Ratifying Mangrove DAO's Governance Model v0

🗳 Governance temp check
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Summary

This proposal seeks to ratify the Governance Model of Mangrove DAO, establishing a foundational framework that integrates multi-stakeholder governance with specialized councils. This model serves as a precursor to a comprehensive constitution, aligning with the DAO’s strategy and providing balanced representation across its community.

Rationale

Ratifying a clear and structured Governance Model is essential to foster strategic decision-making informed by diverse perspectives within Mangrove DAO. It ensures operational efficiency, transparency, and accountability, laying the groundwork for a dynamic and responsive governance system.

Specification

Mangrove DAO’s governance model combines multi-stakeholder general governance with specialized councils, analogous to legislative and executive branches in a parliamentary system. General governance sets strategic directions and policies, while councils, elected or appointed by the general governance, are responsible for operational execution and remain under its overview.

1. Multi-Stakeholder General Governance

General governance at Mangrove DAO encompasses:

  • Strategic Decision-Making: Overseeing high-level goals and strategies of the DAO.
  • Council Oversight: Electing, funding, and overseeing council decisions.
  • Operational Oversight: Evaluating and approving key operational proposals initiated by the councils or the community.
  • Metagovernance: Updating and refining governance parameters and processes.

Stakeholder Groups in Multi-Stakeholder Governance:

In contrast to coin-voting governance, multi-stakeholder governance in Mangrove DAO is designed to ensure that strategic decisions are mutually beneficial for different interest groups, reflecting a diverse array of perspectives and concerns within the ecosystem.

  • Token Holders: Those who hold Mangrove’s governance token have a say in its direction. This group includes investors, users, and anyone eager to actively participate in Mangrove’s ecosystem. Their participation ensures that a wide range of voices are heard, particularly those with a vested interest in the protocol.

  • Builders: Long-term contributors integral to the protocol’s success, including core team members, advisors, and key specialized service providers. Their focus is on ensuring the ecosystem thrives sustainably over the long term. Builders bring a deep understanding of the protocol’s needs and a commitment to its ongoing development and growth.

  • Pods: Comprising strategists and developers, Pods are focused on building and operating products on the Mangrove protocol. Their primary concern is maintaining the neutrality and permissionless nature of the protocol, providing them with a reliable foundation for developing their businesses.

Voting Power Distribution:

Each stakeholder group in Mangrove DAO holds an equal one-third share of the total voting power, with each group employing its own method to weight the influence of its members:

  • Token Holders Group: Utilizes coin voting. The more MGV tokens a party holds, the greater their influence within this group. This method aligns voting power with the level of investment in the protocol.

  • Builders Group: Influence varies based on the duration and intensity of collaboration (full-time or part-time). Quadratic voting is employed to smooth out inequalities within the group. The distribution of voting power within this group is self-determined and may evolve over time without external validation.

  • Pods Group: Initially, each pod is given equal voice until their economic contributions can be objectively measured on-chain and there is a sufficient number of active pods. Subsequently, a pod’s voting power will be proportional to its economic contribution to the protocol. The transition to this new model of voting power distribution will be decided by the general governance.

Additionally, it’s important to note that individuals or entities may hold memberships in more than one group. They have the option to consolidate these memberships under a single address for voting or maintain separate addresses to vote independently within each group.

Accessing Groups:

This section explains how individuals can join and exit each stakeholder group in Mangrove DAO’s governance model.

  • Token Holder Group: This group is permissionless. Anyone holding at least one MGV token is automatically a member and can participate in governance decisions. Membership in this group can be exited simply by transferring MGV tokens to another address.

  • Builders Group: Membership in the Builders group is based on cooptation, decided collectively by existing members. While primarily focused on active contributors, the group may occasionally retain members for their valuable experience and insights, even if they become less active.

  • Pods Group: Membership access is managed by the Ecosystem Council, which applies criteria set by the general governance.

2. Councils

Councils within Mangrove DAO are constituted, elected, and funded by the general governance, which also determines their mandates’ duration and composition. While these Councils operate autonomously in managing day-to-day operations, they are accountable to the general governance, particularly for proposals exceeding their predefined mandates or for decisions requiring broader strategic alignment. This structure ensures that the Councils act within the scope and strategy set by the general governance, while also maintaining the flexibility needed for effective operational management.

Roles and Responsibilities

Mangrove DAO establishes two councils to address distinct areas requiring specialized skills:

  • Protocol Council: Responsible for maintaining the Mangrove protocol, overseeing research, technical product management, devops, security operations, and the technical enforcement of governance decisions. It manages both on-chain and off-chain components, including extensions such as SDKs.

  • Ecosystem Council: Takes on the economic and social aspects of Mangrove. Its responsibilities include the curation of public strategies, strategic roadmap development and management, attracting and supporting Pods, managing resources, implementing incentive programs, forming partnerships, and overseeing the DAO’s treasury.

Both Councils appoint specialized teams and individuals, ensuring expertise in their respective domains. Their operational responsibilities also include managing budgets, responding to community inputs, and preparing governance proposals as necessary.

Duties towards Community

Councils are required to document and report their activities on the DAO’s public forum monthly, encouraging community reviews and feedback. They must process community initiatives and ideas, rewarding impactful contributions and responding to all inputs within a reasonable timeframe.

Successful ideas from the forum’s ‘temperature check’ process must be addressed by the relevant Council. The Council must either elevate the idea to a formal proposal or provide public justifications for its rejection, explaining the reasons and considerations behind their decision.

Elections

The general governance of Mangrove DAO is responsible for electing Council members, with the initial mandate set to a 6-month period. The specific details of the election process will be outlined in the first proposal initiating council elections and can be amended by the general governance as needed.

Expertise and Knowledge Required for Council Members

  • Protocol Council:

    • Mangrove technology, particularly smart contracts and SDKs.
    • Building and running strategies on Mangrove.
    • Ethereum/EVM technology.
    • Security in Web environments and crypto.

  • Ecosystem Council:

    • DAO governance and operations.
    • Growth, incentives program, and grant management.
    • Treasury management in crypto and traditional finance.
    • Marketing, communication, and community management.
    • Business development and partnerships.

In addition to electing members, the general governance allocates a budget for the entire duration of the Councils’ mandate. This budget, prepared by the Ecosystem Council, ensures the Councils have the necessary resources to fulfill their responsibilities.

Compensation

Council members are compensated for their work, with the compensation amount decided by the general governance during budget allocation.

3. Relationship Between Mangrove DAO and ADDMA

Mangrove DAO, inclusive of its Protocol and Ecosystem Councils, is the primary entity responsible for controlling, operating, and administering the Mangrove protocol and its ecosystem. In this capacity, Mangrove DAO retains full autonomy and authority over its governance and decision-making processes.

The Mangrove Association (ADDMA) is an independent entity with its own governance structure, board, and funds derived mainly from early private token sales to investors. While ADDMA operates independently, its foundational purpose, as stated in its statutes, is to support the creation and development of Mangrove DAO.

In fulfilling this role, ADDMA functions as a service provider to Mangrove DAO. As such, ADDMA’s role is to facilitate and enable the initiatives of Mangrove DAO, aligning its actions and contributions with the strategies and objectives decided by the DAO.

The core team and service providers, who are crucial to the DAO’s operations, are currently financed by ADDMA. However, the strategic direction and operational decisions come from Mangrove DAO, which provides instructions to ADDMA’s executive board. This dynamic ensures that while ADDMA offers essential support, it does not control or interfere with the governance of the DAO.

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Many thanks, PhilH, for your contributions and the initial proposals crucial to establishing the DAO!

I am delighted to read here the first application of the “multistakeholder governance” concept. I believe this represents an innovative step in the DAO’s world, potentially paving the way beyond the conventional plutocratic model where 1 token equals 1 vote.

Over the coming months, I will be interested to examine the voting statistics and the distribution of voting power among the three existing groups (Builders, Holders, Pods). It appears that regular monitoring of these metrics will be essential to ensure that no group is disengaged in governance. If there is, we must be ready to react accordingly.

Quick question: will the “Snapshot” implementation provide us with this data inherently, or will we need to extract it ourselves?

Thanks again :innocent:

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Thanks @philh for pioneering this initiative. We are supportive of this governance structure and think it solves many problems that plagued failed governance structures of the past by creating a model informed by hundreds of years of successful business and organizational structures.

My additional thoughts can be found on a thread here

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Thank you @Disiaque!

I agree that this is a valid concern. We’ll probably easily get a sense of the actual participation at the beginning, but we need data indeed. As far as I can tell, we’ll need to put some work in data extraction.

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Thank you for the diligent work in designing and detailing the governance process @philh

The concept of a dynamic and evolving governance system seems very practical. However, I think a multi-stakeholder governance model requires a clear reporting mechanism and effective metric tracking. Could you share your strategies for monitoring processes, improvements, and retrospectives in the future?

Additionally, I’m eager to learn more about the specific details concerning the election of Council members in the future.

Overall, I’m thrilled about the initiation of this process. Congratulations!

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Thank you @maerg!

strategies for monitoring processes (…)

As mentioned in the proposal, it is an important duty of the councils to report on its decisions and on the activities it oversees. However, the details of how tracking and reporting will be done are left to the councils’ decision. While I have my views on how it may be organized, this is something that should be discussed and decided by them, since they will be the ones in charge of providing it!

specifics details concerning the election of Council members

Another draft proposal will be posted shortly here to that end!

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Thanks @philh for creating this proposal, excited to see the Mangrove governance being shaped !

The multistakeholder governance design is very interesting. In addition to being an experiment in DAOs management, it’s also aiming to give a voice to people/projects building with/on top of Mangrove which may create value for its ecosystem despite not necessarily holding MGV.

However I fully agree with Disiaque that monitoring these metrics in the coming months will be highly important, especially to prevent abuses if any, or to reconsider the model in case the voting distributions bring issues between the different groups.

Make sense. As the builder group can include many different profiles, I guess the differentiation between full/part time is a simplified way to define influence, so it doesn’t require tracking the contribution time of various contributors ?

It can be useful to add a link explaining the Quadratic voting in case some are unfamiliar.

I have two concerns on this point:

  • While I agree that counting on councils to submit most votes on Snapshot at first can prevent mistakes/unclear info/spam, adding this restriction for the forum steps might prevent new people from contributing.

However, if any contributor gets the ability to publish a temp check/formal proposal, it will help a lot to have core contributors as forum moderators, enabling to update the post if needed (i.e wrong proposal number, missing/wrong post type, missing info requested in the framework etc) which can’t be done on Snapshot.

  • This design aims to fix a common issue in governance with an initial idea proposed on the forum, followed by discussions/feedback/changes before voting. The best would be to recap all updates & adapt the snapshot, however proposals are often either posted on snapshot without changes, with a simple TL;DR or with the forum link as justification, in which case voters have to actually read everything.

So I agree that having most changes in temp check to have a clean proposal reflected on snapshot make sense if the goal is only having a clear governance, but my second concern is more about the duration to execute a proposal with all steps included (temp check/debate/formal proposal/feedback/snapshot vote) which can affect efficiency if too long (but probably a topic for governance process v0).

Outside of these details, I’m looking forward to observing the multistakeholder governance design in action for the Mangrove DAO ! :fire:

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Thank you @Dydymoon for your detailed comments and insights! Much appreciated :slight_smile:

monitoring these metrics in the coming months will be highly important

100%
We can’t have it at launch, but we’ll work on it (or maybe someone from the community will help with that). The data is there, we just need to process it.

differentiation between full/part time is a simplified way

Exactly. It’s either full-time or not, so builders score 2 points for every month of full-time contribution, 1 point when they contributed part-time or as advisors, no point otherwise. Simple to check and track.

link explaining the Quadratic voting

Great idea, will do!

For the rest, I think we’re very close and the details will be fine-tuned in the “Establishing Governance Process” proposal indeed. More specifically, I agree that any contributor should be able to publish a temp check proposal. Gate keeping formal proposals make sense if we consider that this category shows the final version of proposals actually brought to vote on Snapshot.

Thanks again! :pray:

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ADDMA’s legal firm, DNA, suggested to have the past activities of ADDMA ratified by the DAO, and to establish a comprehensive framework for the future. Since such change would exceed the scope of this proposal, we’ll just shorten the section about “Relationship Between Mangrove DAO and ADDMA” and add a paragraph to introduce the future proposal:

“A comprehensive proposal outlining the past contributions of ADDMA to the DAO and defining its future role will be presented to the governance for ratification in the forthcoming weeks. This proposal aims to formalize the historical activities carried out by ADDMA on behalf of the DAO and to establish a clear framework for the ongoing collaboration between the two entities.”

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It can be useful to add a link explaining the Quadratic voting in case some are unfamiliar.

On top of the link you suggested, I felt that an additional explanation regarding why we use quadratic voting here makes sense.

The builders’ group within Mangrove DAO has established a voting power system based on each member’s intensity and duration of involvement in the project. This system acknowledges that long-term, full-time contributors should have more influence compared to those who recently started or are advising the project on a part-time basis.

Note: This consensus was not easily achieved, as nearly half of the builders initially favored a one-person-one-vote model. The group retains the discretion to modify this voting power allocation system in the future.

To simplify tracking of contributions, we implemented a point-based system known as the Builders’ Activity Score. Each builder receives 2 points for every month of full-time work, and 1 point for part-time work (which includes occasional advisory roles or ongoing part-time collaboration).

Upon initial calculation of this score, the disparity in voting power ranged significantly, with the highest score being approximately 80 times that of the lowest. To address concerns about excessive disparity and maintain motivation among builders with lower scores, quadratic voting was introduced. This approach calculates voting power as the square root of a builder’s Activity Score. Consequently, someone who has been building for three years would possess 3.5 times the voting power of someone who has been building for three months. This method effectively balances the voting influence, allowing newer contributors to have a meaningful voice in governance decisions, thereby ensuring a dynamic and adaptable governance environment, even as it recognizes the contributions of longer-serving members.

For further information on quadratic voting, the following resources provide comprehensive insights:

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