Short summary: To drive forward the discussion on how we can improve governance, especially to prevent spam proposals, we propose how new design proposals can be evaluated. We provide a first evaluation of some of the designs proposed in the forum, and we propose a roadmap on how to proceed with this discussion.
Background & goal
Caused by a number of submitted proposals that did not have any actionable content, there are flourishing discussions in the community on how to prevent such spam proposals. Often, these discussions go over and beyond the original spam issue and propose further improvements for other aspects of the voting process as well.
We are very happy to see how many interesting discussions were proposed and how many people actively participated in these discussions!
To evaluate different ideas and compare them with each other as well as with the current governance system, we think it is important to first define what goals the governance system should even achieve.
To this end, the aim of this post is to:
- Propose a set of governance goals that can be used to assess proposed solution and compare them with each other
- Summarize the different solutions against spam that have been proposed by the community and assess them against these goals
- Propose a roadmap towards improving governance.
What we ask from you
We are looking for feedback for all three points! That is whether you think the proposed goals make sense, whether you agree with our initial assessment of the existing design proposals, and whether you think the proposed way forward is reasonable.
Goals of the voting process
Why we propose goals
In order to discuss whether a proposed governance design is a good one, we first have to define and agree on what properties constitute a “good governance”.
Example: Imagine a governance system with a single trusted voter. If this voter never submits spam proposals, such a governance system would solve the spam problem. However, we can probably all agree that such a governance system would not be desirable to govern the Internet Computer as it is clearly not decentralized. Therefore, to fully understand whether a given governance design is desirable, it is important to consider all goals.
Such a set of goals will also allow us to compare different proposed designs. If a design A satisfies one goal more than another design B, A should be preferred to B. Of course, in practice, there will be many cases where design A achieves a certain goal better than B and another goal worse than B. In such cases, a list of defined goals is still helpful to make tradeoff decisions about which goals should be weighted more.
The goals that we propose
This is a list of goals that we propose to consider when evaluating governance designs and changes. These goals also influenced the current design of the NNS.
- Decentralized & active: The governance is decentralized. That is, the voting power is distributed over many, independent entities and there is not one single or a few entities that can decide by themselves how the Internet Computer evolves. Also, there is a broad and active community meaning that many participants regularly interact with the governance and there is a variety of active voters (known neurons).
- Secure & available: Malicious proposals, that would be against the interest of the majority, cannot bypass the voting process and be “voted through” by exploring limitations of the voting protocol. Moreover, the governance system is always available to take new proposals and process them.
- Long-term thinking: Voters are incentivised to vote in the long term interest of the Internet Computer.
- Efficient & scalable: The voting process remains practicable when the Internet Computer and its community increase in size over time. This includes ease of deployment (change is easy to program and test). Also, the voting process can be completed efficiently by voters. For example, it is efficient to identify worthy proposals and easy to vote.
- Reactive: High priority proposals, for example urgent security patches, can be adopted and executed quickly.
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Purposeful: Proposals should not be misused/bogus. For example not
- Skew rewards without meaningful proposals
- Bad content, display bad/inappropriate content to users
- Simple & accessible: There is a low barrier for entry, meaning that users with limited commitment (small staked amounts, low dissolve delay) can propose new ideas and contribute to the discussion. The voters understand how the governance system works.
Of course we are very keen to also have a discussion on these goals and get input if we missed some important ones!
Initial assessment of designs proposed in the forum
Three general solutions against spam proposals that have been discussed in the forum are periodic followee confirmation, adjustment of all voting reward weights to 1, and voting in stages. We have assessed the above goals for each of them. There are additional solutions under discussion by the community which we could jointly add to the assessment.
We first present in an overview table how we assess the different goals in each of these proposed solutions compared to the current governance system.
We then give more details about how we arrived at these choices.
Overview assessment of proposed designs
More details regarding the assessments of the different designs
Periodic confirmation of followees
- Decentralized & active: Improvement
- Requires periodic confirmation of following and thus a more active interaction in the process.
- Reactive: Worsening.
- Only approx 190mn active voting power currently on governance topics.
- A periodic reconfirmation of neuron following would presumably (at least initially) result in a similar active voting power for other topics as well (out of a total voting power of 410mn).
- Thus, even if all voters voted, we would have to wait for the end of the voting period which is a show-stopper for urgent updates (e.g. update of subnet)
- We consider this as being one of the most important goals to keeping the IC secure and thus do not recommend to implement this solution without further enhancements
- Purposeful - no reward skew: Improvement
- Removes the financial incentive to submit spam governance proposals.
- Only works if default following for governance and non-governance will be set up identically.
@wpb, @Kyle_Langham: As you coordinated the discussion on periodic confirmation of followees, what are your thoughts on this assessment in particular on the point of reactivity. Has this already been covered in prior discussions ?
Reward weights back to 1
- Decentralized & active: Worsening
- After introducing the weighting scheme, voting participation increased from approx. 10% to 40%. Reverting to the old set-up might reduce participation in voting on governance proposals.
- Purposeful - no reward skew: Improvement
- Removes the financial incentive to submit spam governance proposals.
Voting in stages
- Secure: Improvement
- Additional hurdle against malicious proposals.
- Efficient & scalable: Improvement.
- Only proposals supported by a certain amount of voting power will be submitted to an overall vote. This prepares for a future with many more governance proposals.
- Proposals are pre-screened before they reach the general audience. Thus the voting process becomes more efficient for the standard user.
- Purposeful no reward skew: neutral/slight improvement.
- More effort is required to get to the overall vote. However, it only partially addresses this issue, as there is still a financial incentive to bring spam proposals to the general vote in order to collect governance rewards.
- Purposeful no bad content: Improvement.
- Seems like a pragmatic way to not show inappropriate content as part of the overall vote.
- Simple & accessible: neutral/slightly negative.
- Makes it more difficult to get proposals to an overall voting stage. However, in order to get a proposal passed eventually, you need to gather prior support in forums anyway. Thus, this is not really an extra barrier.
- The voting process becomes more complex.
@lastmjs: As you recently proposed a solution for voting in stages, do you agree on the above assessment and do you have any additional comments?
Roadmap and priorities
We would be happy if the lively discussion on this subject is continuing and look forward to also contribute in further evaluating proposed designs!
Before taking concrete actions we think it is also important to take a step back, systematically compare all discussed solutions with each other and think about whether we can combine other ideas to arrive at an even better design.
The NNS team is currently working heads down on the service nervous systems (SNSs), which we consider to be a key feature for the development of the ecosystem on the Internet Computer.
Therefore, we propose to include the work on spam proposals on the DFINITY roadmap but not prioritize it over the SNS work. This means that fully analyzing and implementing the spam proposal prevention cannot be addressed right away and will take more time.
We are looking forward to your inputs and suggestions on all of the above topics! Specifically, the discussion around spam proposal prevention will be led by @bjoernek.
Lara & Björn