is a pilot implementation (SD-4) of a framework (SD-3) for dynamic self-governance of DAOs (decentralized autonomous organizations).

Platform Operations

High Level Sequence Diagram

Associated Projects

We rely on previous open source P2P tools such as blockchain and distributed hash tables:


Code

Resources

We are using GitLab Issues to track the concrete steps we are taking in assembling this system. For more information see SD-1.

This wiki is to be maintained as an introduction to the project. See SD-2.

This project is a pilot implementation (SD-4) of a framework (SD-3) for dynamic self-governance of DAOs (decentralized autonomous organizations).

Platform Operations

High Level Sequence Diagram

Associated Projects

We rely on previous open source P2P tools such as blockchain and distributed hash tables:

See Also

References

  1. ↑ Craig Calcaterra, "On-Chain Governance of Decentralized Autonomous Organizations" (May 24, 2018). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3188374 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3188374
  2. ↑ Craig Calcaterra & Wulf Kaal & Vlad Andrei, "Blockchain Infrastructure for Measuring Domain Specific Reputation in Autonomous Decentralized and Anonymous Systems" (February 18, 2018). U of St. Thomas (Minnesota) Legal Studies Research Paper No. 18-11, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3125822 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3125822
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